Attending the various conferences like NCECA and GAS, and looking at the crowds of information hungry, community-starved attendees has often prompted me to ponder the presumed or constructed identities of the various groups of craft object makers in attendance. I have walked around these conferences and eavesdropped long enough to begin to recognize the various clustered groups of the wood firers, paperweight makers, anti-aesthetic vessel makers, the goblet makers, the fusers, the functional object makers, the conceptual sculptors, etc. Looking at them all, the way they dress, the lectures they attend, I have often thought to myself, “I wonder who he/she would put on a t-shirt?”

This is to say, we all have our heroes that we base our artistic identity upon and these heroes serve to establish a target of what we think good craft work should look like. For example, some ceramicists idolize Peter Voulkos, others Robert Arneson, while others would hold up Betty Woodman or Viola Frey; some glassmakers idolize Billy Morris, others Dale Chihuly, others may hold up Harvey Littleton, I could go on but you get the point.

My point is, “What if we put it right out there and walked around these conferences with the picture of our guru on our chest?” Would this alter the nature of our conversations or who we talked to? Would this make the whole game a little more obvious? Could it help us move forward and drop the pretentions about who we think we are?

You can see it in the work people make. You can tell what we value by the types of lectures that we attend and the types of magazines that we read. My thought is that in order to move craft forward, we need to shuck the history, the baggage and all notions of who we think we are.

Our history pervades what we make and history is the very issue that distinguishes craft from art; craft is steeped in its own history. The materials have a history. Often, the objects that we make, by their very form, reference a history, while Art constantly seeks to discover new ground. Through the use of new materials, forms, processes, etc., Art strives to distance itself from its history. If it has been seen, Art is not interested.

I think who we think we are is actually what is holding craft back. We need to get past who we think we are as craft object makers, do a little soul searching and figure out what is really happening within our field. We need to talk about it. It is time.

In any case, just for the occasion, I did a little soul searching myself and then I went to Neighborhoodies and had my new identity put on a sweatshirt for all the world to see; I hope you like it.

Dennis Stevens, San Jose, California

Semantically speaking, the phrase Redefining Craft suggests that there is something wrong with the way that craft is currently defined. Therefore, the question is: What is it about craft that is different today than in the twentieth century? The biggest difference today is in the expanding notion of context. Thanks to post modernism, the world is becoming increasing interdisciplinary and because of this we are now beginning to evaluate art objects based upon paradigms of reference outside of the myopic scope of Western art history. This is good news for craft since it suffered great pains throughout the second half of the twentieth century while attempting to wear a shoe that was much too small. Presently, quite a few sculptors within High Art are seeking novel, new materials and methods in their work, as they do not want their work to be tied to any history via their materials; for them newness is equated with hipness, sort of like driving a new car or owning a house that has never been lived in.

Because of their history, the crafts are not always equated with cool. Of course, you can’t tell that to the glassblowers but that is a separate essay altogether. As a collective group, craft object makers are generally cognizant of the history and legacy that pertains to their respective use of materials, but not necessarily in the feel-good nostalgic way that people reference when they misrepresent craft.

Object makers working in craft materials are not afraid of tradition and history but rather consider it to be an inherent part of their work, or to put it another way, they are the folks that can live in a fixer upper craftsman in an “up and coming” neighborhood and are willing to continuing driving their “old” car long after it is paid for. Therefore, when we compare Art Object Makers to Craft Object Makers you can see they are different types of people and they mostly do not attend the same parties. However, while recognizing these differences, it is also important to note that one does not reign supreme over the other, unless, of course, you view the world merely through the green-colored glasses of capitalism.

To simplify matters in our comparison, let us presume that we are dealing with oranges and tangerines. Evolutionary speaking, it is obvious that oranges and tangerines share similar origins but they are not the same thing. If we were to evaluate oranges and tangerines in an effort to say which one is better, would we say explicitly that oranges are better, more valid or more enjoyable than tangerines just because people have historically paid more for oranges than tangerines? Of course not, whether a person likes or dislikes oranges or tangerines is entirely subjective and is based upon personal taste. Further, you can like tangerines and still enjoy an orange now and then. There are no negative consequences associated with liking both. Now that we have simplified matters, what is the big deal?

The big deal is that by their very nature, human beings organize themselves into a hierarchical “pecking order”. This will occur within every community where people gather. If over a period of time, a higher cultural status is associated with the ownership of an orange and a lesser one to ownership of a tangerine then suddenly we have a skewed value system, similar to owning tulips in 17th Century Holland. The fate of the tangerine is the partial history of craft’s struggle for validity and relevance in the twentieth century and will continue to be a challenge that object makers working with craft materials will face in the twenty first century, at least until Dr. Phil convinces us ALL to “get real”.