More thinking

I had an interesting conversation with Liz and Karen, MA students at Herts today. Liz came out with a profoundity that caught my attention.  Liz thinks there is a critical difference between craft and art, in that applied artists, who create craft, are quite happy for their work to be handled, whereas fine artists do not want their work touched so make it more remote by framing behind glass or displaying in a cabinet.  I feel very strongly that I want my work handled because this informs my thinking and it is important to be accessible.

This also relates to the status debate between Art and Craft.  I seem to listen to a lot of conversations that rail against the lower status of Craft in comparison to Art.  I do get fed up of them.  I am working in the craft sphere, in the fortunate position where I do not need to earn my living from it, and am enjoying the thought process and haptic sensations of making.  My interaction with the materials is largely inward facing, and all about me.  It is not outward facing and about external recognition or money or commerciality.  I am interested in the value of everyday, mundane materials and under-valued people and their activities, and arguments about status seem singularly irrelevant.  I get irritated when I feel pushed towards making art objects on the grounds that they are more interesting or valid (on the grounds that it becomes Art) rather than a tactile object with a purpose (that makes it Craft).  I am interested in the tactility of the object, irrespective of its status as defined by others (possibly a paternalistic Art Establishment?)

I have been reading Vision and Difference, Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, by Griselda Pollock.  I have been considering my views on the role of women and domestic space.  I like things that are domestic and mundane.  As a woman who has worked full time for 30 years in male dominated manual industry, I find the home very much a sanctuary, where I enjoy spending time.  My working life was non-typical of my female comparators and peer group.  Pollock refers to European bourgeoisie as a class founded upon inequality and difference of social/financial class and of gender.  It compartmentalised the public and private and allocated these by gender.  Men controlled the public arenas of commerce, politics, government, law and public service, and women were restricted to the private arena of the home.  Women were therefore deprived of money and power, but were given social status by not needing to work.  As value systems within art are created by and run for men, it appears to me that art is designed for the public environment and is allocated higher status, and work (craft) created for the domestic situation, usually by women, is therefore lower status.  My experience as a woman, as a craft worker, and of working in public service challenges this view of status.  Public/private is not better/worse but merely different because the benefits are measured in different ways.

Pollock says women's work is stereotyped because of social systems that product expectations based on gender.  She analyses the work of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot to demonstrate that the environments they portray are domestic spaces, whereas male impressionists were frequenting bars, cafes, backstage