Radical (cr)After Thoughts

So I've been mulling over the conference and the whole notion of radical craft and its intersection with industry and art practice and I keep coming back to the simple idea that craft is a code for labor and that radical craft - building on Harold Koda's thinking - is code for a whole lot of labor. And this has been making me a little sad.

It seems to fundamentally reinforce a notion that craft is something done with the hands and that there is still some un-bridgeable schism between the working hands the thinking brain. Work - almost by definition - must proceed according to plan to minimize waste. If the plan is found to be inefficient and is later revised, existing labor might be unspooled and erased so the product can be completed. The emphasis lands solidly on product despite any attempt to call attention to product.

Perhaps this is what was so striking about Billy Collins' poetry - it's polish speaks to the care with which he selects each word. (Digression: when Collins picks on Paul Valery, as he did in a poem he read at the conference, I think something terribly misleading is happening. I am reminded of a story about Frank O'Hara arriving at a poetry reading on Staten Island and delivering a work he had composed on the ferry on the way to the event. The other poet on the bill - whose name escapes me - brushed this aside, saying something about how he was going to read things he'd composed in advance and implying the superiority of that method. But O'Hara - I believe like Valery - had done unthinkable amounts of work preparing to write that poem in his reading, writing, observing and participating in the world up to the moment in which it was fixed on the paper. It's a little like the Whistler/Ruskin argument about a painting that took an afternoon to make but a lifetime to get ready for, and what's the role of craft in that?) It is not possible for craft to be thought of less as polish than as fuel? Might we not benefit from including in our definition of radical craft such things as edits, false starts, and erasure?

The more I think about it, the more I take comfort in Isaac Mizrahi's response to a question about the relative importance of brand and product. Mizrahi seemed a little stunned by the question - as if it were so fundamental that he had to think about his answer. Like the courtier that a fashion-person must be, he answered without offending anyone yet not without being unequivocal - he said that you needed product - content - to have a brand in the first place. It was reassuring to hear someone so confidently assert that things are where meaning begins (especially after the weirdness of the College Art Association Annual Meeting, wherein people complained that panelists were spending too much time talking about "things and images" rather than "ideas" as if they could be separated in visual art...)

I hope others will weigh in on the subject of craft and its possible radicalism with comments. We're looking forward to a few more posts on the panels I missed from students to whom I offered extra credit for writing. I'll also post links to whatever I see about it here, like this one to Jonathan Ive's site. Or this one, to christung, a design blog.

Part II: Word Craft

As I watched musicians perform on the giant projection screens in the wind tunnel, I figured out what is so strange about the Radical Craft conference...it looks more like an awards show than a conference. Think about it. Musical interludes. Short films (including segments from the Muppets and the Simpsons) to introduce speakers. Big corporate sponsorship. Fashion people. Stars!

Anyway - the first speaker in the wolrd craft segment of the show was Erin McKean(see the picture), whose stand-up lexicography drew cheers. It should be noted that McKean had a better dress than any of the fashionistas present. Setting out to dispell the "nun/librarian" myth of the lexicographer, she introdeced the scientist/reporter metaphor in its place. She cleverly walked the audience through the basics of assembling a dictionary, talking about the importance of the corpus with amusing examples (one can hardly resist adding to the Google footprint of "asshat" by including it here...). But her connection to the subject of craft was tenuous. In fact, her talk appeared to dissolve when it came time to "beg" for a new design for the dictionary itself. One was left questioning what kind of room there is for radicalism in a field as inherently conservative as dictionary compilations.

As she was leaving the stage, I began to wonder what place the dictionary McKean was talking about had in the brave and much-hyped new world of Wiki. And show should take the stage next but Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia.org, the online encylcopedia. Those who have studied with me in any kind of research capacity know my distrust of the Wikipedia hive mind concept, and I tried ot give Wales a fair listening, but I still felt as though he was missing the point. As amped as he is about making a new encyclopedia available to the world for free, he doesn't seem to realize that the world expects it to be the same kind of authority as the old encylopedia. (Think of Jasper Johns remark about how one who intends to make chewing gum that is used as glue is actually making glue.) So when he points out that half the edits on the site are done by just .7% of the users and that the most active 2% of the users generate more than 70% of the entries, he seems to miss the fact that these are really small percentages - obviously larger than those of conventional authorship but still in figures that sound downright elite. His arguments were weak and biased - after all, can you really trust someone who uses the words "community" and "friends" interchangeably? - and his assertion that Wikipedia's radicalism resided in its open-source ideology struck me as too broad. What's radical and useful about Wiki is the way it reflects its users' understanding of any given subject, and that's also a limitation on it. It may be interesting and, in ways, radical (as if that's really worth anything at the end of the day...) but it's also not an ecylcopedia in the traditional sense.

I really want to dislike poet Billy Collins but one cannot dislike work that's so beautifully crafted. He describes his work as "suburban" and "domestic", and he reiterated a definition of craft offered earlier in the conference ("craft is something made by one person for another") as a way of asserting his reader-consciousness. Rather than lecturing, Collins performed his poems in relaxed way, reading from several collections, including his latest, The Trouble With Poetry. Beyond the exceptional skill with which Collins renders his subjects, his poems are enchanting for the way they are about poetry itself. Just as it seemed that he was going to coast by on the charm of his work itself, Collins let drop a terrific remark about the how art can be evaluated. Talking about haiku, he talked about how the strict, 17-sylable form “offers resistance to your self-expressive tantrum.” That craft might be a form of form – of container or barrier to the fluid nature of content – seemed radical in that instant. And rewarding.

Glamour Craft: From High to Humble

Greetings from the Art Center College Radical Craft design conference, where I'm pleased to be writing through the good graces of a heap of cold medication. This morning's panels included Entrepreneurial Craft (meds hadn't kicked in - I'm trying to find someone who can report on that one for you) and Glamour Craft: From High to Humble, which featured speakers Harold Koda, Claudy Jongstra, and Isaac Mizrahi.

Harold Koda was the epitome of the fashion scholar in his talk about the importance of cut as a basic craft of fashion. Spanning centuries of couture, his most compelling images were perhaps those of Issey Miyake's pieces made from single pieces of cloth. Along the way, he showed some exquisitely made dresses in which craft could be defined as the lavishing of extraordinary labor on a work (moderator John Hockenberry joked about designer jeans made "at the cost of sickening several dozen and killing a few of the laborers"). I was also pleased to see Martin Margiela's clothes dyed by molds and bacteria. But for Koda, it appeared that truly radical craft resided in the modernist adherence to material possibilities and that all the beading and dying was secondary to the cutting and draping. This struck me as a kind of attempt to reassert modernist principles, and a sad one in light of a passing remark that was part of Koda's talk - about the way that couture garments were really lures that attracted audiences for the more profitable lines of a designer's output - fragrances, accessories or ready-to-wear. It was as if to say artists should labor excessively on a few pieces that will attract attention to cheaper, more profitable wares (those that fulfilled what Hockenberry called and “acquisitive” lust.)

Cloudy Jongstra’s talk about her work in felt was staggeringly unfashionable – and, in the context of the group, therefore refreshing. She reminded me of Winifred Lutz in her concentration on the material properties of the wool, silk, cotton, and hay from which her felt is made. If there was anything “radical” about Jongstra’s craft (which she repeatedly asserted was ancient in its origins) it was her insistence on the craftsperson’s knowledge of a material’s properties and possibilities.

Isaac Mizrahi was clearly the star of the morning’s talk – and he appeared to know it. Anyone looking for a working definition of “radical craft” in his talk would be hard pressed to synthesize one from the anecdotes and sound bites he offered in response to Hockenberry’s questions (that Mizrahi was interviewed rather than delivering any prepared remarks made him seem even more like a bauble included to attract attention). This is not to say he wasn’t entertaining, but rather that one felt he’d say anything to earn the temporary love of the audience. And he was successful. Declaring at one point that “craft is getting the meds right” Mizrahi left the impression that he was saying whatever came into his head at the moment (a little like a blogger…), but he had clearly thought a little about some things. When Hockenberry asked him to explain his success at wedding high and low, Mizrahi admitted that he felt it wasn’t because he “did a great job” so much as that we are “culturally, socially and economically ready” for such a phenomenon (a little self deprecation goes a long way with me…). When an audience member asked him about “nostalgia” she clearly touched a nerve. “Everything I do refers tot he past,” Mizrahi said, “because it’s beautiful enough to refer to.” Perhaps the radicalism of Mizrahi’s craft is the construction of a stable identity in so many strata of the market and mass consciousness.

After all this, Target served us a swell lunch on which I’ve been picking as I write. But now, back the conferring.

Radical Craft

I'm pleased to say I scored a couple of session passes for the Art Center College of Design's swanky Radical Craft conference this weekend. Expect posts. Meanwhile, you can visit here for more info.

Others are noticing this event - see the designed objects blog for more hype.

Going it alone or getting along

''Who Gets to Call it Art?," Peter Rosen's documentary about the rapid-fire changes in American art in the 1960s, begins with a startling premise that it never really follows up on. ''What will the public think?" asks sculptor John Chamberlain of trends in art. He answers it himself: ''Well, who gives [an expletive]? It's their job to catch up."

Cate McQuiad of the Boston Globe begins her short review of Rosen's movie with this little anecdote, which is very much to the point of something I've been thinking about lately.

The other day in class I mentioned the "avant garde" and was met with blank stares by my students, who needed the idea explained to them (part of me was relieved...I mean, after all, wasn't the avant garde myth something a lot of us were out to get rid of in the first place?) I thought of one of my favorite reflections on an artist's relation to his audience, which appeared in an essay Jonathan Franzen wrote about William Gaddis called "Mr. Difficult". Here's a brief excerpt:

It turns out that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience. In one model...the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work, it's because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel...exists independent of how many people appreciate it. We call this the Status model. It invites a discourse of genius and art historical importance.

In the opposing model a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, the writer providing the words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group...This is the Contract model. The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.

Substitute "artist" for "writer" and "artwork" for "novel" and you've got a common loggerhead at which artists often find themselves - should we concentrate on the nutrional value of the meal we're serving, or should we be looking for clever dressings to make the vegetables more appealing? Do we want to challenge or please or audiences?

The answers appear to be more complicated than one might expect. Nearly every artist I talk to these days - and maybe it's an LA thing - seems concerned with "serious" subjects and goes out of his or her way to avoid things that could be seen as trivial or self-absorbed. What you get is a lot of art that one feels people ought to be interested in because it's serious - like the problem of rural illiteracy or hunger in the developing world - but which few actually care about, a concerned minority that almost always excludes the artist himself. Everyone gets challenged; no one gets pleased.

I feel like the Dave Hickey of "Frivolity and Unction" - like making a rallying cry for art that artists actually care about enough to debate whether or not it needs to be shown in the first place. Art that they are too pleased by to let go, but too bothered by their own selfishness to keep to themselves. This is closely relates to my other platform these days - a forced anonymity for all artists under the age of 60. Under my scheme, all contemporary art would be sold as "anonymous" and the revenues passed through secret accounts to the artists. Besides destroying the market for fashionable artists whose names are more interesting than their work (insert your favorite example here), this initiative would have the added benefit of discouraging anyone from entering the profession for purposes of seeking fame, as any renown - even recognition - would be off the table for decades. Audiences would be free to choose their own pleasures and their own challenges in a world in which one could no longer call challenge a pleasure or pleasure a challenge as a means of excusing lapses of personal judgment.

Finding Someone to Envy

As a first year painting teacher and MFA student, I find myself regularly evaluating how to best instruct someone in the methods of painting. I waver between step by step, technical tutelage and simply giving the students the supplies and a loose assignment and helping them struggle (currently I live in the later). But all this thinking has got me evaluating how we are taught, or guided, because really I think that is a better description of MFA instruction.
Critiques seem to focus on looking at someone's work, at times I feel, just long enough or deeply enough to make a connection to some other artist, and then directing the artistic-sheep toward a new potential shepherd. Sometimes I feel like this process does more to expand my mental card catalog of artists, rather than expand my abilities to paint, but there is some merit to this method.
Since everything has already been done, more or less, all the wheels have been invented, there is little sense in totally reinventing, when we can get right to "pimping our paintings," taking the valuable framework of another, established artist, combining it with some shiny, chrome-like techniques of a few others, welding it all together with some ideas, and calling the galleries. But seriously as Robert Henri taught "whatever an artist leaves is so much for others to use as stones to step on or stones to avoid." Indeed there is some truth in that quote, another great quote, which really speaks to the value of this teaching method, came from Billy Collins, a Poet Laureate, whom I met last week, and had the pleasure of listening to. Mr Collins was asked how he learned to write, and how he teaches/ can others be taught to write poems, and his response was to the effect that, "all artists need to find people who make them jealous; people who can do the things they wish they could do, then through aspiring to be like that individual, they may discover themselves." He in fact mentioned that he spent years "stealing" from other poets and he turned out alright.
Perhaps artistic individuality is not an inborn idea, but based more on the particular composition of our experiences, influences and all those artists to whom we are directed who fill us with envy.

Blogstorm

Our first ever BlogStorm, scheduled to begin today, has been postponed (as much in my life has been) by the arrival of the baby and attendant scheduling conflicts. Hopefully, it will be presented before the end of the term; no one will be penalized for this unexpected change of plan. My apologies.

Bill Harris Painting ( I think of Keith)

Hey there! Keith, there is a local artist here at the shop that my studio is located that reminds me of your work. I thought maybe you'd like to check him out. His name is Bill Harris, and he's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. I really enjoy is stuff and there is a quality that reminds me of your work over the summer. Mainly the self portait you did. If you ever want any more info besides his website let me know cause I work almost right next to him. The website is http://www.wcharris.com Have fun!