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Crafts
criticism.
Janet Koplos Metalsmith Summer
1993
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.