Below is a fascinating article from MUSEUM magazine written by our very own Sarah Jesse. The article is a bit longer than our usual post. But you will be glad you to the time. Enjoy.
Tradition Meets the Modern World
By Sarah Jesse
We live in a culture swept up by instant gratification. Products that can be manufactured quickly and consistently have been accepted as routine in our daily lives. The gift of speed provided by mass production has endangered time-consuming techniques and is rendering them increasingly obsolete. But not for everyone. At the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla., the exhibition “UK/OK: Exploring Traditions in Contemporary Design” features work by 67 craft-based artists who purposely employ traditional, labor-intensive methods in their work. In a quest for authenticity, these artists embrace the slowness, leaving a trail of interesting art in their wake.
There are many examples of artists holding on to traditions after new techniques have been adopted and made universal by technology. Twentieth-century painter Paul Cadmus steadfastly swore by egg tempera long after most had moved on to oil. Sculptor William Zorach faithfully revived the same drawn-out, direct carving approach that shaped the Parthenon, but at a time when pointing machines had become the norm. Current artists using time-sapping strategies and traditional techniques include Vija Celmins, who is known to spend up to a year creating one of her meticulously detailed drawings, and Sally Mann, who uses a 100-year-old camera that requires her to use her hand as a shutter. And, of course, she still uses film.
Unlike the previous examples, the artists in “UK/OK” aren’t breathing the rarified air of painting, sculpture and photography. They’re working in the soil of less acknowledged pursuits like basketry, ceramics and textiles. These are objects that tend to get the cold shoulder from the art world, if they manage to get in the door in the first place. Exhibition curator Scott Perkins makes no value judgments on the work. Instead, he has chosen to build his exhibition around connections between artists working in the United Kingdom and Oklahoma.
That the Sooner State has a hard time holding its own against the whole of Britannia will astonish no one. It’s a delicate premise and not a fair fight. What does surprise and delight is the sheer dedication artists on both sides of the Atlantic bring to their work. Throughout the exhibition, there is an intense intimacy between process, material and maker. Labels highlight and nicely detail how each piece was made, while also providing an image of the artist. This link between process, material and maker is significant for the viewer too, as it creates a warm, cozy feeling that eludes most mass-produced products.
An extreme example of this kind of hyper-intimacy between artist and material is the work of British artist Lisa Bech, who weaves amoeba-like baskets out of organic Scottish willow that she grows and harvests by hand. The results are both a solidly functional and deeply personal expression of her alliance with the material. What could be more intimate than an artist growing the materials he or she uses to work?
Some of the stunners in the show are the pieces imbued with a magical quality that can only come from handmade objects. For example, British artist Claire Coles’ embroidered wallpaper Oriental Garden looks typical from a distance, albeit lovely with its pattern of colorful birds and flowers. Upon closer inspection, you discover it is actually a collage with felt and leather cutouts of images from other vintage wallpapers embroidered onto the paper. The piece shows how handmade objects can cast a spell, becoming more and more rewarding the closer you get and the longer you look.
While all of the artists in the show are working with centuries-old processes, they have different goals. Some seek to merely preserve tradition without reinterpreting it. For them, there is a compulsion to keep a dying skill alive long after there is a need so it is not one day forgotten. Others aim to add a contemporary spin to tradition by tweaking technique, reimagining content or sometimes both. At times, these innovations are so impressive that it seems as if the conservative nature and restrictions of their disciplines push these artists to be more creative and playful. There’s nothing like having limitations to get the creative juices flowing.
Some of the knockout pieces in the show are by three artists who are rooted in tradition yet are able to elaborate on it. The first is British textile artist Eleanor Pritchard, who creates gorgeous handmade blankets using a technique called double cloth that dates back to 700 C.E. While Pritchard has preserved the technicalities of the traditional double-cloth method and looks to traditional British fabrics for inspiration, she manages to make the end product more contemporary. The geometric patterns, chunky textures and rich hues of blue, gray and orange produces utilitarian art objects that look anything but dated.
British artist Robert Dawson also exhibits both respect and irreverence for tradition in his ceramics. The pieces Crumbled, Bridge, Boat and Doves are part of a series of bone china plates printed with a traditional blue-and-white willow pattern. The pattern dates back to late 18th-century England, when it was popular for kitchenware to bear Chinese motifs like birds, bridges, pagodas and willow trees. By the late 20th century, these designs were viewed as kitschy and old-fashioned. Using a computer to deconstruct and rearrange the elements, Dawson reinterprets them by magnifying and projecting details over six plates, each one bearing an identifiable fragment of the original pattern. The end result is something completely different from the original—pop-inspired graphic imagery in the form of contemporary art.
London-based art collaborative SORT (Society of Revisionist Typographers), the brainchild of artists Tom Boulton and Theo Wang, similarly fuses 15th-century letterpress printing processes with contemporary design aesthetics. Working with letterpress today is like opting for a horse-and-buggy over a Boeing 747. The idea seems to fall somewhere between quaint and crazy. While looking at their Hints to Mothers on the Treatment of Their Children, a Victorian-esque advice manual made for a modern parenting periodical, you’re struck by the crisp text and luminous saturation of color that you’d never get out of your crummy laser jet. SORT employs the stark, authoritarian language and tone of the Victorian era, as well as the distinct look of letterpress, to create a slick, up-to-the-minute graphic-design piece.
Exhibitions like “UK/OK” remind us how wonderful it is to be surrounded by one-of-a-kind handmade objects and to know their makers. It’s such a pleasant feeling that we’re almost compelled to demand more of this in our daily lives. But how practical is that? The cold reality is that we move too fast to live in an entirely handmade nation. We can only hope exhibitions like “UK/OK” will inspire other artists to take up the cause of traditional, labor-intensive techniques—no matter how long they take.
Sarah Jesse is the Bernsen Director of Education and Public Programs at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla.
