tea bowl by Ogata Kenzan, the Rembrandt of Japanese ceramic artists*
I was reading a discussion on Artblog that got into the difference between illustration and fine art. The discussion started with a link to some new paintings by Walter Darby Bannard, artist and writer, in the course of which the word “illustration” was used in a somewhat pejorative way. I thought to myself, “I’ve heard that argument before”. Substituting “craft” for “illustration”, it reminded me of the craft/art debate. I was primed for this after listening to Garth Clark’s talk on “How Envy Killed the Crafts”, recently delivered at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, and also my recent discovery of Bruce Metcalf’s new blog, CraftGadfly. So this is what I posted ( comment # 160):
Some of this discussion about illustration reminds me of the “craft vs. art” debate that takes place in the contemporary craft world. That debate seems tiresome, if not specious to me, but nevertheless reflects some truths about the current art world, if not art. Sculptor Martin Puryear said that art doesn’t need craft, though an exploraton of craft is essential to his work. I think he is surely correct. When artists who come from the traditional crafts make it in the contemporary art arena – Betty Woodman and Josiah McIlheney are examples – they are often considered to have broken through to Valhala, mainly because the “rewards program” is better, as ceramics dealer Garth Clark has put it, and sometimes those who don’t cross over to Chelsea or Art Basel are seen to be existing in a kind of purgatory. Allison Elizabeth Taylor’s marquetry pictures are another example, though Allison seems to have appropriated craft technique to go directly to Chelsea. This turns some craft artists back to the defense of an idea of pure craft, and misty references to the modern craft “movement”, steeped sometimes in no small amount of nostalgia, and for some, a sense that the “art world” just doesn’t give a hoot about them anyway, which is true. The recent rise of design stars like Marc Newsom and Ron Arad only confuses the issue, although Clark points out that design and craft are natural allies, and he says that craft artists who wish to make it in the larger art world should leave the craft field.
Many of these arguments are about the art world, the art business, and don’t have much to do with art really, except in the following way: in the 60’s and 70’s, with the advent of conceptual art, contemporary art incorporated theory into its practice, “It could be argued that one of the reasons for the problem of criticism today is its redundancy when changes in art practice, notably Conceptual art, displaced criticism from its role in relation to the avant-garde by incorporating critique – including the critique of a descriptive, objectifying epistemology into the practice itself: art theory replaces art criticism as the appropriate way of mediating the practice, and is often carried out by the artists themselves” – Michael Newman from The State of Art Criticism. This refers to the notion that the contemporary work of art is supposed to incorporate a critical (theoretical) position. To this observer however, the rigors of 70’s conceptual art are often merely a holdover, a grab bag of labels almost, as generations of young artists have been spoon fed theory by their academic teachers. Some of the best artists will have absorbed those lessons and incorporated them into their objects, but it must be done with a sure touch. Like Puryear’s sculpture, the craft object must be about more than an idea. Another way of stating this might be to say that conceptual art drew attention to the fact that all art is conceptual. It seems pointless to try to divide the brain into the part that thinks and the part that sees, surely a life of looking at art teaches us that.
Anyway, the comparison with illustration isn’t perfect, but I find it interesting to consider. The mention of japanese prints earlier in the discussion ( are they illustration or art?) was also interesting to me because my perfect art object is the japanese tea bowl – a utilitarian object that, in its time and place, often contained high art – which can carry beauty, utility, ceremony, cultural history, human history. What more could you want?
*the reverse side of this remarkable bowl bears a poem:
Billowing forth, white like snow;
Then a river that flows for all eternity.
It’s interesting that the Garth Clark lecture came up here together with mention of my posting on Artblog. I am wondering where to get a transcript of that essay because it sounds right in tune with the lecture I gave out at Pilchuk called “Craft and Art Envy” in 1985, subsequently published in NEW WORK #27 (Autumn 1986).
It’s really a matter of semantics and the usual power jockeying that goes on everywhere. The illustration/art thing got pretty heated on Artblog.
I’m with you on the tea bowls. They make the whole controversy look silly.
Darby Bannard
Said by bannard December 7, 2008 at about 4:55 pm
Darby:
Is your piece in the online archive or otherwise available ? It is really about power isn’t it? I could see what they were getting at regarding illustration. I think Franklin and Chris and the other participants on Artblog are looking for that real art experience, as we all are,and trying to parse the elements of that experience. I happen to think that it can happen anywhere, anytime, and it can happen with a craft object just as easily as with a painting or a piece of sculpture or a building. That’s what I try to write about here.
Said by David Richardson December 8, 2008 at about 5:34 pm
Sorry – I should have included the link:
http://wdbannard.org/?mode=by&id=69
I suppose it could happen with just about anything, Art is whatever gets experienced as art, so it is wide open. But it is more likely with some things than others.
If we decide an object is a kind of thing, like a craft object, it may well inhibit seeing it as art, just as seeing it as art might inhibit its use as a bowl. We get from the world what we decide to take from it, and when we decide it.
Said by bannard December 8, 2008 at about 8:43 pm
These definitions really get in the way don’t they?
I read the piece “Envy” last night, along with several other pieces in your archive. Good stuff. Written like a painter, that is, you focus on what is in front of you, and not so much on the art world or the personalities.
I’d recommend another piece to our readers that may be even more useful for craft artists at this particular moment: “Excellence and Postexcellence”. 2000.
http://wdbannard.org/?mode=by&id=119
I love the phrase “loathsome things in vitrines”.
Said by David Richardson December 9, 2008 at about 12:59 am
Bruce Metcalf sent this:
Hi David,
I found this bit in the NY Times Sunday Book Review. Amazing how familiar the language is.
“A new book about gardens declares that a contemporary garden “describes an aesthetic, conceptual, critical and political positioning… Its framework has recourse to phenomenology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural geography, political inquiry, communications and cultural studies, as well as environmental and ecological concerns.” Furthermore, “the whole conception of the garden as a little piece of nature is not only outdated, but in fact has always been false.” (Leslie Johnstone, ed. Hybrids: Reshaping the Contemporary Garden in Métis)
Wow.
Bruce
Said by David Richardson December 13, 2008 at about 3:02 am
Bruce:
Interesting. At least they didn’t claim Marxism. I guess that would have been a bridge too far. It’s very revealing isn’t it. First, that a garden should involve “positioning”, other than the positioning of furniture and stone gnomes. The classic japanese garden designers loved to make literary references of course, so there’s a grand tradition of referencing the broader culture in a garden. So I could agree that a garden can carry cultural references like any art form. It’s the chosen references that are revealing, as you say. Nature is not profound enough to be a satisfactory reference on it’s own? It’s too bad nature is so easily dismissed. It used to be part of our culture, but we are far from Romanticism. Maybe they’re just French.
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
Said by David Richardson December 13, 2008 at about 3:03 am
Bruce Metcalf replied:
In fact, the writers & gardeners in question are French-Canadian, who are always trying to be more French than the French themselves. But it’s odd that you should quote Rousseau (very French!) and his bit of proto-Marxist rant.
As for my own garden, I’m certain that all those weeds are a little piece of nature. As are the whiteflies that kill my tomatoes, etc. etc.
Said by David Richardson December 13, 2008 at about 3:33 pm
Bruce:
I realize that the Rousseau quote is certainly proto-Marxist, but I chose it more as proto-Romantic. The writer critiques society and heads off into nature. I was thinking of “the american sublime”, the Hudson River painters, of a time when nature was an inspiration to artists – American landscape painting 1820 to 1880 – the title of a show at Tate Britain in 2002 linking these painters to Turner. I was thinking of Turner himself.
Here’s another reference to the sublime derived from nature:
“One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty transcends the “earth art” genre to which critics have consigned it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime.” -Arthur Danto from an article on Smithson in the Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/danto
Evidently Thoreau was somewhat inspired by Rousseau. I was thinking about Thoreau. Here’s another quote: Boris Groys in “The State of Art Criticism”, edited by James Elkins and Michael Newman.
“The departure from social communication repeatedly practiced by modern art has often been described, ironically, as escapism. But every escapism is always followed by a return: thus the Rousseauian hero first leaves Paris and wanders through forest and meadows only to return to Paris, set up a guillotine in the center of the city, and subject his former superiors and colleagues to a radical critique, that is, to cut off their heads.”
I was thinking about that Rousseauian hero’s outbound trip. I was thinking he was an artist.
Said by David Richardson December 13, 2008 at about 3:58 pm