BETWEEN ART & CRAFT

Issues between art and craft seem perennial. Is it art, or is it just craft? It looks well crafted, but is there any art to it? It looks like art, but it's terribly crafted - how can there be any art in it without craft? Why is art thought more important than craft? Such questions seem nagging to many. If you Google the subject you get 164,000+ hits. Art discussion boards on the Web are littered with discussions of the difference between art and craft.

I have had difficulty getting caught up by these questions. I suppose my alienation from the issue (for that is what it feels like) stems from my own relationship to my materials - paint, canvas, pigment, brushes, oils, charcoal, clay, steel, paper, words, vowels, consonants, breath. I've never felt like I had to attain some kind of masterful control over a medium. After all, my materials are not just stuff lying around to breathe life into, but media - so already alive and resonating with the world. It's a dance I'm concerned to join, to connect to, to understand within, not a battle to win or an opponent to conquer. But of course the best craftsmen I've met understand this kind of partnership as well as I do. It's just not generally appreciated. Mastery is not the most important thing, either in art or craft - or life. But that's not generally appreciated either.

I do believe very much in craft. I'm not disparaging it. It is just that it is the craft of swimming, not hammering that I'm committed to.

I was once asked to write about the issues between craft and art. Here was my take on it then:

“Between Art & Craft”

Artpapers, December, 1992

(working in my studio in 1992)

"Craft is a matter of doing necessary things well. Unfortunately in our culture today, very little is clearly understood as necessary. What we are left with in both art and craft is personal necessity, and that is increasingly reduced to the manipulation of signs and symbols that are shorn of once vital connection to experience. Because of this reduction, all craft has become an anachronism.

On the floor of my studio lie the scattered and scuffed up remains of paintings stillborn, bits and pieces that couldn’t move me or compel me to accept their necessity. they remain here because I’ve mostly, but not quite wholly, given up on them. Some of these pieces remain, like such remnants always do in artists’ studios, as keepsakes; but others because I might one day be astute enough, or even just plain lucky enough, to find the bit that’s necessary in them. Even though they constitute a pile of rubble now, grown old over the seventeen years I’ve spent in this particular studio, I am afraid to throw it all away. It is a midden heap of my failures, which may yet be redeemed.

It is by such scraps that I build my paintings. These scraps are torn bits and pieces, never wholes, and in a sense I never craft my paintings, only find them. There is some magic in this, and on the rarest of occasions, even grace.

("Moonlight Over Howgill Farm," 1999, mixed media)

This has come to seem necessary, but never wished for. Most of my paintings confirm that scraps are all I have, bits and pieces of consciousness of world and self. It seems a small orbit for painting or myself. I know I’m not alone in this predicament. Artists of all kinds have never before found it so difficult to transform experience into a generally understood and coherent language. As a result it is our individual isolation that more and more defines us as artists, as it does ourselves as individuals. There seems hardly any practical need for craft when we have only our individual selves to save or glorify.

On a studio table strewn with drawings, there is a ceramic bean pot. Made in Jugtown, North Carolina almost sixty years ago, it is rich in age, use, and craft. Its glaze is crackled and fissured, darkened by cooking along the bottom and part way up the sides to a deep black. On both sides the handles are pinched into the body with the fingerprints of the potter plainly visible. From the moment this pot was sliced wet from the potter’s wheel it has bulged with a fullness and wholeness. Still after all these years it always looks full, though no one in years has been really tempted to fill it with beans and put it in the oven. Its aesthetic is that welded to its original everyday purpose.

("Jugtown Bean Pot," circa 1930's, Ben Owen, Jugtown, N.C.)

On most days, no matter how many finished paintings lean against the studio wall, the empty pot is the most whole thing here. It’s hard to match its sense of necessity, in reasonableness or practicality, or in a kind of truth that doesn’t stray far from these sources. This pot is fully turned from its culture. But that culture is gone now. The pot speaks of a world gone under, where the relationship to things was different, and was necessarily more intimate, magical, and marked with clearer limits.

But here in my studio, what is clearly necessary? Generically speaking, paintings seem quite unnecessary. Here surrounded by jars of wonderfully exuberant colors, sheets of rich cream tinted paper, soft as skin, anything seems possible. But what seems necessary on most days is just the pressing need to make paintings; on the very best of them to get something right and thereby draw some private truth from it, and on the worst of them to simply make some contact with the world. These seem today matters of only the most personal and private necessity.

It is commonplace for artist like myself to simply dismiss the crafts as primitive formative versions of the fine thing art has become. When someone points to a work of craft on the “cutting edge” we know they are talking of its artfulness and not its craftsmanship. Despite two heroic efforts in modern times, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Bauhaus, it is still perceived as a regressive rural phenomenon in a progressive urban culture. Craft criticism is largely an addendum to art criticism, left to languish or fit itself to the current fine art paradigms; which is to say we simply can no longer summon a need for craft any more than we can for much of our past. What little we keep is with nostalgia, and that is the place craft largely has for us today. But I believe craft is essential. Disparaged, sentimentalized, even transformed into “fine craft,” craft is still a matter of doing necessary things well. In a culture where nothing but money is really considered necessary (that is, where all values come down finally to a price), it may be impossible to define such a concept of craft without falling victim to nostalgia, or trying to reshape it one more time. The necessity to form a shape in a certain traditional ways has become largely a mystery to us today. What we are left with in both art and craft is only a personal necessity to require that real life be the private life and and not the life of the community.

There is a connection between our entrenched notions that the personal is somehow, however impossibly, the real authentic form of cultural life, that our past is behind us, and that craft is out of place, a footnote to other pressing cultural forces. Craft is inseparable from traditional cultures. Thus the crafts are permanently estranged today from their sources. Such traditional communities are marked by the continuity they weave between individual and community, past and present. For such societies the past is not dead, not even past, but living all about, transformed into a timeless nurturing presence, and the individual is not isolated, but part of a seamless coherence. In that social reality - and it is quite different from our own - the important issues always remain the same, whether practical concerns for the shape and form of a cup, or metaphysical models for the cosmos. So what is valuable about craft is valuable about the community and the past, and the future. These values are not ideals, but hard truths derived from living within the limits of the natural world. It is these practical aspects that have borne and sustained crafts.

And it is to these aspects that artists can no longer clearly turn for a grounding in the practice of the  necessary. I do not mean to the slickness, cuteness, prettiness, or comeliness that often pervade the crafts as well as fine arts, but to a standard of quality stubbornly grafted to the object created. This is a kind of attention and concentration inhering in the practical task at hand of creating something plainly necessary for one’s own immediate life and community, but which nevertheless connects the fullness of a bean pot to a past far older, and to an inconceivable future."


The issue won't go away of course, no matter what I say. On last Sunday, with friends over to celebrate July 4th, and some of us drifting into the studio, an old friend (and collector of my work) pointed to some older paintings stacked against the wall and said "I'm glad to see you're doing that kind of work again - they're more crafted. You can see it took the artist a long time to do it. People appreciate that." And so they do!

TWO WORKS FROM THE BEOWULF CYCLE (2002 & 2010)

Two works from the Beowulf Cycle:

"So Grendal Ruled in Defiance (2002) charcoal on paper":

"Wall Stead - In Heorot" (2010), oil on paper 12"h. x 30"w.:

A new friend wrote me saying these works reminded him of Rothko and Mondrian. Certainly. But I was hunting after something grimmer, with the teeth of wild dogs in the night - something in the silence after you hear the howling stop at midnight up on the ridge above my house; something old, very old, yet something still with us.

After all, this cycle of works was born out of that long time after September 11, 2001 when we all struggled with what terror means in our lives, some of us for the first time. The television repeated a thousand times over the long shot clips up the Manhattan canyons of the falling towers and the close up shots of frightened people fleeing wearing cloaks of the ashes of thousands of others. But the t.v. was impotent to tell of what it meant. That we each had to do ourselves. And we had to do this midst a storm of words generated by the media afterward, including the absurdity of our President exhorting us to just go out and fly and buy!

We don't see those t.v. clips much any more of course - that sense of horror can't be maintained. Through repetition we became numbed, but the sense of it drives deep within us into subterranean rivers. There it flows with our deepest fears and desires. Only later does it push up in new springs to the surface, where we drink of it in the form of revenge or hate, distrust, shame, alienation, estrangement and disaffection.

In the hollowed out days following the terrorist attack, I too struggled with some way to understand what had happened, and what, in its aftermath, was happening to my country. Of course, I went to the studio, picked up the deepest black stick of charcoal I could find, and began to draw.

A month and a half later my sister gave me a new translation of the 8th Century Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. It stunned me. Here was a clear sense of where to take this work: the starkly hewn way it carves and holds in constant balance line by line a palpable sense of light and dark, beginnings and ends, the ephemeral interlacing of humankind and nature, the way a line welds together a descriptive fact about nature with an evocation of human emotion, the way this energy is coiled and then released through succeeding lines like a driving wave. All these qualities resonated with my own confusion about what 9/11 meant, and suggested a "holding form" - that embryonic bud of a visual vocabulary, with which to explore toward some understanding.

It's now been over 8 years since that Tuesday morning in September. Some of us would like to forget. Some of us can't. As a country we are still trying to come to grips with what the presence of terror means in our lives. Our civic leaders have tried to turn it into a war - that way it is so much more understandable to a country gotten used to one war after another (after all, in my 65 years there have only been 10 when my country was not at war!). Our conflicts can't so easily be encapsulated I think except within the hollow pretense of newspapers, t.v., or on political stumps. The sources for our "wars" run fearfully deep within us - the Beowulf saga is a clear testament to that. We are at "war" with deep conflicts within ourselves, and we extend them not only to each other but to the natural world itself. It sometimes seems we are at war with the world at large, and the wall steads we have built to stand against disaster are falling all about us, like the mead hall in Beowulf's Heorot.

It's an old plaint and lamentation - the destruction of the world as we've known it. And in its destruction, the creation of something new.

Today I'm still exploring this work, still exploring my understanding of what it means through the work itself. It is called The Beowulf Cycle, and if you would like to see more examples just click here .

A POEM FOR WINTER SOLSTICE

WHAT’S NEEDED

What’s needed
is water
and dark

moving to a time
as slow as roots

in a well

where silvered fish
swim

in a dream
of knowing

not caught
but foreseen.