Thinking here about your mini essay on post-modernism tom.  It strikes me that Robert Rauschenberg really is one of the truly significant post-modern practitioners, and that I need to read so much more on him.  Its bizarre, he put together collages of random objects, and stated that he didn’t look for any meaning in what he placed together, but that the viewer would find his own lyrical connections, how the hell is this good, how the hell is it art, but yet it is!!  its the true avant garde, precisely because its rough, uncompromising and relentlessly indefatiguable(?!?).

the need for a return to craft- craft as art/art as craft/craft in art.

  This is a potentially misleading opinion and you was right to immediately place the idea under scrutiny.  The great painter of the present will incorporate a range of techniques to produce his/her work, dipping into a wide range of contrasting subjects found in both high and low culture, juxtaposing these often in the same work.  Indeed, one of the catch phrases that can be most commonly applied to post-modernity is disharmony. How one object seems to not quite fit reasonably with another, causing a friction.  Of course these frictions have been played out since painting began, think of the simplified colour and form exercises in abstraction, look at earlier scene paintings and you will see the same abstract awareness of form and colour, then think of lyrical associations that contradict the overall aesthetic, Titians wonderful little dog in the flaying of Marsyas is a good example.  The art of making a painting balance is tricky enough, but the greatest artists have always seemed to add the tension of disharmony into the mix. So how is this Post-modern disharmony different?  To say it is self conscious (one of the most common descriptions for Post-modernism) would be wrong, this effect has always been consciously sought after.  Perhaps it is better to say it is more sought after.  The line with which painters in history dared not cross, which would in essence make the visual enjoyment of the picture disappear has been drastically moved, that is to say, it has always been moving, but with the advent particularly of Manet, Cezanne and then Cubism, along with the publics gradual acceptance and now love of these works, we are able to break our images apart even more than ever.  Because of this, a whole range of analogical meanings can be expressed more deliberately than ever before within the breaking apart of a pictures harmony.

I am digressing, so I’ll return to the original point of craft in work.  It is a dangerous point to make because it can become easily misconstrued that craft can be art, and it becomes even more dangerous when we take into context the post-modern/duchampian idea that anything can be art.  So how do we make a defined, reasoned explanation that craft is not art?  Just in the same way that not all painting can automatically be called art just because it is a painting;  I suppose it comes down to the nature of why the work was produced -it has to be socially and artistically self-aware- is the outcome at once present and eternal?  The difficulty is that, when producing a painting, to be too ‘aware’ is to place the idea before the deed, and this outcome can only produce bad painting.  There is no easy answer, but an artists day-to-day concerns must feel present within the work.  This means that a painting of some nice mountains in Wales does not constitute Art although it may be a very nice painting, but if the paint is handled in some particular way or an object is placed in the landscape which results in a cutting lyricism then the image may indeed be Art.

 So, I move onto the Peter Doig show that is currently on in London (until end of April 2008) and the issue of craft and art raises its ugly head again.  There is no doubt in my mind that the show I witnessed was produced by a supreme master of the medium in question.  He really knows paint.  And equally there were some singular works which stand out as being profoundly emotive pieces, so why, on the whole, did I leave feeling slightly cold?  The answer is a fairly simple one, his oeuvre is just a bit too easy, I didn’t feel like I came out of the show having seriously questioned anything about myself or the world, I didn’t feel different at all.  And this harks back to the fact that his paintings give you what you want, there isn’t enough tension within them.  There’s visual tension, of the formal variety, but there was no tension in the subject, and if you’re gonna produce figurative works, you’ve got to include both in order to be seen as a great artist.  It is common place to advertise the outsider-ness of an artist, and Doigs retrospective certainly didn’t disappoint, there has been reams of writing on how he bucked the trend of the yBa’s, producing painting when there was no excitement surrounding it, the fact of the matter is, people never stopped painting, they just didn’t get famous for doing it.  Living in Trinidad, a true outsider, his works speak directly of this.  The single figure in splendid isolation.  They’d become almost like a sad cliche if it wasn’t for his painterly excellence, of which he really does excel at.