Papers
Zero to one thousand to nothing
Robert Cook
June 2004
I have nothing to say about craft and have been saying it for ten years. I say nothing and it takes 750 words, 5000 words, for me to finish. Here, it's 1000. That means I've got 964 to go. I don't care that I'm an imposter. 955. I don't care because I'm not the only one. Most writers about craft, when they face themselves, would admit that they are irrelevant to the actual flow and significance of craft. Well, maybe that's a projection, maybe they don't. Maybe they are entirely satisfied with their production. Who can tell about other people, really? So I'll keep this personal and confess that I firmly believe that all my time spent at the keyboard under the guise of making sense or value adding or fuelling the dialogue has done little more than make the editor expecting the text happy that he or she has some filler between ads. Most of what I've said has been pointless...either drivel or bad writing or bad philosophy or false history. It's either not read or it is read and it goes in one ear and out the other.
So why do I say nothing about craft and, relatively, so often? Well, I came to it in the mid 1990s on the back of the feminist critique of art by Pollock and Parker, et al. Remember, craft was an underdog? Craft was about interior, feminine/feminised space. Ah, how the words of that great bullshit artist Bachelard rung in my ears. And writing about craft was so easy because I could convince myself that I was so on-the-ball, ideologically speaking. Hey, what was that line I used to use? Oh yeah, it was: craft's materiality was a challenge to patriarchal ocularcentrism and the visual excesses of global capitalism. Stylin'. In the process of cutting a fine swathe through the babble of pseudo-academicism I knew where I stood, could convice myself that there was a sense of urgency, that writing about craft was an Occasion. (Admittedly, it was an Occasion the great elders of the craft world would have had me shut up at. But what did those stuffshirts know?)
Whatever, there was still something to say even when the academic pretensions were shed. Remember how craft was resistive in general? How it didn't fit into our understanding of what a commodity culture was. Craft was slow, moved at its own speed, couldn't be hurried to meet a production deadline, to hit the shopfront gleaming. It was wilfully unfashionable, even if this was a sort of fashion of its own. And yes, in a way, this took the place of an unspeakable spiritualism. So I embraced metaphor and went on and on and on, tying myself up in analogy and simile and gagging on my thesaurus. I spoke of 'a poetics'...whatever that was, a way of being vague, I guess, dressed up in the consolations of Joyce, Woolf, Cixous, et al.
And (though I did so less frequently) I could write about saving skills. And here I could write with urgency too, because they were, and are, dying. In the cracks of all this I could write like an idea of a connoisseur I had in my mind...a guy with a velvet jacket for the city and flannels for the weekend.
When the scene changed I followed that too. I flapped jaw about how the youngsters were thinking of themselves in relation to other organisms, fashion, etc. How their work is located within particular subcultures rather than a craft tradition as such. How craft was fragmenting and changing, and whatever else was the go.
Yes, throughout all this (and, largely, unbeknownst to myself) I was little more than a hired gun, adopting other people's agendas, passing them off as my own. I was the ventriloquist act with the over chipper voice, the punchline and the neat and cosy conclusion. Still, what a big ol', enjoyable, breeze this was. People liked me, patted me on the back and stuff. In the meantime, however, what did I say? What did it amount to? All this culture? The answer is very little indeed, certainly far less than my righteousness led me to believe. I prattled, got paid, picked up some research, or cv, points. I gave a little arbitrary and incomplete form to a private enthusiasm or two and yeah, some reporting, after a fashion, was done.
But I was just another of those interchangeable voices adding to the feeling that something was going on. After all, isn't the trick that if we keep talking about exhibitions opening and coming up and grants being awarded, then we can make believe we have a serious culture. Surely, this is one of the biggest fictions the arts deals in. It's a fantasy space that writers, such as myself, are so easily seduced by. After all, it allows us to entertain the notion that we're writing as if we were the vessel, giving form to things, elucidating. In reality, us writers are the void given whatever form we have by the pot that surrounds us.
By not recognising this, I think we've both let the craft makers down, and the objects they make, down. So much was expected of us - validation, support, encouragement, informed critique. And we tried to give this, but we never could, never can. Sure, we helped when they attached our words to grant applications, but in real terms, in the manner of the making, in what it means within people's lives, we've done nothing except extend the pillow of an administrative culture across practices in an attempt to smother them like an unwanted kitten beneath the brute force of our interpretative meanderings.
Perhaps I'm making too much of this, because craft goes on without us anyway. Thankfully. It goes on when the journals we write in close up shop for winter and then die not from lack of funds - there are always enough funds!; Jesus, how much do photocopies actually cost? - but from lack of caring. It goes on when we fail to show at forums and symposiums and everyone is more relieved than aggrieved. Above all, it goes on via an oral culture, that is more dynamic than those of us non-makers generally realise. It goes on at night, in the sleep of makers, as their hands scuffle a shape on the sheets, or their lover's warm stomach. Yet we so rarely get at the heart of this. Now it could be that I have just become addicted to reality television and refuse to respect boundaries, but I want more, I want revelation. See, I can't help but feel that the objects are only the tip of a craft culture. A culture - as we all know yet conveniently allow ourselves to forget - is about networks, and exchanges. It is made of the daily stuff of life. And it's my lack of grip on this, my failure to connect beyond the current array of stereotypes that passes for discourse, that makes me feel so strongly that I write nothing of craft.
Naturally, therefore, however much I might finick and fuss about an object, weave stories and interpretations around them, I miss them and the real order of their circulation. 1 Partly this is because the structures we've inherited to talk about craft cannot get into the fact that craft is largely about the construction of social, imaginative and physical spaces that only partly exist. Craft objects are propositions. Even knowing this, I can never get the balance right. I focus on the material, make a hash of that, and then over-compensate by over-intellectualising, or being overly categorical with the signification.
In between, something is missing, creative breathing space maybe. See, if the vessel, for example, conjures a beachscape in South Japan, why aren't I there, considering that, the intricate layers of associations? Who knows, maybe all I am after is a tweaking of the reception or reader response theory from the 1980s in light of the current connectionist thinking in cognitive science that maps the diffuse connections between ideas and memory traces and actions and beliefs. Or do I simply want that mix of studium and punctum that barthes spoke of, as the studium, on its own, just seems more and more pointless, more and more like a false lead.
I've a feeling that if us writers could get our act together in this way - by blurring high class journalism with cultural studies reflexiveness with a novelistic attention to the lifeworld 2 - we might get more respect from the makers. We might because we'd be entering into a real dialogue with them as both of our crafts merge with each other. And this would be to take the lead from craft. As we know, art history, like history, is written by the winner. The rub is that crafts are never, or rarely winners. This is their charm. Yet this is why it is hard to embrace them in a culture that is so hardened by the PR hype of a wannabe professionalisation that it cannot let itself notice the struggles that are going on to make work and how rich and human and brilliantly creative it is. All of it - from glass to fashion to seventies textiles to ceramics and more. As writers we can riff off this.
Sure, the outcome of a type of open writing about craft that refuses the dominance of the fashions of the day 3 and examines, yes, its resistiveness in general, its tenacity, its stalwart beauty and ploddingly graceful richness, will probably be nothing too. Yet it will be importantly nothing because instead of trying to drive the agenda and getting lost in administrative fictions in the process, it will proffer a little about why we care about objects and their production. So I guess having written nothing for so long I may as well continue. It's just now, I can see there's a better kind of nothing to attain to, a nothing that might do justice to the labyrinthine phenomena of the crafts in all its complexity, at all its levels.
Robert cook is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia
- Schopenhaur (in The World as Will and Idea) is just one of many who have commented on the latent idealism of such a complaint. Despite this it is a real and motiviating force, perhaps a constraint in the design sense, that all writers deal with.
- A model for this might be, of all things, Jean Renoir's touching Renoir, My Father.
- And yet redeems them at the same time, by applying them not resolutely, but tentatively and with the objects feeding back on them, rather than vice versa.
