Thinking about art versus craft and where I fall in the continuum. Where in it do I spend my artistic time exploring?
Art versus craft
This is a post that’s been brewing in my head for months or maybe years. This week I’m vacationing with family and we’ve been in conversation about it. We are a family of makers and creators. We have musicians and composers, photographers, writers and editors, actors, and artists who work in various mediums. So there’s always cross talk about how we work in these various areas, about how there’s more overlap than seems likely and where our areas diverge.
What’s a craft?
There’s artisanal crafts like woodworking, pottery, and quilting where there is a focus on the beauty in functional items elevated by years of practice in the form. I could, if I were so inclined, go and make a pot out of clay. It might be functional for storing something but odds are my attempt would be fairly clumsy and not very artistically beautiful my first 100 or so attempts. But when in those 100 attempts at making the thing both functional and beautiful does it become an artistic endeavor? Can I only start thinking of the artistic side of this after I’ve at least somewhat mastered the form?
And is it only a craft if it’s functional? If it’s a beautiful vase that won’t hold water does that make it more of an artistic interpretation of an object that is usually a useful one? I think about this divide a lot as I am crocheting. I make both practical, useful items to keep people warm but I also use crochet a lot in my art work.
My remix
This is one of my pieces from the Ground series. The background is made out of canvas that would traditionally be on stretcher bars for painting but instead I washed it, ripped it into strips, and crocheted it. I wanted to deconstruct the idea of a stretched canvas as the starting point in this work. I’ve used crocheted pieces, paper, and painted bits of canvas to gesture at what a painted landscape could be.
So here I’ve taken a skill that is normally a traditional handicraft but used it to make some artistic interpretations. I wanted to intentionally play in that space between craft and art using a skill that is normally delegated as women’s work and push it into the painted landscape which is so often seen as the purview of men.
Why is art for men and craft for women?
Then there is a gender debate to this conversation which is summed up in this gorgeous sweater knitted by crochetingmoonfairy:
This sweater makes me think of Barbara Kruger’s collage work which often deals with themes of feminism and consumerism. Collage has traditionally been considered a woman’s artistic form, so even inside artist circles there is a gender hierarchy. There’s this amazing piece at the Seattle Art Museum called “So good it could have been” that fits in this conversation as well.
I think there’s something to the way we view what women make creatively verses how we view what men make. While today we view knitting and crochet as primarily women’s crafts, knitting at least started as the purview of sea men and shepherds. It was used to repair nets and make warm garments. Today it’s often viewed as a hobby and the domain of grannies.
Women account for nearly half of all working artists today in the United States. But between 2008 and 2020 in the United States only 11% of museum acquisitions were created by women-identifying people. (This article is a fascinating, if deeply depressing, breakdown of women and black women in the arts. It’s well worth your time.) There’s volumes to be said about access to these spaces, both to the halls of institutional power and to the socio-economic power to pursue artistic endeavors.
Divisions? Maybe not so much
Writing this makes me realize that I don’t have as many hang ups as I thought I did about this topic. I thought I was all up in arms about the divisions here (ok, I am for real sore about that museum statistic) but I find in writing about it I don’t care much about some of these divisions. If there are crafts that people don’t think are particularly artistic, that just leaves me more area to play in. I find exploring my own ideas and pushing my own boundaries is more important to me than spending a lot of time being mad about what I’m not supposed to be doing.
I keep going back to the Mark Rothko quote:
I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on — and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
It is some of that emotional experience that I am looking for, both for myself and my viewers and readers. Exploring that emotional space and experiencing it can happen with both arts and crafts. So for me at least, the line between arts and crafts is so blurry I can barely see it.
Do you have thoughts about art versus craft? I’d love to know what you are pondering! Catch up with me on socials, email me, or go old school and leave a comment on this post to be immortalized for all of time.
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