Craft exhibits and the definition of Craft

I stopped into the Renwick Gallery today to see their exhibit of young artists: "40 Under 40: Craft Futures", and to ponder what exactly crafts are, different from art that might be shown in another type of art museum.  I was surprised by the way contemporary craft seemed to be defined by the works in the Renwick's exhibition -not good or bad surprised, just surprised.

Before visiting the exhibit, I might have defined crafts as handmade objects that strike a balance between function and beauty, made by people who feel a deep affinity to a long tradition of cultural practices of creation, even as their works range from the conservative to the wildly updated and unique.  An example from the Renwick's permanent collection illustrates this:

This is a Teapot, made 1989 by Ralph Bacerra.  It is tied into folk traditions of ceramic and tea drinking, while having its own kooky, tilted personality.  It is beautiful and original, without completely loosing its connection to functionality.  (Of course, being inside a glass case at a museum, it never fulfills its function as a teapot -but in theory, you could take it out of the glass case and serve tea in it if you wanted to.)  Other works in the permanent collection which seemed to fit with my definition of crafts included quilts, jewelry, furniture, vases and utensils.  

The works displayed in "40 Under 40" had a different relationship to all aspects of my definition.  Many were not handmade, but took advantage of computer and other technologies.  Many so altered traditional forms that although they might remind viewers of objects with a function, they could no longer function themselves as anything but displayable art.  An example is this quilt made entirely out of 16mm film tape, not a material you could cuddle up under on a cold night (work shown below, Hula Hoop by Sabrina Gschwandtner, 2010, 34" x 34").

Connections to a traditional cultural practice haven't disappeared in these new works -they are very evident, for example in the quilt above, but the most important connection seems to be with movements of the post-modern art scene, more than to folk traditions.  There wasn't a great deal of difference between what was on display at "40 Under 40", from what might be found at many a museum of contemporary art.

I liked the definition the exhibit gave for contemporary craft, that craft is no longer as much about being "handmade" but about the attitude of the maker to "improve quality of life through a closer relationship with making." This meant that the exhibit paid a lot of attention to the process, through videos of the artists at work.   I was also fully convinced by the beauty of many of the objects, and the complicated issues they raised about contemporary society.  The exhibit was engaging.  However, I wonder if something isn't lost by this trend for craft to distance itself from connections to functionality and traditional practice, and become more like other forms of contemporary art. Are functional objects less worthy of placement in a museum? If they are being crowded out even in a craft museum, a place where they should reign supreme, where will they every be shown?

Museum Objects, and Beauty in Context

The thoughts I expressed in my last blog entry were informed by, and in some ways an argument against, the ideas in the essay by James Cuno, “The Object of Art Museums”, published in the 2004 compilation book Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust.  The book brings together essays from six high level art museum directors and curators, musing (no pun intended) on the proper shape of the Art Museum in the twenty-first century.  And all of the six gentlemen (the essays were all by men) generally agreed that for the museum to retain its status as a trusted cultural institution, it needed to return its focus from fancy educational programs and new technological gadgets geared toward attracting visitor participation, back to a focus on the art objects that are the center of a museum’s identity. 

I don’t exactly agree…

Some of the essays in the book did a better job than others of convincing me that an overabundance of information and programs detracted from the experience of the artwork.  John Walsh’s essay “Pictures, Tears, Lights, and Seats”, pondered the shift from a past time when the appropriate response to great works of art was deep emotion –crying or laughing, to today when the appropriate response is usually intellectual advancement, irrelevant of any emotional response.  When did art shift from being largely about the heart to being largely about the mind? 

I love Walsh’s question, because I had never thought about it this way before, and it strikes me as remarkably true about how I perceive and connect with art: in focusing on connecting to it with my intellect, I forget to notice how it makes me feel.  I think I could find a lot of satisfaction and meaning by sometimes turning off my intellect, or at least setting it to the side, when I visit a museum, and letting works of art strike more my heart.  The museum too, could encourage emotional responses, perhaps by changing lighting, or by reflecting not just on facts in information cards, but on touching stories.

Reading James Cuno’s essay, on the other hand, my pen was kept busy marking the places where I disagreed with his vision of art, and how museum visitors best relate to it.  He believes that an art museum is a “steward of beauty”, the noblest of quests, because when visitors experience beauty, they  “experience an ‘unselfing,’ and all the energy [visitors] formerly put into the service of protecting, guarding, and advancing the self is then free to be in the service of something else” (Cuno 50).  It strikes me, that museums aren’t stewards of beauty; beauty can be found everywhere.  Besides, whether or not something strikes one as beautiful depends on ones personal taste, and current mood, as well as cultural trends.  Cuno’s perspective on beauty seems far too elitist, and far too absolutist.  Besides, I disagree that seeing something beautiful is an “unselfing”, as he puts it.  Noticing beauty gives me a stronger connection to my self –things we find beautiful are things we can, on some level, feel a kinship with. 

In my experience, beauty is enhanced by context.  Cuno argues that we should remove labels from the walls so that visitors can contemplate beauty undistracted.  And then he delegitimizes his own argument in giving examples of beautiful objects and convincing us to be excited about these objects by the thoughtful anecdotes he relates.  Far from being distractions, stories, words are powerful ways to connect to objects and their beauty. Labels, and other ways that museums use to connect the art objects to stories, shouldn’t be removed; they should be created with utmost care, since they are such a valuable 

In sum: slow down, connect not just intellectually to works of art, but emotionally.  Accept the power of story and contextualization to make a work of art more powerful, and memorable to the viewer, give the viewer these stories to allow the him or her a greater chance of a sense of kinship with the art.  

Spiritually uplifting, life-changing art

Should art museums try to give their visitors spiritually uplifting, life-changing experiences in front of art?  Imagine an experience -maybe you've even already had one or two like it -where you come into contact with a work of art that, through its profound beauty and/or its deeply human feeling, touches you in a life-changing way. I can remember my most profound one-on-one contact with art, and it still gives me chills to think about it.

It was a couple of years ago. I was visiting Rome by myself -a dream I'd wanted to fulfill ever since becoming obsessed in the third grade with children's books on that ancient toga-clad civilization. So this trip was exciting for me. But it was also a lonely period in my life, a time of confusion about my role in the world, and where I might find meaning in my experiences. This particular late-afternoon in Rome, my feet were tired, having trudged tourist-routs through the city for hours, so I entered a dark church on the side of a big plaza, planning to rest for a few minutes and to secretly whisper some of my worries to God, on the off chance he was somewhere nearby.

When I saw the Caravaggio painting in a side chapel, I nearly stopped breathing, so powerfully did the painting fill my consciousness. I knew the painting was a Caravaggio, even though it wasn't one I had studied, because it used his signature chiaroscuro, and seemed realer than reality. The painting shows an old, wrinkled couple, bowing down in humbly, before a statue of Mary and Jesus, giving themselves up to the mercy of God as if they don't know how else to find the hope to continue. And there before them, beautiful, assuring and holy, the holy mother and child come alive because of their faith and their prayer, and reach out to bless this destitute couple. The old couple in the painting were having the kind of moving experience true faith in God can bring, and I, looking at them, was having the kind of moving experience that a beautiful, emotional painting can bring. For a long time, kneeling in front of the Caravaggio, I cried.

This was the only time I have been so spiritually moved by a painting.  I have seen ten thousand  works of art, and nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine of them have had far less dramatic effects on my lungs and my tear ducts.  I think it is relevant that my most spiritual experience of art happened in a church, with its dark, candle-lit aura, and not in a museum with its well-lit, more secular atmosphere.  I'm sure it was key that this experience came for me while I was on a spiritual quest of sorts, unsure about my life and on a long-dreamed of trip to Rome.  But the truth is, these types of life-changing connections to works of art are as rare as blue moons, and can't be forced.  There are many other ways to experience art, as educational, as evocative of discussion, as beautiful -but more prosaically so, that if perhaps not quite as exciting are just as valid.  An art museum can do far more to give its visitors these kinds of experiences than to try to force spiritual uplift. 

Reviews of the Pre-Raphaelites exhibit at the Tate London leave me with more questions than they answer

If I were somehow able to teleport, I would spend the next few hours visiting the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate London.  Even the online reproductions of the images on display there, such as Dante Gabrielle Rosetti’s The Beloved (‘The Bride’), from 1865-6, are breathtaking and alluring to my sense of fantasy.  The paintings are moments in intricate, dramatic stories, and one glance makes me want to find out the beginnings, middles, and ends of the tales. 

Since I can’t teleport, I have to rely on the Tate’s website, and the reviewer’s opinion in The Guardian (Jonathan Jones, September 10, 2012) to get some sort of a sense of the exhibit, how the curators arranged and discussed the works of art, how they contextualized them in art history and in Victorian British society. 

The exhibit’s full title is Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, which instantly begs the questions –how were the Pre-Raphaelites “avant-garde”?  The word is usually associated in the nineteenth-century context with movements originating in Paris, movements, so the classic art history story goes, that led neatly from one revolution in art to the next, each one influenced by yet leaping beyond the cultural frameworks set up by the revolution before it.  It is hard to make the claim that the British Pre-Raphaelites, men who looked to early Renaissance styles for inspiration, fit into this story, and the Guardian reviewer at least seems to feel that the exhibit falls short of its goal to connect the Pre-Raphaelites with the idea of the avant-garde.  The exhibit, as he sees it “is less an insight into modern art than an appealing celebration of the flawed, bonkers and brilliant Victorian age” (Jones).  And yet, the Pre-Raphaelites were radical in their own ways, particularly in how they recognized the interconnectedness of different art mediums and saw craft and design as the equals of painting.  The Tate exhibit highlights all these mediums, (although on the website at least, paintings dominate) and maybe helps the viewer make exciting connections about the artificial nature of the divide between “high arts” and “applied arts” that the Pre-Raphaelites were so radically exploring.  I would have to visit the exhibit myself to get a sense if this is fully the case. 

The last sentence of the exhibit’s website blurb reiterates the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in the connections between mediums, and then leaves the reader with an intriguing yet frustratingly incomplete thought.  It states: “The exhibition shows that the Pre-Raphaelite environment was widely encompassing in its reach across the fine and decorative arts, in response to a fast-changing religious and political backdrop and in its relationship to women practitioners.”  Women practitioners.  These are last two words in the whole description, imbued by their placement with importance, and yet are nowhere further explained.  Who were the women practitioners?  There were certainly no women directly involved in the movement, which was, after all, called the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”.  None of the dozen works of art illustrated on the website are by women; are any in the exhibit?  In fact, another connection between the Pre-Raphaelites and other (French) avant-garde movements was the severity of the gender divide in both countries: men were the artists, the masterminds behind paintings, and women were the muses, the subjects of paintings.  Women were not practitioners, so what does the Tate mean by its account?  The last two words in the exhibition description are like the Pre-Raphaelite paintings themselves; they imply a complex, dramatic story, but only show a single moment in the story.  Unfortunately The Guardian reviewer does not mention whether the rest of the story hinted at by the words “women practitioners” is told at the exhibition.  This is why I really need to figure out how to teleport and visit the exhibit myself.