I need to think about where the line is between craft and art. This has been prompted after a discussion with my tutor.
There is an enjoyment and a compulsion in the act of making things which could be described as craftmanship. Some objects are highly crafted like the work of Richard Deacon and others objects are sucessful with very little craftsmanship. Even painting has an element of craft. Somewhere in the making process the work crosses the line into becoming art.
The difficulty is being able to recognise and then understand what has been created. I think this happens a good while after the event. In order to understand the process a bit better I spent the whole day drawing man-made and natural objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the University Museum in Oxford. I needed to re-focus on forms that are not art objects in order to refresh. Everything I drew was functional. I then went to the Ashmolean to see objects created for a different, more artistic purpose.
Then I went back to reading The Language of Sculpture by William Tucker where he talks about Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. It is a crafted, functional object which cannot now be recognised as anything except sculpture, especially in the formal terms of structure, composition, and material. It is a question of recognising it as sculpture and not anything else. This leads me to ask whether there has to be a conscious attempt to make an object as sculpture.
