On a windy frigid Wednesday this week, Jer and I visited the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. The visit was frigid, fascinating, and raised some internal questions for me.
The Archie Bray is a ceramics workshop, foundation, and clay business, started by a brick manufacturer who was fascinated by art ceramics. According the website, the Archie Bray was founded “in 1951 by brickmaker Archie Bray, who intended it to be ‘a place to make available, for all who are seriously and sincerely interested in any of the branches of the ceramic arts, a fine place to work.’ Its primary mission is to provide an environment that stimulates creative work in ceramics.”
The Foundation consists of a compound containing the old brick works, a large house, various outbuildings and offices, the clay business, classroom buildings, a gallery building-in-progress, and new buildings and kilns for resident artists. And large grounds full of ceramic work.
But this isn’t about the Archie Bray, but about my thoughts in visiting there. If I were a ceramic artist, the wildly varied, fascinating, and accomplished ceramic works placed about the grounds would have been enormously intimidating. I have no trouble imagining myself turning and running away if faced with this evidence of the skill of those who came before me.
Luckily, I am working in an environment, the Montana Artists Refuge, where the keepers of the flame conscientiously remove any evidence of prior artists’ work. Even the line drawing of a Tibetan Buddhist Tanka that faced me when I first entered the studio was whisked away to the bathroom behind the bank vault so it wouldn’t interfere with my artistic insights.
I know that I am susceptible to feeling inadequate when faced with the fine work of others. This is particularly true in the area of stitching and quilting, where eons of workers have so perfected the craft that one can’t hope to imitate, let alone achieve, what the fine sewers accomplish. I am not intimidated by the art that is done by the fine stitchers (or not much, anyway) nor do I feel my enthusiasms quelled by seeing Rembrandts and Van Goghs.
I’m not sure why I find the craft side of stitching so intimidating (except that I started late and always was a bit awkward with my hands). But I can only imagine that ceramic workers, faced with the Archie Bray compound, might flee in despair before they even began.
So I’m wondering if any of you all feel some areas you tend to avoid because of the feeling of inadequacy that overwhelms you. If the photographers here were to be working in the darkroom with gelatin printing techniques, would that be almost unbearable, given the work of previous photographers? Is there an area of sculpture that Jay stays away from because he’s intimidated by his predecessors? Does McFawn find she can’t read some authors because of le mot juste? Does Sunil shy away from watercolor because the whites are too scary? Or are there other kinds of areas,not just the craft of your art, that you try to avoid because they might stop your art in its tracks.
A couple of other observations: I have a new appreciation of the effort that goes into photographing under adverse conditions (i.e. Steve’s frozen waterfalls, also photographed in frigid Montana). I don’t think i got frost bit.
And I heartily recommend, provided you are not a timid wannabe ceramicist, visiting the Archie Bray Foundation, although you might want to choose a less windy day with a somewhat higher temperature for your visit. The grounds of the compound are worth a day’s stroll and the artists’ studios look to be heaven for those that work in clay.
The Bray doesn’t seem to toot it’s own horn much on its web site, but it has hosted ceramics gods like Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, and had a huge influence on the field. There was a four-year nationally touring show on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. So there’s good reason to be intimidated!
There are subjects I wouldn’t take on, like the grand landscape in Yosemite. But I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at Yosemite my way. In fact, I’ve scarcely tackled large-scale landscape at all. It’s not that Ansel Adams is intimidating me, it’s more that I haven’t yet found my own voice in that sub-genre. I’m not at all sorry he’s been there. (Incidentally, I don’t view working in the darkroom as artistically any different from processing at the computer.)
June:
I really appreciate your mentioning me in this context. I’m going to go and swim now and will use wet time making voluminous lists of who and what I try to avoid.
Steve,
We were amazed to discover this place with all its famous alums. And I’m glad to hear that you aren’t intimidated by either the Grand Canyon or the darkroom. My memory of darkroom work was that it was exciting rather than intimidating, but then, I had no aspirations in photography back then.
Jay, what is it about swimming that allows you to make such lists? Curious minds need to know….
June:
I’m back and dry.
I can imagine a wicked glint in your eye as you formulated your innocent little question.
One dependable way to size up another is to ask what causes unease in that person. Does the individual dread speaking before an audience? Losing in competition? Incurring social embarrassment? I would say that the gist of your question falls into this general category. And many instances can be found for this in the art context: am I doing my best?, how do I stack up in this group show? do I have a thick enough skin to repel inevitable slings and arrows? And many more.
The average canine does not want to be called a “bad dog” and neither would I want to be considered a “bad ________ (insert name of artist). For some, this danger is a call to action as she or he strives to be a “worthy successor to _______”, or a trail blazer. For others it can lead to becoming a practitioner within a certain domain of acceptable accomplishment. This sort of thing is common to every field of endeavor.
For me the situation, while full of aversions, is complicated by a relative inability to come down where I ought to be – to paraphrase the old hymn. I was walking through the Giant Eagle the other evening with a rather blissful impression that I was fitting my existence like coffee in a mug. It doesn’t happen that often, but more so as I age. So I have neither been really happy with a product as exemplifying something personal, nor anticipated that making more would rectify the situation. It has been a kind of setting up shop at the starting line so as to serve an overactive imagination. That’s why I keep coming up with a bit of this and that. Such a stance, or lack of one, precludes any particular concern about being compared, nor about being particularly noticed.
But my adventures with sticks actually feels like a path.
June:
Have you ever swam/swum? It’s sensually rote and conducive to wool gathering.
Jay,
Not only was I a swimmer in my day (I’m now well on to evening), but I once swam the mighty Columbia — Labor Day, 1991. It was An Event In My Life, believe me.
Alas I don’t swim now because there are too many barriers, beginning with the waist-length hair that has to be washed after every chlorine outing in the frigid waters of community showers.
But that was more than you wanted to know. The columbia swim, by the way, is held every year — just in case you’d like to go for it.
And I like your “setting up shop at the starting line.” You may want to stick with your sticks, though.
June,
Blessed is what you consider ..and always was a bit awkward with my hands..
That way, you perfected the use of your robot, the sewing machine.
.. I still find enormous power in the stitched quilting line.
Thanks, Birgit, for the kind words.
In the depths of my heart, I think I derived a certain obverse strength by avoiding the standards of traditional stitchery. It allowed me a lot more freedom (out of ignorance) and didn’t get me into the trap of, for example, using only traditional materials because eccentric ones don’t work as well. In many ways, eschewing the craft standards was a source of opening up new worlds for me. And for that, I’m grateful.
I have had rather heated arguments with traditional quilters about the satisfaction of being “competent” in the craft. I’m definitely competent — my stuff hangs together, the seams are seamed securely, when essential I can make things square, etc. But I am only competent in my sewing, and because my interest is in the art, not the craft, I think that that’s OK. But many traditional quilters are horrified at the idea that one would be content to rest there.
I have come to believing that the difference between art and craft lies in part in the questions one asks oneself at crucial moments in the work. Fine craft practitioners ask, when they come across a problem, “what is the most elegant solution to this challenge — how can I best meet it with traditional materials and methods.” Artists ask “what am I trying to say in the midst of this challenge? How can I most clearly encapsulate my primary concepts while solving the problem.”
But for many years, I had to avoid like the plague going to quilt shows because I could see that I could never hope to achieve what the fine crafters achieve. (This is definitely my problem, not the quilters’). Now I’m happy not to be asking their questions but, rather, questions about content/form.
June:
I loved your title: “The Weight of Perfected Craft.”
Actually, I don’t see craft as either good or bad. To me it’s just competence – or in some cases virtuosity – in design and construction techniques that may or may not have fallen out of use in a computerized and industrialized society. What’s the role and value of craft in making art? To me that’s an open question to be settled on a case-by-case basis when looking at individual works of art.
Craft can matter enormously in a work of art. It may even be the essence of the work, as with Bernard Leach. But craft, when misapplied, can also detract. Unless the art is intended as a statement about obsessive-compulsive disorder or about the slow passage of time in prison, the end product needs to justify the time and labor invested.
The viewer needs to come away feeling that the artist has reached out – has offered up some feeling, insight, narrative, concept of beauty, whatever – by making reasonably efficient use of the tools and techniques available at the time the object was created. Otherwise the art looks overworked. It presents itself, ultimately, as a feat of willful endurance and drudgery rather than communication.
Textiles, I think, are particularly vulnerable to overworking. Because of their labor-intensive nature (inescapable in times past, less so today). Because they’ve so often been made in the home for purely domestic use by people whose labor is not assigned any market value. And because the contemporary subculture within which quilts (in particular) are made, exhibited, and sold has strong antiquarian interests and fairly weak ties to the larger art world.
Craft indeed has weight, especially “perfected” craft. Tradition, craft, and the unthinkable labors of unthinkable numbers of ancestors weigh on every artist. But only the artist living and working today can decide how to make art today.
Catherine,
As usual, you say it more eloquently than I could.
Hi June – delighted that my sculpture of the Bray residents c 2002 has made it onto your page. I think the confluence of creative energy that results when we meet should never be anything but positive for us all. Time and practice may vary. Ego has no place in art. Enjoy the MAR!