I have been asked why I don’t write about music or some other creative discipline. The name of this column seems to have posed a problem for some as I have been writing exclusively about visual art.
Since around the 16th century, the term ‘art’ technically has referred to things made by human hands which are to be appreciated primarily for their beauty (relative as beauty is) and which possess an emotional or intellectual presence. These things have traditionally been visual in nature and thus the term referred to painting, sculpture, and architecture; the so-called fine arts. Drawing was excluded as it was traditionally undertaken as a foundation of training and as a preparatory stage in the production process. Thus, it was not seen as a means to an end and worthy of being a distinct discipline of art.
Much later, the term with some ideological permutations was also inclusive of photography, some ceramics, and some textiles. Now in more recent times, with the profound questioning of art from within the institutions – schools, galleries, artists, and critics – the term is also a referent to some forms of ‘sound-expression’, some performances, some events, qualifying film/video, and drawing. Contemporarily also, the term ‘art’ no longer denotes beauty and beauty has ceased to be a defining characteristic of art.
In common parlance, art is a catch-all term but technically it is not all-embracing. In other words, what constitutes art is much more limited than casual everyday speech would suggest. In fact, the parameters of art are hotly debated with occasions when things are presented as art but are rejected by some from within the institutions. In responding to the first article to start this column (Eye on Art, October 23, 2022) a reader offered delightful feedback and stated, “[…] Robert Mapplethorpe was considered the most influential visual artist of the late 20th century although my granny considered him a pervert.” US-born Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was a mixed media collage artist turned influential photographer who was known for his black and white homo-erotic imagery and the fetishistic representation of the black male body. Thus, in the generosity of feedback, my reader aptly illustrated a point I was making then and one which I differently state here: oftentimes what institutions present as art to us the public is an affront to our parameters. As such, audiences are asked to stretch their boundaries. Sometimes the stretching is good for us. But we as audiences do not need to comply. We can resist the stretching.
As I prepared to write this column in a mode of procrastination, I skimmed my social media for news on art. After weeks of writing about a single artist, what did I wish to write about? I saw a post about a local exhibition and looking through the photos was confronted by the lower posterior of a standing woman with locked knees bending forward. As she was nude and wore only pointe (ballet) shoes, her pose revealed an approximation of the intimate orifice of a woman’s sexual pleasure. Two similarly nude brown bodies flanked this bare-bottom brown female, one on each side facing one other. The huddle of bodies made me ask myself repeatedly, “What is the point?” No, this was not only a question of curiosity but of offence and annoyance. I saw the proposition and I rejected the image. What was the point!? Another image sexualising the female body for what purpose?
The adjacent poem did not help. In fact, the work’s justification should be in the work and not an adjacent text. I suppose the news cycle of the past weeks – a teenage female’s body allegedly violated by a man in office and subsequent absurd apologies cause me to wonder how this image is helping women. How is this image helping girls to feel like they are more than their biological realities? I decided this image is not for me. I recalled that this is precisely why some girls in first-world spaces, fearful of their bodies and the harm that can befall them, make the choice to medically transition to male before regretting the choice and de-transitioning. I questioned the potential harm done in the name of art and being an artist.
While art appears as a catch-all, likewise who is an artist is a catch-all for all creatives, some of whom may be crafters or artistes. Nonetheless, they each employ skill in the production of their product. And in its earliest usage, the term art meant precisely that – skill (not painting, etc.) and this association persists today.
All art falls under the umbrella of arts. An encompassing term that embraces creative disciplines that are principally visual as with what is technically referred to as art, word-based as with literature, and sound-based as with music. Meanwhile, the ticklish term craft refers to those works that emerge from human hands, which may exhibit skill and have an aesthetic quality but above all are functional and exist to be used in day-to-day living. Thus, a handwoven mat, planter, or jewelry box may exhibit beautiful design and craftsmanship, and irrespective of how each is used, each is a craft object and not art.
Another defining aspect of craft is its reproducibility. The handwoven mat may be copied and woven a dozen times, and the same can be done with the planter and the jewelry box. But the distinction between art and craft gets additionally ticklish when one considers that some paintings and some sculptures, for instance, can be reproduced by human hand and thus can exhibit aspects of the craft object. Thus, I find it useful to think of art and craft as existing on a continuum of utility with each existing at the opposite extremes.
In the Western tradition (of which we in Guyana are part despite occasional divergence), craftwork was historically delineated along lines of sex and a strict hierarchy existed which attributed craft to a lesser rung on the ladder with fine art at its pinnacle. Thus, higher valuation was possible for the fine art object and by extension, the creative work of men was valued higher than those of women as the latter were the traditional crafters. It was Second-Wave Feminism that challenged this hierarchy and in doing so demanded that the two – art and craft – be looked at as essentially on par. Consequently, a hammock from the famed and highly sought-after Rupununi Weavers could be valued on an equivalent level as a well-executed sculpture or a painting. Second-wave feminism also allowed for the recognition that historically women were not the intended audience of substantial swaths of artwork as women’s bodies had routinely been sexualised and presented for a masculine heteronormative gaze. Thus, the bending nude ballerina was intended for a viewer other than myself.
