Your “official textual” material is interesting — both apt and overly academic at the same time. It touches on subjects that interest me such as maps and networks. But I’ve read so much stuff on the use of themes in art that I can’t help but rolling my eyes at how cliche it sounds. I think I could do better myself, but maybe not that much better.

Indeed, it is a language issue and the phrase was, as the panelists said upfront, intended and used (not by them) to get your attention.

I was more interested in the change from craft as something to be apprenticed to and mastered and only then transformed to art to craft as what you picked up when you needed it, and only that which served the immediate need.

Anne Wilson attempted to line up the various reasons why “informal” craft had suddenly become so popular with young artists, but her emphasis was not on the “informal” part but the materiality itself, which she said was what her students felt a lack of in the digital age.

I like your phrase: a “Respect for tools and materials.” I suspect that the more one works with particular tools and materials, the more respect one gains for those who are truly masters of their crafts — even while, like myself, the person who is just learning decides to stop learning the craft when it’s adequate and pursue the meaning instead.

Thanks for checking in.

“sloppy craft” – is this an oxymoron? Coming up through the “fine arts” in my formal education, I was taught that respect for tools and materials is the basis of all good work in the arts. That good craftsmanship is simply that: a respect for tools, materials and the uses to which end results will be put.

In my less formal “needlearts training” I was taught that the degree of craftsmanship required was determined by the end use of the item. A chair must function to support the weight of the user, a container must hold its contents well, etc.

It is interesting to me that Peter Voulkos was mentioned: A well respected potter, he became, over the course of his career, a “ceramic artist”. He, along with Rudy Autio, are credited with the perceptual transformation of clay as a utility craft to ceramics as an art form.
It is notable that as their work progressed it became less concerned with the standards associated with “fine craft” and much more immediate – an improvement, IMO. But “sloppy”? I think we have a language issue here.
OTOH, the use of the word got my attention .

Not much was made by the panel (as I remember it) of the imperative of “process” in contemporary art — but some of the most acclaimed contemporary art deals with process — like the guy who set up a kitchen in the museum, cooked dinner, and invited spectators to join him in eating it.

But the DYI movement, I think, is not just about “learning at the time of need” but also about process — and tactility — getting the hands into the threads and paint and knitting wool.

It’s also about people living longer and having many different lives to live through — so your process sounds like mine and the kind of process that we urge our (grand)children to work through — “try things out when you are young.” Well, now, we are into the “try things out” mode, only at the other end of the age spectrum. Alas, by the time the world figures out that grandma Moses wasn’t the only elder who took up art seriously, we’ll probably be long gone. Or maybe that isn’t an “alas.” Maybe, it’s the process, and only the process, that’s so exciting.

By the way, why did you paint water with watercolor. Watercolor is maddeningly difficult. I actually did some terrific water in oils using both big and little brushes to form the surface texture. The rest of the painting stank, but the water was [she said humbly] terrific. I recommend you go back to oils, but then, I’m prejudiced.

“Sloppy Craft” is an unfortunate phrase — Given the word’s meaning, it sounds as if the work is sloppy intentionally, when it’s meaning that is intentional — the work and material are more incidental, as Alison puts it, to a deliberate concept.

I just read an article on Urs Fischer, showing at the New Museum in NY, who works at the size and in sort of the frame of Jeff Koons, but whose work is “sloppy.” The curator of next year’s Whitney says “Urs sloppiness is absolutely perfect sloppiness…. It’s almost the platonic ideal of sloppiness. That’s the interesting part.” Urs’s work is in that continuum that Hixson talked about in conjunction with the Chicago exhibit Spectacle/Trash — he has a crew of constructors who work up his models on the computer and then send them to China to be made. But they must be made “sloppy,” perfectly sloppy.