In the world of fine arts, crafts are often relegated to
second-class status. Consider how even the term “arts and crafts”
perpetuates this stigma: Crafts are the cultural tagalong, too
important to be excluded from the equation, but necessarily separated.
In other words, craft is art, but it’s also not art. It’s a
contradiction rooted in Hegel’s aesthetic hierarchy, in which practical
application is a distracting barrier on the path to encountering
unadulterated beauty. The inaugural show at the newly relocated and
renamed Museum of Contemporary Craft convincingly argues that utility
and beauty are far from mutually exclusive.
Craft in America: Expanding Traditions, a traveling
exhibition which makes its second stop in Portland, collects 120
objects spanning a wide breadth of craft-based disciplines, including
furniture, quilts and fabric art, jewelry, and ceramics. Such sprawling
content not only makes good use of the museum’s impressive anchor space
in the renovated Daisy Kingdom building, it also illustrates the
potential for limitless variation and subversion of these traditional
forms and practices. So while Sam Maloof’s meticulously carved “Double
Rocker,” a two-seated wooden rocking chair, is an astonishing show of
technique and design, other furniture pieces rely more on concept and
sheer visual impact. George Nakashima’s “Conoid Bench with Back,” for
example, marries austere, Shaker-style legs and backing to an
irregularly shaped black walnut bench. The clean contours of the legs
and backing, which have been shaped by hand, create a foil for the
unruly and gnarled segment of walnut. By preserving the natural edges,
Nakashima reverently acknowledges the source of his material.
By contrast, Charles Hollis Jones’ “Wisteria Chair” from 1968
reflects concurrent visual arts trends, rather than established
furniture-making practices. In Jones’ retro-futuristic piece, a single
orange cushion seems to levitate in a spare, geometric frame of
transparent Lucite. Its cold and unfeeling angles, which anticipate the
reduction and restraint of Minimalism, hardly seem fit for human use;
the bright orange cushion, conjuring the vibrant colors of Pop Art, is
the lone indication that the chair should be a comfortable and inviting
site of repose. In this sense, “Wisteria Chair” takes on a sculptural
quality that places it closer to art object than domestic
accessory.
Like Jones’ chair, many of the exhibition’s inclusions blur, if not
obliterate, this distinction. In Katherine Gray’s playful hot-worked
glass piece, “Wonder Bread Sandwich Serving Tray,” the artist creates a
white tray shaped like a piece of sliced bread. On top of the tray, she
arranges five small bowls of varying size, colored in the unmistakable
red, yellow, and navy blue hues of the Wonder Bread logo. According to
Gray, she was drawn to the subject as a symbol of a “blank white
slate.” Void of nutritional value or, figuratively, substance, the
bread takes on the metaphoric possibility of an untouched canvas. Her
bowls, shaped like halved bubbles, echo this sense of vacuous airiness
as much as Wonder Bread’s package itself.
If the blank slate motif of Gray’s glass sculpture references
painting, the exhibition’s most painterly work is the stunning “Traces:
Intent” by the fabric artist Lia Cook. At a distance, the tapestry
appears to be an enormous print of a child’s face, partially obscured
in shadow. (In fact, the image is taken from a family photograph of
Cook as a child.) But as the viewer nears the piece, it both
transitions into unintelligible abstraction and reveals itself to be an
intricately woven surface. This effect, which Cook uses a computerized
Jacquard loom to achieve, overtly refers to Seurat’s pointillist style,
which relies on the human eye to process color juxtapositions as visual
information. That closer scrutiny undoes the illusion of clarity and
distinction in “Traces” also points to more recent paintings by Chuck
Close, in which elaborate grids of strategically placed shapes create
seemingly photorealistic images. Cook’s art historical allusions bridge
the supposed gap between arts and craft, but her use of computer
technology undermines the assumption that the craftsman’s product is
always hand-made.
In that sense, Cook’s work is the exception in a showcase of artists
who use their hands to create objects that boldly assert the value of
preserving traditional art-making practices. It’s tempting to interpret
this work exclusively within the categorical confines of artistic
history and tradition. But because crafts are so directly tethered to
social practice, they speak to a wider swath of issues. After all, in
an age of digital information and mass production, they become
important testaments not only to individuality, but also to the
activities—whether expressive or mundane, ceremonial or quotidian—that
make us human.