If Koons were to exhibit a series of bronze figures produced according to a traditional “lost wax” method, the hands of the modelers of the wax — fingerprints even — would be captured, and upon close examination revealed.

Better evidence of the “hand” there could not be. Yet still Koons would not be in any danger of being called a “craftsman.”

No, the “craft” (noun) of wax working would reside in the wax worker; and the wax would have been “crafted” (verb) by those same wax workers.

The art, the “craft,” possessed by Koons, and I think in these latest pieces (Wind Up, Portable City) the art most practiced by Anne Wilson, is the architectonic art: the art of ordering the other arts.

Wilson is a good artist, and too is capable of crafting objects in a most skillful manner. I don’t know that I am willing to be led to believe the same about Koons. Having written that, my opinions are less well regarded than are their reputations; and I damage myself more than them with the present inquiry.

But it seems ironic that where a good deal of both the interview and also the commentary deal with the concept of craft and clarity of language no one wonders about the making of things:

- Who performs the labor?
- In what manner is the reward of said labor divided? Fame as well as money?
- What sort of entry barriers to competition prohibit young and/or financially disadvantaged artists from working in a similar method?

Each of these artists utilizes workshop fabrication, and teams of assistants to create the finely crafted work they produce. A major point of difference is that the art of Anne Wilson is often focused upon handwork, while Koons and Murakami, for whom craft plays more a secondary role, strive to efface the hand entirely.

Wilson is also different from other artists in her approach to artistic ownership. She has joined Koons and Murakami in taking on the role of “artist as facilitator,” but the collaborative nature of her recent work can be set against the nameless herds of studio assistants in the ateliers of other artists.

This stresses the importance of the act of making within her work, and highlights the cultural and political significance of craft. In so doing, we are confronted with the implications of the loss of making within Western society, and the politics of labor.

Looking at the resurgence of craft as a response to a “culture of the screen”, as Wilson put it, a move toward tactility may be tonic for the detachment of the digital age. It can also be seen as a response to the exportation of labor to third world countries, and the growing despondency in our political situation.

Wilson’s emphasis on continual shifts between micro and macro emphasize the need to reassess at the current situation, in the art world as well as the globalized world.

Walking into Hoffman’s space on the 25th I was struck by the amount of ferrous metal that I encountered; too, I noticed that said metal had been fabricated into angular structures — angular structures that provided the support for, and contributed to the ultimate shape of, the artworks.

The color of the filaments used in Wind-Up – Walking the Warp received immediate and sustained attention. I’ve wondered for months about what was underneath them: the square tube and round stock used in the fabrication of the giant frame/peg loom upon which those filaments were hung.

Was the steel work done in studio? The plastic work involved in producing the vitrines that encased Portable City? If said objects were produced for, rather than produced by, the artist: Is it necessary to think more carefully about the artist as maker? I suppose that I imagine a spectrum with, oh, Koons and Brancusi at antipodes — as portrayed in their respective mythologies.

Christo: Running Fence, 1972-1976. Composed of textile elements strung between ferrous elements. Running-Walking. Fence-Warp. An action, and then a structure that defines. The movement from the ‘72 to ‘08 being a movement from the organic [the more "Natural" quality of line, at least] to something much more rigid…c’est la vie.

I will never reference anything. I will refer to things, I will cite them, and I will make/write/display/utilize/use references. Check this out:
http://time-blog.com/looking_around/2008/04/the_decline_and_fall_of_wester.html

Mostly, my bad habit, is typos and then not using the correction feature to fix them.

I too was struck with how clearly all spoke here. This is not all that common in over-memorizing beaurocratic and academic artworldia. Thus, for some reason, the refernce then stuck out to me. More important, though, were all the other far more salient points of the discussion.

I by and large agree re. “referencing,” but most folks aren’t excited by “cites,” which tends to imply a specific source that you’re citing. The slightly wrong new word has a kind of flexibility that people like, almost *because* of its wrongness. It’s a cheesy, small-time wrongness; not much of a thrill to it, to misuse “cohort” or “presently.” So I think we’re stuck with “referencing.”

What impressed me about the discussants of #152 is how confident they all are. The link between that and the grounded, descriptive quality of the language they used is that nothing brings out the meaningless preemptive blather, in the artworld as elsewhere, like anxiety. I keep reading about how the artworld (the academic side of it at least) is a confused ruin these days. Would that it were true, but if it is, why is it that these people are all so confident, so relaxed, so smart and even funny? Maybe it’s just the company, the intimacy of radio and the hosts doing a great job.

Hooray for them, then, but I’ll reserve the right to reference this as part of a larger trend sometime later. See you.

“Hardly a single meaningless word” — very good observation. I concur. I suspect that has a lot to do with Anne’s very solid, “concrete” concern with technical process, among other things. I would add that one of Duncan’s strengths in the interviews is often how he gets things to the point, to even controversial points, in an often self-deprecating fashion.

I would like to call a moratorium, however, on the trendy, bureaucratic back-built verb “references” in the artworld. We have a verb. I.e.: “That work REFERS to …” or “That work makes a reference to …” To take a noun built from a verb and build a further verb is unnecessary double-latinizing.

The Columbia Journalism Review describes it so:

“…the unattractive use of “reference” as a verb has grown exponentially in recent years.

The verb is solidly established in the phrase “cross reference,” and it has some specialized applications of its own (a textbook that is well referenced, for instance). But mostly it’s legal and business (and art) jargon–you know, the above-referenced quadruple ax murder–and should be shunned by English-speakers. It was painful to read:

* that a governor wrote his legislators “a letter referencing the Rolling Stones”

* that a speaker “referenced the old parable: pride goes before the fall.”

* about “communal tables referencing a …”

One point that was made in the interview (don’t remember by whom; hard to credit accurately when it’s all collaborative, yes?) is that as the work evolves, definitions evolve (mutate, exfoliate) with it. Back when conceptualism was new, it was either a scale reduction of the aims of Minimalism, or it was a confused expansion of those aims and ambitions. The latter; the Kosuth version, got popular in the art schools, and what followed was a decade of rigorously meaningless artspeak.

With the return to things, what we ALSO return to is language that has to be clear about things and can’t get lazy and vacantly self-referential. Listening to this show, i was thrilled that here were some artschool hotshots talking about process and goals, and there was hardly a single meaningless word (even “relational” is starting to mean something). Objects have (and this is particularly true of your work) a granularity and potential for self-contradiction that concepts don’t have. It seemed like a really smart thing for people to aspire to Conceptual Art, but it was actually intellectually lazy, and that showed up in the opacity and astonishing bullshit level of the language that was used to support it. There is not a single Conceptual Artist whose work is not more interesting than his/her ideas about it. So we haven’t “returned” to the object: it was always there.

Has he joined the early 90’s and obtained e-mail yet?

We’d love to have you on the show!

Richard and BAS

When more conceptualist artists spend time with more conventionally thought-of “craft practices,” the results often look really good (i.e., like “art”), but let’s not forget that the stuff which looks less, well, like art, doesn’t get shown. Anne has always worked intelligently, and her transmogrification into a conceptual/critical practitioner is a matter of the artworld extending its territory to include what she does, not a shift on her part to curry another order of favor.

I’ve been fighting a long battle to get concern for technical ability/craft back into painting along with philosophy and stuff. it looks like the “craft artists” are doing some great pioneer work in that area.

Of course those artists who had everythinbg farmed out ’cause that was CC de rigueur will soon be jumping on the make-it-yourself bandwagon as soon as there is one. Oh, …. oops … as you mention, at least one of the Chicago Neo-Cons ones already has …. guess that deconstruction of the production was just all a load of trendy memorized crap. I doubt if they’ll have the licks though.

Nice to ehar Mike B and Tony again. I like the kickass Batman too. Loved Mike’s comment last week — “dialogue from women 20-some year-olds going on 17.”