Randall Moody on fri 14 aug 09
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Lee Love wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Randall Moody
> wrote:
>
> > Clark does say that one of the things that killed Craft was the ACC bei=
ng
> > taken over by people who treated it as a commodity.
>
> Commodification is one of the aspects of consumer society the
> Mingei movement was working against.
>
>
>
> > Future of Craft conference. His main thesis is that Craft died from the
> > toxicity of art envy, overdosing on nostalgia. We also don't think
> > critically about our work according to Clark.
>
> The main premise of Leach's Potter's Book was "toward a
> standard." And the preservation of traditional work was not
> nostalgic, but was to protect local culture from the encroaching
> commercial global culture that was engulfing the planet. William
> Morris and Okakura Tenshin worked on these issues before Leach and
> Yanagi.
>
> It is easy to put Leach's criticism of our work back in the
> '50s: we were not working from the foundations of craft that had
> been opened up to us because of better communications and the
> scholarship of the past that was available to us. If you don't
> understand where your craft came from, you do not have a strong
> foundation. This is a problem Leach saw in the studio arts programs
> he visited.
>
> This is what I think Clark was arguing against to some degree. He states
that the Craft aesthetic is anachronistic and that we should encourage craf=
t
into the 21st century aesthetically speaking. We need to move away from the
"Little House on the Prairie rustic field. He also, and rightly in my
opinion, argues that we need to let go of the old crafts movements and leav=
e
them in the 20th century at least in regards to the ideology. The Mengei
Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement are all dead. Craft is now shuffling
around crying "Bring out your dead!"
--
Randall in Atlanta
Vince Pitelka on fri 14 aug 09
Randall Moody wrote:
"This is what I think Clark was arguing against to some degree. He states
that the Craft aesthetic is anachronistic and that we should encourage craf=
t
into the 21st century aesthetically speaking. We need to move away from the
"Little House on the Prairie" rustic field. He also, and rightly in my
opinion, argues that we need to let go of the old crafts movements and leav=
e
them in the 20th century at least in regards to the ideology. The Mengei
Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement are all dead. Craft is now shuffling
around crying "Bring out your dead!"
Randall -
These are very good points, but I think that the circumstance you refer to
is typical of almost any period in the evolution of art/craft. At the
Appalachian Center for Craft we used to suffer from the expectation that we
would only be addressing "traditional craft" - white-oak baskets and
salt-glazed jugs. Someone tell me what "traditional craft" is as a coheren=
t
concept. Craft is and always has been a continuously-evolving dynamic that
is rarely static, except in some extreme cases of imperial or dynastic
aesthetic such as ancient Egypt, where qualities of the pharaonic aesthetic
were almost completely unchanging for 2500 years.
Our current Craft Center mission statement says that we address traditional
craft in a contemporary context. That means that we want to teach a strong
foundation of traditional knowledge and skills but within the context of
what is happening in contemporary craft and the contemporary world.
In support of what you say above, there is a tremendous amount of
uncertainty in the world right now, about so many things. In such cases
artists either cling to past movements that give a sense of comfort and
security, or they really jump off the cliff with something outlandish and
new. The first is easy, whereas it is very hard to define a new movement o=
r
direction out of a lot of people jumping off cliffs with outlandish new
things other than the general tendency to jump off cliffs. I love
traditional art/craft, and I am fascinated by contemporary
conceptual/installation art. But with the latter, I always find myself
asking "Where is this taking us?" Conceptual and installation art do not i=
n
themselves represent any coherent direction, but out of it all will sift
something important. The same is true of the things people are doing in
contemporary craft.
Seeing a lot of people doing work referential to past movements is a
powerful statement. Artwork always expresses the time and place in which i=
t
was created. A painter in 20th-century England doing work highly derivativ=
e
of John Constable is making a strong statement about her/his own time and
place. Artists cannot help but comment on their own time and place. That'=
s
what they do. I think this presents a fascinating opportunity to evaluate
contemporary directions in fine craft. Let's not dismiss the phenomenon of
"bringing out the dead." Let's ask why it is happening, and in what way it
represents a way of conceptualizing/making/viewing fine craft in the
contemporary world.
- Vince
Vince Pitelka
Appalachian Center for Craft
Tennessee Tech University
vpitelka@dtccom.net; wpitelka@tntech.edu
http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka
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