Crafts
criticism.(Janet Koplos Metalsmith Summer 1993)
The following is reprinted from
the 1992 monograph published by the Haystack Institute, an annual forum
to examine ideas of philosophical importance to the craft field. (Haystack,
P.O. Box 518, Deer Isle, Maine 04627
Crafts
criticism is a mess. It has a shaky past, uncertain credentials, no theoretical
basis and only a vague vision of an ideal. A lot of it is defensive, operating
on the assumption that crafts is an underdog field, unfairly denied status
as art. Yet almost never does this defensive criticism really consider whether
being defined as art is a good thing. [...]
To start off, I'm going to assert that, as a product of art schools, and
of such criticism as there has been, the whole crafts world has been like
Cinderella's wicked stepsisters trying to squash their big feet into the
glass slipper - that is, crafts has been trying to be something that it's
not. For 40 years craftspeople have been trying to make painting and sculpture
- usually not trying as hard as possible, more like just standing with their
feet in the same place and leaning toward art. (The advantage of not trying
too hard, of course, is that you always have an excuse for failure.)
One consequence of this persistent inclination has been a tendency of craft
critics to borrow the nominal vocabulary of art criticism, along with a
tendency of everyone to treat the whole craft field as a unity, which it
is not. In the process of grinding up crafts in the art machine,
what is useful and valuable and distinctive about crafts is often forgotten
or disparaged.
Let me state the obvious: crafts isn't
just things that want to be called art and want to be looked at in galleries
and museums. [...]
But [...] let me enumerate some of the varieties of crafts.
1) One kind is the work using conventional crafts materials that succeeds
in making it into art galleries and art magazines. So far, work in clay
has most often been the recipient of art world acceptance.
2) In addition, crafts encompasses what we can call artisanry - for example,
the functional ware that potters make for sale in their town, or at art
fairs.
3) Besides that, there's public commission, - for example the large-scale
textile works that hang in hotel atriums.
4) In addition, there's folk art, such as Appalachian jugs or baskets.
5) There are are a few craftspeople who make design prototypes for line,
of porcelain dinnerware, jewelry, or luxury glass collectibles.
6) There's also hobby crafts, although our crafts field always tries to
distance itself from the hobbyists.
7) And finally, and most nebulously, there's the stuff that's called "Exhibition
work" but that stays within traditional craft forms - for example,
teapots that can't be used and are made to show.
Of these groups, only in the
first and last case does it make any sense to write "art criticism"
about the work. That's because criticism, as it is extracted and extrapolated
from the art world, deals with personal expression, with originality; but
at rock bottom, with ideas. Art is always about something. Art introduces
ideas visually, and the things may be philosophical, political, social,
historical, spiritual, psychological. Even in the case of abstract art,
there is presumed to be an underlying concept that may deal with formal
issues or has some meaning by analogy. The fact that art is always about
something means that it has layers, it is not just one thing. Both "art
works in craft media" and "exhibition works" have this kind
of subject matter, and criticism can enrich our understanding of them.
(Criticism, you understand, is not some god-given truth, not some final answer
to what the work means. It is simply a proposal, a tentative interpretation,
based on a very careful observation by someone who can write. Criticism is
an outside view of what a work communicates, based on translating a visual language
into a verbal language. Criticism is a service or an educational endeavour -
although there have certainly been cases when art criticism has become so self-conscious
that it has turned into a self-serving performance and actually become an impediment
to understanding the art work.)
Although criticism can be a useful contribution to "art in craft
media" and "exhibition works," it is destructive in the case
of useful objects. Functional things differ from the intellectual and often
almost cynical leading-edge art today.
I hope nobody thinks that all visual objects should be art and should engage
with articulable ideas. Our world and our needs are not that narrow, and squashing
everything into one category just makes the category meaningless. Functional
things are different from art, but they're not less, they're not dumb, they're
not shallow - they're just different. Let me again state the obvious: the prime
characteristic of functional work is that it performs a function. Criticism
as currently constituted, being based on exhibitions in which the things on
display are not supposed to be touched, cannot address function. You can tell
very little about the efficiency or experience of use by just looking at an
object.
Critical writing about functional work has always been problematic. It might
be useful to write about the work in terms of engineered design - using technical
language - or it might be rewarding to talk about its physical character and
the nature of the experience of using it. But that's not art criticism as we
know it today, which deals with ideas. There might be some question of readership
for such design information, but then, there's a question of readership for
every kind of art writing, and I don't think it would be a terrible stretch
for readers of most craft publications to absorb such information. Technical
analysis might require some new writers, though.
Functional work still has its visual aspects, of course. It has form
or shape, it has color, it has texture, it may have pattern or image. All those
things can be discussed in the kind of "art appreciation" approach
that I think should always be a part of good criticism, to explain how a work
visually communicates. But it would be a very odd distortion to write about
those aspects in isolation while disregarding the purpose of the object. Yet
that's what happens when art criticism is applied to functional works.
Moreover, those visual aspects that can be discussed do not adequately encompass
psychological and sociological aspects of the work that may be very important
- may in fact be more important than any specifics of appearance. Perhaps writing
about functional work should never be restricted to the work alone; perhaps
the whole way that a maker lives and deals with material goods should always
be part of the discussion. Perhaps, the object is just the physicalization of
a philosophy that shapes a lifestyle.
The pernicious effect of criticism in functional work is not a matter of attacks
on specific objects: the problem is that the irrelevance of "use"
in art-critical discourse means that "use" is discounted. Functional
work is less likely to be reviewed, and when it is reviewed the function is
less likely to be discussed. The slow but inexorable result has been that use
seems outdated or even mindless. [...]
Another reason for this shift, though, is economic rather than critical:
functional work has to sell for reasonable prices or people won't be willing
to use the objects - this is less true of jewelry - but the price of art can
rise almost limitlessly. Thus even if functional craftspeople themselves aren't
seduced by the thought of making more money for their work if it's nonfunctional,
this factor can act as a damper on galleries. [...] The conclusion one has to
draw from this situation is that functional work belongs in shops. That would
be a neat solution to the problem, and an end to this discussion, if our minds
weren't poisoned by the assumption that what's in a shop can't be as important
as what is in a gallery.
Critical writing can also be destructive in the case of folk crafts. Usually
the beauty of folk crafts is something distilled over time by what I like to
think of as a bedrock human sense-and-sensitivity that comes through when distractions
are removed. There has been some philosophical speculation that purely functional
things are by their nature beautiful - an interesting idea that the straightforwardness
of function is inherently beautiful. Folk crafts are defined and they appeal
to us - because of their distance from trends and from arbitrariness. But writing
about folk crafts often has the unintended result of destroying that healthy
distance.
The best example of this that I know about
happened in Japan, but it could happen anywhere. It's the famous case of Onta
pottery, which was "discovered" in the backwoods of the island of
Kyushu, so to speak, by Soetsu Yanagi, the founder of the Japan Folk crafts
Museum. He wrote about it as the perfect realization of community-based cooperative
pottery production yielding useful forms that exemplified what he called "healthy
beauty". As a result of the attention he brought to Onta pottery, collectors
and dealers wanted to acquire it, so prices rose, making it awfully expensive
to use. Then some traditional forms were dropped because there was less demand
for them among the new buyers. And foreign celebrities such as Bernard Leach
visited and introduced foreign forms and practices, such as pitchers or handles.
In addition, individual potters were singled out for attention, and that upset
the social system of the pottery village. The consequence was that Onta became
modern pottery, not folk pottery. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.[...]
Maybe we should conclude that there should be no writing about folk
crafts. But there is a natural human interest in it, and besides, we have to
accept that it can't be locked in a time capsule involuntarily (and perhaps
not even voluntarily).[...]
There's still a separate question of whether criticism is appropriate for folk
crafts. In this instance, critics can't talk about personal expression. That
aspect of art is seldom present in folk crafts. Ideas can certainly be discussed,
but the ideas in folk crafts whether manifested in form or decoration - are
usually cultural standards, so there is seldom the kind of multilevel ambiguity
that distinguishes the stuff we call art. Today the symbols used in folk crafts
are used because their meaning is shared in the community. They are understood
by all members of the community. This suggests that the interesting aspects
of folk crafts can be addressed in anthropological terms, without the speculative
projection of meaning that is typical of art criticism. And with folk crafts,
as with artisanry, there's more to the story than just the object, so criticism
is too narrow. So here again, art criticism strikes out.[...]
Production lines sometimes don't
differ at all in visual character from the singular or limited-edition products
of artisans, and if there is a difference it tends to be only a greater refinement
and standardization in mass-produced work. The philosophical claims that are
made for the preferability of handmade work over factory-made work are actually
extra-aesthetic - that is, they're things you know through ways other than seeing.
They're no less valid than visual aspects, though. In fact, in these days when
politically correct leading-edge art criticism insists on taking into account
the cultural context in which art is produced, it would be interesting to try
to make an art-criticism case for the moral preferability of handmade work.
Such a case would have to be argued, presented as a manifesto, but such a reasoned
ideological approach is uncommon in crafts criticism.
The marketing systems of these two fields make a big difference in their relationship
to criticism. Factory-produced work has more to gain from advertising or exposure
to buyers through home-decorating magazines. Criticism, being geared to discussion
rather than sales, does not have much relevance to the aims of production lines.
Public-commission crafts occupy a very visible yet a very ambiguous
position. In hotels and corporate lobbies this work is likely to be treated
as decor rather than art and to be unlabeled. The same thing happens to paintings
in the same setting, so the problem is not in the crafts works themselves. The
difficulty that craft or art faces in this context raises interesting questions
about "art in life", and about how much of art's power derives from
its placement and treatment rather than from inherent qualities of the work
[...]
Crafts works placed in public settings are usually abstract and usually large.
They tend to concentrate on such formal interests as color, structure, or texture,
which are presumed to be understandable and appealing to an untutored public;
they are intended to be pleasant rather than intellectually or politically challenging.
It's a quirk of today's art world that likable work is seen as less
"worthy" than difficult or unpleasant work. There is no automatic
correlation. Still, the public art that gets treated by art critics is the work
that's different: difficult, or critical, or austere, or challenging. There's
more to say about work that is an exception to the rule. Use of craft materials
is not cause for exclusion from critical writing about public works. So that's
what criticism focuses on. Crafts do better here than in some other situations.
Still the public works are never placed for the purpose of attracting critical
attention. Their target audience is average people, rather than critics. The
work itself does not seem to accrue prestige from favorable criticism and so
become more valuable to its owner. But favorable public attention - such as
people liking to have their picture taken in front of the work - has an intangible
value for the owner. In the case of public works, criticism is not pernicious,
but neither is it particularly significant. More appropriate are simply reports
on this sort of work, such as newspaper coverage, or analyses that focus more
on public response than on artistic intentions.
"Exhibition works" and "art made in crafts materials" are
the two categories of work that are made to show, made to talk about, made to
be critically analyzed in accordance with our 20th century practice of art
criticism. [...] This work is easily discussible in the terms art critics normally
use, or else it is somehow so compelling that it forces critics to use its language,
to choose a vocabulary keyed to its originality.
"Exhibition works" is probably the largest and most bothersome category.
These works are the ones I mentioned that lean toward art, that adopt its forms
or its language or its subject matter but that don't adopt the art emphasis
on individuality or originality. They continue to be shown at crafts galleries
and in juried crafts exhibitions Ð self-segregating themselves. They have just
enough in common with the other forms of art that it's rather easy for members
of the art world to look at them and say, "This looks familiar, and it's
second-rate art." To some degree, that criticism is justified [...]
Let me baldly state another truth: crafts
makers believe that art is more important than crafts, so they look at the shows,
read the magazines, and, in following the trends, they come off looking like
copyists. [...] Yet in general, by copying or by responding to someone else's
invention, you can never catch up. You stay at the end of the line. (At the
same time that I talk about this influence from exposure to art, I must observe,
contradictorily, that it's also true that most craftspeople don't really keep
up with art, aren't very well informed about new work and new artists. The work
that gets through to them is what's well established, which is what I mean by
this work not really entering the art world but just leaning toward it, and
is also why crafts tends to look dated in an art context.)
Yet to confuse matters further, crafts has such a rich and varied
history that often when some new trend shows up in the art world, the crafts
world declares, "Oh, but we've been doing that all along!" This is
a pathetic situation, because while it's true that crafts had the precedent
(the latest example is the art world's newly found multiculturalism), to bring
up that fact is to use the defense of the powerless. Crafts did it all along,
but crafts criticism never made anything of it, never set multiculturalism as
an ideological foundation stone of crafts work - until it became important in
art. The "me too!" defense just proves again that the art world is
the one that determines the subject of the conversation. [...] You might equate
the crafts position with the female role in conversational exchange - typically
the woman introduces topics but the male determines whether or not they are
taken up.
It's not hard to see the blood kinship between art and crafts. But crafts is
definitely different from art. People who have been looking at painting and
sculpture and turn to "exhibition crafts" frequently think that the
work is too timid and too small. This, again, is a case of art setting the ground
rules: most leading-edge art today is large scale, and the occasional work that's
not tend to be amazingly dense and by that means are as assertive and demanding
of attention as larger sculpture.
The truth of this matter is that crafts in general is more concerned
with surface qualities than art is, and thus is more involved with subtleties.
Crafts more often places a premium on communicating the natural character of
the material it's made of; and that usually requires a close look. This intimacy
is an identifying character of crafts and it's certainly not a weakness per
se, but it does require shifting gears as one moves from painting and sculpture
to crafts. People who spend all their time involved with crafts see the subtleties,
see the innovations, and can easily get excited by good work, whereas people
from the art world may only see a kind of diminishment. Furniture currently
seems to be one place where there is some potential to overcome this dichotomy.
A bench or a desk is large enough to make a bold statement in a gallery, yet
because furniture is used it is perfectly normal for people to get very close
to it so they see the subtleties, too. Crafts galleries often perpetuate or
exacerbate the problem of this change in focal distance, I guess it could be
called, because they line the gallery walls with objects placed too close together
and set in display cases that distance them and suppress their distinctive qualities.
Crafts galleries present work more like shops do than like art galleries do.
Crafts also differs from most art in terms
of directness and metaphor. A painter's activity is so divorced from normal
life that every action has to be seen as freighted with intention and meaning,
whereas a craft object may be just what it is - a body adornment, a utensil,
a protective covering - unless the maker consciously works at adding other meanings.
These basic purposes are keyed to the human body, so crafts usually is made
in a familiar, intimate scale that doesn't demand our full attention as the
extremes of scale in painting or sculpture often do. Also, the tangibility,
the reality; the material identity of craft objects are almost indomitable,
which means that it's hard for a craft object ever to create a pictorial illusion
of a different scale. Only rarely, do you look at crafts and get pulled into
an imaginary space - an effect that's quite common in painting. Usually when
crafts makes a convincing illusion, there's a correspondence between the size
of the craft object and the size of what's being depicted. All these factors
of difference result in crafts that strive to be art; thus they often seem modest
and unexciting. But it doesn't have to be that way. Crafts' best route to art
is to capitalize on its strength, it's own character, doing the things that
other art media can't do.
But perhaps if craftspeople develop more confidence to do exactly
that, to capitalize on their differences, they'll stop worrying about being
art and just be themselves. That doesn't mean being a wicked stepsister or even
a weak stepsister, it just means being an individual with confidence in your
own identity.
In closing, I'd like to say that criticism should be applied only to that segment
of the crafts world that pursues ideas, originality, ambiguity and the other
characteristics of art. Craftspeople should recognize that if they want the
"privileges" of art, they're also going to have to accept the "responsibilities"
and that means jumping into the art world and facing tough criticism. Still,
criticism should not be seen as an honor but simply as one way of discussing
a particular type of work. Crafts critics should not struggle always to sound
as if they're talking about art, but should adopt the language of the object
they're describing, even if that includes aspects that are not currently popular
in the art world. Crafts galleries should allow space between objects and at
the same time should allow intimate approach. Crafts publications should not
try to treat all aspects of crafts in the same tune and the same "elevated"
regard which has the regrettable effect of distancing these things from our
lives. Crafts publications also should consolidate, so that when there is important
writing of whatever sort, it can serve an educational function for more than
just the little section of the crafts world that reads a medium-specific magazine.
And finally, craftspeople should remember
what brought them to the field and to the material, and should be true to their
own hearts and not be swayed by what others are doing.