Skilful Manoeuvring in the Arts

Skilful Manoeuvring in the Arts

Glenn Adamson Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg, 2007, pp.69-101

Glenn Adamson is a curator at the Victoria and Albert in London where he is also Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies. Since writing this book he has written The Craft Reader, and several other books on design. His current research includes a reassessment of deskilling, division of labour, and stylistic eclecticism between 1750 and 1850.

The bit in the reading that interested me the most was on page 72, where he quotes David Pye's analysis of skill in his book The Art of Workmanship, and Pye describes skill as "the human equivalent to a jig in woodworking or a mold in ceramics-it is control within a productive operation, the ability to reduce error" (my emphasis). This is a succinct and accurate definition of skill without the usual moral component. Skill is something we employ when we don't want to make a mistake; when we want to get it right. It is also something we employ when we want to reproduce something accurately and if the resemblance to the original is important.

I initially felt that in art today, often the art worker is trying to find new areas of knowledge, to discover something they didn't know before they started working on their project, and so skill is something they would want to suppress in order to not get it right. This week on the net I happened upon Simon Sheikh's Representation, Contestation and Power: The Artist as Public Intellectual[1] where he talks about how the artist today has to interact with the apparatus of art production, as I am sure artists always have had to do, but how complex they are today. I realized that apart from the debate around skill in art production itself, there is this whole other area which is also part of the labour of art. The skills employed in this area are vital and I am sure that here we would want to reduce the margin of error and get it right.

Then in the magazine Mediations 25.1[2], in an article called The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work: an Interview with Paolo Virno by Alexei Penzin, Virno was talking about the work of Lev S. Vygotskij[3], where he describes how we don’t acquire our identity from building it ourselves and learning to live in society, but that society slowly brings us into its mold. Perhaps this is true of our skills as well? Our skills that we feel are hard won, are actually shared by everyone. Perhaps we just have to relearn how to share them again.

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[1] A central issue for critical artists today is the question of interactions with the apparatus surrounding art production: the parameters for reception (institutions, audiences, communities, constituencies, etc.) and the potentials and limitations for communication in different spheres (the art world, the media, public spaces, the political field etc.). How connections are made and how they are, indeed, broken. This can be discussed in a number of ways, ranging from the practical and methodological, that is, discussions regarding the use of signs and spaces in installation, about conceptions of tools and politics of representation, the role or function of the artist/author in the construction of other spaces and subjectivities, that is alternative networks or even counter-publics. Such discussions must focus not only on the interface between the institution of art and the individual artist, both politically and artistically, but also on bodily relations in political spaces, the advent and usage of technologies, and finally the establishment of networks, communication lines and escape attempts.

http://republicart.net/disc/aap/sheikh02_en.htm

[2] His main idea is that the social relation precedes and allows for the formation of the auto-conscious “I.” Let me explain: initially there is an “us”; yet — and here lies the paradox — this “us” is not equivalent to the sum of many well-defined “I’s.” In sum, even if we cannot yet speak of real subjects, there is still an inter-subjectivity. For Vygotskij, the mind of the individual, rather than an incontrovertible departing point, is the result of a process of differentiation that happens in a primeval society: “the real movement of the development process of the child’s thought is accomplished not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual.” Gradually the child acquires the collective “us,” which we can define as an interpsychical dimension, turning it into an intrapsychical reality: something intimate, personal, unique. However, this introversion of the interpsychical dimension, this singularization of the “primordial us,” does not happen definitively during childhood: it always repeats itself during adulthood. Experience is always measured — either in an insurrection, a friendship, or a work of art — through the transformation of the interpsychical into intrapsychical. We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior.

Alexei Penzin. “The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work.” Mediations 25.1 (Fall 2010) 81-92

www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-soviets-of-the-multitude

[3] Lev Semyonovich Vygotskij (1896–1934) was a Soviet psychologist and internationally-known founder of cultural-historical psychology. Vygotskij was a highly prolific author. His major works span six volumes, written over roughly ten years, from his Psychology of Art (1925) to Thought and Language (1934). The philosophical framework he provided includes not only insightful interpretations about the cognitive role of tools of mediation, but also the re-interpretation of well-known concepts in psychology such as the notion of internalization of knowledge