Lili Krakowski on fri 11 may 07
Several times now in the discussion of how and why and why not making stuff
with molds relates to "handmade" and to "pottery" the concept has come up
that making stuff in molds allows the fragmentation of the production
process and the performance of some task by low wage unskilled workers.
That last really pains me. That some workers are paid badly is terribly
sad. But the whole concept of "unskilled worker" is, in a way sadder. We,
as craftsmen, should know better.
Who decides who decides who is skilled? Who decides which skills leave one
"unskilled" and who decides what skills make one "skilled"? Oy! Did this
great divide hit my generation in the head! How many women I knew who
divorced in middle age--women who had married young, had no college, had
kept house and raised children and so on and on--were told they were
"unskilled" when they went job hunting!
Let us talk instead of saleable, marketable skills. SO the fellow hired to
take casts out of molds (I first wrote cats!) IS skilled. He is extremely
good at a specific task. It requires handling the mold carefully, handling
the piece carefully, taking the mold to one place, the piece to another.
Remarkably like a worker taking thrown ware from the drying shelves to the
kiln room! Remarkably like a worker sorting out and cleaning kilns shelves.
Remarkably like a bunch of tasks which are not performed by the Master
Potter in a large studio. Remarkably like a bunch of tasks now performed by
machines in many clay studios. (A strong little guy rolling out slabs with
arolling pin is an unskilled laborer. An MFA rolling out slabs with a
$2000 machine is a skilled laborer. The slab won't tell, and the slab don't
care.)
I have read that Leach often just decorated pots that were thrown by others
and then sold as "his". Certainly Picasso did. What is THAT all about?
If some people consider slipcasting a lesser skill than throwing so be it.
Can't we just look at the WORK and say I think this is just plain awful
kitsch and look at other work and say "How glorious"? Must we invent yet
another caste/class system?
As to all you talented lovely skilled people who slipcast! WHEN OH WHEN are
you going to pull yourselves together and once, and start fighting back?
Lili Krakowski
Be of good courage
Vince Pitelka on fri 11 may 07
Lili wrote:
> If some people consider slipcasting a lesser skill than throwing so be it.
> Can't we just look at the WORK and say I think this is just plain awful
> kitsch and look at other work and say "How glorious"? Must we invent yet
> another caste/class system?
Lili -
I don't think anyone said that it was a lesser skill, and this certainly has
nothing to do with "inventing another caste/class system." That's a bit of
a melodramatic interpretation.
It takes a huge amount of skill to design and create a proper slip-casting
mold to cast a complex form. I certainly acknowledge that. The whole point
here is that slip-casting is an assisted-technology industrial
mass-production process that allows many identical pieces to be cast from
the mold, and that moves the process entirely out of the realm of the
handmade.
I am really surprised that this discussion has gone on as long as it has.
To me, this seems so obvious. Slip casting is a mass-production process,
and even if the process is completed from original to casting by a solo
artist in his/her own studio, it's still inherently a mass-production
process, and it's not appropriate to say that the resulting cast form is
handmade.
- Vince
Vince Pitelka
Appalachian Center for Craft, Tennessee Technological University
Smithville TN 37166, 615/597-6801 x111
vpitelka@dtccom.net, wpitelka@tntech.edu
http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka/
http://www.tntech.edu/craftcenter/
Randall Moody on fri 11 may 07
I can't believe that people aren't getting that nobody is saying that the
person that is slip casting is less skilled or works less etc. The point
isn't the amount of skill or amount of work that is involved in the process
but rather that the end result is not "hand made". The argument that bronzes
aren't worked by hand is a fallacious argument as is the arguments about the
printmaking process. Sculptors don't promote their work as "handmade" and
painters who sell prints of their work are honest enough to differentiate
between the original and the prints. (That is why they call them prints
instead of paintings.)
It isn't about skill or work it is about whether or not the end result is
"hand made".
Randall
On 5/11/07, Lili Krakowski wrote:
>
>
> If some people consider slipcasting a lesser skill than throwing so be it.
> Can't we just look at the WORK and say I think this is just plain awful
> kitsch and look at other work and say "How glorious"? Must we invent yet
> another caste/class system?
>
> As to all you talented lovely skilled people who slipcast! WHEN OH WHEN
> are
> you going to pull yourselves together and once, and start fighting back?
>
>
>
>
> Lili Krakowski
> Be of good courage
>
>
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Kathy Forer on fri 11 may 07
On May 11, 2007, at 6:40 AM, Lili Krakowski wrote:
> I have read that Leach often just decorated pots that were thrown
> by others
> and then sold as "his". Certainly Picasso did. What is THAT all
> about?
I came across a dense but clarifying article not long ago.
Pots, Politics, Paradise: A Hypertrophied Art of the Pantry
Author Kenneth E. Silver, Published in Art in America, March 2000
It reframes your argument in a twentieth century historical context
where the endless discourse of art and society was perhaps more
manichean, less overwhelmed by the information age, relativistically
exploded to bits and hard to pin down:
Yet Picasso's ceramics took their place in the newly
politicized climate, nonetheless, not through their
themes or style, but in larger ways: in terms of their
discursive emplacement, their means of manufacture and
their economic consequences. Obviously, in turning to
craft--in contradistinction to the more academic, and
elite, mediums of painting and sculpture--Picasso
shifted the ground of his artistic reception away from
the personal (or individualistic) and towards the social
(or collective), i.e., away from "bourgeois" ideas of
high art, in favor of "revolutionary" conceptions of the
popular (ideas that were, of course, long inscribed in
"social art" discourse). Equally salient, in the context
of Picasso's membership in the Communist Party, is his
production method: by creating his ceramics in the
ateliers of Vallauris he joined with his working
brothers and sisters, the local artisans, in the
realization of his art, rather than remaining in his
studio, aloof from le peuple. Not that there was
anything cynical or opportunist in this.
Like so many of the ceramic artisans, Picasso had been
working at his own metier since childhood. He may well
have felt more at ease with all these other hard-working
people--many of them possessed of extraordinary
expertise, which they gladly put at his disposal--than
with most of the courtiers in his entourage. Thus it is
not a dour Picasso fulfilling his obligations to the
Party that we observe in photographs of the artist
surrounded by the local population in the Madoura
ateliers and in the cafes of Vallauris and Golfe-Juan,
but a man in his element.
Kathy Forer
www.foreverink.com
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