Skill in Modern Art

In James Elkin’s Master Narrative and Their Discontent he suggests the possibility of reincorporating skill into the art historical discourse (specifically the history of painting). He notes the common gap between art academics and the rest of the world who still insist, “my six year old could do that.” Outside the art world a common standard used to judge all art is a 17th century academic aesthetic, that primarily includes the ability to render as the eye sees. Modern art is judged against photographic standards of realism. Thus the discomfort with modern art that often snubs its nose at craft in the traditional sense.

Skill signifies the triumph of culture in the culture/nature division. Jeff Koons comes to mind as the artist who epitomizes an artist who totally accepts his industrialized commodity driven culture. Koons does not build anything but is a director who hires his objects and images out to be made by professional craftsmen. A Koons piece is icily finished, polished and perfect, as good as the finish on any new automobile or plastic toy. Koons makes craft a weapon of alienation and tension, where kitschy, banal, sentimental objects are made car size with laser-crafted precision. Hence, Koons brings to light one use of craft in art. The machine has long trumped man’s handmade ability.

If skill signifies this triumph of culture over nature then the modern art’s cultivation of naïve craft, taken from folk art, children’s art, and the art of the mentally ill, would come to signify the acceptance of organicity and the animal state of nature. It also assumes an antagonistic posture towards culture. The raw and unfinished signifies an emotional release, the expulsion of tension, out of sync with the restraints and repression implied by skill and craft. Craft, from this point of view, rings emotionally hollow.

Skill became an embarrassment to the modern artist who sought to avoid it if s\he had it or to intentionally oppose it. Yet however fashionable this turn away from skill became the wide spread abandonment constitutes part of the mournful tone of modernity. Despite its rhetoric of progress and utopia, the cultivation of naiveté was a form of rebellion against high European culture. Notables are Gauguin’s famous abandonment of his upper middle class life to live in Tahiti, Picasso who curbed some of his own skills as a draftsman to draw like the adept child, Klee as well, Nolde, Dubbeffett, and Guston.

Skill in the production of artists like Koons and Hirst (one might add Peter Halley and many others) signifies the triumph of the mechanistic commercial world and our alienation from a world of computerized images and assembly line things, from all those things the artist who adopt intentionally “poor” signifiers think of as integral to humanity and to their experience of the world.

Skill necessarily concludes in the loss of the artist’s hand/body- and by extension it’s individuality. Perhaps concluding in the mobility of the film, capable of photography’s cold and seamless mimesis and of perfecting time and the real movement of the eye and the chronology of an action. The machine of course beats the eye, the mind, and the hand.

In the history of modern art, craft is made into a conservative position that reinforces passé, artistic tradition. While an art that intentionally courts the improvisational and the aleatory believes itself to be outside of the any standardized aesthetic. A contradiction, it always succumbs to the expansion of the aesthetic and the canonization of the rawness of expression, thus its rebelliousness is weakened and the artist necessarily moves on to something new.