The C Word - A Look at the Role of Craft in Contemporary Art.The Doris McCarthy Gallery, The University of Toronto, 2012. Curated by Richard Mongiat.
For artist interviews videos please visit - https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dmg/thecword/html/videos/index.html
Catalogue Essays - Richard Mongiat, Shelley Adler and Richard Rhodes
The “C” Word
by Richard Mongiat
Why does the word “craft” send some people scrambling for their six-shooters while others man the barricades and everyone else runs for cover? In 1969 Sol LeWitt wrote: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”[1] Thus began craft’s long and bumpy roller coaster ride vis-à-vis its relationship with art.
Since the nineteenth century and the invention of the camera, art—its purpose, how it’s made and the way it’s viewed—has changed dramatically. And, of course, the way that art “looks” has also changed no less dramatically. With the exception of some Dadaist works and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, almost everything that was considered to be art before the 1960s was made by someone’s hand. And to “make something” meant engaging with the concept of craft—whether rejoicing in, re-framing, or battling against, preconceived notions.
Sometimes an artist’s work or career is referred to as a “practice,” implying “practising,” or striving to get better at whatever activity is being undertaken. If you work in one of the more traditional art-making genres, you soon become aware that certain sectors of the art world hold the view that being too skillful in your use of materials, or taking the formal visual concerns of your art too seriously, is somewhat gauche (though I’ve yet to encounter anyone being accused of being “too good” at installation, conceptual, or video art). To raise the “c” word is to run the risk of being seen as a mere technician, whose work must therefore be devoid of any deep feeling or thought. I have frequently heard artists express concern that their work isn’t “tough” enough (read: ugly, clumsy or harsh), as if only through a determined avoidance of skill (and beauty) will they be taken seriously. While I have no interest in the type of art that steers technical virtuosity towards steely perfectionism, eye-catching yet shallow, I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Debates about the uneasy relationship between art and commerce have raged for years, with the art object squarely on the front lines. In the battles waged over seriousness and significance, painting, for example, gets killed off cyclically (of all the art forms practised throughout the past century, why is painting the only one that needs to carry around its own defibrillator?). Art critic/writer Dave Hickey’s claim that any good American salesman could sell a “box of air” as easily as a framed canvas,[2] make most of these arguments, in my opinion, moot.
The artists selected for this exhibition have two things in common. First, they don’t want to know the answer before the question has been asked. In the filmed interviews accompanying the exhibition, you will hear them talk about not wanting to have everything worked out in their minds before starting a work. For these artists, the idea of change is automatically incorporated into the making of the work; the spur-of-the-moment decisions, surprises, and even mistakes that happen during the process are crucial elements in the content of the artwork. Secondly, they love the struggle of working with and transforming materials into unique, mysterious, strange, and beautiful objects as a way of describing the world.
Some of the artists, such as ceramicist Susan Collett and furniture maker Gord Peteran, push their practice—albeit kicking and screaming—into the realm of art. Among those working in the more traditional fields of painting and sculpture, I have tried to present a range of styles and genres: from Tom Campbell’s rough-and-ready figurative sculptures, the raucous paintings of Sheila Gregory and Scott Sawtell, and Elizabeth Bailey’s bed paintings (as visceral as Chaim Soutine’s flayed beef carcasses), to the more elegantly handled works of Moira Clark, Gerard Gauci, Howard Podeswa and Tim Zuck; and from Marianne Lovink’s and Catherine Beaudette’s quirky and clever organic forms, which look as if they’ve just arrived from another planet, to Suzy Oliveira’s photo sculpture of a bear and a woman lying together (is this danger . . . or love?). Then there are the intricacies of the delicately cut stencils David McClyment uses to create his paintings, the brooding drama of works by Michael Gerry and Ron Shuebrook, the shimmering surfaces created by Brent McIntosh through the obsessive layering of colour upon colour, and finally, Jay Wilson’s meticulous toothpick sculptures and dollar-store-foam wall pieces (does anyone know more about the aesthetic qualities of dollar-store foam than this man?).
An element of this exhibition that’s dear to me is the artists’ interviews. Although the idea for the exhibition came about through many conversations with fellow artist Shelley Adler, I felt it was important that each of the eighteen artists be invited to address the issue of craft in his or her own voice, as each of them has a particular view on the subject. Any attempt by me to summarize their thoughts, crowding them all under one umbrella (mine), would have robbed the audience of insights far beyond my capabilities.
Finally, this exhibition is not meant to elevate works that engage with craft over those that employ other strategies—hierarchies are not my interest—but to draw attention to the stubborn persistence of craft in the work of serious artists today and the continued relevance of making objects as a viable and worthy activity.
As for the personal struggle of pursuing one’s practice in the boxing ring of contemporary art, where the brawn of avant-garde aesthetics is championed and beauty is suspect, I say: Let the delicacy of a butterfly’s wing be taken as seriously as the violence of a broken nose.
I would like to thank Ann MacDonald and the Doris McCarthy Gallery for giving me the opportunity to put together this exhibition, and both Ann and Erin Peck, along with the rest of the gallery staff, for their hard work, patience, and support. I’d also like to thank Ray Sylvestre for his terrific ideas and impressive skill in filming and editing the artists’ interviews; Norman Mongiat for his generosity and superhuman patience in helping me with the catalogue; Lin Gibson and Sheilagh McEvenue for their editorial eyes and insightful suggestions about my essay; and Shelley Adler, whose conversations with me early in the process helped guide and shape the exhibition, and who kindly contributed an essay to the catalogue. Thanks also goes to Richard Rhodes for taking time from his busy schedule to contribute some of his thoughts on the subject of craft, and who didn’t blink when I sprang the idea on him. Finally, a special thank you to all the artists for graciously agreeing to take part in this escapade, and for lending their works, without which there would be no exhibition.
Richard Mongiat 2012
[1] Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (New York: 0-9, 1969).
[2] This statement was made during a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2009 or 2010.
by Richard Mongiat
Why does the word “craft” send some people scrambling for their six-shooters while others man the barricades and everyone else runs for cover? In 1969 Sol LeWitt wrote: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”[1] Thus began craft’s long and bumpy roller coaster ride vis-à-vis its relationship with art.
Since the nineteenth century and the invention of the camera, art—its purpose, how it’s made and the way it’s viewed—has changed dramatically. And, of course, the way that art “looks” has also changed no less dramatically. With the exception of some Dadaist works and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, almost everything that was considered to be art before the 1960s was made by someone’s hand. And to “make something” meant engaging with the concept of craft—whether rejoicing in, re-framing, or battling against, preconceived notions.
Sometimes an artist’s work or career is referred to as a “practice,” implying “practising,” or striving to get better at whatever activity is being undertaken. If you work in one of the more traditional art-making genres, you soon become aware that certain sectors of the art world hold the view that being too skillful in your use of materials, or taking the formal visual concerns of your art too seriously, is somewhat gauche (though I’ve yet to encounter anyone being accused of being “too good” at installation, conceptual, or video art). To raise the “c” word is to run the risk of being seen as a mere technician, whose work must therefore be devoid of any deep feeling or thought. I have frequently heard artists express concern that their work isn’t “tough” enough (read: ugly, clumsy or harsh), as if only through a determined avoidance of skill (and beauty) will they be taken seriously. While I have no interest in the type of art that steers technical virtuosity towards steely perfectionism, eye-catching yet shallow, I see no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Debates about the uneasy relationship between art and commerce have raged for years, with the art object squarely on the front lines. In the battles waged over seriousness and significance, painting, for example, gets killed off cyclically (of all the art forms practised throughout the past century, why is painting the only one that needs to carry around its own defibrillator?). Art critic/writer Dave Hickey’s claim that any good American salesman could sell a “box of air” as easily as a framed canvas,[2] make most of these arguments, in my opinion, moot.
The artists selected for this exhibition have two things in common. First, they don’t want to know the answer before the question has been asked. In the filmed interviews accompanying the exhibition, you will hear them talk about not wanting to have everything worked out in their minds before starting a work. For these artists, the idea of change is automatically incorporated into the making of the work; the spur-of-the-moment decisions, surprises, and even mistakes that happen during the process are crucial elements in the content of the artwork. Secondly, they love the struggle of working with and transforming materials into unique, mysterious, strange, and beautiful objects as a way of describing the world.
Some of the artists, such as ceramicist Susan Collett and furniture maker Gord Peteran, push their practice—albeit kicking and screaming—into the realm of art. Among those working in the more traditional fields of painting and sculpture, I have tried to present a range of styles and genres: from Tom Campbell’s rough-and-ready figurative sculptures, the raucous paintings of Sheila Gregory and Scott Sawtell, and Elizabeth Bailey’s bed paintings (as visceral as Chaim Soutine’s flayed beef carcasses), to the more elegantly handled works of Moira Clark, Gerard Gauci, Howard Podeswa and Tim Zuck; and from Marianne Lovink’s and Catherine Beaudette’s quirky and clever organic forms, which look as if they’ve just arrived from another planet, to Suzy Oliveira’s photo sculpture of a bear and a woman lying together (is this danger . . . or love?). Then there are the intricacies of the delicately cut stencils David McClyment uses to create his paintings, the brooding drama of works by Michael Gerry and Ron Shuebrook, the shimmering surfaces created by Brent McIntosh through the obsessive layering of colour upon colour, and finally, Jay Wilson’s meticulous toothpick sculptures and dollar-store-foam wall pieces (does anyone know more about the aesthetic qualities of dollar-store foam than this man?).
An element of this exhibition that’s dear to me is the artists’ interviews. Although the idea for the exhibition came about through many conversations with fellow artist Shelley Adler, I felt it was important that each of the eighteen artists be invited to address the issue of craft in his or her own voice, as each of them has a particular view on the subject. Any attempt by me to summarize their thoughts, crowding them all under one umbrella (mine), would have robbed the audience of insights far beyond my capabilities.
Finally, this exhibition is not meant to elevate works that engage with craft over those that employ other strategies—hierarchies are not my interest—but to draw attention to the stubborn persistence of craft in the work of serious artists today and the continued relevance of making objects as a viable and worthy activity.
As for the personal struggle of pursuing one’s practice in the boxing ring of contemporary art, where the brawn of avant-garde aesthetics is championed and beauty is suspect, I say: Let the delicacy of a butterfly’s wing be taken as seriously as the violence of a broken nose.
I would like to thank Ann MacDonald and the Doris McCarthy Gallery for giving me the opportunity to put together this exhibition, and both Ann and Erin Peck, along with the rest of the gallery staff, for their hard work, patience, and support. I’d also like to thank Ray Sylvestre for his terrific ideas and impressive skill in filming and editing the artists’ interviews; Norman Mongiat for his generosity and superhuman patience in helping me with the catalogue; Lin Gibson and Sheilagh McEvenue for their editorial eyes and insightful suggestions about my essay; and Shelley Adler, whose conversations with me early in the process helped guide and shape the exhibition, and who kindly contributed an essay to the catalogue. Thanks also goes to Richard Rhodes for taking time from his busy schedule to contribute some of his thoughts on the subject of craft, and who didn’t blink when I sprang the idea on him. Finally, a special thank you to all the artists for graciously agreeing to take part in this escapade, and for lending their works, without which there would be no exhibition.
Richard Mongiat 2012
[1] Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (New York: 0-9, 1969).
[2] This statement was made during a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto in 2009 or 2010.
“C” is for Craft
By Shelley Adler
craft / krɑːf /noun 1. an activity involving skill in making things by hand: the craft of bookbinding | pewter craft • (crafts) work or objects made by hand: the shop sells local crafts | [as adj.] (craft) a craft fair • a skilled activity or profession: the historian's craft • skill in carrying out one's work: a player with plenty of craft • skill used in deceiving others: her cousin was not her equal in guile and evasive craft • the members of a skilled profession. [1]
Is “craft” really a dirty word? Do people care about craft anymore? Or maybe, the question is: Who’s afraid of craft? Well, let’s ask the question then: What is craft? Is it the stuff you make using white glue? Or the stuff you have to sew and cram with string? Or strange objects made out of driftwood? Or maybe craft means the process of making something--how it was actually made, or simply, the method . . . of anything. Or maybe it means knowing exactly how much linseed oil and OMS to dip the brush into to get an effect that looks effortless and accidental.
In a time like ours, when ideas are the medium, it may seem strange to shine a light on the age-old traditions of craft. Yet, in a time like ours, does anyone—whether artist or viewer—really cares who made the piece? (See, for example, the work of Jeff Koons, Mauritzio Cattalan, or Damien Hirst.) After all, aren’t we in a “post-craft” era? Well, yes, if your definition of craft involves making something using your hands, you could argue that the reality of our technological and conceptual world really does put us into a post-craft era. But, you could also argue that until our species learns to use technology to do everything, we will still use our arms and legs to make and create, and as a result, connect ourselves to the masters of the past through the continued use of the materials that have always been employed.
Looking for Magic
When a painter is on his or her game, a painting becomes magical. Haven’t we all stood in front of a painting, marveling at the mystery of its surface, its colour and texture, its transparency and glow, and asked ourselves, “now how did they do that?”
Making a painting or sculpture is a long and arduous journey that requires figuring out how to make materials speak in precisely the way the artist wants. That’s the artist’s craft. And the better the artist is, the more his or her craftsmanship will be hidden from view. The less you notice it, the more likely you will think of the “what” of the work. You will be focused on, or directed by, the subject, or the story, or the object, and less likely to think of the “how.” As my friend James Lahey recently remarked, “you see artists in museums getting as close to paintings as possible because they want to know the ‘how’ of the work. The ‘what’ of the work seems to be the concerns of others.” And that's okay.
So, are artists reluctant to talk about craft? Their own craft? You bet they are. It’s for them to know and us to find out. In the case of Gord Peteran’s work, the viewer might speculate about how things are made, and might get it right. Or wrong. Sticks and twigs that suggest the depth of human fragility cannot be measured by the number of ties and twists in an artwork. And while we are on the subject of twigs, Jay Wilson’s work, made with toothpicks and twigs, evokes the fragility of our existence while engaging banal materials. These humble materials are magically transformed, contradicting their very nature, and arranged with a swagger unequalled by the work of most artists, veer into the world of design.
Sheila Gregory has spent her life dripping, pouring, spraying, and brushing paint in to an ever-expanding universe of shapes and textures, her canvases always delighting the eye with new layers and possibilities. And never take for granted a square in a Michael Gerry painting. It may look like just a square brushstroke, or maybe a little rectangular in shape, a little soft on the sides, but it embodies space and volume and the lightness of being as it represents the great and intangible distance from here to there. Brent McIntosh has developed a painting technique that defies description, and no amount of nose-to-the-canvas inspection will reveal how he does it. His painting of the water’s edge hovers between abstraction and representation, transcending ordinary significance.
These five artists, along with the thirteen others in the exhibition, are but a slice of those out there in the field perfecting their craft. They have made their choices about which materials speak to them, and are working to ever refine and redefine those materials to whatever ends they choose. Ultimately, for these artists, it’s about the materials and processes, and the experiments and investigations required to serve their subject—it all goes hand in hand.
What evolves from that relationship can be absolute magic!
Shelley Adler 2012
[1] New Oxford American Dictionary
By Shelley Adler
craft / krɑːf /noun 1. an activity involving skill in making things by hand: the craft of bookbinding | pewter craft • (crafts) work or objects made by hand: the shop sells local crafts | [as adj.] (craft) a craft fair • a skilled activity or profession: the historian's craft • skill in carrying out one's work: a player with plenty of craft • skill used in deceiving others: her cousin was not her equal in guile and evasive craft • the members of a skilled profession. [1]
Is “craft” really a dirty word? Do people care about craft anymore? Or maybe, the question is: Who’s afraid of craft? Well, let’s ask the question then: What is craft? Is it the stuff you make using white glue? Or the stuff you have to sew and cram with string? Or strange objects made out of driftwood? Or maybe craft means the process of making something--how it was actually made, or simply, the method . . . of anything. Or maybe it means knowing exactly how much linseed oil and OMS to dip the brush into to get an effect that looks effortless and accidental.
In a time like ours, when ideas are the medium, it may seem strange to shine a light on the age-old traditions of craft. Yet, in a time like ours, does anyone—whether artist or viewer—really cares who made the piece? (See, for example, the work of Jeff Koons, Mauritzio Cattalan, or Damien Hirst.) After all, aren’t we in a “post-craft” era? Well, yes, if your definition of craft involves making something using your hands, you could argue that the reality of our technological and conceptual world really does put us into a post-craft era. But, you could also argue that until our species learns to use technology to do everything, we will still use our arms and legs to make and create, and as a result, connect ourselves to the masters of the past through the continued use of the materials that have always been employed.
Looking for Magic
When a painter is on his or her game, a painting becomes magical. Haven’t we all stood in front of a painting, marveling at the mystery of its surface, its colour and texture, its transparency and glow, and asked ourselves, “now how did they do that?”
Making a painting or sculpture is a long and arduous journey that requires figuring out how to make materials speak in precisely the way the artist wants. That’s the artist’s craft. And the better the artist is, the more his or her craftsmanship will be hidden from view. The less you notice it, the more likely you will think of the “what” of the work. You will be focused on, or directed by, the subject, or the story, or the object, and less likely to think of the “how.” As my friend James Lahey recently remarked, “you see artists in museums getting as close to paintings as possible because they want to know the ‘how’ of the work. The ‘what’ of the work seems to be the concerns of others.” And that's okay.
So, are artists reluctant to talk about craft? Their own craft? You bet they are. It’s for them to know and us to find out. In the case of Gord Peteran’s work, the viewer might speculate about how things are made, and might get it right. Or wrong. Sticks and twigs that suggest the depth of human fragility cannot be measured by the number of ties and twists in an artwork. And while we are on the subject of twigs, Jay Wilson’s work, made with toothpicks and twigs, evokes the fragility of our existence while engaging banal materials. These humble materials are magically transformed, contradicting their very nature, and arranged with a swagger unequalled by the work of most artists, veer into the world of design.
Sheila Gregory has spent her life dripping, pouring, spraying, and brushing paint in to an ever-expanding universe of shapes and textures, her canvases always delighting the eye with new layers and possibilities. And never take for granted a square in a Michael Gerry painting. It may look like just a square brushstroke, or maybe a little rectangular in shape, a little soft on the sides, but it embodies space and volume and the lightness of being as it represents the great and intangible distance from here to there. Brent McIntosh has developed a painting technique that defies description, and no amount of nose-to-the-canvas inspection will reveal how he does it. His painting of the water’s edge hovers between abstraction and representation, transcending ordinary significance.
These five artists, along with the thirteen others in the exhibition, are but a slice of those out there in the field perfecting their craft. They have made their choices about which materials speak to them, and are working to ever refine and redefine those materials to whatever ends they choose. Ultimately, for these artists, it’s about the materials and processes, and the experiments and investigations required to serve their subject—it all goes hand in hand.
What evolves from that relationship can be absolute magic!
Shelley Adler 2012
[1] New Oxford American Dictionary
Stops Along the Craft Line
By Richard Rhodes
Craft was inescapable in the fall of 2005. The Art Gallery of Ontario was presenting Catherine the Great: Arts for the Empire, a massive hulk of a show that was part of a partnership with the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. At the time, the Hermitage was involved in assembling major tours of works from its collection as part of a decade-long coming out party for the new Russia—celebrated with highlights from the old Russia—after the dour and sometimes terrifying seventy-five-year Soviet interregnum.
These were touring treasures indeed. The popular star of the AGO show was a long and lovely Romanov Coronation Coach built in Paris at the Royal Gobelin Factory in the early eighteenth century. Constructed from oak and ash and beech and walnut, it was a hardwood wonder slung on a rolling architecture of iron and steel decorated with bronze, silver, glass, leather, silk, and gilt. The list of materials evokes richness itself, but itemization alone doesn’t quite do justice to the impact of seeing the hand-tooled bubble of power and luxury in the flesh. This was a portable palace finished in exquisite detail, literally fit for kings and queens, and eloquently speaking inside and out for the wealth of a nation and the due glory of its rulers. The coach with its loving, elevated finish was an embodiment of divine rights and gifts, a sign system for power and glory, constructed in a similar spirit of homage to what once went into the making of medieval cathedrals.
The same held true for the other two hundred objects in the exhibition. Each and every one of them was a glory: a snuff box layered and patterned with gold, lazuli, glass and enamel; bedroom furniture showing off the finest articulations of Tula steel; a box from China that otherwise was a metal crab in gilded silver and filigree; washes of silk and satin draperies; rare woods carved and joined with impressive ingenuity. The net effect was more than pomp: it was an articulated belief system where wealth and finery communicated an idea of service—to God, to the Queen, and to the graces of art and talent. It was, almost exclusively, a handmade world filled by objects with no easy path to duplication. Time moved slowly and in one direction across the surfaces of things that possessed immediacy, intimacy, and a drive for transformation beyond themselves.
They belonged to a world different from the modern world, to a hole in history. Any resurrection of craft in contemporary art also occupies that hole in history. Craft, among other things, is an extension of magic and mystery and a connection to a more integrated universe, one where “well made” is synonymous with “well done.” It carries a long attachment to the idea of intrinsic value. This root identity of craft-related art can be problematic in a contemporary art framework where the boundaries of artmaking have been revolutionized by avant-garde aesthetics, new media production and, some would say, historical necessity. In this context, nothing can seem so dispiriting as an art object grounded in appealing surface finish and an unquestioning embrace of tradition. It belongs to Catherine’s world, voicing a past that belongs to an era of fixed beliefs and absolute hierarchies. Fundamentally out of time, such art, made now, sells human circumstance and imagination short.
This foot-dragging variety of craft is what generates the sometimes negative connotations around the “c” word that can seem so out of step with the improvisational energies of contemporary art. There is room for a knowing joke that adds craft to the scatological lexicon, as the title of this exhibition does, but, that said, craft has an important countervailing history in relation to modernism that runs on its own revolutionary circuit, beginning with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, which functioned as a resistance to mass production and industrialization. For William Morris, the movement’s British leader, craft and artisanship were means to combat the falling social, moral, and aesthetic standards of an industrial culture and economy. Craft and its practitioners were regarded as humanizing forces in an increasingly dehumanized world.
There is a history in contemporary art that returns again and again to this positive formulation of the craft enterprise. Whether the Muralism of the 1930s, feminist practices of the 1960s and ’70s, gay crafting, or the anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist activism of the contemporary Craftism movement, or the glorious bottle cap tapestries of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, craft production—as opposed to the hierarchy-ensconced world of commercialized art production—serves as a vehicle for shaping a softer, wider, more politically responsive society that is mindful of the myriad dimensions of diversity in a globalized world. Craft, as a ubiquitous human resource, represents a move in the direction of fair trade. It is the friendly face of a livable future. It doesn’t look back. It looks ahead.
Richard Rhodes 2012
Richard Rhodes is the editor of Canadian Art
By Richard Rhodes
Craft was inescapable in the fall of 2005. The Art Gallery of Ontario was presenting Catherine the Great: Arts for the Empire, a massive hulk of a show that was part of a partnership with the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. At the time, the Hermitage was involved in assembling major tours of works from its collection as part of a decade-long coming out party for the new Russia—celebrated with highlights from the old Russia—after the dour and sometimes terrifying seventy-five-year Soviet interregnum.
These were touring treasures indeed. The popular star of the AGO show was a long and lovely Romanov Coronation Coach built in Paris at the Royal Gobelin Factory in the early eighteenth century. Constructed from oak and ash and beech and walnut, it was a hardwood wonder slung on a rolling architecture of iron and steel decorated with bronze, silver, glass, leather, silk, and gilt. The list of materials evokes richness itself, but itemization alone doesn’t quite do justice to the impact of seeing the hand-tooled bubble of power and luxury in the flesh. This was a portable palace finished in exquisite detail, literally fit for kings and queens, and eloquently speaking inside and out for the wealth of a nation and the due glory of its rulers. The coach with its loving, elevated finish was an embodiment of divine rights and gifts, a sign system for power and glory, constructed in a similar spirit of homage to what once went into the making of medieval cathedrals.
The same held true for the other two hundred objects in the exhibition. Each and every one of them was a glory: a snuff box layered and patterned with gold, lazuli, glass and enamel; bedroom furniture showing off the finest articulations of Tula steel; a box from China that otherwise was a metal crab in gilded silver and filigree; washes of silk and satin draperies; rare woods carved and joined with impressive ingenuity. The net effect was more than pomp: it was an articulated belief system where wealth and finery communicated an idea of service—to God, to the Queen, and to the graces of art and talent. It was, almost exclusively, a handmade world filled by objects with no easy path to duplication. Time moved slowly and in one direction across the surfaces of things that possessed immediacy, intimacy, and a drive for transformation beyond themselves.
They belonged to a world different from the modern world, to a hole in history. Any resurrection of craft in contemporary art also occupies that hole in history. Craft, among other things, is an extension of magic and mystery and a connection to a more integrated universe, one where “well made” is synonymous with “well done.” It carries a long attachment to the idea of intrinsic value. This root identity of craft-related art can be problematic in a contemporary art framework where the boundaries of artmaking have been revolutionized by avant-garde aesthetics, new media production and, some would say, historical necessity. In this context, nothing can seem so dispiriting as an art object grounded in appealing surface finish and an unquestioning embrace of tradition. It belongs to Catherine’s world, voicing a past that belongs to an era of fixed beliefs and absolute hierarchies. Fundamentally out of time, such art, made now, sells human circumstance and imagination short.
This foot-dragging variety of craft is what generates the sometimes negative connotations around the “c” word that can seem so out of step with the improvisational energies of contemporary art. There is room for a knowing joke that adds craft to the scatological lexicon, as the title of this exhibition does, but, that said, craft has an important countervailing history in relation to modernism that runs on its own revolutionary circuit, beginning with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, which functioned as a resistance to mass production and industrialization. For William Morris, the movement’s British leader, craft and artisanship were means to combat the falling social, moral, and aesthetic standards of an industrial culture and economy. Craft and its practitioners were regarded as humanizing forces in an increasingly dehumanized world.
There is a history in contemporary art that returns again and again to this positive formulation of the craft enterprise. Whether the Muralism of the 1930s, feminist practices of the 1960s and ’70s, gay crafting, or the anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist activism of the contemporary Craftism movement, or the glorious bottle cap tapestries of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, craft production—as opposed to the hierarchy-ensconced world of commercialized art production—serves as a vehicle for shaping a softer, wider, more politically responsive society that is mindful of the myriad dimensions of diversity in a globalized world. Craft, as a ubiquitous human resource, represents a move in the direction of fair trade. It is the friendly face of a livable future. It doesn’t look back. It looks ahead.
Richard Rhodes 2012
Richard Rhodes is the editor of Canadian Art