
Art VS Craft
I recently posted a video of Ursula Hudson, daughter of one of my old friends Clarissa Rizal Hudson who went by Clarissa Hudson when we met and later, changed her name to her maiden name Clarissa Rizal. Here are a number of her blog posts where she mentions our artistic relationship. https://www.clarissarizal.com/blog/?s=cecil+touchon
I bring this up because it was in talking with Clarissa that I clarified my thoughts on the difference between craftsmen and artists especially in relation to indigenous traditions like Clarissa was a master of.
In the case of craftsmen who follow long held craft traditions the main point it to maintain the fidelity to both the techniques and the imagery and the meanings of things. The reason for this tradition dates way back to preliterate times in any given society where the knowledge of a people or a tribe was passed down through an oral tradition and remembered through imagery and the imagery through craft technology such as among the Tlingits of the Northwest coast of which Clarisa and her daughters are part of that linage through weaving. Their devotion and respect for the tradition which they are participants carries a significant cultural onus on them to maintain the fidelity of the tradition both in the technological sense and in the use of symbols and forms and their relationships that comprise the language of the tradition and hold the stories and history and wisdom of their people. That is serious stuff and deviation is not acceptable.
On the other hand, for many decades now, western culture has forgone this taboo based on the fact that all of the cultural, historical, legal, etc. has been written down and codified and everyone in any field can refer to the written word, photographic imagery and the documents used in western culture to maintain the requisite fidelity to past history especially using scientific and academic organizational methods. This kind of scientific clarity has caused many in the West to realize that the story and the facts often do not match up and this has caused much scrutiny and accountability in recent years. All for the better I would say but it does take a little of the romance out of the story when you examine things in daylight and with a magnifying glass.
Hence, this has lifted the burden of fidelity from the craft/art community’s shoulders and left them free to explore whatever they wish, innovate any way they want, experiment, run amok, build and inhabit their own private worlds, etc.
At the beginning artists were quaking in their boots when they realized they were free to do whatever they could imagine. If you are free to do anything you can dream up, what should that be? It was a crisis and at the same time artists were no longer that important to cultural maintenance and were eventually replaced by news channels, corporate advertising, and the internet. That is the cost of freedom. I am of course simplifying the whole subject to account for our attention deficit disorder.
So, in conversations with Clarissa when she explained this cultural burden to me and her fear of straying from her duty to fidelity to the traditions she was working in and what others in her field would think of it I suggested that she could be an innovative artist and a traditional craftsman at the same time. Two different bodies of work. Why not? I think it took her a little while to wrap her head around the idea but then she, at some point, agreed, I think.
So, she came over to my studio for a few times and I showed her how to use some European style painting techniques and the art of collage with her traditional imagery and forms and clearly she loved it after that. You see in the video with Ursula that she too took up painting and collage as a way to rapidly explore her imagery and still stay true to her craft traditions at the same time.
meanwhile…
Ursula mentioned in a recent Instagram post the relationship of the market value of craft items such as weavings to the market value of fine art paintings on canvas as an example. Yes, there is a difference in value - art market value - This is a complex issue that is beyond both the craftsman and the artist alike. When we are talking about the art market and what collectors and institutions value, they are in their own separate sphere away from the communities from which they draw the artifacts. It is a certain kind of exploitation in a way of both the arts and crafts communities but that is what keeps the money flowing so we can all work along. To pull the value out of these communities collectors collect and then a market is created and the items in that market are driven in value by the collectors buying and selling among themselves on the secondary market.
I often say that art objects are mobile real estate. As a commodity it follows most of the same rules. If you buy a art/craft thing at a gas station in the middle of nowhere it is one price, if you buy it in a top tier gallery in New York it is vastly more assuming it is a good work. Then if the maker of the object is also represented in museum collections and has ongoing institution exhibitions, that drives the perceived value much higher and FOMO can set in (fear of missing out) until it is like the old tulip market story.
The art market which is a Western thing based of aristocrats collecting paintings back in the day, paintings became the honored thing to collect and that tradition still holds true today. So you could take a craft tradition like northwest coast weaving designs and start painting them onto big canvases and throw in some current socio/political messaging into the narrative and bang your paintings made now might start trading a generation from now for millions of bucks. It doesn’t mean you’ll get those prices now but future collectors might if you randomly become thought of as a beacon of your generation through critics and art historians and institutions and the influence your work might be having on other artists.
So like I said, it is a complex issue and quite beyond the artist/craftsman. We just have to make a living so we can keep going. Sure, you can be like some of those guys who are playing the market but that is a whole other thing to do with your life than to just keep working along in your studio and living life. And yes, unless something changes to rattle the cage, and it could at some point, Craft will always play second fiddle to especially paintings on canvas.
The upside is the artists/craftsmen communities are a fount of endless wealth production. We generate the culture everyone else lives in. We just need a piece of the pie to keep going.
For more thoughts on this read…