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.

“This matters; this has purpose” and “I can do this, I am able, I can carry out this task to its appropriate end” (correspondence from Joachim B. Lyon, Stanford, California, New Yorker, May 4, 2009).

I found these notions both bemusing and contra-indicated. What do you think?

(Oh, and here’s an image from Rhyolite Nevada ghost town. I don’t know if it has either purpose or, if I paint it, as I intend to do, if I am adequate to the chore.)

After having spent 6 weeks in the desert, perceiving and painting, mostly plein air, I am now back in Portland reading about desert perception in William L. Fox’s The Void, the Grid, and the Sign.

Fox has spent most of his life in and around a variety of deserts and back-of-nowhere lands, but in The Void he’s primarily concerned with the Great Basin, that large space between the Rockies and the Sierras, where water flows in, but never out, where there is no river coursing to the sea.  He says that outside of Afghanistan, this area contains the most mountain ranges (316) in the world, but there are also 90 basins, places where what little water exists is captured between ranges and sinks or evaporates. The best known of these basins is perhaps Death Valley, although that lies outside Fox’s attention. The place I was painting, the Amargosa Plain, is also just outside his wide-ranging travels. However, much of what he says is apropos of the Amargosa and Death Valley.

Death Valley at the Beatty Cut-off, March, 2009

Fox’s interest is in the intersection of geography (and some geology), cartography, personal experience, human perception (of land voids such as the basin and range) and art. He’s a poet, and the first third of The Void, the Grid, and the Sign revolves around Michael Heizer’s City, the enormous earthwork begun in about 1970 and premised to be finished by about 2010.

Fox’s description, found on his website, of the basin and range area is better than any I could create: “The Great Basin, my home desert, encourages … recursive thoughts. Covering almost all of Nevada and western Utah, it is a deeply repetitive landscape of arid basins and high ranges that betrays the cycles of earth, fire, and water underlying it. The entire region continues to swell, uplifted from underneath and pushing apart Reno and Salt Lake City at opposite ends of the Basin. Nevada alone carries three hundred and sixteen mountain ranges, some of them more than thirteen thousand feet in elevation, all separated from each other by valleys that can run a hundred miles long by twenty wide. The basins and ranges tend roughly north by south, massive wrinkles reflecting how the North American plate overrides the Pacific one. The bones of the land are naked here, and so is the syntax of the poetry.

“No water runs out of the Great Basin, all of it falling inward either to sink beneath the ground or to evaporate. Forming its western rim is the two-mile-high Sierra Nevada, an escarpment of granite that casts a deep rain shadow over almost the entire Basin. This is the largest, highest, and coldest desert in the contiguous United States. Because the air is so devoid of humidity there is little blurring of ridges thirty and forty miles away, confounding our sense of distance. Because the spectrum of color in the vegetation is so narrow, our expectations of atmospheric perspective, of a shift in color from a warm foreground to cool background, are distorted likewise.

“The ground at our feet and the distant mountains are all that we see. Nowhere is there a familiar tree or building against which we can measure ourselves. The cognitive dissonance is severe. We don’t know where we are. Traditional wisdom about being lost in the wilderness—follow water downstream until you reach civilization—does not often work here. Follow convention and you are likely to end up stranded in the middle of an alkali flat.

“The only way to understand the enormous space of the Great Basin is to invest time in your experience of it. Slowly your eyes will adjust to the extended reach of vision, and your ears become accustomed to hearing only the wind and your heartbeat. You will learn to read your way around, cutting across the grain of the land instead of following it in order to find your bearings.”

Prior to going to Nevada, I had a vague notion of the basin and range country from having traversed it on route 50, perhaps 40 years before, being astonished at its desolation and at the highway, cutting across basin after basin, rising slowly to the top of inclines, where it would slop wildly down steep backsides, to cross the next basin.

This is a view of a small California basin, the Panamint. The photo was taken from a small unnamed range that we had been traversing in the car; it looks back toward the big Panamint Range (the west wall of Death Valley), which is beyond the top of the photo. The photo has been enhanced a bit to show the road we had just traveled, moving from right center, reappearing to go off center left after crossing the saline flats. The photo may give some indication of the kind of territory that Fox describes and that I tried to paint.

Fox is interested in cartography, how people perceive and map land, and more particularly, how they map apparent voids. Americans, starting with Jefferson and taking cues from much earlier civilizations, map in grids, so John Fremont mapped the Great Basin, disregarding its natural formations and placing it with the rest of the grid that the US was forming. (Other cultures, such as the Australian Aborigines, map in very different ways, through stories and spiritual places, and even city slickers in 21st century America will map the distance from here to the nearest Peets Coffee Shop by time ( 25 minutes) rather than gridded space (15 blocks directly north),

Grids can be comforting, but strangely at odds with what one attempts to paint in the desert. Painting without much middle ground, and without much to focus on, can have strange effects on the painter’s psyche.

This is one view of the ghost town, Rhyolite, from a point south of the Red Barn, where I had my studio for those six weeks. The dots here and there in the center of the photo below the hills are what remains of the town. In its heyday, it had gridded streets, the tracks of which still can be found, as well as three railroad lines, and the usual array of post office, banks, a two-story school, saloons, and whorehouses, all placed on a grid. Just southwest of the ghost town is the sculpture area known as the Goldwell Open Air Museum, about which I wrote earlier. And southeast of Rhyolite is Ladd Mountain, now sculpted on its southern flank by a vat leach mine.

When I painted this scene (plein air) the first time, I was flummoxed by its randomness. Even when looking with my own eyes rather than through the flattening and distortion caused by the camera, the scene had no focus, no way to get hold of it. Here’s one discarded attempt at a plein air work of the subject:

It tooka number of weeks before I found the only spot around where the scene could make sense:

Rhyolite and Sculptures Panorama, 18 x 36″, oil on board

Only on a curve in the paved road going to the ghost town (marked by a big asphalt patch on the right side), can you see that the mountains, Ladd on the right, Busch Peak behind, and Sutherland (and Bonanza Hill) to the left formed a 3-sided wall. The town sat within these hills and looked out over the Amargosa Plain (alternatively called the Amargosa Desert), where that “wretched trickle” known as the Amargosa River sinks. [Digression alert: the Amargosa Plain is not legitimately a "playa", because its water does not totally sink in its depression. A slight decline leads the existing water  down to the end of the Funeral Mountains where it finds further slight declines around the end of the mountain and into a further declination that leads it to below sea level to Death Valley].

One of my earlierst paintings of the Amargosa Plain didn’t capture the void. It’s not a bad painting, but it isn’t the desert that I was confronted with, even though I was painting plein air. My brain simply couldn’t see the void in front of me:

Amargosa Playa 1, 12 x 16″ , oil on board

I painted that desert straight on at least 3 times and obliquely, a large number of other times. The oblique approach was definitely easier, because the mountains gave a place to go with the brush:

Funeral Mountains, Early Morning, 18 x 24″, oil on board

The middle ground is still lacking, so the mountains, which are perhaps 15 miles away to the west, look much closer, but at least they are there; and there’s a road, a sign, that leads one to know what is being depicted.

Perhaps the most successful painting of the void I’ve managed thus far was very late in my stay in Nevada. It is directly down the Amargosa Plain (desert/playa) in front of the Red Barn. It was painted in late afternoon, when the slight haze that the unseen river causes to rise over the ground surfaces gets played with by the sunlight:

The Amargosa Playa 3, 18 x 34, oil on board

The Plain isn’t fully empty at its southern end. A “pinch” allows the Amargosa to work its way between two mountain ranges before it turns west.  So in some lights (like this one at 3 PM in mid-March) there is some edge to the void of the desert.

I have a canvas painting that presents the perspective in a  different way;  In Aereality Fox describes a variation of this form from an earlier painting The painting was found  on an excavated wall at Catalhoyuk, Anatolia (Turkey): “This ‘volcano painting’ a panoramic view done around 6200 BC, shows the town in planimetric (a plan view, as if seen from straight above) and the then active Hasan Dag volcano, its twin summits sixty miles away reaching 10,672 feet, in elevation (in profile, as if seen from a horizontal view)…. there are no hills nearby Catalhoyuk, and athough the residents apparently climbed up the volcano to obtain obsidian, the town was effectively invisible from that distance… why make this composite image in plan and profile…. this is more than a map, but a highly mediated and thus expressive aerial view of the world.”

It is this “highly mediated and … expressive view” of the Amargosa plain, with a plan (aerial view) as well as a horizontal one from the Red Barn Studio,  which I am still reworking. In other paintings, I managed to capture the grids with telephone poles and desert tracks, and even the signs, with speed limits on metallic boards and billboards. The rocks of the mountains have bold layers of folds and geologic structures and chemicals that made them explicable in paint. But the void is harder. And (therefore?) somewhat more interesting. And I swear, I read Fox’s description of the somewhat older art work after I painted the unfinished but blocked out plab/horizon version I’m now working on. I’m hoping to somehow do other versions of that Amargosa void, working the question of perspectives.

I would also say that Fox himself finds it difficult to discuss the void — mostly he discusses its edges, either by driving, hiking, climbing, or flying above them. Rocks and mountains make stops and points of reference; only artists working on the ocean, or someone like Michael Heizer, can make the void fully expressive.

Incidentally, Fox’s discussion of Heizer’s City, in The Void, the Grid and the Sign, is the best I’ve seen anywhere about this reclusive artist’s work. I’m hoping that when City opens (Dia: Beacon says 2010; right now it’s totally closed to the public) that I can spend some time there. Heizer seems particularly aware of the void he faces; he says City is not “in a place; it is place.” From Fox’s description, I can believe it.

Exhibit A is Peter Schjeldahl’s recent New Yorker article on paintings from the Norton Simon collection, now visiting New York (to see the full article requires a free registration, but there’s an open podcast also).

I was pleased to discover, at the Frick, that my mental image of them had been close to photographic. No nuance of the dusky russet shadows and tiny green inflection, in the fruit’s yellow, surprised me. But the other objects registered with a jolt: I didn’t remember and oranges, basket, cup, or rose. My recollection had amputated two-thirds of a tour de force.

Research has confirmed what experience posits: strongly emotional events linger in vivid but narrowly focussed memory, etching certain facts–a gun pointed at you, say–while occluding pretty much everything incidental to them (such as the color of the gunman’s hair, or whether he had any).

Exhibit B is a less recent article (but just discovered by me) from Morgan Meis’ column at The Smart Set. Entitled Painting from Memory, it discusses Pierre Bonnard:

But remember how Bonnard worked. He didn’t go directly from perception to painting. He didn’t set up his easel in the dining room and go to work. Instead, he waited and he pondered. He made pencil sketches of the basket of oranges that might not be there tomorrow, took notes about the way the door was open just so. He’d leave the painting alone for a few years and then go back to it when the time was ripe. Bonnard paints from understanding back into perception. That’s why his work is so often described as “intelligent.” Bonnard is not dealing with the moment of recognition, but with experiences that have been sitting in the brain for a long time. The fact is, we are always working on the images we collect as we move along, living. We’re always going through memories, altering them, adding and subtracting, recreating the crap of our minds to fit the ongoing narrative that makes you, you and me, me. There’s an entire world in our heads. This world corresponds to the one we live in, but not exactly. It has its own rules, its own meaning. Bonnard is painting from that world.

So that’s my haul for the day. Any other examples out there?

Robert Zakanitch, Red Watercolor, 34 x 36, 2007

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 –1985 is the printed catalogue of an exhibit held at the Hudson River Museum in 2007 -2008. The catalogue has excellent essays by Anne Swartz, Arthur Danto, Temma Balducci, and John Perreault, as well as including short biographies of the artists and plates of the exhibited art. Most of the words which follow come from the catalogue.

The P&D catalogue gives a textual underpinning to formats and surfaces that we enjoy but have come to think of as “mere” decoration. Arthur Danto, for example, says that decoration fell somewhere between figuration and abstraction and “encompassed almost the entire visual culture of many non-Western traditions…. The impulse to decorate was the impulse to humanize.”

Miriam Schapiro, The Kimono, 1976, 60 x 50, acrylic and collage on canvas

According to Danto,  the P&D artists were already using decoration before the movement was created, and what naming it did was to “enable its members to recognize what they had in common.”

Joyce Kozloff, Tile Mural for Harvard Square Subway, 1985 -86

Danto is the eternal optimist, claiming that P&D is easily a third mode of art making, and that “formalism ought easily to apply across the boundaries to all three categories of art, had it not been weighted down with prejudices that had little to do with its essential practice….. It is not difficult to suppose that there are three modes of embodiment:” i.e. figuration, abstraction, and decoration.

The P&D movement is obscure, but the impulse, to make pattern, to decorate the environment with beauty,  seems universal, perhaps too common to be seen as on a par with the usual high-art suspects in western art history. Moreover, P&D often lacks irony, a form of expression that dominates almost all art these days. [I'm thinking of D. and the whole LA scene right now....]

Tony Robbin, Coll: the Artist, 2007–4, 56 x 70″

Critics of P&D had to come up with convoluted reasons for rejecting it, although some of the rejections (too pretty, too feminine, too serious) weren’t too hard to come by. But Donald Kuspit in a 1979 article “Betraying the Feminist Intention: the Case Against Feminist Decorative Art” in Arts Magazine felt that “art based on decoration betrayed the critical potential and intention of feminist art.” It apparently was too close to formalism in its theory and therefore, “too authoritarian.” But what is most fascinating is Kuspit’s later “confession:” He felt, he said, that he needed to “rationalize my enjoyment of Rober Kushner’s art  … compelled to apologize intellectually for the deep pleasure I take in it…”

Robert Kushner, Night Garden, Acrylic,Oil,glitter, gold and silver leaf, 60 x 60, 2000

Anne Swartz, the chief contributor to the essays in the catalogue as well as the curator of the exhibit, says “I suspect that until recently, a certain Puritanism surrounded the view of feminist art that prevented it from being seen as acceptable when it was sexually exciting and provocative. So when P&D art utilized some of the mechanisms of feminist art (provocation, pleasure, softness, etc) it challenged the intellectual systems that were supposed to be uppermost in the viewer’s mind, prompting a critic like Kuspit to repudiate the intentions of P&D as not supporting the utopian notion of feminist art as a sterile ideology.”

Swartz also speaks of the “bombastic approach of the new-expressionists…. It [P&D] wasn’t self-referential…and [had] an overall treatment of the surface.” Kim MacConnel said to Swartz, “P&D is nonhierarchical in the sense that it is not refining itself to an end point and time…. It is much more chaotic. It is open to different voices, it accepts different voices, it’s making different voices.”

Kim MacConnel,Tri-Rotating, Acrylic on canvas, 95 x 126, 1980

I’m fascinated by the theoretical underpinnings of this artistic movment,especially the constructs of “non-self-referential” and “non-hierarchical.” aAlthough I’ve moved far away from Pattern and Decoration in my own work, I still love it and so, perhaps, am looking for the verbal language which would allow me to speak more “authoritatively” about it.  But reading and looking at these materials also makes me think I could incorporate P&D into my own vision. One artist, Leslie Gabrielese, serves me as an example:

Leslie Gabrielse, Dancing on Top of the Mountain, 60 x 130, 2001, fabric and acrylic paint

I am a bit bemused at how enthralling I found the textual materials in this catalogue. There’s nothing like having one’s prejudices confirmed, I guess. Aside from the art and perception in this post, when you examine your work history, have you found at one time or another  some verbal explanation that seemed to capture something about a visual that you had but couldn’t explain? Something that enabled you to recognize what you had in common with other workers in the same modes?

The catalogue, by the way, is Pattern and Decoration, and is online as a Google book. The Google pdf version cannot be printed, but you can order a hard copy from the Hudson River Museum, Elizabeth A. Sol, Manager of Administration & Visitor Services, The Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Ave. Yonkers, NY 10701 Phone – (914) 963-4550, ext. 239 Fax – (914) 963-8558. The museum doesn’t seem to have a secure online server, so I ordered my copy by phone. A good slide show of the works (many of which couldn’t be included in the Google online version) can be seen in the NY Times .  Here is the accompanying Times review.

I apologize for the slightly formal tone of this blog entry — I’m still assimilating the language appropriate to P&D and so find myself less easy about explaining it. But here’s one last image that I found, all on my own, to continue the dialogue:

Yinka Shonibare, Here

]]> http://artandperception.com/2009/02/pattern-and-decoration-a-reprise.html/feed 11 http://artandperception.com/2009/01/texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums http://artandperception.com/2009/01/texture-the-internet-and-other-conundrums.html#comments Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:17:28 +0000 June Underwood http://artandperception.com/?p=3226 I have just joined Facebook (thanks, D.) and of course, instantly found a group dedicated to a textile artist’s focus: namely, texture.

The photos of “texture” on the group site were close-ups, both of quilted fabric and of objects that showed as textured. I started through my photos and quickly realized that deciding on what shows texture is not as easy as might be imagined. Here are some possibilities from my files.

The High Note, JOU, Computer images on Silk, quilted, 12 x 12″, 2008.

The upper layer (of computer-printed sheer fabric) is turned back to show under layer. Normally the sheer would fall over the entire piece, showing through as it does on the right bottom. This dropping of the sheer obscures much of the texture while at the same time, contradictorily, adds to it.

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Sunbeam (and various other titles), 1900, oil on canvas.

I was thinking of writing this post on Hammershoi, so I had lots of photos of his work easily accessible. He’s Danish, died at age 52 in 1916, was in Paris while the Impressionists were impressing people (he wasn’t, impressed, I mean), and shocked his contemporaries by not making paintings with stories, content, mytholgies, or “meaning.” Of course, we’ve added all those to his paintings since then.

Photo, Main Street in January, Portland Oregon, 2009

More often than not, we see texture, even if we know the thing we are looking at is flat, like those tree tops that look soft.

Vilhelm Hammershoi,Gentoft Lake, 1905, oil

Hammershoi’s techniques included using paint thinly, in layers, ala Vermeer. His work is near-abstract, although the images are clearly identifiable. He has been highly touted because of the flatness of his images, although his late paintings of city buildings in London have been less than positively reviewed — mostly, I suspect, because they use perspective so classically. But in the Gentoft Lake image the water has great texture, as do the doors in Sunbeam.

Charley Bierly, Little Pine Creek in Snow, photo, about 2005

JOU Little Pine in Snow, oil on board, 2008.

So texture isn’t just a matter of medium (as seen in the quilted piece, The High Note) or a kind of technique (as in my version of Little Pine Creek). It, like most art, is a matter of illusion. Even though we know the tips of the trees would lash rather than soothe and the hills are solid and stony, they still look soft.

Photo of Vilhelm Hammershoi’s parents home in Copenhagen (portrait above piano is by Hammershoi, of his sister, who is most likely the pianist, also)

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30, 1901

Hammershoi gives us clear texture in the table cloth, the woman’s hair, even the butter (which has more goosh to it than can be seen in this internet version).

I’m still maundering about the question of texture in photos (and, necessarily, on the internet.) Shadows, hue changes, and recognition of objects seem to be the most immediate elements that cause us to “see” texture. More often than not, we see texture in almost all representational images, even if we know the real thing (the computer screen, the photograph, the painting) to be flat or relatively thus. Only in true abstraction is texture sometimes obliterated.

Clement Greenberg and the abstract expressionists knew that flatness was an essential of painted art. Greenberg said, ” The essence of Modernism lies… in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself… What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in in each particular art.” ( Modernist Painting, 1961 ) He also said, “It has been established by now, it would seem, that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness (After Abstract Expressionism, 1962).

We have come a long way from the ab exes and C.G., but we also, because of media explosions, see more and more in 2-dimensional imagery in which we insert our own sense of texture.

So I still haven’t resolved in my own mind what I should be looking for when I’m thinking about photographs of art that contain “texture.” Anybody have a brilliant (or even a generally interesting) thought on the subject?

PS: For more about Vilhelm Hammershoi, see also the Ragged Cloth Cafe recent post.

Looking back through the years, I do not remember when I started painting with oils and watercolors… maybe I was about 13. To be honest mostly of I know today has come from my own experiences of try and error.

To me, making a painting was never an issue but something that happens naturally with whatever materials come to my hands. Oils are my favorites, but recently I’ve been painting in a very quick method and found out that a mixture of acrylics, oils, glitter and others mediums work better for my new style.

In the past 3 years I decided to do a Fine Art degree as a nice “add on” to my previous qualifications. To my disappointment, I have learn nothing new but of a chaotic, hypocrite and delusional world from the Art teachers.

If you an artist with already some success and experience I recommend you to aim higher and not to go back to an educational institution. You see, despite your good intentions you setting yourself back and giving your own murder sentence to the chances of being ‘stepped on’ and muffled by the tutors, who also called themselves artists. You must have no previous artistic experience because no matter how you try to please and befriend this so called “artist teachers” you will always be seen as a threat rather than a student.

Unfortunately we live in a world that demands all this qualifications to be taken seriously. I have learned from my own mistakes, maybe because I was a bit naïve, full of dreams and hopes that a new qualification would push my career further, but realize that I brought this to myself to the point I had nothing but verbal abuse, bullying, harassment, intimidation and discrimination from lecturers. In the end I felt from as high I dreamed and have gain nothing but a new pretty BA words in my cv and an awful demoralizing experience I must rather forget!

More new painting in my redesigned website www.magicpaintings.com