Wm Morris, Conundrum

This instructional video, with its breathless pace, leaves so much out. It highlights Morris's Ruskinian emphasis on work as potentially ennobling, if only the bosses could get it right, forsake profits, etc. This brief docu-vid never mentions Morris's work in the socialist lecture halls, his work in architectural preservation, his poetry, his art, or his crowning accomplishment, the Kelmscott Press. 

Speaking of which, you might remember seeing the massive Kelmscott Chaucer toward the end of our visit to the LC. I like these Peter Harrington (a bookseller) videos, because they show a lot of spreads and they spend time assessing the materiality of the book. Books are artifacts, after all. Here's a video looking at a rather decrepit Kelmscott Chaucer from Occidental College. 

These two videos about the Kelmscott Chaucer, different as they are, enact certain constructions of "Victorianism" that we encountered in Matthew Sweet's Inventing the Victorians. To learn more, see Bill and Sylvia Peterson's Kelmscott Chaucer Census. Without doubt, too much fetishistic adulation is poured on the Kelmscott Chaucer. Yet, the attention is perhaps warranted when we consider it as a kind of culmination of the PRB/Arts and Crafts aesthetic. Morris died soon after it was finished. We now know that he died relatively young because he spent his life sitting down: drawing those incessant borders, writing poetry and essays, and conducting business at Morris and Co.  It's hard for us to conceive how busy Morris was in his activities. This timeline gives an indication of his indefatigable work.

William Morris's work is a conundrum right at the center of the critical questions concerning this seminar: "Can you go forward by going back? Can a culture, a society, an art practice, move forward by emulating past models? Must an avant-garde forge a new path?"