Cheng, Wen-ji, Embracing, 114.5 cm x 200 cm, oil on canvas, 2009

This bowl, seen from a distance across the room, looked startingly 3-D. We stepped close to admire its geometric perfection.

The photos shown here were taken with my pocket Leica (lens 1:2.0-2.8/5.1-12.8) as raw file formats and processed in Adobe Photoshop. Whenever I remembered, I snapped the title of the picture next to the painting as shown here. Back home, a friend translated the titles for me.

The following two photos were taken from a painting covering an entire wall. Seen first from a distance, we thought that it was a sculpture.

Liao, XiaoChun, New Anthem College, 346 cm x 599 cm

Approaching the huge work of art, we realized that the human figures were painted.

The close-up above gives a better impression of its detail.

Another series of 3-D pictures, as seen in the detail of one shown below, were exhibited in a darkened room. Googles for viewing these pictures were offered at the entrance to the room.

This picture below was displayed behind glass reflecting the overhead illumination which lightened up some part of it.

The following photo shows one of several moderate size paintings. All of them depicted some sort of aerial view in a highly styelized fashion.

The next two pictures were comprised of multiple vertical screens. The resulting large banners were displayed in halls at the entrance of the museum, indicating their importance in the exhibition. They are two examples of a series with similar motifs. The photos of these 6 meter wide banners, compressed here to 500 pixels, do not do justice to the strong impact they have when viewed in the museum.

Immortal Moon, 152 cm x 607 cm, Ink and colour on paper, 1973, Take A Step Back Collection, H.k.

In addition to the aerial views, the two banners also depict a favorite motif in Chinese art, namely mountains. Another picture with a mountain motif is shown below.

Mount Qomolangma, 184 cm x 182 cm, 2009

The interpretation of the following picture is left to the viewer:

The Early Chaos, Ink and colour on paper, 48.6cm x 50cm, 1985, Shuisongshi Shanfang Collection, H.k.

Then, there were a number of paintings showing Western influence. This one caught my attention because of its carefully painted details – pearls and capillaries on the skin.

Luo, Zhan-peng, 100 Strawberry Ghosts Night Walking #10, oil painting, 194 cm x 259 cm, 2010

The final painting serves to remind that we viewed the exhibition in an Asian museum:

South Carolina morning (1955; oil on canvas, 30-9/16″ x 40-1/4): A woman stands in the entrance of a building, staring in the direction of the viewer. Her lower body pushes forward while her upper body leans backwards. The voluptuous female form in a bright red dress stands in a marked contrast to the severe pale lines (I don’t remember the color of the house to be as dark brown as shown on this photo downloaded from the web) of the house and its concrete platform against an uninterrupted expanse of grassland. Repeating the V-shaped line of her cleavage between her neck and clavicles accentuates the woman’s vivid physicality. The incongruency of female physicality and arid landscape makes me gasp.

Seven AM (1948; oil on canvas, 30-3/16? x 40-1/8?): This picture shows part of a country store and path, both colored with a kaleidoscope of lovely light pastel hues – green, yellow, blue, purple, pink, lavender and turquoise. Inside the store are a wooden clock and chest, painted in rich brown hues. The straight lines of the country store stand in marked contrast to the crookedness of the tree trunks next to it. These crooked stems are painted in weak grey-brown contrasting with the rich wood colors inside the store. The foliage is a mostly dull green accentuating the luminous pastels of the country store. Together with the difference in the illumination of human habitat and woods, the incongruency of their shapes generates the mood of the picture.

Going into the exhibition, I had been much enamored of Hopper’s paintings. I had always felt, as said somewhere on the web, that Hopper’s ‘ evocative canvases confront the viewer with images of isolation and alienation…’. But after studying his paintings for a few hours today, my sense of isolation mutated into a sense of frustration that this gifted artist would play on my emotions using a formula consisting of light/dark effects and incongruencies. Given a choice between a Hopper and a Morandi, I would choose the latter.

Soutine with Dog

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about how Soutine’s use of Christian imagery mixed with his life experiences, artistic influences and his own Jewish culture in his paintins, particularly his carcass paintings such as Flayed Rabbit from 1924. In Part 2, I uncovered beliefs and superstitions specific to the area where Soutine was raised, and how I believe they influenced his work, particularly the idea of the Angel Dumah and his fascination with death. Part 3 goes deeper into these ideas and how one painting in particular encapsulates them.

This all seems to be best expressed in the painting Dog with Forks, date unknown. Because of its subject matter, it seems appropriate to place it right around the early to mid 1920s.  Sadly, the work is missing and can only be seen in black and white photos.

All the elements seen in other carcass paintings are present in this work, an animal lying on its back, limbs splayed, torso cut wide open with forks on either side.  But this is no rabbit or fowl, this is nothing that one would come across in a Parisian market and take home to make soup.

Dead Fowl, 1924

In a photograph dated 1927 Soutine poses with his acquaintance Paulette Jourdain and the dog belonging to his maid and cook.  According to the Soutine scholar Maurice Tuchman, Soutine loved the dog and took it on long walks, thus overcoming his irrational fear of dogs.  This fear was not unusual for a Jew from the shtetl where the evil eye was used on them for protection.  In the photo, the dog stands on its hind legs and its front paws are held by Soutine and friend, so that its belly is entirely exposed.  It is the same shape and size as the dog in the painting.

The dates of the painting and the photograph may be unreliable but if one is to believe that Soutine never worked from memory, if one is to accept willingly that Soutine kept a rotting side of beef in his studio, occasionally pouring blood on it to keep it looking fresh, then what are we to make of this situation?

Is Mr. Tuchman correct in his belief that Soutine overcame his fear of dogs in the most normal way possible, by befriending it?  Or must we think the worst?  That Soutine did to this dog as he did with all the animals and all his demons?  It is difficult to suspend disbelief on this issue but even more difficult to comprehend the alternative.  Yet, must our artists be so safe?

It is interesting to me that while black and white images of this work can be found in older texts on Soutine, it is missing from Tuchman’s and Esti Dunow’s Catalogue Raisonné.

Nefesh…The Hebrew word nefesh is similar to Dumah in that it is a concept with several meanings, some mystical and some more grounded in the physical plane of existence.  One of the Biblical meanings of nefesh is one that works best to describe the carcass paintings of Chaim Soutine.  It means a living human, its breath and blood; more specifically, the breath of life given to humans by God that creates a living being or nefesh hayyah.  Nefesh sustains life and when it is taken away, then bodily life has ended.  As described in the Bible, death is the “going out” of the nefesh, or God’s taking away of life/nefesh.  The Rabbinic (and Greek) meaning is that nefesh is the soul.

Assuming that there is such a thing as a soul, when does the soul leave the body?  In Judaism, there are many ideas about this, and just as the belief that a God gives and takes away our breath, our very life, to believe in a soul that leaves the body implies belief in a greater power that has control over this process.

Soutine, so concerned with death and ritual, may have used the process of creating his carcass paintings to gain a better understanding of what nefesh is; he may have even wanted to control the process as if he was a god.  The more intense works of the 1920s depict creatures that are not quite dead yet.  Despite the flayed skin and the open gut, their mouths are open as if crying out and there is something about them that continues to live as if their nefesh makes them writhe on their backs and brings one to question, “what is death, exactly?”

If it is not exactly a boy in a shtetl wrapped in white sheets, alive and carried through the streets to the graveyard, if it is not exactly being beaten so severely for painting the portrait of a rabbi that one comes near death before escaping to Vilnius and art school, then is this truly death?  Can death be this controlled and carefully arranged?  How far could Soutine push the boundaries before returning to life?

There is an ebb and flow to Soutine’s series of carcass paintings.  One can see he is pushing this boundary between life and death.  He is testing nefesh.  As noted, the early works which began in the mid-teens have a calmer air about them.  Then they become increasingly graphic with works like Flayed Rabbit and Dog with Forks before returning again to more subdued works interspersed with his paintings of sides of beef.  After a break from these works in 1927, Soutine painted two still lifes of fish in 1933.

The Fish, 1933

Christian imagery, Jewish metaphysics and his personal mythology all reside within the carcass still-lifes.  Soutine stripped away any pretense of traditional artistic beauty as seen in the paintings he studied in the Louvre and created visceral works that revealed pure moments of brutal honesty that stand in direct opposition to the Renaissance beauties posing as martyrs who barely express emotion as they are being tortured.

Soutine pushed himself to the darker realms of the mind with these paintings and they continue to push the viewer to do the same; he desired an intimate understanding of the moment of “going out.”

19th century shtetl

In the book, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, Yekhezkel Kotik shares his memories of living in a shtetl not far from Soutine’s home of Smilovitchi in what is now Lithuania and what was once the part of Tsarist Russia that held on desperately to the edge of its borders with dirty fingernails. Of the superstitious beliefs of the townspeople, and there were many, there is this one in regard to death,

And when the body is lowered into the grave, the Angel Dumah appears beside him and asks, “What’s your name?”

To his misfortune, the unlucky deceased has forgotten his name. The Angel Dumah rips open his belly, plucks out his guts, and flings them into his face. He then turns the corpse over, strikes it with a white-hot iron rod, subjects it to excruciating torture, and finally tears the body to pieces, and so on. Everyone believed those things as though they were irrefutable facts.

As a child, Soutine was obsessed with the rituals of death, going so far as to participate with other children in the shtetl in mock funerals and burial rituals. If this particular superstition was known to Soutine, and it seems likely that it did, one can only imagine what a gruesome story such as this would do to a sensitive child who wrapped himself in white sheets and pretended to be dead on a regular basis.

Flayed Rabbit, 1924, Barnes Collection

Although Soutine was from an Orthodox Jewish family, he lived in a part of the world deeply influenced by the teachings of Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism and a Kabbalist whose mystical Judaic teachings stressed the primary idea that God is in everything. And while this has only been speculation by Soutine scholars, one should add to these above mentioned superstitions and teachings whatever psychic weight Soutine carried with him for breaking Judaic law by becoming an artist, something taboo to the Jewish religion at that time. Additionally, putting all speculation aside, there was the very real abuse and neglect Soutine suffered as a child as well as the rejection by his family and his community over his desire to create art.

The Angel Dumah, also called the Angel of Silence, is not an unfamiliar concept in Judaism and has more than one meaning dependent on which school of Judaism it pertains to. For instance, Dumah is the name for a city in Judah and is mentioned in The Septuagint and in Rabbinical Literature; Dumah is the name for the angel who is in charge of souls in the nether world, the one who takes the wicked souls and casts them down into the depths of Hades. But every evening, Dumah leads the souls out of their torment and into Hazarmaveth, (the Courtyard of Death and also a geographic location mentioned in the Old Testament) where they eat and drink in absolute silence.

It is also written in Rabbinical Literature that the soul cannot leave the body entirely until it cries out in confusion from its decaying body and Dumah takes it immediately to Hazarmaveth. So there seems to be a mutual working relationship of give and take between the soul and the Angel Dumah and is inherent in all of Judaism which relies on a give and take between a person and God, whether it is intellectual or mystical or in Soutine’s case, artistic.

Soutine the adult who rarely spoke of the harsh conditions of his childhood, who because of his early years of poverty and lifelong stomach ulcers viewed food as a luxury and never ate anything beyond basics like potatoes and milk, re-enacted both his childhood death rituals and food rituals in these carcass paintings, exorcising whatever fears and fascinations he held towards his religion, culture and memories. Jews were forbidden to be artists because to be an artist is to create and only God can create. Also, according to dietary laws, an animal was to be killed quickly and as painlessly as possible, with the blood carefully drained from the body. It is not to be gutted and posed nor is it to hang in a studio with regular drenchings of fresh blood, as Soutine famously did when he created his Side of Beef painting, based on the work of Rembrandt. Yet Soutine immersed himself in the act of painting, of creation, with an abandon that can be likened to religious zeal.

Side of Beef, 1925

Soutine

Modigliani, Portrait of Soutine

The artist Chaim Soutine’s still life paintings of animals, what I prefer to call his carcass paintings, can be unsettling, especially given the fact that Soutine was known to have never worked from memory, but rather used live, or dead, models for all his works.

Nearly all of Soutine’s art can be jarring to the viewer for a variety of reasons; his use of color, his lines, his brushstrokes and overall style as well as his subject matter are startling, but after our initial response what are we to make of these works? And what is it that Soutine was trying to say?

The bulk of Soutine’s carcass paintings cover a span of ten years, from 1916 to early 1927, as well as a couple of works completed around 1933, and include depictions of fish, rabbits and various fowl.  They increase in their intensity and graphic content by the early 1920s before leveling off again to a calmer style.

In the scholarship on Soutine, much has been made of his use of food imagery in his still-life paintings.  I’ve learned that his many years of poverty and continual stomach illness often made food unattainable; so with that in mind it makes perfect sense to have forks jutting out like arms from a plate of fish, as in an early example, Still Life with Herrings, from 1916.  In addition to this, the traditions of his Jewish religion and culture relied heavily on food rituals.

Still Life with Herrings, 1916

The 1924 painting, Hare with Forks, also depicts a dead animal with forks on either side like a pair of arms reaching in to grab the flesh, while the more visceral Flayed Rabbit from 1921 depicts the animal without forks; yet both animals lie on white cloths like sacrificial martyrs, leading one to the conclusion that there is a greater unifying theme besides food issues to the series of works.

Referring to the Christian imagery commonly used in Medieval and Renaissance paintings sheds an interesting light on how the animals in both of these paintings are carefully posed; the flayed rabbit is in the crucified position or possibly as a St. Sebastian, tied to a tree and awaiting the many arrows.  And the fact that the one rabbit is flayed points to the fate of more than one saint and also most famously the painting by Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas.  Yet there is still a sense of defiance in the upraised arms and stretched legs.

Flayed Rabbit, 1924, Barnes Collection

The Flaying of Marsyas, Titian 1570s

In Hare with Forks, the hare lies on its side slightly curved like a fetus, with fur intact and two forks resting gently on either side of its narrow torso; while a sense of heartbreak permeates, there is little sense of violence in this painting, rather the hare looks like it is asleep, but one understands it is still a sacrifice.  It should also be noted that according to Jewish dietary law, rabbits are treyf, or forbidden, food and further, the word treyf is not only used to describe forbidden food but also a bad person.

Hare with Forks, 1924

Where did these ideas come from?  In my research I learned that Soutine adored the Old Masters, Rembrandt in particular, and reworked many of their paintings in his own style.  So in this respect it isn’t that unusual to think he would use the imagery of the martyrs that he studied in painting after painting in the Louvre.

A Woman Bathing, 1654, Rembrandt

Woman Entering the Water, 1931

When reading the stories of those who knew Soutine and who witnessed his intense and at times religiously ecstatic reactions to art it also makes sense that Soutine would incorporate these Christian themes in his works, but what of his Jewishness?  One may look at the carcass paintings through the above described lens and think that Soutine, born Chaim Sutin in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, would have truly abandoned his Orthodox upbringing as many claimed he did, or as Soutine himself stated.

Self Portrait, Chaim Soutine 1918

And while it is true that Soutine did not practice any form of Judaism in the traditional sense after he left Belarus and moved to Paris, it is my belief that he did continue to practice his own form of the religion, with his artistic process taking on the form of religious ritual and metaphysical exploration and all the while a tug-of-war taking place between an outright defiance and embrace of Judaism and its laws.

Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience says:

It is not possible to look at a scene in general; our eyes keep searching for points of rest. p. 161

If time is conceived of as flow or movement, the place is pause. p 198

Distance is a meaningless spatial concept apart from the idea of goal or place. p. 136

Dancing, which is always accompanied by music or a beat of some kind, dramatically abrogates historical time and oriented space. When people dance, they move forward, sideways, and even backward with ease. Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goals and directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls “presentic” unoriented space. p. 128-129

Is it possible to paint unpaused place, without  goal and multidirectional (hence undirectional) to paint the dance, to put on canvas with brush, pigment and medium — “unoriented” space?

We are back in the desert. The paintings above are as close as I came last February and March to painting unoriented space. I’m giving it another try.

A bit of background: when I was working textiles, I regularly engaged in a “discussion” with quilters (some traditional, some contemporary) about whether the stitching work done on my textiles ( specifically in construction and quilting) should strive for perfection. I always maintained that my goal was “competence.” My attention was entirely on the image and impact (on, I maintained, the art).  The craft was there only to hold it together and/or to add to the art. Hence my seams were not necessarily straight and the back of the art was decent but not flawless (I didn’t bury my threads, for example, simply tidied them). I used the quilting stitches as part of the design, which meant that they were generally not even in length and that they were heavy in places and light in others; this can make the quilted art hang wonkily, requiring heroic measures to make it perform well.

This is an example of a old piece of mine that I claim has “competent” craft:

Sophie, Emerging, 84 x 73″, 2002, Materials: hand-painted cotton, canvas, silk, stretch-polyester, felt. Methods: hand- painted-and-dyed, airbrushed and commercial fabrics. Machine stitched.

Sophie Emerging, Detail

I violated all kinds of quilting craft standards here — you can probably see that the center has been lightly stitched while around it the stitching is quite heavy. I mixed materials so wildly that my friends burst into laughter when they heard that I hoped the canvas, silk, light-weight cotton, and stretch fabrics  would hang flat on exhibit. I did exhibit it, with aluminum rods inserted top and bottom, one of which got lost so the piece buckled badly (the uneven stitching, not to mention the range of fabrics, will do that).   At one point I almost took it out of an exhibit because it showed up so badly next to the much finer craft that it hung beside. We replaced the rod, which helped a little, although it always did look like sloppy craft (albeit not “sloppy craft.”)

I didn’t reform much in the following years, although I did throw away the stretch fabrics in my collection. But I continued to have discussions about how “fine”  the craft which gets put into art should be — how much it should conform to finely crafted quilts, for example, that regularly win large awards at national quilt shows. Is competence sufficient in quilted/stitched textile art?

Which brings me to the panel discussion “Sloppy Craft”. “Sloppy craft” is described by craft theorist Glenn Adamson as the “unkempt” product of a “post-disciplinary craft education.” The panel here in Portland featured The Art Institute of Chicago’s  Professor Anne Wilson (Fibers and Materiality), Wilson’s former student Josh Faught (now teaching Fibers at the University of Oregon), Nan Curtis (professor and head of many departments at the Pacific Northwest College of Art), local artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Namita Gupta Wiggers, the head curator of the Contemporary Crafts Museum. The discussion was held in the Commons at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which in itself startled me — it seemed an unlikely venue for the old Contemporary Crafts Museum. While the CCM has recently moved downtown to the heart of Portland’s art scene and has had some staff shake-ups and financial troubles, they were traditionally a quiet force for High Craft in Portland. Whereas, the College of Art (PNCA) has a highly contemporary, conceptually-based, post-modern orientation.

All the panelists have had wide exposure in exhibits and reviews and writing about their respective areas and seem clear about their own artistic journeys.

Josh Faught, according to his instructor at Chicago Anne Wilson, knows his craft (fibers — weaving, crochet, knitting)  inside and out, and is currently working in sculptural mode:

Josh Faught, Untitled, 2008 crocheted hemp and garden trellis

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, the youngest panel member, also does sculptural work.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins Convivium, 2008, table, linen, paper maché and ceramic, 52.75 x 56.75 x 53.75 inches

Nan Curtis is an installation artist (she did 52 “street signs” along 12th Ave, two blocks away from my house, signs which were posted on telephone poles, like rock band flyers, but having official government looking typeface and material). She has installed complete versions of her home (“Homebody,” Manuel Izquierdo gallery, 1998), and many other conceptual installations of that sort.

Nan Curtis, Role Model #1: She has always served him well 2005
digital photograph on gator board 22.25″ x 29.75″

Anne Wilson too works in installation mode, although her imagery seems less rough to me:

Anne Wilson, Topologies*, 2002

Namita Wiggers continues to make her imprint on the Contemporary Crafts Museum (she oversaw its transition to its highly visible downtown location) and has become a force on the Portland Art Scene. She writes and interviews extensively, is a regular participant in the national crafts scene, and brings exhibits of the highest quality to the CCM.

So, what did this diverse group of artists, three who have roots in traditional fine crafts, have to say about craft and art.

Anne Wilson was perhaps the most interesting interlocutor: she said that “sloppy” was really a sound bite, irresistible once uttered aloud. “Sloppy” indicates intentionality, which she didn’t think was the case with the art she was describing. She would favor terms like “informal” “casual” or “raw” rather than “sloppy” to describe contemporary art that has some base in traditional crafts. Most interestingly, she observed that artists now seem to “take on” crafting only when they need it.

Traditionally, a craftsperson would spend years polishing her craft, working at the highest level until she was so good she could let it go; she would have behind her all the knowledge needed to return to “fineness” if the art required it. To some extent Josh Faught fits that mold. He self-identified as a Fibers Major at Chicago, while his fellow students in fibers always made clear they were “Fibers-and-…” “…and performance,” “…and installation,” “…and assemblage,” “…and collage.” But at some point Faught let go of the fine work of Fiber Craft and turned to rawer work.

Another example of the fine craftsperson turning to raw work after years of exquisitely fine craft is Peter Voulkos.

Peter Voulkos died in 2002 but a look at his biography shows a continuing movement through the highest worlds of craft, then into the fine art world. His craft won him honors over and over again. And his art gained him access to the most formidable museums of high art.

That model, learning the craft inside and out and then letting yourself go, however, has changed to “learning on need” which means that you might teach yourself how to sew a straight seam but can put off learning to sew curves (not to mention French seams).  And you might marry stretch/polyester to silk, which violates a lot of traditional sewing standards, for a number of reasons.

Beyond the Need to Know response of current students were a couple of other aspects of “sloppy craft.” One was the recycling of materials — trash art, one might call it. It’s everywhere these days, at least in Portland, and no one bats an eye at exhibits with “wedding dresses” made from plastic bags picked up on the streets. The other aspect of this kind of casual crafting is that it appears most often in assemblages and collage. Assemblages and collage have clear ancestors, dating back to Picasso, through Rauschenberg and arte povera and  are seen and made by thousands of people who may not even think of themselves as artists.

Two exhibits, Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production were specifically referenced as examples of what has happened in the national scene  when informal craft became firmly entrenched in the world of art. These kinds of works — ready-mades, gritty street junk, messy — are contrasted to the highly commercial and polished art of say, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog or Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton bags, which are “finely crafted brands” (the phrase used by Kathryn Hixson at the School of the art Institute of Chicago in her discussion of Trash to Spectacle).

Anne Wilson made another comment at the panel discussion that stuck with me: she said that so-called sloppy art required the highest level of attention to detail — everything counted, because the meaning of the art is  so central. No lapses into mumbling or side-trips into irrelevant detail could be allowed to interfere with the meaning of the piece. Her example was of a student working with clay and fabric, who wanted to indicate the spilling out of fluid materials from the hardness of the clay. But the student closed the ends of her fabric spillages with stitching  and that attention to a “craft” detail stopped the sense of things spilling and in some sense stopped the art from succeeding.

One audience member at the panel noted that because we are now mostly knowledge workers, with few workers in the general public who craft anything besides digital artifacts, fine craft may be accessible only to aficionados of specific fine crafts. In my experience, people are piqued by color and image and like to see stitching, but really can’t see or don’t care if the stitches are tiny or big. They are aware only the overall  force of the wall-hung or sculptural material.

In fine craft, attention must be paid to every detail of the crafting — stitches must be buried into the interior of the quilt; wood grains must enhance the flow of the entire piece and be carved and sanded to perfection. That’s the “need” of fine craft, focusing attention on the material itself. But the “need” of contemporary fine art, according to Arthur Danto, philosopher of aesthetics, is to pay full and whole attention to the meaning of the work; every detail must express the meaning of the whole.

I would add another difference between high art and high craft which is that art tends to be individually identified: Anne Wilson is the artist, even though she may work with a large crew. But much of fine craft is community-identified: the Gees Bend quilts, the totems of the Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples; African masks. The craft may be formed by a single individual, but it arises from the standards of a community. Sometimes at the highest level, the two overlap, so we may know Bill Reid’s name as one who sculpts items such as were crafted by Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples. But much of finely crafted work is anonymous, perhaps done communally. And the standards by which it is judged are set by a community of craftpersons, those who know exactly how many stitches there are in that particular inch, just by looking at it.

As Kathryn Hixson comments, trashy and fine art and craft may represent continuums rather than opposites (so I’m in the running with my middling concept of “competent”.) I am fond of Bill Reid’s sculpture, finely crafted of course, which seems to exemplify in its imagery some of the difficulties this kind of discussion is always running in to:

Bill Reid, Raven and the First Men, 1980

Reid’s humans, working to escape the clam shell, may exemplify the struggle to understand as well as produce, and to produce out of understanding, that forms the most singular element of our current state of art.

As a kind of PS, I would venture to say that Jay’s work fits perfectly into the informal craft mode, while Hanneke’s seems to harken back to the traditional crafting of fine art. And I just heard about a class in figure drawing at a local university, which runs for 3 quarters. The first quarter features only the bones of the human figure; measuring and drawing bones is all that students do. The second quarter moves on to muscles (with more measuring); the third allows for some flesh — always measured. The mind boggles, but there are at least 15 students in the class who are opting for this model of traditional high art crafting.

And this just in: in today’s NY Times,  Denis Dutton,a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.” takes on the whole question of permanency in crafting and art.

* And as a further PS, I thought it might be worthwhile to present some official textual presentation that accompanied Anne Wilson’s Topologies exhibit, as a sample of the kind of thinking brought forth by her work in “informal” crafting.

project statement from Anne Wilson’s Topologies

While our society faces a growing fragmentation and specialization that seems at times to alienate us all, we have also started to view our world as a series of integrated, even entangled networks. One way we can begin to understand this contradictory state is as a matrix of field phenomena – repetitive patterns of texture, growth, turbulence, sound, light, etc., within a given system or space.

– Douglas Garofalo, architect

Textiles, in their expandable and accumulative structure, can be seen as metaphors for such a matrix. In this new project, the webs and networks of found black lace are deconstructed to create large horizontal topographies, ‘physical drawings’ that are both complicated and delicate. This work is a constantly unfolding process of close observation, dissection, and recreation. The structural characteristics of lace are understood by unraveling threads; following the impetus to remake, mesh structures are also reconstructed through crochet and netting. The computer affords another means of close observation: lace fragments are scanned, filtered, and printed out as paper images. These computer-mediated digital prints are then re-materialized by hand stitching and are placed in relationship to the found and re-made lace in the topography.

The logic of organization within the project is based on the concept of like kinds. Never exactly repeating, areas of proximity are formed on the basis of the structural and visual characteristics of likeness. There is both unity and formlessness as parts coalesce, separate, and collide.

As a physical material, black lace has diverse cultural implications in relation to sexuality, death, and gender. These aspects of material context are embedded in the work, yet are not the dominant voice. This project references many things simultaneously: relationships between systems of materiality (textile networks) and systems of immateriality (Internet and the web); microscopic, specimen-like images of biology and the internal body; and macro views of urban sprawl – systems of organization of city structures, interdependent and/or parasitic, processes of expansion. No single theme or position is privileged over another.

This project is large in scale, but the specific configuration of installation is flexible, the size determined by the space at each venue as the project travels. The horizontal architectural support is created on site — a white painted wood platform.

exhibition history

Topologies (3-5.02), 2002
Installation, “2002 Biennial Exhibition,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7 – May 26, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 18 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (9-12.02), 2002

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, MassArt, Boston, September 4 – December 7, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (4-5.03), 2003

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” University Art Gallery,San Diego State University, April 7 – May 7, 2003
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (1-4.04), 2004

Installation, “Perspectives 140: Anne Wilson,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, January 16 – April 4, 2004
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (11.07 – 2.08), 2007

Installation, “Out of the Ordinary,” Victoria & Albert Museum, London, November 13, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 20 feet long (overall dimension)

A provocative phrase, that — “sloppy craft” sends craftspeople ballistic — and some collectors, too.