#2 Glenn Adamson "Thinking Through Craft"

[...] skill is, at base, a way of achieving cultural authority [...]

Glenn Adamson1

I find it interesting that whenever a discussion about 'skill' occurs, concepts of 'honesty' and 'care' follow as if 'skill' alone were a sufficient condition for the others. The logical leap seems slightly absurd - if 'skill' is a sufficient condition for 'integrity', then a successful forger ought to be the most integral person of all. Yet we pine for 'skill' in a system that has grown to favour conceptual sophistication. Why?

David Pye's separation of 'workmanship' from 'skill' helped me formulate a different hypothesis about why we pine for 'skill': it's a rather bad case of misplaced nostalgia.

The contemporary artwork has not become less skilled, in fact, it has possibly become more skilled with the increased sophistication of ideas and systems of production. What has been lost is workmanship. And we like workmanship. We like well-made objects carrying traces of the human hand. We like labour-intensive objects. We are not really saddened and made anxious by a loss of skill, we are saddened and made anxious by a loss of workmanship.

I hypothesise we feel thusly because we are a new diaspora of makers. Chris Kraus believes 'nostalgia is a product of diaspora' (Kraus 113) where the act of remembering serves to activate our longing to return. Perhaps there could be a better metaphor, but thinking of ourselves as a diaspora of makers seems to work: conceptualism took off around 1950 and six decades has not quite been enough for 'skill' and 'workmanship' to become distinct from each other in our collective awareness - I mean, 'skill' and 'workmanship' have been synonymous and freely interchangeable for much longer than it has not been - leaving us in an awkward place, a bunch of makers without the cultural authority of workmanship yet also not quite sure how to claim authority for our shiny new conceptual skills. The displacement probably leaves many dissatisfied - we have exhanged the security of workmanship (the good old days when you know for sure life is sussed as long as you can throw a pot) for...what exactly? Uncertainties and ambiguities and exploration and that nebulous cloud expounding the virtues of flux gets great writeups in art magazines but it's an entirely different matter to live by it.

But, diasporas settle and gain new points of traction. I am optimistic that our new 'skills' will also allow us to find our own places in this overwhelmingly new system of production and, perhaps, claim cultural authority.

References

1 Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford: Berg, 2007. p. 69-101. Print.

2 Kraus, Chris. "Bad Nostalgia", Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. pp 111-114. Print.