COMMENT: “2nd Class Citizens” was my first foray into serious writing about the crafts. Like many of my generation, I was much perturbed by the artworld’s refusal to accept craft as a legitimate form of art (most of the time, anyway). Like many, I complained, and the astute reader will detect a note of defensiveness in this and much of my later writing. As an early effort, I find this essay naïve in many of its particulars. Still, the basic concept that craft must seek its own critical language and its own competence remains sound.
First published in the inaugural issue of Metalsmith magazine, Fall 1980
I'm supposed to talk about aesthetics. I know a lot of you are thinking, "bor-ing!" and thinking how you'd much rather see some work instead of listening to all these words. I can't altogether blame you, for anybody who has tried to learn about modern-day aesthetics-that is, art criticism-knows how dry and convoluted the subject can become. Picking up Art Forum magazine, most people immediately get the sense that the articles are all badly translated from German, very esoteric and obscure, and that the whole venture is simply not worth bothering with.
So it's easy to believe that all aesthetics are convoluted beyond comprehension, or at least not important enough to deal with. Actually, I tend to agree with anyone who thinks that. But there is another side to the coin, a side where aesthetics becomes important. To illustrate, let me tell you a story. I was visiting a gallery in Boston, the Harkus-Krakow Gallery on Newbury Street. They had paintings upstairs and a show of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz downstairs. I was listening to the gallery owner talk about photography as a different medium with a different vocabulary from painting or sculpture. She spoke of the difficulty that her customers had in dealing with the photographic image, because they were used to dealing with paintings and prints. Their definition of art was too limited, so they couldn't understand the photographs being a valid art form.
Something needed to be explained to them. The gallery owner said that once she explained that photography was not the same as painting-that there were different, but important, ideas and attitudes operating - then the people became more receptive. She was talking about how the work is understood. And that's the purpose of aesthetics, to bring understanding to the work at hand. It's not just what the artists think and feel about their work, but also what is communicated to other people. For the gallery owner, it was important to get her customers to understand and sympathize with the photographs so they would feel like buying some of them. For that reason, she talked about the aesthetics of photography. For her, understanding is a matter of survival.
As I listened to this lady, I thought, "Why don't we speak about the crafts as having distinctive ideas and attitudes that separate them from painting and sculptured" The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Crafts can be understood in a different way from painting and sculpture. That's what I'm talking about today.
Definition of Crafts
Before I continue, I should define what I mean by the term "crafts." I don't think there is a precise definition, but I will give you a broad, vague definition so that we have some kind of agreement as to what I'm talking about. I'm not asking you to believe me, but just to provisionally accept my definition for the purposes of this discussion. Crafts are identified, first, with specific media and their techniques. When we speak of metalsmithing, we are talking about a certain material-metal-and the body of techniques that are used to work that material. Similarly, when we speak of glass, we are identifying both a material and a way of manipulating it-glassblowing.
We also define crafts in terms of function. Jewelry-making, for instance, names a functional context. Furniture-making names another. These functional areas have only a rough overlapping with specific media. Jewelry is usually made our of metal in our culture, it is true, but you can also make jewelry out of feathers. Furniture is usually made out of wood, but it is also frequently made of iron or other metals. So, you see, these definitions are blurred, but they are still useful.
The first question I ask is this: how have the crafts been understood? Traditionally, the crafts have been a second-class citizen in the art world. To put it bluntly, there are a lot of people who think that a craft object cannot possibly be art. Obviously, most of us here don't believe this, but I'm talking about a world considerably larger and more influential than this group of metalsmiths. It's bigger and more influential than any body of craftsmen. Since I'm a metalsmith selling my work in a gallery, I have to deal very directly with this art world. Although you may think that you are immune to the judgments of gallery owners and collectors, of museum curators and art critics, it is their opinions that become conventional wisdom. These people have placed the crafts in a second-class-citizen status, and because of their power their view has pervaded the whole art world. It is through the opinions of these gallery owners, curators, critics and writers that most people understand us.
Fortunately, this position is eroding. There are a number of people who are agitating for equal status for the crafts, and they are meeting with some success. Nevertheless, they are fighting a traditional view that is centuries old and has become one of the basic assumptions in the art world.
Do you doubt me? Let me give you a couple quotes from reliable sources. Most of you probably remember H. W. Jansen's History of Art-the big gray book that's used for "Introduction to Art" courses in almost every art school in the country. If anybody speaks for conventional wisdom, Mr. Jansen does, because he had to be in the best taste and of the most careful conservatism to get his book so widely accepted. And this is what he has to say about the crafts. First he says, "Originality is what distinguishes art from craft." Then he says that the purpose of the applied arts (meaning crafts) is to "beautify the useful, an important and honorable purpose no doubt, but of a lesser order than art pure and simple." Nor is this attitude limited to historical work. I recall a review of a Robert Arneson show a few years ago in which the reviewer said that the work was not intellectual enough and that it stank of the kitchen. And Robert Arneson is about the biggest and best that the crafts world has to offer.
Obviously, there's some kind of gap here. There's some kind of drastic difference between the way you and I understand the crafts and the way these writers do. So, what is the source of this tremendous difference?
Crafts' Five Weaknesses
I think there are five major weaknesses that art critics and historians have perceived in the crafts. These writers act as permission-givers; in a sense it is these people who define the conventional wisdom about what constitutes art and what does not. So, when they perceive a weakness, it becomes a reason to withhold the designation of "art." In examining these weaknesses, we can understand why the crafts have been put on the art world's back burner for so long, and also how to answer their arguments.
First of all, there has always been a weak tradition of writing about the crafts. Art criticism in the Western world goes back to the Classical Greeks, and even before, and has remained a favorite topic for intellectuals ever since. The art academies, and artist-philosophers like Leonardo Da Vinci, revived this tradition of writing about painting and sculpture and regrettably left the crafts out of their deliberations altogether. The only craft organizations that were analogous to the art academies were the guilds, and they concerned themselves with regulating the market rather than with philosophy and aesthetics. There have been very few craftsmen-philosophers until comparatively recently. Thus, with only a few exceptions, there has been no tradition of writing about the crafts. Since writers respect the history of ideas, this vacuum of writing about the aesthetics of crafts seemed to suggest that there was nothing important going on. This is one of the prejudices that affects us even today.
Second, the crafts have traditionally been preoccupied with function. This is not to say that art critics find all functional objects to be inferior art-architecture, for instance, has been regarded as a major art form since the Renaissance. The craft objects that were made in the Bauhaus are generally regarded as art, but only to the extent that those pots and rugs and teapots shared in the conceptual program that the Bauhaus was promoting. To conventional wisdom, then, a functional work can only be art when it serves as a framework to apply some theory to. Those craft objects that simply operate in the functional traditions of crafts - your everyday teapot, for example - have not been given permission to be art because they don't illustrate any theory about modern art.
Third, the crafts have been denied respect because they traditionally make use of ornamentation and eclecticism. To understand why writers and historians think this is bad, you have to look at the central motivations, and some of the illusions, of the modernist movements. After the turn of the century, the modernist attitude was that decoration was decadent and artistically irresponsible. They were referring in particular to hack architecture and design of the period, where a house or a lamp or anything else became a surface on which to affix a stunning mish-mash of ornaments in all manner of historical styles. (Imagine a typically overdone Victorian house.) In reaction to this kind of design, the modernists decided that any ornamentation, and any use of a previous style, was suspect. They tended to prefer straightforward clean design, where the structure of the work was also the image that it presented. The phrase "form follows function" expresses this idea most clearly-and that is why modern art has been so favorable to industrial design. Today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York you can see more propellers and automobiles and the like than craft objects.
For a time, ornamentation was even equated with criminal tendencies. Adolph Loos, a modernist architect, wrote in 1908 that most criminals were tattooed, and that the earliest impulses to art were bathroom graffiti. Since both tattooing and graffiti are degenerate and ornamental, he reasoned, the goal of highly evolved culture is to eliminate all ornamentation from all objects. It's a wonderful leap of logic, and I don't know how many people believe him, but it's clear that architecture and industrial design have gone through the last 50 years as if what old Adolph said was true.
The fourth weakness that people have perceived in the crafts is what I call the "five-year-lag-syndrome." It has often been remarked that a current idiom will show up in the crafts about five years after it appears in painting or sculpture. Of course, there have been borrowings from painting and sculpture into crafts disciplines ever since the three were split apart in the early Renaissance. But what irks critics today is the obviousness of the influence and the tardiness in picking up the style. I recall seeing a quilt done in 1974 that was a series of silkscreen-like images of people, even including one of Marilyn Monroe. It was clearly derived from the serial silkscreens by Andy Warhol. He did Marilyn in 1962, which makes a 12 year time- lag in this case.
Last, and most significant, is the weakness that critics and historians perceive in craftsmen's lack of an intellectual approach. Now, you have to bear in mind that the dominant definition of art in the 20th century holds that art is an intellectual process. Art is judged (and understood) largely by how it relates and contributes to the continuing history of art ideas. Ever since Impressionism, painting and sculpture are often seen to be the only arena wherein art issues are developed. The major directions of 20th-century art-the move toward abstraction, the idea of constructivism, the later move toward rigorous reductionism and a host of other ideas-have been developed in painting and sculpture. Crafts have adopted most of these ideas five to ten years later, as I mentioned, much too late to really claim credit for their development. As a consequence, most critics and writers, and most of the rest of the art world, think that the crafts are completely out of it intellectually. In their view, craftsmen have not done any truly substantial art simply because they have not participated in the ongoing development of important artistic concepts and issues. Craftsmen are not, as the reviewer said, intellectual enough. Or, so it seems on the surface.
Ultimately, the acceptance of these weaknesses depends on your value system, on what you hold to be good and what you think to be bad. I think there is a lot of truth in these criticisms, but I also believe there is another side to the story that has not been considered until recently.
Craft's Language and Tradition
I propose that there is a separate tradition of ideas and attitudes in the crafts. There is a separate language, and in some cases a separate value system, that often has no parallel in painting or sculpture. This tradition, this language, is just as old and honorable as the tradition of painting and sculpture. Its newest manifestations have been just as intelligent and radical as the newest developments in any of the fine arts contexts. These traditions of ideas and attitudes are the real subject of my talk.
I have divided the language of crafts into four categories: attitude, identity, format, and value systems. Each one relates to the others, and as a group, I think they can serve as a beginning and a foundation, for the making of a genuine crafts aesthetic.
Attitude
First, I want to talk about attitude. As I pointed out, the crafts have not been associated with intellectual processes in art. But there is a reason for this. In general, analysis and categorization-which are the corner¬stones of intellectual process-are not seen by most craftsmen as having positive value in and of themselves. This distrust of intellectual process goes back to the roots of philosophy in every developed culture in the world. You can place almost everyone in one of two philosophical camps: the Classicists, who believe in the truth and power of analysis and categorization, and the Romantics, who believe in the truth and power of intuition and emotion. The Romantic attitude, I feel dominates the crafts.
The Romantic attitude is basically non-intellectual and stands opposite Classical philosophy. People in the Romantic camp are not interested in naming, categorizing or analyzing, but rather in experience itself. The non-intellectual tradition is as old as human thought: it is associated with emotion, with humor and fantasy, with intuition and with mysticism. These are all ways of thinking that don't submit to logic and rationality, and that is why I call them non-intellectual. It is this irrational aspect to much of the crafts that has alienated critics, who are committed to rational analysis and literacy, and who are also committed to the role of permission-givers in the art world. Crafts that are non-intellectual in attitude are not given permission to be art.
I suggest, however, that the attitude is the aesthetic. The Romantic attitude favors experience over analysis, it favors feelings and fun and going with the flow. This attitude generates and informs the great majority of craft objects, and I'm sure most of you would agree. Some of the most direct and obvious examples of how the Romantic attitude colors craftwork was in the Funk movement in ceramics. Robert Arneson's "Typewriter" (1966) is typical of the whole movement's approach: a crudely made clay typewriter has fingers with red nails instead of keys. On the first viewing, it is a joke, a humorous and appropriate contrast of images. "Typewriter" is also a dirty alternative to the antiseptic quality that dominated Pop Art at the time, and perhaps also an attack on the seriousness of fine art. In any case, the Romantic attitude clearly informs the work and becomes necessary to both the making and the appreciation of a work like "Typewriter."
In this sense, I suggest, the attitude becomes the aesthetic. This nonintellectual mode of thought is similar to Eastern philosophies that are specifically intended to avoid abstractions and deal only with real phenomena, like Zen or Taoism. Zen, in turn, developed an aesthetic view related to crafts. The special area that men of Zen concentrated on was the cha-no-yu, the tea ceremony. The Japanese tea ceremony was developed in the 13th century by modifying earlier Chinese monastic ceremonies. To paraphrase D. T. Suzuki, the art of tea is intended to establish a Buddha-land in a small group by fostering tranquility and gentleness of spirit. Not only the ceremony, but also the tea utensils and the environment are supposed to encourage this same quietness of mind. From the tea ceremony there emerged a way of evaluating the tea utensils, and, in fact, all art.
The preference was for objects that were unpretentious and homely. The qualities of effortlessness, imperfection and unfashionableness were elevated to the highest aesthetic level, because these qualities were held to represent the authentic Zen understanding. The most famous teabowl in Japan started its life as a Korean farmer's rice bowl. It is rough and unassuming, and because it had these qualities rather than careful aesthetic consideration, it has been elevated to its present status.
The teachings of Zen claim that enlightenment comes not through analysis and categorization, but through meditation and the simple process of merely paying attention. I believe that Zen is a very sophisticated and very disciplined version of the Romantic mode of thought. The way of seeing and the artistic sensibility that came from the way of tea was a direct descendent of Zen thought. There is an aesthetic approach in the way of tea that is highly refined and that sprang from a nonintellectual way of looking at things.
In the 1920s, a Japanese writer named Soetsu Yanagi started looking at indigenous Japanese crafts and discovered for himself the aesthetics of the tea ceremony. He was joined by several potters who shared his enthusiasm, notably Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. These three revolutionized studio ceramics by their insistence on un-pretentiousness and naturalness in their pots. Their aesthetic passed through England to America, where it remains a considerable force in crafts today. The writings of Leach and Yanagi are probably the most widely accepted aesthetic theories to have come from the nonintellectual tradition.
The tea sensibility is related to the way craftsmen work. The fact that you get to work with your hands is of central importance to many craftworkers. In manipulating a material and seeing what it will do, there occurs a mutual communication between object and maker. The material itself begins to suggest alternatives by the way it moves and responds to the actions of the maker. This highly intuitive process of making decisions at the moment of making the object is very similar to improvising music. There is a kind of problem-solving, not by extensive analysis, but by experiencing the problems and allowing the solutions to arise spontaneously. This unpremeditated approach is highly favored by the Zen-influenced potters. The pot assumes form as it is being thrown. The process is immediate and direct and almost like meditation.
It's also important that the process of making gives tremendous satisfaction to many craftsmen. They put a positive value on how the work changes their psyche rather than on how the work meets critical standards. The work is good because it gives a real and immediate emotional reward, not because somebody else thinks it's good. The work itself is what is interesting, and what sustains the maker. This kind of craftsman tends to regard the objects he or she makes as a by-product of a much more important process of making. Again, this is a Romantic preference for experience over analysis. The preoccupation is with the inward, emotional state of the artist and with how the work can change that state. The power of this approach is demonstrated by the number of people who leave lucrative professions and start working with their hands at a craft. I know an advertising executive who became a potter and a concrete-plant operator who became a furniture-maker. I'm sure that many of the members of SNAG became metalsmiths because they recognized their professional lives were not nearly as satisfying as their artistic lives.
Now, this emphasis on personal satisfaction sounds a little like the "Me-decade" ethic, but the Romantic attitude goes further than that. The crafts, and craftmakers, are consistently motivated by simple human needs, needs that are not widely recognized by scientists and intellectuals because they are so hard to quantify and talk about. But a nonintellectual thinker can recognize these needs because he or she can feel them, and doesn't question their reality. I'm talking about simple human needs, like the necessity for complexity, the need for imaginative and satisfying work or the need for personal identity along with a sense of belonging. People need tradition, they need to have fun and be capricious from time to time and they need to take delight in the things they see and touch. These are simple things and they are widely neglected, because no bureaucrat or scientist can tell precisely what they are.
The Romantic thinker recognizes these needs because they are felt and not analyzed. I believe that craftsmen have always gone about answering these needs, often without claiming to. But you can understand how the patterns on a Navajo rug satisfies the need for visual complexity, or how jewelry satisfies the need for personal identity or how a piece of Funk ceramics satisfies the need for capriciousness. Here is an expressionism that is motivated not by theoretical considerations, but by the desire to give something simple but absolutely necessary to people.
The nonintellectual tradition of answering human needs is evidenced in the free use of two things that modernist art theory has held in the lowest esteem for 50 years: ornamentation and eclecticism. You recall that this is one of the major weaknesses that critics have seen in the crafts.
Ornamentation and Eclecticism
You all know what ornamentation is. I believe that ornamentation has always been used to satisfy the human need for complexity and contrast. It is proven in the colorful clothes and festooned jewelry of rural people in harsh environments all over the world. Here, ornamentation serves as a relief from the tedious, barren surroundings. This is probably why so many college dormitory rooms are heavily decorated. Ornament also makes objects delightful-and fascinating. The decoration is intended to sustain people during the course of ordinary life, to give richness and a humane scale where there might otherwise be only blandness.
Of course, ornaments have more formal purposes. Decorating an object introduces a foil and contrast to the structure or body. Ornaments become visual stops and a means to introduce color and texture to an object, and they can also become a vehicle for symbolic content. The free use of eclecticism is another earmark of the Romantic attitude. I haven't defined this term so far, and I figure that some of you are in the dark. Eclecticism is a way of designing where all kinds of historical styles are used as sources, and what seems to be the best parts of each style are used for designing the object in question. As I said before, in the art world eclecticism became the moral equivalent of murdering your baby sister.
Now, another aspect of the Romantic mode of thought is that it tends towards rebelliousness and iconoclasm, and I think that eclecticism has been used in the crafts in a very rebellious way. There has been an intuitive irreverence toward the established fine art morality of the day, and that irreverence has appeared in the form of eclecticism. Instead of using sources that are approved and certified, craftsmen have tended to prefer sources and approaches that go against the grain. This has been a conscious rejection of the current value systems in painting and sculpture, and, as such, bears a resemblance to any anti-high-art-taste movement. That's one reason why Art Nouveau and Art Deco have been such pervasive influences among craftsmen in the last decade.
Actually, eclecticism is a time-honored device, and has been well accepted in the art world when done with sufficient taste and a lot of intellectual-sounding justification. Picasso, in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," selected certain aspects of African art and grafted them onto Cubism. What happened there, and what happens in most examples of eclecticism, is a transformation of an older style in its meeting with new contexts, techniques and ideas. By shifting the context of the styles being used, all sorts of poetic and possibly shocking associations can be made. Picasso used African art to challenge his viewers' preconceived notions about art, and I believe that many craftsmen have a similar motive.
Eclecticism was also used as an antidote to the blankness of reductivist art in the 60s and 70s. As painters and sculptors went through the intellectual process of reducing their art to the essential minimum, huge numbers of romantically inclined craftsmen were bored stiff. By taking influences from within and without the body of art history, craftsmen created a kind of opposite to minimalism and conceptualism. Freely mixing all these influences, they not only rejected the reductivist trend, but they created a more energetic and delightful art, that was much more satisfying to people with nonintellectual sympathies.
Identity
The second aspect of the language of craft that I want to talk about is identity. When a person says, "I am a metalsmith," or "I am a woodworker," they are suggesting that there are aspects of what they do that are different from, say, a painter or a sculptor. Of course, some things do not change from one discipline in the visual arts to the next-color is the same for painters as it is for potters, and composition works the same way whether you are a bookbinder or a printmaker. These formal considerations cross all boundaries in the visual arts, as do many of the more philosophical elements. A symbol is a symbol, for instance, whether it is made of oil paint or clay. All craftsmen have much in common with all the concerns of painters and sculptors.
But I'm interested here in what is not held in common. So, when I say, "I'm a metalsmith," what do I include that doesn't have to do with other artistic disciplines? First of all, craftsmen have a different history. The history of crafts goes back to the beginnings of culture, and it contains an incredibly rich and varied body of work and ideas. Each group within the crafts contains its own subhistory-the story of how each culture used the material and techniques of that discipline. And this history is of great importance to all of us, because it can give us an identity-a historical context-that is not shared by painting and sculpture. The more that you know about the history of crafts and the history of your own discipline, the more connected you feel with the ongoing process of the human condition-at least, I'm beginning to feel that way. I take pleasure in associating my work with the metalsmithing of past civilizations, for it gives me a sense of belonging to a process that is much larger, and vastly more important, than I am.
When I claim to be a metalsmith, I also imply a certain loyalty to my tools, processes and materials. I suspect that painters and sculptors feel much the same way about their tools and materials, but my commitment is to metalsmithing, and that makes me different from them. I love my tools; I take great pleasure from looking at my hammers and stakes, or my drawers full of hand tools. I also love the processes-the long hours spent at the bench, carefully assembling and refining tiny objects. It is away of working that I find very satisfying, and this connects back to what I was saying about the Romantic preference for dealing with the internal experience rather than external standards.
Format
If identity describes an internal state of ,what it's like to be a craftworker, then format describes an external condition. By being craftsmen, we are provided with certain formats, which we accept or reject as we please.
The broadest format provided by crafts is the object. Since crafts, pretty much by definition, involve the manipulation of materials in order to make an object, we are all pretty much stuck being object-makers. There are exceptions, and during the 70s many of these exceptions were explored. I think there was a certain amount of art-guilt on the part of some craftsmen; they felt that they should follow along with the reductivist developments occurring in the mainstream art scene. As art became increasingly conceptual and finally abandoned the object altogether, some craftsmen also abandoned the object. So, we witnessed weavers draping yarn in waterfalls, potters jumping 30 times on a pile of wet clay and the like. However, most craftsmen have remained firmly committed to the object.
Beyond that, each discipline offers more particular formats-certain types of objects that have traditionally been executed in particular media. Jewelry, or body ornament has traditionally been made out of metal, for instance, and clothing has traditionally been made out of fiber. Again, the history of craft comes to bear. In choosing a particular format, craftsmen connect themselves with all the historical solutions to their format. The format that the artist chooses offers a vehicle, and a set of restrictions, within which the artist goes about finding solutions to whatever problems he or she chooses to explore. It is very similar to the idea of a rectangular canvas: the painter uses the canvas as an arena within which to work. The canvas becomes a vehicle for whatever formal, conceptual or intuitive problems that the painter wants to explore.
One format that has attracted considerable attention lately is the vessel. A group of potters in Boulder, Colorado were discussing what they had in common in their work, and they decided that they were all using the vessel-an open, hollow form-as a format. Some were approaching the vessel as strictly functional, others were using the bowl shape as a metaphor and still others were using it as a shape upon which to apply color, pattern and form. The vessel serves as a 6,000 year old format which focuses many layers of historical associations on the present work.
Any other format can be used in a similar way; any format can serve as a vehicle for the artist's intentions. The formats offered within the crafts context provide a range of associations references and historical connections, all of which are available for the craftsman to use. These crafts-oriented formats also suggest aesthetic possibilities that are not available to the conventional painter or sculptor.
Value Systems
The last aspect of crafts aesthetics that I want to talk about is the separate value systems-that is, ways of discerning good from bad-that have been established in the crafts. These value systems are quite distinct from most of the art theories that have come from painting and sculpture. In fact, the two seem mutually exclusive. Each of these value systems establishes a particular way of discriminating good work from bad. They seem to exist independently from considerations about formal properties or concepts. The two value systems that seem to be the most influential concern craftsmanship and function.
I'm sure that everyone has been impressed by the craftsmanship in some object, and has made the amazed and delighted observation, "That thing is beautifully put together!" Most metalsmiths react that way when they see the work of Peter Carl Faberge, court jeweler to the czars. In spite of the mannered and somewhat derivative forms, the sheer excellence of the craftsmanship is outstanding. In a case like that, a positive value is given to good craftsmanship. Craftsmen sometimes evaluate a piece on those terms alone. It is the obvious demonstration of skill, the difficulty of the process and the time spent making the object that are appreciated.
Usually, fine craftsmanship is visible only to the initiated-the more that you understand about material and about technical processes, the more you tend to appreciate seeing it done well. To someone who is not conversant with the same processes, the craftsmanship remains invisible.
Now, I'm not saying that it's good to evaluate art or craft only in terms of how well it's made. I'm only saying that a lot of craftsmen do it. Judging an object in terms of the quality of its craftsmanship seems to be a distinctive characteristic of the group. There is a similar phenomenon when it comes to function, too. If an object is intended to be useful, its worth can be evaluated strictly in terms of how well it fulfills all aspects of that function.
In the case of a teapot, all the following requirements have to be met: the teapot can't leak; it has to hold enough water to serve a sufficient number of people; the spout mustn't drip; the spout must be positioned at just the right height, the handle must be insulated, and the whole thing has to clean easily. That's a lot of requirements for one simple object. The solutions to those requirements needn't be prosaic or unimaginative, either. A great deal of careful analysis can be applied to a functional object, and there can be elegant and creative solutions to complex problems. Interestingly enough, this evaluation strictly in terms of function is exactly how engineering is judged: the well-designed machine is the one that works well with a minimum of fuss.
Most art theorists will maintain that craftsmanship and functionality are not valid aesthetic criteria, and I'm not going to argue the point. Many craftsmen feel that these two value systems are perfectly valid and use them to judge objects every day. I'm only saying that these criteria exist, they are used and they form part of the distinctive crafts aesthetic.
The Future of Craft Aesthetics
In conclusion, I'd like to say that I truly want to see the crafts accepted as art, as important art, and be given the serious respect that I think they deserve. I want to see the day when no object can be designated as nonart simply because it is made in a particular medium. That day is not here yet. Although progress is being made, the crafts are still a second-class citizen in the art world. To make more progress in this direction, I think it is important to remember that we are different, in some ways, from painters and sculptors. By talking about-and actually acting upon-these differences, we can bring real understanding to our work.
I want you to be aware that I do not speak "the truth." The categories that I mention here are not fixed and permanent, nor are my statements unquestionably true. I have only been naming some patterns that I have observed. It is your job to accept or reject what I say, as you see fit.
I believe it is also your job to understand what you are doing, and communicate your understanding. Even if you don't give a rat's ass about fine art, someday, somebody is going to ask you what you are doing. If you turn away from them, or if you can't give a clear answer, then a potential for understanding has been lost. This lecture has been my effort to make things clear, to bring understanding to the crafts. Now it's your turn.
Reading List
Garth Clark and Margie Hughto. A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878-1978. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979
Julie Hall. Tradition and Change. New York: E. P. Dutton,1977
Octavio Paz and the World Crafts Council. In Praise of Hands. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1974
Nikolaus Pevsner. The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design. New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968
Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam Books, 1974
Daisetz T. Suzuki. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeron, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Bolingen Series, 1970
Soetsu Yanagi. The Unknown Craftsman. Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1972