Why craft still matters
How do we understand craft? Stories and anecdotes abound concerning the strangeness of making, its hidden secrets and its capacity for enchantment. The way in which ordinary materials can be made unfamiliar and precious prompts reflections on the nature and the physical rhythms of work, on technology and virtuosity. Virtuosity is often linked to a more practical concept, that of technique or skill. The relationship between skill and making is mysterious, and leads us to think about the education of artists. In schools of art and design, do we require separate departments of painting, sculpture, metalwork, textiles, ceramics and glass, each teaching different skills? Or should these skills be "needs-led", to be mastered as and when they are required? In a world of seamlessly interlinked options the idea of a solitary maker, a major artist such as, say, Francis Bacon (albeit he was self-taught) devoting a lifetime to one genre, the practice of painting, has come to seem unusual, even exotic.
More troublingly, perhaps, our capacity to pay such work the kind of attention it so strikingly demands has been undermined. At a recent exhibition of Damien Hirst's private collection, a small painting by Bacon, "Study for a Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion", was rendered almost invisible by the boisterousness of Hirst's contemporaries, whose works surrounded it. Why?
The problem has been addressed by the sculptor Phyllida Barlow. As a student in the early 1960s, she was taught clay modelling, casting, plaster modelling, the making of armatures and construction and assemblage in wood and metal. But now, as she admits in Objects For . . . And Other Things (2004), she finds she has "an uneasy and very problematic relationship with making". In part this is because the world "is stuffed with fascinating things. We are competing with materialism that is on such a gigantic scale. There is a giant global industry of objects and how does one compete with that?". In her essay "The Hatred of the Object" (1995), Barlow divides the world of things into two categories -hot and cold. The "hot" object, "processed through the private and personal rituals of making", can "repulse through its desperate need to attract". There are other kinds of objects that demand our attention and love -"cold" objects that have been industrially designed and manufactured. They, too, work on our emotions, often seductively and pleasurably, but they can seem repellent when we consider their rapid obsolescence and the polluting materials from which they are made. Barlow argues that "cold" objects have invaded the world of art, as artists employ fabricators or simply re present existing objects. There is no need to engage physically with making: "it can all happen elsewhere", often employing industrial processes.
The tension between the idea of the maker, battling with his or her materials, and the cool conceptualist on an extended research project, using found objects or sending ideas to a fabricator, has a longer history than we might imagine.
It was intrinsic to Renaissance aesthetic debates over the relative merits of painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry -the paragone. Some of the most heated discussions set painting against sculpture. For Leonardo da Vinci, painting was superior because it was more intellectually demanding -"the sculptor's work entails greater physical effort and the painter's greater mental effort". The painter studied science and mathematics while the sculptor wielded a chisel and a hammer. But it is painting that might today seem a laborious occupation when compared with the elegant urban wanderings of a sculptor such as Richard Wentworth, capable of seeing value in an encounter between a throwaway cup and a cast-iron railing or in a pair of galvanized buckets wrapped in brown paper bags.
Virtuosity can take many forms. In their remarkable 1934 study Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A historical experiment, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz scanned ancient and early modern literature for stories about artists. As Nina Lubbren has pointed out, they rescued the anecdote from the condescension of art history and demonstrated how biographical narrative can neatly condense ideas about creativity. Kris and Kurz did not venture much beyond the seventeenth century in their survey but one recurring motif was that of the artist as a species of magician whose work could deceive and astonish through its mimetic power -as when sparrows pecked at grapes painted by Xeuxis or passers-by mistook Titian's portrait of Paul III (placed on a window ledge to dry) for the living Pope. Kris and Kurz suggest that part of the allure of art derives from a technical virtuosity that breathes life into objects, making the artist an alter deus. The idea that art can fruitfully be viewed as magical technology was also explored by Alfred Gell in his quest for an anthropological theory of art that bypassed art-world aesthetics -what he called "methodological philistinism".
His approach went beyond mimesis, opening up the visual field to include the impact of Trobriand Islanders' prow-boards and the wonder he experienced when, aged eleven, he was confronted by a matchstick model of Salisbury Cathedral, as well as a catholic range of Western art.
Gell was an admirer of Marcel Duchamp, and wrote perceptively about his transformational artistic powers. Melanesians, schoolboys and art-loving anthropologists, he argued, all respond to "the enchantment of technology", "the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form". Nonetheless, Gell understood the position of the modern artist to be a difficult one: "Technique is supposed to be dull and mechanical, actually opposed to true creativity and authentic values of the kind that true art is supposed to represent". If technology has a magical dimension today, he argued, it is in pursuit of the chimera of ever-expanding industrial production, the present-day equivalent of the nineteenth-century manufacturer Andrew Ure's dream of autogenesis -a factory of machines that produce without workers.
Gell published his essay, "The Technology of Enchantment", in 1992. Since then the ecological and human costs of the productivity chimera have been increasingly recognized and feared. One artistic response to a world so full of goods has been to cannibalize, recycle and collage existing objects -or to cease to make altogether and instead curate or re-order public collections. The American sociologist Richard Sennett, in books such as The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (1998) and Respect: The formation of character in an age of inequality (2003), identifies craft as an alternative to this artistic reflexiveness -itself the corollary of a more general short-termism in contemporary life, and of post-industrial working practices that damage individual dignity. Where skills won through long experience appear to count for nothing, identities are eroded as a result. Even when it is engaged in production (as opposed to the service industries), work is often unintelligible to the workforce, members of which can neither mend the machines they use nor fully understand the processes of production. We live in a world, Sennett argues, that singles out comparatively few for recognition, yet where we are endlessly assessed and judged. His solution is perhaps surprising: "The best protection I'm able to imagine against the evils of invidious comparison", he writes, is craftwork, and the reason for this is simple. Comparisons, ratings, and testings are deflected from other people into the self; one sets the critical standard internally. Craftwork certainly does not banish invidious comparison to the work of others; it does refocus a person's energies, however, on getting the act right in itself, for oneself.
