The revitalisation of craft and aesthetics in Australian contemporary craft
Art is an idea, not ‘high-brow craft for a cottage industry’s specialised market’. So Joseph Kosuth simultaneously disdained craft as ‘dumb’ and doomed to commodity status, and claimed for art a higher ground, that of the transcendent, immaterial mind versus the immanent, material body. Art is about ‘what is being said rather than the form of the language’, that is, it is an analytical proposition. Art depends on its artistic context and its nomination as art by the artist, its status or raison d’être wholly abstracted from any material implication, perceptive or referential.
In Art After Philosophy, Kosuth attempted to ‘transfer the notion of authorship from the “auratic” and visible aspects of the work to the mental and invisible processes’ of making.(1) He claimed that ‘the artist is not unlike a scientist for whom there is no distinction between working in the lab and writing a thesis’. Aesthetic evaluations did not simply mislead the artist concerned with conceptual investigations, they were basically extraneous to art. Art needed to free itself from its morphological restrictions and could only do so by ‘becoming aware of its functioning as a kind of logic and thus absorbing the function once relegated to criticism’. As Gabriele Guercio observes, Kosuth’s concern to control the conceptual processes ruling art’s practice had all but edited out the work.(2)
The increasingly hard-line stance of conceptualism guaranteed that the reductionist battlelines would be drawn between formalism and conceptualism in art, although this schism took place in the context of a ‘deep-rooted suspicion of the formal elements of the visual arts by all who profess engagement’ that some critics trace to the dichotomy between truth and beauty that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline