GLASSBLOWING

CREATIVE MOMENTS

The better the craftswork, the better the art.

BY PHILIP BALDWIN

CRAFT IS ONE OF THOSE words full of shadings, with various meanings and implications. In its most primary sense, we may say that most of us are bad craftspeople at a lot of what we do, but many of us get good at one or a few things we do. These are often referred to as hobbies. Occasionally they are a way of life, a career, a life's work. There is an anecdote which my partner Monica Guggisberg and I often cite at the end of public lectures we give about our work:

"A good friend of ours has recounted the true story of an anthropologist who went to study the behaviour of a particular tribe of aboriginal peoples in New Zealand. One day he went to the chief of the tribe and asked him a question. How much time did the chief think his people invested in work per day? The chief was perplexed by the question and upon reflection said that he would have to consult with the tribal elders in a leisurely fashion and that the man should get back to him in about three weeks' time. When the anthropologist returned, he asked the chief, 'Have you had the opportunity to reflect upon my question?' The chief replied that yes he had, and that after considerable discussion it had been decided that the people of the tribe invested four hours a day in work. The rest of the day was spent making things."

Craft is about making things. That is, it is about the process of making things, not the things themselves, not the results. The results are objects, books, songs, paintings, operas, statues, theatrical productions, movies, meals, airplanes or baseballs, and yes, baskets, those too. We forget that all creators, whether basket weavers or writers, are obliged to be craftspeople in order to make their work. While we're at it, pickpockets are craftspeople too, along with car mechanics and the makers of golf balls.

But wait – something is missing here. What about quality, the quality of what we make, the aesthetic value or beauty or meaning of the thing? How shall we compare, say, the graphics of the 1960s Volkswagen and Guinness ads (two absolute classics of their genre) with the paintings of David Hockney or the music of Elvis? Simply put, where does workmanship end and pure creation take over? The answer, I believe, is that there is no demarcation line. These things take place simultaneously and side by side. One without the other makes a sorry showing. There can be no art without craft, whether it be good or bad. However, there is plenty of craft that has no relationship to art per se. Take for example the manufacture of rubber tyres, in which good craftsmanship is essential for our safety and well being. Or take an example closer to home: a well-crafted blowing iron is enormously helpful for making good glass.

The editors have asked us to grapple with this subject of art and craft, a subject which normally I studiously avoid as I prefer to hope we have outgrown it. The British journal CRAFT (probably the best journal of its kind in the world today) has been celebrating and showcasing fine works of art for thirty years. The fault-lines are tradition-based and habituated. Painting is art; sculpture is art – unless of course it is made out of wood, in which case we call it craft! Most of us know this to be ridiculous, but traditions and habits die hard.

A further complicating factor revolves around the issue of functionality, although strictly speaking this is in another domain. A functional object is not considered pure art today. It is decorative art, or applied art, or it is design. Only when the thing becomes abstract can we call it pure art. This too I would suggest is silly. But culture loves codifiers, and good luck getting past their clutches. In this case there are some interesting explanations, which confuse us still today.

A good analogy comes with the technological development of photography, which has been a great influence in moving painting from representation to abstract form. Representational painting today is apt to be referred to as illustration, which many consider a "lesser" art. By the same token, photography took a hundred years of development before it began to claw its way into the realm of fine art. Man Ray today still bears the scars of this battle. Headlines were made in the New York Times a few years ago when the dealer Barry Friedman in New York finally fetched over $1 million for a Man Ray work. But behind all this chatter the essential issues remain for the thoughtful viewer: what is moving, what is uplifting, what is inspirational, what is original, what touches our soul?

One more word about functionality. As with the development of photography, functionality has been co-opted by the machine age. The ability to turn out good design by the thousands obviates the need to do these things by hand. Thus the artisan turns from functionality to sculpture, as the painter went from portraiture and landscape to impressionism and abstraction. And yet there are exceptions. We call such artists craftspeople.

People are forever asking, "How long does it take you to make one of those?" The question never fails to irritate me; until I stop to think that it's exactly the sort of goofy question I myself am prone to ask. There are two answers which make sense. The first is "twenty-five years, the amount of time we have been making glass". The second is more confusing. In the course of a month we may actually blow glass for eight to ten days. Then there are about fifteen days for all the rest: marketing, administration, packing, shipping, the telephone, the computer, travel and on and on. And the creative moments that prop up this house of cards? Five minutes? An hour? A day? A lifetime? Most honestly, it's five minutes and a lifetime. And while we're at it, the DNA of our ancestors and the cultural milieu in which we've been working all our lives – especially, in my case, the explosive years of the 1960s. That's because the 60s and early 70s weighed in pretty heavily around issues of body, of mind, and of heart. Robert Pirsig's tome Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was revelatory to me, expressing things I already knew in my gut, if not in my mind. To weave together into a single "career" the head, the heart, and the mind: this was a worthy challenge.

The reader will notice that I keep saying "our". This is because I work in partnership with Monica Guggisberg, a fellow glassmaker with whom I have collaborated throughout my professional life in glass. Our creations are a synthesis of shared ideas and thoughts, the results of a very long and ongoing conversation. In the beginning we called ourselves glassblowers. Then we said glassmakers, then designers, and finally, about ten years ago, artists. That's the job description that naturally gets put down on those immigration forms. Why? Is it because the work has gradually evolved into abstraction and sculpture? Because we have become pretentious in our outlook? Because the marketplace demands it in order for us to be taken seriously? Or because we finally had the confidence to believe the quality of our creations merited the word? Art implies something creative and moving, at the least beautiful or, alternatively, provocative. And it absolutely embraces craft and craftsmanship, the talented execution of an original idea. The better the craftswork, the better the art. Except for the exceptions.

For many years our work was almost entirely about functional design. We aspired to contemporary design, whether it be hand-made or machine made. We still do, although it is a relatively small part of our oeuvre. And it is here that the notion of craft and craftskill take on their most special meaning for me personally. The discipline of constantly repeating a given piece of work, of constantly remaking the same object was never to my mind a boring, repetitive task. Because it was entirely made by hand, the discipline demanded in getting two to look the same, and then a dozen and then hundreds became a consummate challenge. Customers would say, "Oh, but each one is different, each one is a work of art." And I would invariably take issue and say, "No, exactly not. Each one is an effort to be as close to the other as possible, to follow the form and shape and presence of its colleague as faithfully as it can. That's the art in the thing for me!" And in this respect the making of such objects becomes a form of yoga, an endless discipline, a jest, a mantra repeated and repeated, with every now and then a result slightly more exquisite than the last. Out of this practice there come moments of joy. And because the thing is physical, because it is rendered and made from the materials of the earth, it hangs around, it lingers for a moment and attests in its pure physicality to the process of its making, which we call craft.

FRAGMENTATION

ART ELEVATED, CRAFT DEGENERATED

All skills should be equally celebrated.

BY JOHN LANE

If we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures – then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we know and use.

Wendell Berry

THE GREAT INDIAN PHILOSOPHER of the arts and crafts, Ananda Coomaraswamy, wrote that the artist is not a special kind of person, but that every person who is not a mere idler or parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist. In all the Traditional cultures – the ancient cultures of Islam, the lands of the Buddha and the Christian faith as well as all the world's indigenous peoples – religion permeated life. And the crafts, however utilitarian, acted as a living channel for the transmission of divine power and blessing.

Traditional art was therefore almost always anonymous. The craftspeople, be they carvers, masons or artisans, enjoyed a certain social status but saw themselves more as ritual practitioners than as geniuses. The great cathedrals of northern France and the temples of southern India were created by people whose names have rarely been recorded; the statues of the Buddha at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, the carvings of Old Testament figures in the Royal Portal at Chartres, the exquisite tilework of the dome of the Masjid-i-Shah in Isfahan, and of course, countless pots and icons and artifacts, were created by unknown craftsmen and women largely on the basis of traditional models. These were not single and solitary births but, as Virginia Woolf observed, "the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass was behind the solitary voice."

These then were created by men and women who had no yearning for individual innovation or a striving for fame; they did not think of themselves as outsiders fundamentally different from or opposed to society at large, but as its servants, the servants of the faith. And as the faithful transmitters of archetypal and transpersonal realities, mediators of the sacred, their work appealed to aristocrat and scholar, peasant and town-dweller alike. Every English parish church bears testimony to this appreciation.

In the Inuit culture, there is no distinction between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Eskimo simply says, "A man should do all things properly."

The same was true of all the Traditional cultures until the influence of Western attitudes began to overpower time-honoured attitudes. "In pre-European days," says the Maori John Bevan Ford, "my ancestors had no word for art; it was all pervasive." The Sanskrit language also possesses no equivalent for the word 'art' as it is used in modern European languages. In fact the Sanskrit word for art, shilpa, embraces a wide range of activities that include not only what Westerners would describe as crafts, but ritual activity and such skills as cooking, perfumery, love-making and engineering. Vatsyayana's classic Indian text, the Kama Sutra, lists sixty-four arts considered to be accomplishments. In addition to instrumental and vocal music, drawing and dressing, he includes arboriculture, the care of trees, conjuring, manicure, needlework, bookbinding, woodwork, the game of chess, good manners, massage and the art of cheating!

But the totality of this approach was not limited to the Indian continent; other cultures did not separate the 'fine arts' from 'craftsmanship', 'craftsmanship' from 'labour', and beauty from everything else. This is certainly the case with a culture such as the Balinese, boasting one of the richest expressive traditions of the human race. Here, too, there is no word to describe those activities for which the peoples of Europe and North America have developed not only an expansive vocabulary, but an impressive tradition of philosophical and critical literature. Among the latter, appreciation of an 'artwork' invariably involves developing an awareness of its place within a tradition of influence and innovation among other 'artworks'. In Bali, learning to practice and appreciate an art involves learning by doing – participation: picking up a flute or playing the gamelan. 'Art' is the unselfconscious development of a skill.

I have seen much of this for myself. In Mamallapurim in Tamil Nadu I observed skilled craftsmen carving images of the Hindu gods and goddesses. They sat on the dusty kerbsides of a road more like workmen than 'sculptors'. In Novgorod I saw old women kissing ancient icons, windows on a spiritual world painted by monks centuries before their time. In Kyoto I saw priceless utensils and crockery still being used in the tea ceremony and in the cathedral of Chartres observed the carved capitals of the columns as perfect as anything by later Western sculptors. In these places 'art' and religion were indivisible.

Yet, if many of the objects made by the craftspeople of the theocentric cultures were directly related to worship – a stained glass window of the redemption in a Christian cathedral; a bronze image of the goddess Durga riding her vehicle, the tiger, in a Hindu temple; a reliquary guardian figure from Gabon in a headman's hut or a fourteenth century Egyptian glass lamp in a Cairo mosque – objects of more everyday usage such as a North American Indian tepee or a haircomb were often no less irradiated with a kind of cosmic authority. These too were also created anonymously and with no thought of 'art for art's sake'. As an old craftsman in the city of Fez told Titus Burckhardt, "This tradition [of comb-making] can be traced back from master to apprentice until one reaches the Lord Seth, the son of Adam."

And so it was everywhere and for century after century. But as the Middle Ages waned and the theocentric civilization was replaced by one in which the human rather than the divine became the centre of the universe, the most progressive minds in Florence began to flex their wings. Some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, painters, sculptors and architects, among them Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Masaccio, began to question their status and demand equality with the poets. They began to disassociate themselves from the workers of the manual crafts. Inspired by the consciousness of their talent, they sought to attain recognition of their professional status and in their discussions on the subject they made it their business to emphasize the most intellectual elements of their work. "I would wish the painter to be as learned as he can in all the Liberal Arts," wrote the architect and theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, in his influential Latin treatise on painting published in 1435. For him, painting consisted first and foremost in the rendering of the external world according to the principles of human reason. Therefore he could no longer acknowledge a theory of the Arts which did not allow any place to naturalism or the scientific study of the natural world.

The idea of the 'Fine Arts' came into existence in this way. In general the principal aim of the Artists was to dissociate themselves from craftsmen and women. At the same time critics begin to have the idea of a work of art as something distinct from an object of practical utility, as something which is justified simply by its beauty. It is here that a complete Humanist doctrine was formulated for the first time.