I was listening to quite an interesting programme on Radio 4 about the Counter Culture this morning, and even in the 20 minutes I heard there was some thought provoking stuff about beat poetry in the 50s, folk music in the 60s and the desire of people, usually the younger generation, to break away from the shackles, as they see it, of convention. The premise of the discussion was that arts and culture often lead the way, and are an expression of a desire to move forward and away from prevailing cultural views. Currently arts and culture are suffering in the face of the ongoing push towards a technological age – there are massive cuts at university level for example, and young people are not being encouraged to go down this particular road, an attitude which I consider to be very short sighted given the importance of film and gaming to our GDP apart from anything else.
This ties in nicely with my daughter’s graduation which we attended this week in Falmouth. This was a joyous event celebrating the achievement of a cohort of young people in getting their degrees in a range of subjects from animation (my daughter’s degree) to sustainable textiles, to costume design and prosthetic makeup . Falmouth is an Arts university and the Chancellor is Dawn French, herself once part of the counter culture of my youth – she made a brilliant speech, both funny and emotional. I love a rite of passage, and this was a good one. And one only had to look at the young people to see that many of them consider themselves to be part of a counter culture which they demonstrated by the colour of their hair, their extraordinary make up and their clothes. Pleasingly, a couple of my daughter’s friends chatted to me about knitting and how much they enjoy it. One of them was studying sustainable textiles, so I was not surprised, and the other is my daughter’s flat mate, a costume designer and all round creative person.
There are well-recorded links between hand crafts and the counter-culture. Images leap to mind of hippies in crochet tops and dresses. In the 1970’s there was a big surge in crafts such as knitting, crochet and weaving as part of the resistance to the ongoing corporatisation of life – I recall my cousin weaving amazing things in her basement and linking what was essentially a female craft with feminism and activism. In the 1990s the Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement was encouraging people to take up crafting in order to resist corporations, eschewing mass production in favour of small-scale production and in support of women-owned local suppliers, yarn shops and designers, a sentiment I heartily agree with, for obvious reasons!
As we face the age of AI, something about which I am not even slightly enthusiastic, I hope that people will continue to turn to crafts such as knitting. Its very physicality, the feel of the yarn, the colours, the joy of creating something all by yourself make it an attractive option. I think it is why we do see more young people knitting and crocheting. It is no longer about making something because it is cheaper than buying it in a shop (it certainly is not), but more about being in the moment, about resisting cheap fashion and unsustainable materials, and about human rather than machine creation. Not to mention the human contact found in talking to other knitters. Most of the young people I have talked to recently are not fans of AI – they see it as destroying our environment, taking their futures and jobs and enriching a small number of already excessively wealthy people. This, I think, will be the focus of their counter culture and I very much hope that hand crafts will continue to play a part in it.