Put a sock in it, Katie

This comment appears in The Times today.

AN EXHIBITION called Knit 2 Together opens this month at the Crafts Council Gallery. It comprises the work of “15 international artists who are pushing perceived boundaries within knitting”, and its curator, Katie Bevan, makes expansive claims for its timeliness: “There’s a sort of Zeitgeist. . . Everyone just wants to go home and knit socks.”

I know that Ms Bevan’s assertion is not literally true, but I can still admire the enthusiastic promotion even of a decorative art in which I am uninterested. Things become more contentious when artists venture judgments beyond the aesthetic. Ominously, The Guardian notes that the artists in Knit 2 Together — whose exhibits include representations of prostitutes’ calling cards and a text by the literary semiologist Roland Barthes — seek “ the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force”. For them, knitting is a statement of resistance to capitalism and war.

“It’s about making objects, but it is also about sharing stories, an oral tradition,” says one knitter. “If more people knitted, the world would be a more peaceful place.”

It is easy to parody these sentiments, but the notion of a pre- or non-capitalist tradition of simplicity, harmony and collective wisdom is an enduring theme of Western thought, through Rousseau and Herder. The only problems with the notion are that it is historically bogus and politically pernicious.

The history of knitting in the British Isles, especially after the mechanisation of the garment industry ensured that only coarser work was available to its craftsmen, is one of necessity and bare subsistence, not Arcadian creativity. Excepting a longstanding trade in the Shetlands and a few other remote areas, periodic revivals — as in Donegal in 1887 — have been largely an expedient for the relief of desperate poverty.

There is, in fact, a genuine radical political tradition in needlework, exemplified by William Morris and his early association with the Royal School of Needlework, founded in 1872. But Morris celebrated art, not folk wisdom. His protest against industrialism was that it foreclosed the cultivation of beauty, which he looked forward to becoming “a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces”. Today’s radical knitting, by contrast, extends to patterns for “a knitted willy with realistic head and veins”. Clearly, we have the philistines always with us, after all.