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).

I like it when I see a Richard Serra curve in a piece of furniture or in a ceramic object. I recently used Yoko Ono’s “Voice Piece for Soprano” as an example of how an art piece carries knowledge. Here’s the piece:

Scream.

1. against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky

This is a work that always grows in my imagination. For one, it tells me things about Japan and nature . It was used as a subtitle for Alexandra Monroe’s 1994 “Japanese Art After 1945, Scream Against the Sky”, so now it also tells me things about modern post- war Japan. It tells me something about art that breaks free from being an object. It works more like a metaphor than a text of course, but it gives me a lot. The object here is a conceptual art work, but it could also be the ceramic vessel with the Serra curve, or a contemporary piece of furniture with Krenov joinery and an LED screen embedded in its door. Does the object carry knowledge? I think it certainly does. Does the object transmit knowledge? That gets more mysterious, but the answer must be yes. Maybe I’m just talking about inspiration. With the Ono piece (is it an object?) the reference to nature – scream against the sky – tells me that the Japanese culture of nature doesn’t end with Hokusai but carries through to the Fluxus artists and this gives Ono’s piece a very different character from contemporaneous N.Y. and European examples of conceptual art. Just this week I saw a special installation of Joseph Beuy’s work at MOMA including a film of his famous performance at the Rene Block gallery with the coyote – a different experience and expression about nature. In Twombly, it isn’t the individual marks so much, as if they were a text, although plenty has been written about Twombly’s marks. It’s his particular engagement with  Pollock – what he came up with in response to Pollock – going primitive at first, and then his response to Mediterranean culture when he moved to Italy.There’s an interesting essay on Twombly’s humanistic education by way of Charles Olsen and Black Mountain College at the Tate site.  Twombly is interesting because people either love him or dismiss him, and a painter can’t really copy him. Many see him as a leftover ab ex painter. I see his work as a development out of that period that goes way beyond what they did. For me to sit at my laptop in New Bedford and to discover these things about Twombly, to look at individual pictures, to learn about his full career, and maybe to go to the studio and paint – there must be knowledge that’s getting to me. Just now I’m working on some drawings in a comic panel format. I’m doing simple images of rain on water and other landscapes.  I’m studying Hokusai – I’ve adopted his conventions for depicting rain as slanting lines for example. I’m using the imagery in both paintings and furniture. Call it influence, call it stealing, or call it research, a restless maker will use anything at hand to realize their work.

The Story:

I made a delivery  to the east side of Manhatten last week. I was done by noon so I headed down to Chelsea. It was pretty sleepy in the last week of August. Many of the galleries were closed, though there were a fair number of limos parked along w. 25^th street. I popped into Cheim and Reid to see The Female Gaze. It was good to see. Among  other things,  a wonderful figure painting by Joan Mitchell of a powerful black model was a big surprise. There was also a great photograph by Francesca Woodman, Betty’s daughter, and one of the best photographers ever to come out of RISD. Looking through the gallery catalogues, I found one from painter Pat Steir’s last show. We went to a retreat/class with Steir a few years ago at the New York Zen Center that was wonderful, and she’s one of my favorite contemporary painters. The catalogue has an introduction by Anne Waldman, the poet, in which she refers to an interview she had done with Steir in 2003:

“In an interview I did with Steir for Bomb magazine, in speaking of ‘A Breughel Series(A Vanitas of Style)’ 1982-84, she says she was ‘thinking about ‘vanitas,’ working in vain. The Vanitas paintings were about the vanity of life, the pilgrims’s progress. I had been hearing architects use the word ‘postmodern’ since 1978, and I thought, Postmodern! I haven’t even gotten to Modernism. Not realizing that, in fact, all of the work I ever did is now classified as postmodern because I tried to see everything at once.”

Robert Irwin said something like this about Modernism: “Modernism? I think we’re about in the middle of it. In another 200 years maybe we’ll know if it was a good idea?” So historians? I love them, but with a caution: the maker (my default term for artist/designer/craftsman) has a different kind of knowledge and makers should remember that.

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