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Ark of the World Museum, 2002, Greg Lynn building project, Zeitgeists turn up in the strangest places, though few stranger than at a crafts
San José, Costa Rica. Photo: Brandon Welling
conference in Canada. NeoCraft, the conference in question, was held last
from left: November at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Its stated ambitions
Michael Brennand-Wood, Stars Underfoot–Random Precision
were large – ‘to develop critical thinking, theory and history in relation to the
(detail), embroidered flowers, acrylic, wire, glass, fabric, thread, mosaic
on wood panel. Photo: Stephen Brayne crafts’ – although its unspoken aim was larger. Through three days of speeches
by the heavy-hitters of the crafts world ran a single, painful refrain: the crafts are
Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, 2007 (installation view).
© V&A Images in crisis, and the emergency has been provoked by art. The question NeoCraft
set out to answer was, ‘What can be done about it?’
Robert Foster, F!NK Water Jugs, 2006 (designed 1993), pressed
and anodised aluminium with powdercoated aluminium cast handle, You see the problem. Not so long ago, making an artwork and making
each 30 x 10 cm. Photo: Russell Pell
a craftwork were alike in calling for skill. Differences between the two kinds
of production were less significant than the similarities. No one sneered at
Benvenuto Cellini when he took time off making bronze sculptures to make salt
cellars; Alberti ranked master of terracotta Luca della Robbia with Donatello
and Masaccio. Genius rested equally in the hand and mind, and needed both
to express itself.
By degrees, though, skill lost its place in the scheme of things. By the end
of the eighteenth century, salt cellars and clay plaques had become the remit of
industry. The Industrial Revolution reduced craftsmen to peons, the objects they
made to trinkets. By the mid-nineteenth century, and despite the best efforts of
John Ruskin, William Morris and Prince Albert, art was defining itself as anti-skill,
which is to say anti-craft. The unfinished surface of an impressionist painting
says all kinds of things about Japanese immediacy, but it also sends out a coded
message: I am not well made. From Monet it is a surprisingly small step to Sol
LeWitt. LeWitt’s devolving of his murals to assistants who made them from
cursory instructions scribbled on scraps of paper says that drawing is something
anyone with a prehensile thumb can do. The genius of this work lies in the mind,
not the hand.
If conceptualism did craft no favours, its real low point has come in the
past 20 years. LeWitt’s murals still required the implied touch of the artist, even
if the hand actually doing the touching was not his own. For all its Factory-made
appearance, the same might be said of an average Warhol. But by 1990 a kind of
art had come into being whose aesthetic lay in the fact that it could not possibly
have been made by the artist, that it was palpably untouched by his hand.
This was particularly true of Britart, and of central figures like Damien
Hirst and Marc Quinn. Bound up in the work of both men was a horror of the
flesh, a concern with putrescence and contagion that was part fascination, part
revulsion. This in turn translated into what might be called an aesthetic of asepsis
– in Hirst’s case, vitrines full of formalin and pills; in Quinn’s, cryogenic freezing
units. Just as the duo seemed appalled by mortality, so were they obsessed
by their own power to infect. Their work came to embody a kind of neurotic
cleanliness, signified by the fact that they themselves had never touched it. That
lack of touch, unthinkable to any previous generation of artists, became the
embodiment (or, maybe, the disembodiment) of what Britart was about (Tracey
Emin is the notable exception). Craft – the act of making – had already been
split off from the mind. Now it was cauterised from art as something dirty.
If uncraftedness was a metaphor for purity in Britart, it was also the
product of market forces. Another thing that separated Hirst from LeWitt was
the pressure on the former to produce. The art market had changed radically
between 1975 and 1995; LeWitt could never have had four concurrent shows
on four continents, as Hirst did. LeWitt chose not to make his own work as a
conceptual statement. Hirst simply didn’t have the time to. The idea that any
artist could cast a human skull in platinum and then mount it with 8,000 diamonds
is patently absurd. Bound up in the never-touched-it aesthetic of Hirst’s art is a
form of confession, an admission that the things he gets other people to make
are commodities as much as artworks.
Which takes us back to Nova Scotia. Whatever the reason for Britart’s
mood, its implications for craft were serious. Handmaking has become not a
counterpoint to art but its opposite. Craft isn’t just folksy, it is impure. The only
place it has in the fine arts is as an object of postmodern mockery. Things can be >
Design Focus.indd 93 7/3/08 10:14:29
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