Thoughts on Craft (Evolving)

I'm going to post some responses to the idea of craft from an email I sent to handful of interesting artists to whom I think such a question would be relevant. This post will evolve as I get responses, so check in a couple of times if you want the whole story.

From Candy Depew

witches practice "the craft"
ie witchcraft

crafty = sly and devilish

so with this line of thinking, this theory
of craft clearly implies
sly and devilish witches practicing
(or witch practice- singular)

thats pretty radical : )

From Mary Barrett

I wonder if the paleolithic cave painters thought their renderings were more "high art" than the crafters of bowls, clothes or bodily ornamentation? We'll never know, but one can speculate that if paintings of auroch stampeding across the cave wall provided some sort of ritualistc invocation for a good hunt, they may have been seen as fulfilling a magical/spiritual function. But who is to say that the adornment of the body with beads made from shells or teeth or such didn't also fulfill an important spiritual function? Or even an aesthetic function? And why is intellectual sometimes perceived to be more important than spiritual? I think interaction between all aspects is inevitable. At any rate, the beauty of the beast is captured, and humans are fulfilling what I believe to be an innate need to create and connect the physical and spiritual worlds. I also think that so called tradition crafts can also fulfill this need. The difference seems to be that craft, yes, relying heavily on the notion of work and product, also relies on tradition. "Fine Art" at least in modern times, seems at times to want to break tradition, to move forward, to reflect change. But wait a minute, didn't the arts and crafts movement do that too? I guess Radical Craft also seeks to create change, and at the same time to preserve community.

I think that art and craft both involve body mind and spirit. When Adrian Saxe curated the 2001 Scripps College 57th annual Ceramic Annual, he chose for the theme: "Between Thee and Me: Objects of Agency." He noted in the curators statement that this theme is present in some of the most compelling artists today. "It is the potential for an object to become an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace, or of inner conflict and evil, and serve as a conduit of emotion and memory for both the maker and the user of the object."

I think crafts and the communal aspect of crafts is important to identify who we are as humans and how we interact with each other and something else, on a physical, mental and meta-physical(spiritual) basis.

From Bill Gerhard:

I don't know what I think about craft anymore. I guess there are two kinds of thinking, one that has to do with a high level of skill and technique and another that has to do with appropriateness of means, which means you shouldn't have to think about it. I think in grad school someone said the moment you notice craft is when you stop looking. Craft people are very proud and defensive, which is their big problem.

From Sumi Maeshima:

What is curious about the word craft (used provincially in the U.S.) is that it seems to lack autonomy, as if it always needs clarifications of what one means by the word. Or it needs a contrasting word: craft v.s. fine arts, crafting v.s. thinking. At the same time, there is something moralistic about the word craft, and that moralistic stance can be fashionable or unfashionable, radical or conservative, which in turn tells where the speaker stands, instead of what she/he means.

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.