Still, they are marshaled as evidence of a recent “new wave” of hand-making, with little effort expended to distinguish their methods.Ĭounteracting this lack of nuance, a spate of scholarly texts written in the past several years have begun to add needed historical and theoretical perspective to this phenomenonexemplary works include Glenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft (2007), Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, Thread (2010), and a recently launched peer-reviewed venue for critical writing on craft, The Journal of Modern Craft. Aside from a shared interest in recasting traditional forms of handiwork, though, these artists have little in common, as they use craft for very different endsto reconfigure assumptions about the gendered nature of amateurism, in the case of Perry to explore stereotypes of femininity, as Amer does or to transform the surplus of consumer waste, as Anatsui does. However, over the past decade craft has experienced a resurgence of visibility within the art world, as attested by the prominence of international makers as diverse as British potter (and Turner Prize winner) Grayson Perry Egyptian-born artist Ghada Amer, a producer of sexually explicit embroidered canvases and Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, famed for large-scale tapestries of bottle caps and labels.
Despite an increasingly mainstream do-it-yourself movement, craft is often still pigeonholed as outside the purview of art, and has yet to be thoroughly examined at the critical or curatorial level. Ai’s work and the controversy around it are indicative of the disruptive nature of traditional handicraft within contemporary art, but also of the relatively easy containment of craft within institutional and market structures. Though the proverbial dust seems to have settled, the specter of outsourced labor that hovered over the masses of individually crafted seeds (made in Jingdezhen, China, a city known for its porcelain production) continues to inform debates about the ethics of hand-making in a global economy dependent on cheap factory labor. Installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2008.ĪT AI WEIWEI’S EXHIBITION at Tate Modern in London this past October, visitors tromping around in his installation of a hundred million handpainted porcelain sunflower seeds allegedly kicked up dangerous clouds of ceramic particles, prompting museum administrators to cordon off the work only a few days after its unveiling. Crafting session for Stephanie Syjuco’s The Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), 2006–2008.
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