Craft! Craft! Craft! Hmm. . . I don't feel dirty

The Art Form That Dares Not Speak Its Name

By CAROL KINO

WHY has "craft" become a dirty word? This question has bedeviled its practioners and museum insiders in recent years, as a number of prominent institutions devoted to handmade arts have downplayed or dropped the word "craft" from their names.

The first high-profile defection occurred in 2002, when the American Craft Museum in New York announced that, besides moving to a new building on East 53rd Street and refocusing its mission to include design, it would be called the Museum of Arts & Design - MAD for short, an abbreviation that many felt accurately described the decision. Because it is the leading craft museum in the country, the change garnered notice. In 2003, another craft-oriented museum, the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, Wis., opened a second larger campus and christened it the Racine Art Museum, avoiding the word "craft." The same year, the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco restyled itself the California College of the Arts.

It is not unheard-of for museums to change their names. The venerable Louvre has gone through many during its 212-year history, including the Musée Napoleon and the Musée des Républiques. While historically, name changes have resulted from political and civic upheaval, more recently they have tended to accompany a new building, a reconfigured mission or an especially persuasive donor.

In the case of the craft museums and the college, all arrived at their new names for their own reasons. Still, their directors would most likely agree with Holly Hotchner, the director of the Museum of Arts & Design, when she explained the switch. "The art world has changed enormously," Ms. Hotchner said. "I would say that is the biggest reason why we changed our name."

The museum, which remains the leading craft showcase in this country, was founded in 1956 as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then, the word "craft" denoted a functional or decorative object - like a chair, a vessel, a wall hanging or a piece of jewelry - made by hand by a highly trained artisan. Examples from that time might include the elegantly modeled wood furniture of George Nakashima or the sculptural tapestries of Lenore Tawney.

By 1996, when Ms. Hotchner arrived as the museum's director, crafts had become so popular that more amateurish forms were glutting street fairs throughout America. "People's opinion was, 'Why should we come to a museum and pay to see stuff we can't buy when we could just go to a craft fair?' " Ms. Hotchner said. Another problem, she said, was that visitors and potential lenders alike were constantly confusing her museum with the American Folk Art Museum, which is across the street. "Our issue became, 'How do we get more people interested in our field?' " she said.

The questions led to brainstorming with Alan Siegel, chief executive of the corporate identity consulting firm Siegel & Gale, and a board member of the Museum of Arts & Design. The task of rebranding the museum proved more complex than either Ms. Hotchner or Mr. Siegel had guessed. "When I first went to Alan, he said we can do this in 10 minutes," Ms. Hotchner said. "We were still sitting there six months later."

Mr. Siegel said that it took only one round of focus groups to conclude that "the negative associations for craft were so great that no amount of money could effectively overcome them." (He said his favorite survey comment was, "Craft can never shed its macramé potholder image no matter what's done.") Not only that, Mr. Siegel said, the craft artists he surveyed kept telling him, "We're artists, not craftsmen."

Which begs the question, What is a craftsperson? Carmine Branagan, the executive director of the nonprofit American Craft Council, said, , "We would traditionally define it as an artist who's working in craft materials - clay, metal, fiber, glass."

For Mark Lyman, the director of the International Expositions of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art, a high-end crafts fair held annually in New York and Chicago, the word "craft" is a verb, not a noun. "To me, craft is about technique and process, about abilities," Mr. Lyman said. "It's the manner in which things are done."

Whatever one's conception of "craft," its modern usage dates to the Arts and Crafts movement, which originated in mid-19th-century Britain in response to the Industrial Revolution. Artists and designers, most notably William Morris, banded together into guilds and societies to produce hand-crafted buildings and household products.

The movement spread to the European continent, including Scandinavia and to Japan and the United States. Its ethos was built on the belief that society could be improved by well-designed, well-made architecture, furniture and household goods, setting the stage for early-20th-century utopian movements like De Stijl, which aimed to integrate fine and applied arts, and the Bauhaus, which incorporated industrial design.

Crafts enjoyed another resurgence in the 1950's and early 60's, when some artists began turning away from the Pop movement's celebration of technology and mass production to embrace natural materials like clay and wood. They sought inspiration from tribal and folk art, as well as from Arts and Crafts masters like Gustav Stickley, and rediscovered older techniques.

Today, however, some craft artists are working with nontraditional materials, like plastic, or using computer models to plan their work - media and methods associated with industrial design. At the same time, much of the work produced has been creeping closer to fine art, becoming more abstract and less functional. According to Bruce W. Pepich, the executive director of the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts and the Racine Art Museum, "part of what's happened in craft in the last 50 years is that, on one hand, people like Scott Burton were making sculpture that resembled furniture and questioned its boundaries," he said. "And then we also had people coming from painting and sculpture working in craft media."

Indeed, craft has become a growing - if sometimes unacknowledged - presence in contemporary fine arts museums. The 2004 Whitney Biennial included such things as a fragile glass nest made by Jim Hodges, known for his gender-bending, craft-inspired work, and a room furnished by Andrea Zittel, famous for her artist-designed environments. Craft can even be found in the redesigned Museum of Modern Art, where the contemporary art floor showcases an installation by the glass artist Josiah McElheny.

The blurring of boundaries between art and craft was behind the name change at the California College of the Arts. Founded in 1907, the college was dedicated to furthering the social goals of the Bay Area Arts and Crafts movement. That goal remains, said Michael Roth, the college's president. However, he said, "in the end, a simpler name with the same commitment to connect art and society is what drove our decision."

For Mr. Pepich of the Racine Art Museum, the decision to use only the word "art" in the name was deliberate. He notes that the founding museum, the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, had always been primarily an art museum, one with a strong focus on crafts.

"The goal behind our program at RAM is to assist the field in breaking down barriers by showing how craft and fine art are similar rather than different, and to create a context for craft that places it within the contemporary art field," Mr. Pepich said.

As an example, he pointed to a current show at the museum, "Glitz!!!: Luster and Luxe in RAM's Collection," which combines luster-based ceramics and gold jewelry with works on paper by abstract painters like Lee Krasner.

"The traditional contemporary fine arts curators are still a little bit nervous about this," Mr. Pepich said. "Part of that is because museums like RAM are in the role of breaking down the hierarchy that was used to categorize objects when museums were starting up in the 19th century."

As for Mr. Siegel, the board member at the Museum of Arts & Design who concocted its new name, he said that "people were really attracted to the word arts as opposed to art. They thought it seemed all encompassing."

But he also cautioned that no name should be taken too seriously. "A name is a name is a name," Mr. Siegel said. "The success or failure of this institution is going to be tied to the quality and diversity and excitement of the shows they mount. That's when the name will begin to mean something."

Fygar here. I reprinted the article in its entirety just in case some of you heathens out there haven't signed up for the NYT web site or you're just too damn lazy.

I'm almost at a loss as to where to begin with this article. Hey, Carol Kino! Hey, Board of the Museum of Arts & Design! Craft is not a dirty fucking word! Craft does indeed dare to speak its name! I speak here in the name of craft! I speak here for all the people who are struggle to move this discourse forward and to expose and flummox all those (and there are a lot of you) who think you're doing craft some sort of favor while, in reality, you're stabbing every maker in their backs, hunched over their wheels and work tables and looms.

Here's the deal: Just because you call your Yugo a Ferrari, it ain't gonna perform any better. Until the board and the director of the Museum of Arts & Design pull their collective heads out of their collective asses, they will continue to hinder craft (and now they're even disparaging poor, innocent arts and design with their misbegotten well meaning). You are not helping!! Here's an idea: rather than spend loads of dinero replacing stationary and signage, what if you got together, dumped most of your permanent collection in the East River and started from scratch with a board and a director who knew what it meant to be a craftsperson? Who knew what it meant to be a maker?

This name change is such a bald-faced attempt to get units through the door rather than improve the standing and exposure of craft, it would be comical if it weren't so pathetic. How is shitting on your original namesake going to earn craft any respect? Let me ask another question: Where was MAD at NCECA? Where was MAD at SNAG? Where was MAD at ABANA? Ohhhh, you were at SOFA? Ahhh, I see: the food that the galleries serve is so much better than getting all stinky with a bunch of smelly undergraduates and their garlicky hummus. Dumbasses. That is where the future of the crafts lives! Get your butts out of your swanky, upper west side apartments and get your hands dirty! Then talk to me about your desire to expand the school of craft.

Now, I could be all wrong. This could be the big breakthrough. This could be the moment that, suddenly, the larger world realizes the importance that making holds in the lives of millions and our s0ciety. This could be the moment that more and more people discover that craft (and art) (artandcraft) are the things that have glued societies together, recorded their history and that the hand-made object along with Art can point towards a brighter aesthetic future. It could be, but I don't think that the Museum of Arts and Design is going to have a hand in the process.

You will not be able to focus group this movement. You will not be able to shed aura of irrelevance that hangs on your museum like a thick, dark shadow with a simple name change. You will not be able to be at the forefront of craft, art, or design if you listen to people who think, "Craft will never be able to shed its macramé potholder image". That fucking potholder is important! Why don't you want to look?! Give me your tongue depressor log cabins! How is a necklace that Lee Krasner has blessed with attention more important than the tongue depressor log cabin? This is not about The Market. This is about The Making.

Holy Cow! There may actually be hope!

There are TWO of us!

Note to sticks in the mud: you are going to pulled up, dried out, stuffed in the kiln so we can use your tired, sorry, old ass to get this mutha up to cone 10. Here's the dealio-yo: We (all two of us) are sick of your shit. This is just the beginning; There will be more of us; we will get more readers; there will be more blogs; mindless appreciation of crap-ass pottery will no longer be tolerated! So, please, by all means, enjoy the next while. Soon, very soon, the revolution will be upon you. This wheel is still in spin, baby.

NCECA: The Hangover

If you're reading this, it puts you in a couple of different categories. One is pretty elite: a place among the three people that currently know this page exists and the second, while honorable, is slightly larger: craft freak and someone who knows what the acronym NCECA stands for.

I gotta give it up for this year's conference: there were a shitload of good shows, the panels didn't completely suck, and the exhibition hall was loaded, loaded with booths for all kinds of vendors and schools. Someone used a pretty freaky-deeky analogy: they told me that this whole conference, as it grows, is kinda like a planet or a star that has collected material over the years. Somehow, the core remains dense enough to hold all of the amalgamated goop together. And, goddamn, that's pretty much NCECA in a nutshell. Every year, you can't imagine that it can get any bigger, then it does and it still holds together. As annoyed and frustrated as I can get about the absolute freaks and idiots that populate our medium, there's something to be said for a material that can bring together a bunch of goofballs, peacefully, annually.

First off, I've got to give mad props to the fine city of Baltimore. I highly doubt that there has been a conference that was welcomed by high-ranking city officials, imploring us to explore and enjoy their city. Pretty fucking cool. Baltimore (almost literally) reeks of age and history. It's a city that has seen cycles and cycles of growth and change, near collapse and regeneration. There were loads of good restaurants and weird, hipster neighborhoods.

I came to this NCECA fully prepared to be completely annoyed. While I think that they have a long, goddamned way to go, there were way more shades of skin walking the aisles of the exhibition halls than I had seen at any conference previously. I still think that the panel on Arts and Community was full of shit. Basically, like the worst panels, it was a self-promotional opportunity for the directors of the included institutions. I'm not really dissing on these places, I'm just saying: if you're going to talk about community, do it. I don't need to see slides of the North Carolina mountains or your great kiln room, tell me what you're doing to improve the community where your facility is located. Yep, I thought so.

Robert Hughes' opening lecture was exactly what you'd want from the mighty bear of Art History: great, gruff grumblings about the state of art and the world. Declarative sentences soaked with scotch and so heavy with sadness, they had to be true. It was pretty much his stock speech with enough references to ceramics to keep us awake. He either really, really knows his audience or was completely mis-guided into mentioning raku bowls. Certainly, he set all the raku freaks in the crowd a-flitter and possibly, inadvertently validated the dumbest sub-set of an already marginalized group. Oh well. Fuckin' A that NCECA even got him in the first place.

Even so, I find it disheartening that NCECA feels like it has to get these art world big-dawgs (Robert Hughes, Jed Perl) just to help us feel like what we're doing has some validity in the art world. There was a pretty crappy article in a recent Ceramics Monthly where the writer attempted to rationalize craft's marginalization in the art world by holding up a bunch of old articles from art magazines, shaking them in our faces and saying "See, they've been paying attention all along!". Bullshit.

There may need to be a seperate discourse, there may not. I go back and forth. Guess what, though? Jumping for joy everytime the art world shits in our general direction is not going to get us the respect we expect. When they do pander to us, and especially when NCECA pulls some sort of bullshit bizarre-o, meta-pandering, we should stand up and say "Fuck you!! Fuck you! Where have you been all these years! Fuck you! Where will you be in the morning?! Going back to your whore painting, your whore photography, your whores that make you all the money, that's where you'll be, bitch. That's who you'll wake up with tomorrow. Fuck you! We don't need you!"

Now that I think about it, we need some motherfuckers to stand up in front of us and talk about the ass-rockin' passion that we feel for the material. 'Cause that's what it is. NCECA is not (or shouldn't be at least) about sculpture over pots or raku over soda (even though raku does suck [sorry folks!]), it is, in the end, about the material. Clay, baby, clay. In your fingers and on your clothes, the kiln glowing hot: decals melting all sexy or salt popping in the firebox. So, there, I see now: fuck you Art Big-Dawgs! You are sexy and you make us feel good but, tomorrow morning, all we'll have is this stinky bag of mud to comfort us. And, fuckin' A, if that isn't enough.

The no-man's land between having some taste and, well, being a dumbshit

Alright, so, you think you know something about pottery. You think you can walk by a kiln or look at a kiln load once or twice and you think you know what the problem is. You think xyz wood kiln consistently gives bad results: "Hell, I walked by as they were unloading the other day and that kiln just sucks". "I didn't see it when they unloaded it in June, but Jim-Bob, there, did and he said that kiln just sucks". "Dogshit pots is what I heard. You might as well fired 'em in a gas reduction kiln".

Now, see, I may be taking this a bit personally here, but I don't think so. I think all this points to a bigger problem in the world of craft (and art): people just don't know what the fuck they're talking about 99 percent of the time. Hey, hey, don't get me wrong: I'm not gonna sit here I tell you I have a clue about anything or that I'm hundred percent right allll the time but, at least I'm fucking smart enough to realize that fact. Fucking aesthetics are a matter of taste, right? Well, what if, tragically, you just don't have any fucking taste and (even more tragically) you're just too fucking dumb to realize it? What do you do?

I'm getting pretty specific here but, oh, who gives a fuck? When you're stuck with a wood kiln or any kiln for that matter in a institutional setting, well, you had better just get used to that goddamn kiln, adjust your half-assed idea of what a wood-fired pot has to look like or, preferably, shut. the. fuck. up.

I guess that's what I'm trying to get at here more than anything about taste (currently) or brains. I'm trying to say: open your goddamn eyes to the aesthetic possibilties. What if you realized that every pot from a wood kiln doesn't need to covered with ash and snot and chunks and shit to be "wood-fired"? What if you took your dry pot here and your juicy pot there, looked at the results of a firing and said, "hm, not bad"? What if you took two goddamn seconds to actually think about what you're looking at, fucking educate yourself, rather than worry about fitting everything into your tight, narrow, pansy-assed idea about what everything is supposed to look like?

We Wish We Were Diverse, We Really, Really Do

So, the poster for NCECA came today. It’s usually pretty entertaining and aggravating when it comes out every year for me: you get to see old friends and folks with whom you’ve crossed paths on panels, demo-ing, or moderating panels. It’s fascinating to watch, over a period of years, the cliques of the clay world define themselves and to notice people who return every so often to beat their dead horse of choice.

I think I’m going to get why these panels usually suck in another post, closer to NCECA itself. Today, I’d like to talk about something that jumped out at me as I perused the poster, fresh out of the mail box: Community, Clay, and Culture, that’s the theme for this year’s NCECA conference. Ok, now, these are all very good things: Community? Great! I love it. Love the people! Clay? Clay is good, yup. And Culture? What can I say? It’s in the title of the blog. I love the pop-culture, the fine culture and the low culture.

However, in the context of the poster, which features blather about how Baltimore, the host of this year’s conference is a great place to examine culture because it’s so diverse, the panels, the theme and NCECA becomes more of a joke than usual: No wonder nobody takes clay seriously! Hey NCECA, here’s an idea: if you’re going to preach about diversity and community, you had better start fucking practicing. You can’t have a conference based around the idea of “community” and “diversity” and not have any goddamn panels about what that means! And, don’t throw us some lame-ass bone about community by having a panel featuring directors of clay centers from around the country talk about, um, community. In the context of this poster, touting diversity, please, tell me, what have any of these people done (truly) to promote diversity? I can tell you right now, one of centers represented here is located in a neighborhood that is a center of the Somali population in Minneapolis. Guess how many Somalis take classes there. Another director is from a wonderful school in a county where the locals think we spend our time having orgies in pentagram-shaped wading pools filled with chicken blood. One school created a community of potters; the other exists because of it. I’m confused: what the hell does diversity have to do with anything of this?

Both places I’m referring to have fairly large outreach programs going out to schools in each of their areas. And what with arts programs going in the shitter, it seems to fall to places like these to do a minimum of art education and the little bit that we do is goddamn wonderful. But, I’m sorry, the last time I checked, neither of these directors did any organizing, scheduling, teaching, picking up, firing, or dropping off of the work that makes the kiddies eyes light up. . . so why are they fucking there?! If we love community so much, where are the outreach directors?! In fact, as long as we’re at it: where are the people who are actually doing something for the community? Where are the mad props for my homies at Empty Bowls? The Empty Bowls people who ask for no credit, who expect nothing in return, who have set into motion a giant fund-raising, people-feeding machine that knows no boundary: city, state or country!

I know, that was a little abrupt. But here it is: art classes are great, but people in this country are fucking hungry and, mostly, they’re not potters. So, NCECA, instead of having some masturbatory, ego-stroking session where a bunch of rich whiteys talk about their communities and what they’re doing for them, why don’t we have a quick, five-minute meeting, pull our heads out of asses and go fucking help some people who actually need it?