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Craft vs. Technology
For handmaking
handmade as long as they are handmade badly: thus Michael Raedecker’s kitsch
embroidery, Tracey Emin’s faux-subversive stitching or the coils of a Grayson
Perry pot. (Perry takes this satire further by referring to himself not as a ceramicist
to regain its
but as a potter, a term jealously fought over by craftsmen.) Art and craft being
conjoined twins, this distaste for making has affected them both. People who
have spent their lives slip-glazing or Jacquard-weaving find their skills worse than
status, it will
useless, their work judged by the laws of a country not their own.
All this was the cause of understandable worry at NeoCraft, the more so
have to be
because the problem’s solution, like its cause, lies outside the world of craft. For
handmaking to regain its status, it will have to be reclaimed by art. And this fact
takes us to various places, among them White Cube Mason’s Yard.
reclaimed by art
Here Marc Quinn’s latest show, Evolution, holds out the distant promise of
change. Downstairs, half-a-dozen studies of embryos hint at various things. The
artist’s preoccupation with mortality has played itself backwards: thus, in middle
age, Quinn’s concern with the end of life has been replaced by an interest in its
beginning. But in terms of material and technique, too, the works in Evolution
are foetal. Gone are the icy vitrines; in their place are sculptures made in that
most archaic of materials, Carrara marble. Their cemetery sheen and pallor
make no great claims for skill. The aesthetic is more monumental mason than
sculpture park, and there is no sense of Quinn’s hand having been anywhere near
them. Nonetheless, the games they play with making do at least feel different
from Emin and Perry’s. The embryo is born from the block in a way that might
have intrigued Michelangelo, and that birth isn’t just to do with postmodern
sniggering. You wonder if the next stage in Quinn’s retro-evolution may actually
see him making his work himself, and whether that work might be not just clever
but skilled.
If so, then he will not be alone. Hirst’s diamond-skull For the Love of God
(2007) was a ne plus ultra of commodification, an object so full of loathing
for the market (and itself) that it is hard to see how its maker can go back to
subcontracting. Waiting to supplant him are the legions of guerrilla knitters and
environmental artists whose homespun practice is a snub to trade. Where the
maker’s mark spelt dorkiness to Britart, it could now spell a revolution: those
haptic virtues Ruskin saw as a bulwark against industrialisation are coming
back into fashion. Artists like the sculptor Sophie Newell, a thirty-three-year-
old Bloomberg New Contemporaries discovery, speak openly of an anti-YBA
backlash – “a reaction against the whole get-it-outsourced thing”. Newell‘s neo-
baroque wallpieces may not be hugely skilled, but they are insistently handmade;
“and that”, says Newell, “is kind of their point”.
And curators, too, are sniffing the air: the latest show at the Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Arts is not about conceptualism or queer theory but fabric.
Cloth and Culture Now may be a clunky name, but its willingness to find a link
between art and the way it is made is fashionably old-fashioned. The Victoria
and Albert Museum’s Out of the Ordinary, too, tried (alas, badly) to blur the
boundaries between craft and art by showing the work of fine artists alongside
that of craftsmen. Even if the effect was spoiled by mere reality – the artists
disliked being classed as craftsmen, and vice versa – the show put making back
on art’s agenda. Somewhere in all of this, you sense the opening of a middle
ground, or at least of a no-man’s-land. The problems of NeoCraft are not going
to go away tomorrow, but they may go away one day; and the implications for
art are enormous.
Edna Rupert, Rug, 2004, hand-tufted wool, 270 x 200 cm.
Collection Romaldo Giurgola AO. Photo: Marinco
Kojdanovski, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
97 Artreview
Design Focus.indd 97 7/3/08 10:19:38
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