Provocative lecture on the death of the craft movement now available as a print-on-demand book

Garth Clark at his Museum of Contemporary Craft lecture in Portland, Oregon, in October 2008.

Ceramics dealer and prolific author Garth Clark has a message for those working in craft media such as ceramics, metal, wood, fiber, or glass: The craft movement that sought to elevate craft objects to the status of fine art is, for all intents and purposes, “dead.” The results of Clark’s inquest indicate that the movement was a victim of fatal overreach that cut itself off from its base, and kept it from evolving with new technologies and ideas.

In a 2008 lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, titled “How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts,” which has just been issued as a print-on-demand book (the podcast of the original lecture is available for free here), Clark takes pains to distinguish between a movement and its practitioners, who he acknowledged are very much alive. He stressed that he was in no way saying that the crafts themselves are dead. But in an erudite and often humorous account of the past 150 years of craft’s bid for a higher status, Clark points the finger at craft’s attempts to force their way into the fine-art realm as the very thing that has kept the field prisoner.

Glass-makers may be surprised to read that their medium is “dead,” especially in an item on the blog of GLASS magazine, whose very existence is proof that interesting work in glass continues to be produced. Clark’s point, however, is that at a certain moment (around 1980, he suggests), crafters began to try to escape the field, when “the argument that craft was really art was ubiquitous, fevered, and relentless.” The aftermath of this frenzy, according to Clark? Compared with art and design, “craft is now more marginalized and more irrelevant than it has ever been.”

Clark uses the term “art envy” to describe the specific cause of craft’s death. As an illness, art envy is manifested by several symptoms, such as craft’s “overdosing on nostalgia,” an over-dependence on academia, and “regressive and anachronistic” aesthetics. However, the problem is not, and was never, craft’s raison d’etre of “devising gracious, intelligent objects for the home.” As a counterpoint to craft, Clark discusses the applied arts, or design, suggesting craft and design are like twins separated at birth; both share the same objectives, but design has been much more successful at developing its own identity in relationship to the fine arts. Ironically, it has been design and not crafts that is  beginning to get increasing respect from the fine-art world, as in the often-cited 2008 Marc Newson exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, London, where limited edition work fetched stellar prices that had the art world buzzing in the months before the stock market crash.

In response to a question from the audience about how he distinguishes between craft and art (Clark says he handles both in his ceramics gallery), his answer was as honest and thoughtful an appraisal as has yet been offered. He said, off-the-cuff:

Craft is one of the visual arts.  It focuses on a close relationship to materials and processes. In the simplest way, that is what it is. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be everything else, that when you work with materials you don’t bring your entire life’s biography into it, that you don’t have ideas that flow through it. But, ultimately, it is different from other fields in that it has a material and process intensity, and that is also its problem. Now, as art is going multimedia, you can work with any material, change, shift processes. If there’s a store in town, a junk-pile somewhere you can drag something out of, you can migrate from one material to another. Crafts is a difficult issue for our culture today because it takes, depending upon the field, anywhere from 7 to 10 years to develop that extraordinary intimacy with the  materials. The other thing that makes it different, and this is probably a personal bias, craft is to my mind at its best when it is dealing with sensuality. When it starts putting on all those little footnotes from art history, it tends to get a little more tiresome than when it grabs you by the throat and thrills you because of  something that you see that is completely abstract that has no narrative whatsoever. That’s something that it does that, at least in fine arts, you don’t experience that much.

A recent exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance (which the Hot Sheet discusses here) addressed anew the troubled relationship between craft and fine art, inspired by the scholarship of Glenn Adamson (whom Clark also admires). It seems to remain a topic with a lot of traction—but how does glass’s own historical and critical trajectory fit in with Clark’s chronicling of the death of a certain view of craft in general? This is a difficult question to try to answer, especially within a publication that effectively began at the same time that craft began its supposed descent into infirmity. For GLASS readers, perhaps the best place to start is with Clark’s iconic final words to his audience:

“Craft is dead; long live craft.” It’s the hopeful recognition that an ending of one way of understanding something can also function as the beginning of a new understanding.

–Analisa Coats Bacall