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Art Journal

ISSN: 0004-3249 (Print) 2325-5307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaj20

The Problem with Craft

T'ai Smith

To cite this article: T'ai Smith (2016) The Problem with Craft, Art Journal, 75:1, 80-84, DOI:10.1080/00043249.2016.1171544

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2016.1171544

Published online: 06 May 2016.

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1. See the exhibition press release for Wendell Castle Remastered, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, October 2015–February 2016, at http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/wendell-castle-remastered, as of April 16, 2015.2. Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007).3. David Pye, “The Nature and Art of Workmanship,” excerpted in The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn Adamson (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2010), 341–44.4. Pye, 341. See also Glenn Adamson’s important nuancing of this dichotomy in The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), in which he dis-cusses the complex relationships between skilled artisans, factory machinery, and manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. 5. Rafael Cardosa notes that while the field of fine art has a longstanding connection to concepts of “intellectual labor” dating back to the Renaissance (in treatises by Alberti and Leonardo), craft’s rela-tionship to theory is far more tenuous. The work of craft is (or seems) by definition not an “intel-lectual exercise.” Cardosa, “Craft versus Design: Moving beyond a Tired Dichotomy,” in The Craft Reader, 321–32.6. Hennesy Youngman, “Art Thoughtz: Damien Hirst,,” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y_8DWg5W0w, as of February 22, 2012.7. For a short description of their friendship, see Lynne Cooke, “. . . in the classic tradition . . .” in Agnes Martin, ed. Cooke et al. (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2012), 13.

One might wonder why or how craft fits a discussion on diversity practices in art history, especially as it pertains to issues in modern and contemporary art. To begin, it should be said that this thing called craft is internally diverse, or rather underpinned by several subcategories. So the word is used to describe the activi-ties of various makers: amateur knitting circles, the Gees Bend quilters, “master furniture maker” Wendell Castle, skilled glassblowers at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, the work of indigenous practitioners, or that of fiber art-ists like Lenore Tawney.1 But craft is also, as Glenn Adamson has made clear in his Thinking Through Craft (2007), a dimension that underpins almost any work of art—be it that of Constantin Brancusi, Jeff Koons, or Robert Smithson.2 Further,

craft pertains to those everyday items, mostly mass-produced, which are nevertheless manu-factured (manually created). Even the shirt you bought at Old Navy or Nordstrom, or the gadget from Applestore.com, were assembled in part by hand, by workers in some factory in

Bangladesh, Thailand, or China. Craft is pervasive and multiple.While there is a consistent focus on the process—the relationship between

hands, tools, and techniques—it is the making in craft that also makes it a slippery concept. Whether produced on an assembly line or in a workshop, craft works on a sliding scale between what the mid-century English theorist David Pye called “workmanship of certainty” and “workmanship of risk.”3 Even some automated processes involve a certain degree of risk, while the craft-based industries (for example, joinery, pottery, or weaving) are hybrid processes involving tools, jigs, and patterns. This is important because it disrupts any stark binary between indus-try and craft—almost nothing is purely one or the other. So the “honorific” variety of labor called craft is ultimately rather close to “ordinary manufacture.”4

It should come as no surprise, then, that the study of craft has been seated at the outskirts of the table of modern and contemporary art history, where ideas and “issues” occupy the center, and where anxieties about labor (art being con-nected to ordinary manufacture) run high. The modernist century, as the narra-tive goes, brought us the radical gesture of deskilling—of rejecting hand skill in favor of articulating concepts.5 This seemed to democratize artistic practice (almost anyone can buy an object at the hardware or grocery store and call it art). But in getting rid of the hand—turning art into a process of consumer choice—the Duchampian readymade deftly converted the “lowly” object of (working-class) labor or craft into some magical (or bourgeois) entity called Art. The unstable category of craft thus raises significant political questions about our values regarding things and the labor involved in making them. As the eminent critic Hennesy Youngman has said of Damien Hirst’s exploits: “Most of the work is fabricated and his studio assistants make it. . . . I understand that as an artist if you actually touch your own artwork the value of said artwork is severely depreci-ated. That’s just how the market works nowadays.”6

To consider the problem of craft, we could turn to a particular example of Tawney’s work, Dark River (1962). She crafted this “woven form”—as she called it—in the early 1960s, in her studio in Coenties Slip, alongside a community of abstract painters who also occupied the lower-Manhattan neighborhood. She and Agnes Martin were especially close friends, and the painter titled many of Tawney’s’ works.7 Interestingly, while Martin’s painting of almost the same title, The Dark River (1961), explores the internal limits of painting through the idiom of

T’ai Smith

The Problem with Craft

Lenore Tawney with Dark River (1962) and The Torch of Night and Day (1962), South Street studio, New York, 1962 (artworks © Lenore G. Tawney Foundation; photograph by Ferdinand Boesch)

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8. Tawney’s exhibitions received little critical attention (Holland Cotter is a notable exception), which might explain the paucity of literature on her art historically. The best analysis to date of Tawney’s significance within the field of fiber art is in Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 265–79. 9. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).10. Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).11. See, for example, Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces,” Journal of Modern Craft 2, no. 1 (March 2009): 59–80; and Frida Hållander, “Homeless Practices,” Journal of Modern Craft 6, no. 2 ( July 2013): 205–12.12. In fact, critical thought on craft has been developing over the last fifteen years or so, and many other writers could be mentioned, including Pennina Barnet, Amy Gogarty, Paul Mathieu, and Howard Risatti.13. The art historian and critic Julia Bryan-Wilson has done the most to advance this discussion in the mainstream art world. Notable texts include: “The Politics of Craft,” Modern Painters 20, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 78–83, 110; and “Sewing Notions: On Craft and Commerce,” Artforum 49, no. 6 (February 2011): 73–74.

the grid, Tawney’s version in linen challenges a fundamental tenet of her medium, the loom. To create the nonrectangular shape of her woven forms, Tawney had to remove the top bar of the reed—a part of the loom that assures that the warp maintains verticality and tautness. This allowed those threads to be regrouped, crossed, dispersed, or consolidated, so that she could reshape the cloth into abstract, somewhat alien-looking forms. Not quite organic, not quite geometric, the work exploits the loom’s system only to yield mutations of its logic. So within the fabric’s “frame,” a mesh of threads—but not a grid—the lines that form this network are never perpendicular. Indeed, a dialogue clearly existed between the two artists about the role of the grid in their respective practices. But where one saw the warp and weft of the canvas as the starting point for the appli-cation of paint or graphite to the surface, the other worked against the textile’s grid to disrupt the structural system marking her craft.

In some sense, Tawney’s reworking of her peer’s obsession with recti- linearity could be considered a prescient vision of the shift from Minimalism to Postminimalism, or modernism to postmodernism. Yet her radical manipulation of the grid remains unacknowledged in most art-historical accounts. Tawney’s contribution to art history has been eclipsed by the designation of her medium as not-quite-art, in part because of the history of acquisition and a traditional system of museum classification: Tawney’s Dark River currently resides in MoMA’s Architecture and Design collection, not Painting and Sculpture.8

In spite of this history, thought on craft and reskilling has experienced an upswing in art circles since about 2007. Art historians and critics began to acknowledge and analyze this typically invisible, opaque, and unseemly category through texts, exhibitions, and events, including the Getty-organized panel and conference “Craft at Its Limits,” which established many of the parameters of the recent debate. A few months after Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft from that year, the sociologist Richard Sennett published The Craftsman, and both texts have had wide readership beyond typical craft circles.9 Adamson’s lengthy edited volume The Craft Reader (2010) catalogued the complex web of thought about this field, which extends from Roszika Parker’s discussion of femininity and domestic crafts to the philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s consideration of the “genesis” of the tech-nical object. Elissa Auther’s book String, Felt, Thread (2009), on the rise of fiber art in America, further helped to reframe the art-craft hierarchy—by comparing the work of Robert Morris and Eva Hesse with lesser-known artists (and fiber artists) like Claire Zeisler and Sheila Hicks, a history in which Tawney’s work resides.10 Meanwhile, periodicals like Journal of Modern Craft and Textiles: Journal of Cloth and Culture, or the regularly scheduled Critical Craft Forum at CAA’s annual conference, have provided readers with critical investigations of the role of craft within queer or homeless practices.11 (Of course critical writing on craft has been around for several decades in America—the work of Rose Slivka in the 1950s and 1960s is notable—but specialist craft magazines have tended to rely most heavily on straightforward methods of reportage.)12 This new, exciting work was a real boon to the economy of contemporary craft—helping to turn it from an area discussed by a limited group of craft specialists and practitioners into a field that has gained recognition in the pages of Artforum, Art Journal, and Modern Painters.13 As an irritant (what we might call art’s troublesome neighbor), craft became, for a few years, a rather explosive term in contemporary art. Hence, between 2012 and 2015 (after

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14. The Stuff That Matters: Textiles Collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT, at Raven Row, 2012. For a brief account of the exhibition, see www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/the_stuff_that_mat-ters/ as of April 16, 2015. Other notable exhi-bitions include: Social Fabric (INIVA, London, 2012), Decorum (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2013), Hollandaise (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, 2013), Textiles: Open Letter; Abstraktionen, Textilien, Kunst (Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 2013), Kunst und Textil (Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, 2013–14), To Open Eyes: Art and Textiles from the Bauhaus to Today (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2013–14), Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present (ICA Boston, 2014), and Wow! Woven? Entering the (sub)Textiles (KM Graz, 2015).

an exhibition at Raven Row in London revealed that the Conceptual art dealer and publisher Seth Siegelaub had also been a significant collector of historic textiles), several exhibitions in Europe and America examined the complex metaphors and politics attached to cloth, fibrous materials, and the textile industry.14

But the work of rethinking the field is far from complete. For while the recent critical discourse of craft has been and will continue to be productive for art history, approximately nine years since it went mainstream, we may need to reflect on this expansion’s inauguration and what has been recentered or ren-dered problematic in the process. The lessons of cultural studies, as understood by Raymond Williams, are important here. For to move forward in critique, it proves important to locate the context in which this new discourse finds value. For example, the rise of craft and attention to skill and making is marked by the circumstances of our post-Fordist, outsourced world, in which twenty-some-things form knitting circles and find sustenance in Etsy sales. As the 1970s hippy crafters have been reshaped into digital-age hipsters, savvy at once about Tumblr, Twitter, and locally sourced, hand-dyed hemp, more analysis is needed of how the new discourse of craft intersects with the marketing phenomenon known as DIY and what the implications of this historical tangent are within the arc of the new capitalism.

Moreover, as the contemporary art world is broadening its scope to include “global” (meaning: not ethnically European) artists in its midst, there is a ten-dency to use practitioners’ engagement with “traditional” mediums as means to brand (or exoticize, or recolonize) them. This development seems to have its roots in the curatorial legacy of the notably problematic Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in

Olivia Whetung, onjishkawigaabawin, 2015, 10/0 red seed beads, nylon thread, steel, installation view, AHVA Gallery, University of British Columbia, 2015 (artwork © Olivia Whetung; photograph provided by the artist)

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15. Olivia Whetung, e-mail conversation with the author, September 27, 2015; further quotes in this paragraph are from this conversation.16. Carrie A. Lyford, The Crafts of the Ojibwa (Phoenix: US Office of Indian Affairs/Phoenix Indian School, 1943).17. Csákány proposes that his work addresses the conditions of sweatshop labor after communism and a bygone era of modern machinery. See his website István Csákány, at http://csakanyistvan.hu, as of September 26, 2012. 18. The topic was originally posted on September 26, 2012, at www.facebook.com/groups/310882667610/perma-link/10151057025402611/, as of September 30, 2012. (Membership in the Critical Craft Forum’s Facebook group page is required in order to see the page; anyone with a Facebook account may join the group.)

1989, in which indigenous artists were presented as anonymous representatives of their cultures. The Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung’s onjishkawigaabawin (2015), like the work of many young artists, struggles with this legacy. Conceiving the piece as neither a work of performance art nor a demonstration of Anishinaabe beading technique, Whetung spent time over three weeks occupying a gallery space during its open hours while she gradually “took over a minimalist sculptural form” of five metal structures placed on the wall and “beaded on top of it.”15 If understood within the domain of art, the designation might problematically categorize these metal structures as frames—not as bead loom armatures—or the completed work as a red, glossy, serial-minimalist object, seemingly indebted to Donald Judd. Yet, if put under the rubric of craft, perhaps just as troublesome, the designation could eclipse the artist’s complex appropriation and negation of the art world’s (and the craft world’s) “colonial and capitalist system.” Creating beadwork patterns based on those found in a mid-twentieth-century book, The Crafts of the Ojibwa,16 Whetung noted how this 1943 Office of Indian Affairs (USA) document “obscures the bod-ies and identities of the women who designed and made those items. It ignored them as people and made their work into ethnographic curiosity. There was little or often no information about where they came from, who they were, what the patterns represented. The diagrams were an erasure of native presence.” Whetung’s work was thus an attempt to make present Anishinaabe women’s bodies and their labor, and to disrupt two narratives at once: an art world that appropriates and spits out artists as brands according to stylistic and ethnic categories, and a craft world that abstracts making-as-skill by deracinating practitioners and craft patterns from their colonial history. The use of the category craft, in other words, can open up the field only to, just as quickly, close it down.

Finally, the fact that many contemporary conceptual artists are embracing craftsmanship means that the labor problem is being examined critically in some cases—as in István Csákány’s Sewing Room (2012), an “exact replica” of an industrial sweatshop crafted in wood and shown at Documenta 1317—whereas in others we’re left pondering the ethics behind this move. What workshops (or sweat-shops) overseas are being used, for example, to make certain crafted work? Who is the anonymous wood carver paid by the hour, and should she get recognition as a collaborator? What, we should ask now, are the new hierarchies within this craft field? How do they reiterate the structures and power dynamics that gener-ated the art-craft hierarchy in the first place? While I was writing this essay ini-tially in 2012, a lengthy discussion on Critical Craft Forum’s Facebook page took place about the implications of Molly Hatch outsourcing her ceramic work to Chinese factories.18 This new model of production (along with her design work for the retailer Anthropologie) may provide the artist with economic freedom to explore ideas about the history of decorative art in her conceptual practice, but Hatch’s move from “mere craft” to “fine art” at the hands of anonymous laborers working elsewhere could prove to be ethically sticky, to say the least. What was an explosive term in 2007, it seems, has become theoretically nuanced and reinstitu-tionalized simultaneously. It may be within this problematic space that thought on craft will find new stakes.

T’ai Smith is assistant professor in the department of art history, visual art, and theory at the University of British Columbia. The author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), she is currently working on a book that examines philosophies of clothing and modes of management within fashion capitalism.

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