I know this is going to be a most sensitive and difficult discussion. There are many of you out there who are quite satisfied, even honored, to consider yourselves as potters and approve of your work as existing comfortably within the greater category of craft. Others of you seek to use clay, perhaps in figurative and sculptural ways, and want to claim the designation of ceramic artist. The rest of you maybe don’t care and think the continuing fuss about whether ceramics is craft or art to be endless and even boring. As always with my blogs, I want to communicate my perspective, based on my own passions and prejudices, not seeking to persuade or convert but merely to share. I hereby embrace the importance and meaning of craft as the rubric and generic heading of those things I most value and care about in ceramics. In the following few paragraphs I will attempt to tell you why.
Craft is many things to me. First it is a way of being in the world. To craft a life was the subject of my last blog. To craft as verb means to apply a lifetime of practice and skill to the immediate task and do it with a mastery achieved through disciplined devotion. It is an extension of personal pride and self-respect because it is handcrafted and exists as an artifact shaped and created by humans. The accomplished task or completed artifact demonstrates integrity because it reflects the integrity of the craftsperson that did it. I like craft because it takes time, it does not save it; because it takes physical labor, it does not save it; because it will demand unconditional attention to the task until excellence has been achieved. The virtues I have mentioned are in a sense old-fashioned virtues. Today our technology seeks to save us time and labor, to make it easy and quick. I am not sure most people know what to do with their saved time and labor but that is the promise. I want craftspeople to really work hard at what they do. I want them to sweat and get dirty and I want it to be very, very difficult to achieve a good result. Surely that is not unreasonable?
Craft comprises the work of making beautiful and enduring things. I do not want it to be easy. Because humans are fallible, even the greatest of craftspeople can make errors. Success in the result is never assured, no matter how good you are at what you do. I think craftspeople must love the very essence of the material, be it clay, fiber, wood, or glass, they work with. They must know its secrets learned over a life-span, know the character and nature of the medium, know the experience of being surprised and sometimes pained by the unexpected defiance and resistance of the material, suffer failure and yet still love the complexities and difficulties of the chosen media. I will go even further in arguing my perspective. I believe that no artifact, identified as either art or craft or painting or sculpture or pottery, can be called art if it does not contain the crafted skills that make both great art and great craft.
Craft represents an active caring that makes doing the act of crafting a series of loving and patient gestures that affirm the best of human nature and intentions. Craft is only possible when it is directed and controlled by the human hand. When the hand forfeits control to some kind of machinery, then it becomes a manufactured product. These last statements are arbitrary conclusions on my part. Many recent writers on craft would disagree with me. Some writers are overly generous and inclusive, in my opinion, and would permit anything done by any means to be called craft as long as there was a level of attention and care in the process. I don’t agree and I will remain adamant and stubborn on this matter. Craft cannot be mass-produced or made by a machine, that is all there is to it.
Craft as a noun involves the evident results, the material artifact as a consequence of that expenditure of time and labor. I am primarily interested in the studio craft artifact. This rather recent phenomenon of the crafted object as art object has historical ancestors in all the hand-made artifacts made before the industrial revolution across the globe and still being made in those cultures that have not been industrialized. In these pre-industrial societies, domestic function was essential and comprised the very rationale for the creation of the object. The results of craft as a studio activity diminishes the requirement of function and in its place takes on the aesthetic dimensions of the object as art. For me, this does not involve the surrender of the object as craft and its transformation into something called art. Rather it proves that the aesthetic dimensions and the skills of craft can be integrated into something that remains craft but achieves art.
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Read Part 2 of Richard’s Blog Post about the Importance & Meaning of Craft in mid-April.
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