Grayson Perry discusses art and craft
I am unsettled by the work that sits between
art and craft because I think craft and tradition
are very firmly linked and that must not be
denied. That is one of the great things about
it, and craft, by definition, is something
that can be taught to someone else, you know,
you can teach someone how to throw a pot and
they will become as good at it as you if they’ve
got the necessary. Whereas art is very much
linked to the individual and their vision
and it’s not necessarily something that
can be taught or passed down. You can be derivative
and take up parts of someone’s vision but
you can’t become that person. I think that
therein lies the rub, that craft, in its very
essence, the minute you invoke it…you’re
saying, is this art or is it social work?
You know, is it art or is it fashion? It’s
like there’s a tension in that their values
by their very nature are pulling apart from
each other. And for me, you could say now
that painting has practically become a craft,
it’s on the way to becoming a craft. I think
that post-Duchamp, it’s so old this argument…because
anything goes is a really old idea now, and
since Duchamp the notion that you can teach
craft as part of art. You can teach the philosophy
of craft, once you’ve set what you’re
going to do - whether it’s piling up bits
of plastic or doing a poo or making a video
– is what you’re doing for your art,
then do it really well. But I think when we
talk of craft we talk of a certain set of
processes, whether that be clay or glass or
jewellery or textiles and we look back through
history instantly. It’s quite interesting
when things start to become kind of less relevant
in the modern world, that’s when they start
becoming kind of nostalgia-ised. Like, say,
old-fashioned photography is now very rapidly
becoming a craft because with the plate and
developing and all that sort of thing. And
it will be fetishised by a group of mainly
men probably who’ll kind of like become
all train spottery about old techniques of
daguerreotype and, oh yes, this is Kodak film
and you can’t get this anymore.
The big challenge to visual culture is probably
digital and I think that craft will grow up
within that. But what I think is tricky about
the digital revolution is that it’s intangible.
It’s the fact that whatever you do with
a computer you only ever interact with the
computer as a go-between, between you and
the finished thing. I’ve done works which
are digitised and there is something very
different in the relationship to the finished
product. It’s not a kind of organic relationship
of mutual impact that you might have with
clay, where you want to do something with
the clay but the clay says, no, I don’t
want to do that. Whereas with the digital
thing…you know what it can do, you can see
that you want that thing to be that blue and
you just alter that blue until it’s the
perfect colour blue and you push a button
and it goes blue…People who are like computer
programmers, they talk about code as being
almost organic because…you’re dealing
with such vast quantities of information that
it has unpredictable consequences quite often,
in the same way as…when you’re carving
a piece of wood that has a grain, you might
find a sudden knot in it. People talk about
computer code in that way. So maybe we are
entering an era when the people in Pixar Studios
or whatever are the craftsmen, they are the
Michelangelos of the twenty first century,
rather a galling thought, maybe. They are
the people I regard as cutting-edge craftsmen.
There’s a counter movement against digital
culture which I think is very healthy. When
you think of folk / music festivals, live
theatre, live events of all sorts, live activities
like craft, do have a balancing revival. How
kind of deep that is, I don’t know, but
I trust that human nature will out, and that
we will get what we want, or deserve, or need.
In our lifetime we have seen our relationship
to making things change. My father’s generation,
utility man, could mend anything in the house.
He could build a wall, he could install the
central heating, he could rebuild the car
engine, he could even have a tinker in the
back of the telly because he was very good
at that sort of thing. So we’ve gone from
that to a point where people can’t change
a plug. It’s regarded as kind of a skill
if you can bake bread or something really
basic like that. The fact that now we have
this constant…these trends…like knitting
suddenly becomes fashionable. There’s about
half a dozen magazines about scrapbooking.
That’s a shocker to me. Scrapbooking used
to be something you mucked about with as a
kid, you cut up old magazines, now you go
to the shops and you buy scrapbooking supplies.
It’s happened so fast. I think that one
of the great empowering things about learning
craft is…it’s almost like a manifestation,
a physical manifestation of, I can change
the world. Whereas perhaps children now, I’m
being very out there in thinking this, perhaps
now they’re thinking, I can change the virtual
world. Meanwhile their real world around them,
they’re powerless. That’s the extreme
view, but I don’t know, I wonder.