Método de determinación de distancia

The relationship of mind to material is central to this thesis. As will become apparent, my view is that the two cannot be disentangled. But at the time that this research began, its focus was on the apparently simpler task of critiquing the view that Williams expresses: that art must have ideas, and that without ideas, it is just craft. This is exactly the sort of pomposity that Shrigley lampoons. The motivation for undertaking this work is inferable from the

account of my own education: it felt like I was offered a choice between working in an intellectual or a material culture. There are signs that this is changing. Craft practice is finding space in contemporary art venues, the recent show of Anni Albers’ textiles at Tate Modern (2018) being one such example. A few contemporary sculptors who employ craft processes, for instance Caroline Achaintre and Rachael Kneebone, enjoy considerable critical and commercial success. Craft can be a provocative idea.

Against this evidence, however, we could consider the different career trajectories of two artists who work in clay, Grayson Perry and Richard Slee. Perry uses craft as an interesting position from which to comment on gender and taste. Slee’s work comments on many of the same issues, but its success as ‘art’ is occluded by the technical brilliance with which it is made. Because Perry’s ceramic work is less well made, his work is easier to assimilate into fine art discourse. Nevertheless, Perry - who frequently dresses as a woman and calls himself, in this guise, Claire - described his own struggle with acceptance in these terms (Perry in Frayling 2011:11):

I think the art world had more trouble coming to terms with me being a potter than with my choice of frocks… If you call your pot “art” you are being pretentious. If you call your shark “art” you are being philosophical!

In a fine art context, it seems as though craft is vital as a provocative idea of making, but that it cannot do what it is really good at, which is to make things well. The original conception of this project was to use the art medal as a site of practice that belonged neither to art nor craft, as a way of rethinking the

relationship of technical ability and ideation. My idea was that it might be an interesting place in which different and new artistic identities could be

rehearsed. A later chapter presents several works by contemporary artists who have done exactly that.

One of these artists is Cathie Pilkington. Her experience of art education is indicative of the way in which the art medal sits across the antagonistic fold between the two cultures. Pilkington is a very successful artist. In 2015 she became Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy in London; twenty-one

years previously, Williams interviewed her for a place on the Sculpture course at the RCA, an experience that she remembers clearly. Pilkington’s journey to the Sculpture department at the RCA was not straightforward. Her first choice of undergraduate degree was Sculpture, which she studied at Edinburgh College of Art. As a student on this course, she was encouraged to work with heavy-gauge metal, but received inadequate instruction in how to work this material and she struggled to manipulate it. Her frustration was compounded by the critical approach that was taken to the resultant work: as is typical for a fine art subject, the discourse was ‘not really about the material’. For these reasons, after a brief period, she chose to transfer to the Jewellery and Silversmithing course, where there was a teacher who, as she says, ‘actually taught me how to do things’ (Pilkington 2012:unpaginated).

The show that she mounted at the conclusion of her Jewellery and

Silversmithing degree was unusual. Rather than being a presentation of a small collection of wearable forms in precious metal, Pilkington made a three-meter long brooch in the shape of Noah’s Ark. She applied to the Royal College of Art, and was accepted onto the Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery course (GSMJ) to study electrotype processes under Professor David Watkins. Once there, however, the narrow focus on one process felt too prescriptive. A critical point in Pilkington’s transition from a craft department back to sculpture came when she met the sculptor and medallist Ron Dutton, who had visited the RCA to talk to Masters students about art medals.

Dutton is a one of the most significant figures in British numismatics. In 1982, along with Mark Jones, at the time Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, and Graham Pollard, an eminent numismatist and Deputy Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Dutton was one of the founding members of the British Art Medal Society (henceforth BAMS). The society set out to promote the understanding and production of art medals (see M. Jones 2017:5- 7 for an account of this period). Dutton’s particular task on this visit was to foster participation in a competition that BAMS was holding in conjunction with the Royal Mint. Unlike her tutors at the RCA, Dutton addressed Pilkington’s work as sculpture; this brought her frustration to a head; following Dutton’s

visit, she decided to transfer departments. However, when she attended an internal interview, Williams rejected her work as ‘too aesthetic, too thematic, and not large enough’ (Pilkington 2012:unpaginated). Pilkington was required to put together an entirely new portfolio over the course of a year out from study, which she did, and was – eventually – accepted. Williams’ judgement, ‘too aesthetic, too thematic, and not large enough’, is expressed in practiced academic shorthand. But what, exactly, does ‘too aesthetic’ mean? It seems to me that this objection hinges largely on matters of taste, despite his suspicion of this faculty.

Taste is a property that belongs to the artist rather than to the work that they make. As the painter and academic Howard Singerman puts it (1999:22): ‘Artists are an ontological rather than an epistemological problem; theirs is a question of being, rather than of knowing.’ Singerman’s broader point,

expressed in his book length critique of art school education, is that art tuition in these institutions is directed to the acquisition of personal qualities and behaviours rather than the instruction of technical ability, in other words, art school teaching shapes the artist’s personality, their mind, rather than their aptitude with material. Singerman’s observations are consistent with my undergraduate experience at Chelsea. The learning was largely discursive, and tacit, more like Shrigley’s psychoanalytical approach than anything too messy or physical.

This view, that art is somehow inside the artist, whereas craft, as a technical ability is somehow exterior, is a remarkably persistent opinion. It is surprising that artists who might be expected to think otherwise, artists who have a relationship with craft practice, also express these views. We can see this view in Williams’ lecture, and in Castle’s tutorial advice; but for an historical overview we can take the following three quotations, all statements made by sculptors, spanning a period of approximately one hundred years:

I say Art cannot be taught. Art education is therefore impossible. The art school is no good to anyone except as a springboard for revolutionists. Learning about art, reading about it, museums and exhibitions all alike, are of no value to the workman. They

are the occupation and invention of well-meaning theorists and dealers. Technical institutes are a different matter.

Eric Gill ([1918]2009:62)

…I don’t want to put too much stress on the actual act of carving, or on the craftsmanship involved. Craftsmanship in sculpture is just common sense – anyone can learn it. It’s certainly easier than painting, I’d say. The mental grasp is difficult, and the three- dimensional conception, but the workmanship, which people like Eric Gill thought so important, can degenerate into a most awful mental laziness, like knitting or polishing the silver.

Henry Moore ([1961]1992:137)

…Craft and tradition are very firmly linked and that must not be denied. That is one of the great things about it, and craft, by definition, is something that can be taught to someone else, you know, you can teach someone how to throw a pot and they will become as good at it as you if they’ve got the necessary. Whereas art is very much linked to the individual and their vision and it’s not necessarily something that can be taught or passed down.

Grayson Perry (2012:online)

All of these sculptors actually make things. But each one of them articulates an assumed distinction between the teachable and the un-teachable, the exterior and the interior, between craft and art. If we follow the assumption that artistic ability is an interior property, connected with personal vision and the mind, and that craft is an interstitial ability of dextrous skill, a teachable facility that sits between people and their materials, then we can associate these two cultures with different parts of the body: art is a brain activity; craft belongs to the hands.

In its small but persistent way, the art medal sits across this false division. The reasons for this are, in part, historical. The art medal emerged with early Humanism. It was born into an age before the crafts were separated from the arts (Jones 1986:15). It relies on techniques that are more associated with craft – or even manufacturing – than they are with art; and yet it has a long history of being practiced by painters and sculptors, like Pisanello, who are claimed by art history for the academy.

Those are historical considerations, but the format of the medal also works against this divide. The art medal employs words and images, and mimetic representation and abstraction, to achieve its full effects. In this way, it appeals to the literary mind at the same time as to the sensuous and mimetic

apprehension of natural likeness. Most importantly, it is an art form that is designed to be held in the hand in order to be seen. An art medal is both a visual and a palpably physical object. For these reasons, it appeals to both senses of engagement: it is simultaneously interior and exterior, mental and physical.

A few years later than Pilkington, my first encounter with the medal was as a student at the Royal College of Art, when I was encouraged to enter the same Royal Mint competition. My effort was a medal commemorating the centenary of Henry Moore’s birth, a derivative form with a hole in it, which I did not cast. A decade later, in January 2008, I was appointed Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at the University of Wolverhampton, and here I encountered BAMS again. The departments of Sculpture, Painting and Printmaking had been merged into the more general subject area of Fine Art; in the first year of my appointment I was asked to organise an exhibition of medals made by the retired Head of

Sculpture, the same Ron Dutton, most of whose creative output is limited to medallic production, and who had recently received an honorary fellowship from the University. I did not welcome the task, but I became interested once I started to handle the objects that had been made by Dutton and others of his peers. By the time the show opened, in October of that year, I had formed a distinct interest in these strangely liminal objects. I arranged for a BAMS council meeting to be held on the University premises, and joined the society. A few months later, I was elected to their council as Artist Secretary, where I was responsible for commissioning new medallic works. I was convinced that the medal offered an interesting environment from which to think about a number of issues that had long concerned me, in particular, the relationship between thinking and making, imagination and skill. I wanted to test the idea that the art medal might provide an interesting space for artists to develop an authorial

identity that did not prioritise faculties of mind over those of the hand. That is how this work began.