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| Stairwell Weave-In, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh |
Remaking means added value. It's something I addressed at the talk I delivered
last Thursday at the
Whitechapel Gallery, part of the Real World series of talks curated by
Orlagh Woods for
Artquest. In the light of this I’ve decided to
re-write my notes and publish them here. This partly for myself, but also for those
who couldn’t attend the event which did sell out. I’m doing
this in the form on a Q+A, asking myself questions
and answering them. The topic of the talk was how do
artist manage the boundaries of art and craft and how are these practices
shifting and evolving.
Shane, how do you
negotiate the boundaries between art and craft?
Badly. My
work is often perceived in a fine art context as being too crafty and in a
craft context as being too messy. Meanwhile
Crafts magazine in a recent review
referred to me as a performance artist. So, I’m either terrible at negotiating
these boundaries or an expert at it. You can be the arbiters of this.
Are these
boundaries useful anyway?
Yes, at least
to know when and where to step over them.
Glenn Adamson in his book
Thinking Through Craft puts a solid argument
for these to be clearly defined so we're able to use them as a filter to understand what we are looking at.
How do you
define these then?
How much time
do we have? An answer to this can only lead to endless debating, but here goes…
My feeling is that craft objects have to refer in some way to the process
of their own making, while art objects don’t. Art prompts you to look at it from another point of view than how the object is made. My interest in process over product is probably why my work
is perceived as craft. The boundaries are porous of course, and it is always
worthwhile looking outside your own practice to reinvent it and push your work forward. Someone told me recently that this question of boundaries will only be of real concern to crafts people
and not fine artists. A perceptive comment I think. Rather than think about
how to define art vs. craft, better to think of how to identify with
either. Key to this is context and presentation, which qualifies what we are
looking at and how we experience it.
Tell us more?
Objects are
not revealed to us by looking only but through interaction. The value of objects all too often gets in the way of this interaction. What do you know of a
pot unless you hold it in your hands after all? Art ought not simply to be about communicating ideas but also to convey experiences. We’re not just brains on sticks; we need to relate bodily to
objects. The preciousness of objects starts working against them, requiring them to be displayed on plinths, vitrines, cords to separate them from their audience. One of
Richard Tuttle's pieces in the current exhibition apparently required two first
class seats (one for the artwork, one for the courier) to be shipped from the
States to London. Getting up close and interacting with this object in this case is of course impossible and probably why the artist himself prefers his work to be shown in a domestic rather than a gallery or museum context.
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| Making by Instruction workshop at The Poly, Falmouth |
What are the answers then?
Adopting
participatory approaches when making and showing work, engaging
audiences with processes and materials of making rather than presenting them for the sole purpose of being looked at.
Daniel Miller writes ‘objects don’t matter, it’s what
you do with them that matters’. Pioneers of participatory work talk about how ‘the
object has lost it’s significance unless it is a mediator for participation’
(
Lygia Clark).
Helio Oiticica states ‘a work should range from the
givens (things already produced), to the livings (the route to be traced by
audience) and the transformable givens (the objects that demands inventive
participation from the creator)'. There are many reasons why I have chosen to do
participatory works over the past 10 years and one of them is to enrich the
connection between object and audience.
Another
strategy might be to do away with objects altogether. Objects don’t
last forever (taking a larger historical perspective on this) and can
always be remade. I’m very interested in the process of making by instruction and the process of interpretation that goes on as work is reproduced. Value can be added to an original work as it is remade and therefore reinterpreted. So why not keep instructions
and scores rather than the objects themselves and involve artists and
audiences in the remaking of these? This is after all is common practice in dance,
theatre, music. Why not art?
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| Knitting Piece #11, Prague Biennial |
Isn’t the
answer obvious? Not everyone can paint Monet’s Waterlilies.
True. There is of
course a case for safeguarding artworks, but the use of plinths and vitrines,
despite being an issue for half a century or more, still needs addressing I
think. Thinking about this I’ve been looking again at the work of Phyllida
Barlow, and reading her ‘Hatred of the Object’ essay, where she denounces the
use of vitrines – they deaden work, make it safe, clean, polite. Her work
embraces fully the sculptural over the pictorial. It celebrates making and
materials in all its mess, awkwardness but also subtleties. Barlow never looses
sight of the temporality of sculpture, celebrating how things fall apart,
rot, melt and disintegrate. The making of her sculptures and installations, or elements of these, are
often rehearsed and then performed in situ to create the work. After being displayed they are dismantled and parts reused for making other work. I love the ecology
of this. I also love how these monumental works carefully calibrate the
relationship between space, body and object, carefully considering what
materials can do for a space as well as the people in it.
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rehearsing Garland #21 with
Cheryl McChesney Jones at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios |
Is there then
an ideal model for displaying craft?
I’m not sure
about a model but a guideline could be to think about what
André Lepecki describes as the constitutive qualities of dance: ephemerality, precariousness,
corporeality and scoring.
Thank you very much Shane. Let’s hand it over now to the
audience now. Are there any questions?
