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Midweek Perspectives: Contemporary art's new dimension Three exhibitions this fall in Pittsburgh promise to explore the limits and engage the senses Wednesday, September 01, 1999 By Clarke Thomas
Across the years my wife Jean and I have had a running argument over the difference between art and crafts.
I have favored traditional oil paintings and water colors or sculpture in the round. Other manifestations, I have maintained, were handicrafts or decorative arts and therefore not in the exalted category of High Art.
But I am beginning to realize that mine is a lost cause. For instance, Post-Gazette art critic Mary Thomas, in a review of the Three Rivers Arts Festival last spring, wrote that it is obvious that two-dimensional art doesn't interest many artists these days. Imagine that phrase, "two-dimensional art," for a tradition that has extended from the Egyptian tomb painters through Giotto and Michelangelo to Rembrandt to Cezanne and the abstract painters of our century!
Furthermore, three major exhibitions coming up as the fall/winter season in the arts commences will more thoroughly undergird Jean's position than mine. First comes the Fiberart International '99, Sept. 9 through Oct. 30, at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in Squirrel Hill and the Society for Contemporary Crafts in the Strip District, featuring 81 works of 70 artists from 11 countries around the world.
The next opening is an exhibition at the Mattress Factory, Oct. 31 through June 2000, "Installations by Asian Artists in Residence," works by 10 artists selected by director Barbara Luderowski and curator Michael Olijnyk. By definition, the installation art that has made the Mattress Factory known far beyond Pittsburgh is definitely not "two-dimensional art." In fact, the artists already are arriving from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand to begin reshaping the rooms at that museum's locations in the Mexican War Streets to encompass their art.
Finally, there is the granddaddy of them all, the Carnegie International, Nov. 6 to March 26, 2000. If recent exhibitions of this prestigious show are any example, there will be many examples of art that I once might have dismissed as "crafts."
Let's go back to the Fiberarts International show as a particular example of the trend I no longer can dismiss. Contemporary fiber art is explained as fine art constructed with flexible materials - from silk to copper wire - or also using traditional textile techniques with such nonflexible materials as nails, garters, buttons, river rocks. Processes such as fusing, burning, scratches, computing and puncturing can be incorporated to create non-functional work - shoes not for walking, books not for reading and dresses not for wearing.
I find several explanations of what has happened. One is that this is a logical outcome in our postmodernist era where, by definition, "anything goes" with everyone in the arts struggling to find answers.
Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in an article "Is Painting Dead, or What?" in the British newspaper The Independent, said: "It's difficult for artists to imagine how to do anything new in paint." But rather than considering art to have a clear line of "progress," Hughes prefers "the Iwo Jima model. I mean, you have the successive attacking waves coming in on the beach. On the beach, behind the pill-boxes, is something called the Academy" - that is, the defenders of the status quo.
So maybe the fiber artists are the latest attacking wave, beating their way into full recognition. A less militaristic explanation comes from an article in Fiberarts magazine by Polly Ulrich, a Chicago artist and writer. She writes:
"A quintessential characteristic of fiber art - indeed, craft art - has been its involvement with the corporeal world and the human body. In particular, fiber's association with warmth, tactility, shelter and flesh has always allied it with the world of physical materials and our embodied selves." But for that very reason, Ulrich continues, "For many hundreds of years, this physicality has relegated fiber - and other craft art - to the lowest status in the hierarchy of the art world."
And this placement has fitted, Ulrich contends, with the philosophy of art "which has dominated art discourse in our culture since the Enlightenment of the 18th century." "In an attempt to disarm art as propaganda for kings and the church," its advocaters "isolated art from daily life."
But Ulrich argues that we are in the midst of a radical change. "Since the 1930s, philosophy and art have begun to redeem the body, reposition it as an important aesthetic subject." Thus the rise in the influence of fiber and other craft art with "their emphasis on the totality of body experience."
So the very hominess with which embroidering and quilting and the like were engraved in my mind constitute a major reason why the fiber arts are surging to the fore. Interestingly, fiber artists are skittish about anything implying their work is not art, but "just" skill. But I still think the fact that skill is involved is an attraction for people turned off by the often slapdash look of some contemporary art.
For some analogies, I suspect the "Iwo Jima effect" comes in part for a public searching for alternatives to the "eat your spinach" demands of abstract expressionism and much of modern music.
As to the latter, I cite the growing popularity of Early Music (pre-Bach) by knowledgeable music lovers. Certainly the concerts of the Pittsburgh Renaissance and Baroque Society are one of the most popular series here. Note also a return to tonality among classical music composers, as the popularity of Tobias Picker's opera "Emmeline" has shown.
It seems that ultimately the artist, however free, cannot stray too far from the public if there is to be an interplay of ideas, emotions and experiences.
That's why I'm taking a new look at my presuppositions about what is art and, particularly, High Art. I look forward to the remarkable opportunities with the various international exhibitions in the next few months to see art in its various manifestations.
I suggest that Pittsburghers take the same opportunity this fall to evaluate for themselves the trends in arts, leaving aside artificial distinctions about what is art and what is handicraft.
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