Super-Objects. A Theory of Contemporary, Conceptual Craft

My doctoral thesis is entitled SUPER-OBJECTS. A Theory of Contemporary, Conceptual Craft. It focuses on a conceptual tendency that emerged from the middle of the 90s, first and foremost characterized by a radical breach with the traditional, formal aesthetics of craft in favour of a more ‘external’ agenda. In this new, conceptual craft society is addressed, questioned, commented upon and gently mocked by objects that possess reflective layers of meaning. A common trait is the way meaning is produced first and foremost through the form typology of the objects. This point is crucial: It is the point of departure for the thesis, that instead of constructing meaning via formal relations based on the aesthetic potential of a specific material, the conceptual layers of meaning are based in a specific relation with material culture.

Here we find a practice that can neither be defined in the common Danish conception of craft as a (hand-made, ‘authentic’, aesthetically concerned) part of design practice, nor in the international tendency to conceptualize craft as “an artistic practice equal to all others”, quoting Barbara Tober, chairwoman of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. For both these ways of conceiving craft, emphasis is put on what I have labelled the ‘maker’s perspective’; an aesthetic-technical practice, that especially Peter Dormer has promoted via his conception of the ‘tacit knowledge’ of craft. (Dormer 1997). In response to this conception of craft, the thesis investigates more profoundly the form typological relation to material culture. Here I find - both historically and contemporarily - an essential difference from both art and design, that can be conceptualized in my definition of craft as a ‘super-object’.

It is one of the main arguments that craft takes up a unique position in the so-called art/life-dichotomy: A main characteristic of craft simply is that it exists in a special position between art and life, that is strived for by both art and experimental design.

This position is not new: Since the British Arts and Crafts-movement initiated craft as a modern practice, craft has been positioned here. Arts and Crafts has mainly been received as an aesthetically oriented “politicized response to modernisation” (Greenhalgh 2005) that reacted against the alienation of the Industrial Revolution by trying to bring back aesthetic sensibility and pleasure. In the thesis, another aspect is investigated: The reaction of the Movement on the autonomization of visual art caused by “the Great Division” of the arts. (Shiner 2001).

Instead of following the well known artistic axis that goes from Arts and Crafts, through Bernard Leach and into the raising artistic autonomy of the Studio Movement, the thesis points to the apparent paradox: Arts and Crafts initiated an oppositional response to the art/life-dichotomy, but ended up as a studio practice claiming artistic autonomy; subscribed to a modernistic, formal language of the expressive potential of the ‘tacit knowledge’. Starting off from this paradox, the thesis develops another line of artistic affinity; namely that of the avant-garde. By drawing on the concepts of Richard Murphy; “aesthetic” versus “an-aesthetic” avant-garde (Murphy 1999) it can be maintained that the seminal role of Arts and Crafts was not necessarily predisposed to develop into a radical formal artistic language. Instead, Arts and Crafts can be placed in line with later avant-garde movements as “Dada, Duchamp, pop and conceptual art” (Greenhalgh 2005); a line that Greenhalgh however does not develop, maybe because he fails to recognize the point of Murphy, that an avant-garde practice has two different attitudes. By placing Arts and Crafts as an avant-garde movement, the role of studio craft can be questioned as to how ‘natural’ a position, the mostly accepted hegemony of studio crafts is.

The appearance of conceptual crafts revives this question, as this practice does obviously not relate to the formal artistic language of studio crafts. The conceptual practice is instead characterized by a relationship to material culture. Existing form types (in the analyzed cases tableware, vases, a boat, sanitary devices, furniture, military ribbons etc.) are transformed into semi-autonomous objects that comment and reflect upon material culture.

This semi-autonomous position is stressed as one of the most important features of craft. Drawing on the avant-garde theoretical discourse initially defined by Peter Bürger, the thesis follows the art/life-dichotomy as it is discussed, revised and reinvented by Richard Murphy, Andreas Huyssen, Hal Foster and Ben Highmore. This discourse is characterized by the search for a position from where it is possible to overcome the art/life-dichotomy and instrumentalize an artistic practise to influence on everyday life. For Bürger and especially for Foster, a semi-autonomous position seems to be the only possibility for maintaining a critical position that does not turn into an affirmative adaptation to the art institutionalization: Foster explicitly by searching for a “running room” in a culture that has been taken over by aestheticization. (Foster 2002). For Huyssen and Highmore, however, this position is ambiguous. Huyssen reveals the viewpoint that the avant-garde has succeeded only in mass culture, while Highmore points to the fact, that the conception of everyday life as something that should be released by art is a “restricted avant-garde economy” (Highmore 2002a). Everyday life, argues Highmore, possesses its own critical, subversive potential. Here Highmore takes the avant-garde discourse into the field of material culture studies.

In continuation of the avant-garde discourse, the thesis therefore develops an axis that follows some positions within material culture studies. Judy Attfield’s conception of “wild things” that gain their meaning only in a social context (Attfield 2000) is coupled with Arjun Appadurais politically based “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986). Here is found a possibility for objects to circulate in the chain of consumption; still revealing their own meaning, though determined by some fundamental systems of value. Neil Cummings sums up this potential by pointing to the “grammar of consumption”, which could be revealed as the possibility to create another logic order than the intended. (Cummings 1993). This means that it is through breaching with the existing order; the systems of value, from within use itself, that a critical position is possible.
This theoretical frame is very useful when applied to conceptual craft. The relation to material culture is revealed as crucial in the way that the practice actually materializes this position of an ‘alternative grammar’. The established logic is confronted with reflective objects that suggest alternative visions, but - as a crucial fact - from within material culture itself. This position is neither autonomous nor purely heteronymous; it is a purely semi-autonomous position that inhabits this space as its natural position.

In this way an artistic relationship is sketched out that is opposed to the modernistic formal, material features. It is important to stress, however, that the conceptual practice is maybe seen as a breach with tradition, but not with the identity of craft: Conceptual craft elucidates a practice of aesthetic opposition that craft has been taking ever since its emergence as an independent practice. It represents the ‘running room’ of material culture, guaranteed by its semi-autonomous position, and thereby guaranteed by a critical friction that neither visual art nor design possesses in their core definitions. The question about this ‘running room’ being carried out as a formal (historical, modernistic, aesthetic) or a conceptual (current) practice is thereby revealed as a matter of artistic affiliations and taste.

The concept of the ‘super object’ therefore functions as a good indicator of the role, that craft plays in contemporary culture. According to Victor Buchli’s historical definitions, the ‘super object’ grew out of the Wunderkammer and the privileged aesthetic object of the 19th century World Exhibitions. It represented different underlying systems of values while it also contained a social agenda about materializing ‘good form’. (Buchli 2002). Craft relates to material culture in much the same way: It functions as privileged objects; the objects of desire of consumer culture, at the same time as it materializes a logic that goes behind the established systems of value, first and foremost characterized by the critical friction of the semi-autonomous ‘running room’. Hereby the concept of the ‘super object’ facilitates an understanding of craft as an interpretation of material culture. Material culture is revealed via the form typological displacements of conceptual craft into a “denial of the standard vision of reality” in order for “old and tired formulas to be made new”. (Astfalck 2003). Neither as art nor as design it inhabits a position that is essential in contemporary culture.