The Chinese artist Lu Shengzhong and the Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda, for example, employ culturally specific pre-industrial technologies -the folk art of paper cutting and fine block carving in wood. To work traditionally in China is not necessarily a conservative gesture. At the 2006 Shanghai Biennale there were plenty of threnodic tributes to craftsmanship by young Chinese artists.
The Mindicraft group (Zhang Beiru, Ruan Jiewang and Mak Yee Fun) seek to honour Ming and Quing craft skills. Yan Jun re-creates traditional Chinese furniture out of disused heating pipes. Ling Shaoji's video, photography and timber installation "Essence of Wood" mourns the ongoing demolition of vernacular architecture.
Meanwhile another artist, Liu Jianhua, underlines the reality of present-day China. His piece piles up 30,000 low-cost objects made in Yiwu. This is a manufacturing town unfamiliar, I would guess, to most of us, but Yiwu exports a thousand containers daily to the shopping malls of the West. The presence of so many works that comment on lost skills and working practices suggests that China is developing a twenty-first-century arts and crafts movement -a turn to painstaking handwork as a response to destructive modernization -that is just as radical as its nineteenth-century Western predecessor.
Both Lu Shengzhong and Yoshihiro Suda have adopted pre-industrial rhythms of working, chanting while cutting paper, emptying the mind, going against the grain of the hyperreal present. They both generate "artists' anecdotes" of the kind valued by Kris and Kurz. Lu Shengzong recalls a life-changing encounter with a folk artist in Western China. Yoshihiro Suda had a moment of epiphany when he embarked almost by chance on an exercise in carving in his first year at art school. Like a Lysippus or a Giotto, Suda needed no teacher. And like many of the artists discussed by Kris and Kurz, he has an apparently magical mimetic skill that works to unsettle the eye of the spectator.
Mimesis, replication and trompe l'oeil are also explored by two British artists, Susan Collis and Annie Cattrell. As with Suda, theirs is not the painterly deception of Xeuxis but something more unnerving -the recreation of the thing itself. We might reflect that craft and replication are often linked.
In R. G. Collingwood's famous aesthetically led discussion of the difference between art and craft, he argued that the craft object will always replicate, be part of a series, and be planned in advance. For Collingwood this meant that craft was a second-order activity. But replication, when detached from industrial manufacture, has more complex connotations -of trickery, but also of the pursuit of beauty. As Elaine Scarry puts it in On Beauty and Being Just
(1993), "beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replications and other times to resemblances". Hallucinatorily accurate replications -Yoshihiro Suda's weeds and flowers, Annie Cattrell's "Capacity" (a rendering of human lungs in glass), and Susan Collis's deceptive trompe l'oeil of marks and stains on clothes and objects -are inherently troubling, partly because of their perfection. They invert "the expected hierarchy of original over copy".
Anatomical drawings and models have a long history in which science and art overlap, ranging from Leonardo's diagrammatic researches to actual body parts preserved in formaldehyde -originals presented as instructional copies. Annie Cattrell has made body parts and functions visible in various ways -through the handwork of glass-blowing and lampwork in "Capacity" but also through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans translated into files that can be modelled by a rapid prototyping machine. Rapid prototyping, in its various forms, has unexpectedly poetic qualities. Cattrell's extraordinary SLS (selective laser sintering) rendering of her own heart demonstrates the creative slippage between the perfection of the digital file and its translation into production, where the algorithm meets the material. These "rapid" prototyping machines remind us of Victorian technologies like electrotyping. But their slow pace of replication (not so rapid after all) appears to mimic a ghostly handmade procedure, an autogenic making.
The concept of craft begins to drift, and perhaps we need to return to the shore. In Nigeria craft comes with a weight of history. It remains intrinsic.
