ideas
Some Assembly Required Fine artists are increasingly turning to skilled craftspeople to help them realize their works. Michael Petry talks to us about The Art of Not Making. interview by Julie K. Hanus what could i – an editor at a craft magazine – have to talk about with the author of a book titled The Art of Not Making? Plenty, as it turns out. Though Michael Petry approached his latest book project, quite naturally, from his background as an artist, curator, and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, he has assembled a volume that addresses issues at the crux of the conversation between art and craft. In the book’s lushly illustrated 200-plus pages, Petry has chronicled a rising movement of artists who have realized, as he puts it, “I don’t have to know how to pour bronze to make a work in bronze” – and the craftspeople, artisans, and foundry workers who help them do it. Brilliance? Blasphemy? There’s a whole lot more to the conversation. And it’s one that Petry – who exudes energy and good humor, even over the phone from his studio in London – is more than willing to spark. The Art of Not Making starts from the observation that, in recent years, the fine art world has returned to a “highly crafted aesthetic” – and, in many cases, is relying on craft artists and/or artisans to realize it. What’s driving this shift? Lots of things. One is that [fine] artists are interested in objects again. At the same time, they feel they have – and 104 american craft aug/sep 11
I would say they do have – the freedom not to have [specialized] skills, but to work in a directorial way, to garner and gather those skills to produce objects. So the imagination of artists is expanding, or at least growing, in a new way – with new materials, new methods of presentation. The museological space, for better or worse, is also very interested in spectacle, which requires bigger kinds of works, which are almost never made by one person. So you’re getting works like the Charles Ray Firetruck. It’s a massive piece – it’s the size of an actual fire truck – which in the past would not have really found a place within a traditional museum. It was actually parked outside the Whitney for the 1993 biennial; it was too big to go inside. So classic craft mediums, such as glass, are appearing in a fine art context – but the authors of the works didn’t physically make them. Does that blur traditional boundaries between art and craft – or heighten a maker versus not-maker divide? I hope it’s dissolving boundaries, because they’re artificial in the first place. A lot of the work that I make, I make in the general sense: I produce it in my studio. I don’t produce the glass because it’s a highly specific kind of object-making. And I think that’s fairly true for a lot of artists.
Kiki Smith makes her drawings, her paintings – but she doesn’t make the glass, because she doesn’t blow glass. We’re also seeing people like Dale Chihuly, who makes work from that point of view of craft. He doesn’t make anymore because he’s been blinded in one eye, but even before that, he was designing things and had huge teams of people making them. So that line is being blurred from both sides of the traditional boundary, which I think is a good thing. At the end of the day, the question should be: Is it a good piece of work? Is the question ever “Whose work is it”? I did a lot of interviewing with artists, but also with people who would be considered artisans, about this making process. All the makers felt that the work they were asked to make for someone else was not their work. Generally the other artist was asking them to do things completely not in their realm of conceptualization around “I [personally] would like to make that.” At the end of every movie, you have a huge list of credits of all the people who did all the different things. But it’s still a Martin Scorsese film, or any other director’s film, because we understand what that means – it’s their vision. A work blown for Kiki Smith is still a Kiki Smith piece.
That’s a great metaphor – but does the average museum or gallery visitor understand that’s what’s going on? No, no, not at all. That’s why I wrote this book, because of the number of times people have said to me, “Oh, how do you blow glass?” I wouldn’t know; I don’t actually do it. I’m there, I’m overseeing, and I have some real understanding on the intellectual level, but I haven’t actually done it – and I haven’t actually felt the desire to do it. Because I absolutely understand how difficult it is. What I want people to know is, yes, this was by this artisan, we collaborated on this, this is the end result. What I am always talking about is trying to find honesty in labeling. I can’t think of a case when an artist would say, “Don’t say I didn’t make that.” In a catalog I always put [who worked on a piece]. Yet museums often seem reluctant to put that [information] out there. Sometimes even in your book that information is not available. It’s mysteriously, even frustratingly anonymous – “used the services of expert craftspeople,” for example. That’s where the [artist, museum, or gallery] could not provide the information. When I did the first installation art book [in 1994], so much information was missing. People