Cy Twombly, from “Poems to the Sea” via tate.org.uk

Garth Clark’s talk “How Envy Killed the Crafts” has prompted much thought in the craft community, but I haven’t seen any responses in print or online, so I’d like to venture some thoughts of my own as a little push back to historians. I’m not sure I like it when a historian or critic tells me what I should be – I should be a designer, I should be a manufacturer, I can’t be an artist: “Crafters who want to be artists should leave the field.” The suggestion that craft ally itself with design makes good sense as a practical matter. I take this to mean the design “world”, as a system of practice and distribution. To evoke the art , craft  and design worlds as separate arenas serves a purpose. It brings up an image of the commercial spheres that many of us swim through. The historian will describe these spheres as they’ve existed in the past, the critic will read them at the current moment, and if brave enough, will venture suggestions on where we may be headed. This is fair. Some, like Garth Clark and Glenn Adamson, do so with the proper amount of caution backed up with prodigious scholarship and experience, and believe me I hang on every word. In the spirit of cautious predictions then, I offer a concept and a story.

The Concept:

Prompted by James Elkins’ recently posed question “What do artists know?”, I’ve been thinking of the crafts and the fine arts as spheres of knowledge. Now that the craft movement is over, we can see it as a whole – as a collection of experiences and discoveries that constitute a body of knowledge. Similarly in the fine arts, although we usually speak of influence, an individual artist’s work, as well as the larger times they have worked in, can be seen as forms of hard- won knowledge. Is this just semantics or a conceptual amusement? I find it a useful way to describe what artists, designers, crafters do ( I use those words without any particular hierarchy for the moment – the times are too ambiguous to settle this just now). If you consider the work of furniture maker James Krenov or painter Cy Twombly for example, as bodies of  knowledge, you can study them as much as you like, and the more you study, the more you can take from them. I hear someone say “Isn’t that what Postmodernism was about?” Well yes, but Postmodernism as a historical period may end up being defined more by it’s particular forms of irony than for a synthesis of good ideas. You can almost date recent arts production by its quality of irony – you have Duchamp’s irony, post-modern irony,  post-post-modern, neo-conceptual irony – irony as a marker for connoisseurship. I suppose you could start your study of 20th century irony with Oscar Wilde (who died in 1900).

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David Richardson, Six Views of the Hozu River, detail

As the Furniture Society conference in Boone, NC gets underway, I want to wish all my friends well, although I must send my regrets. I hope to see you all next year in Boston. The rest of this post has little to do with furniture, but is really just about the water, as in the stuff we are all swimming in. Water is my favorite subject and metaphor. John Maeda, RISD’s new president, recently said in an interview, “people don’t want technology now. They want humanity.” Here are some links and comments culled from hunting and gathering on the web.

This Is Water

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” -David Foster Wallace, commencement address, Kenyon College, 2005

Evidently this commencement address by David Foster Wallace has been around the internet for a while, but I just discovered it via Design Observer, through a link to a post by Marie Mundaca who designed several of Wallace’s books, including an elegant version of this address. It’s kind of a plea for compassion, a call for “changing your default setting.” “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

This is water.

This is water.”

Donald Vaccino

My friend Donald just sent me photos of new work. Here’s a beauty:

Art Doctor

Because I’m a furniture restorer, I can’t resist sharing this New Yorker article on a conservator of contemporary art. He describes carving dung and installing a Gordon Matta-Clark, throwing left over bits from the bottom of the packing crates artfully here and there. Registration required to view articles.

Creating a New Craft Culture

The American Craft Council has a blog for the upcoming conference “Creating a New Craft Culture.”

Posts by Bruce Metcalf and Glenn Adamson are featured. Bruce’s post is a repost from his own blog, Craft Gadfly – a review of the book Handmade Nation. This was my comment in response:

Thinking about today’s DIY craft, I’m reminded of an earlier thought. The great arts writer and critic John Russell once wrote about Alberto Giacometti’s work and Paris in the post WW2 years and described it as a time when life had a hand made quality. I’ve always remembered that comment. I believe he was referring to a time when scarcity and deprivation forced people to live carefully and purposefully. He wrote this against the background of a heated up art world and the general corporatism of the 80’s. But the rise of the DIY impulse shows that people are still looking for those qualities that Russell observed in Giacometti’s Paris. The phrase “a hand made life” also makes me think of the culture of workrooms and studios that I’ve been around all my life. The brothers Giacometti – Alberto and Diego – were both trained as sculptors, but they worked on commissions for the top French decorators like Jean Michel Frank, for high end Parisian clients. I’m thinking of a culture where the fine arts and decorative arts (as they were once called) brushed up against each other. Politically, DIY and high end art/craft/design are at opposite poles, but it seems inevitable that they should meet somewhere. William Morris somewhat bitterly complained that he had made “bibelots for the rich”, but there must be a better way to think about good work. David McFadden has said of work being done today that mixes between craft, art and design “we don’t know what to call it yet.” I like that statement. It makes me feel like there is something to be discovered.

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