Recent Sightings: Buzzwords

This article series from Metalsmith Magazine is named "Recent Sightings" where Bruce Metcalf talks about art, craftsmanship, design, the artists, and techniques. For this 1995 Summer issue, he talks about buzzwords.

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Words are often used to condense the whole craft/art project into sound bites. Consider some of the favorites: creation; expression; or statement. Reviews in this magazine are full of such old chestnuts. Here's Ben Dyer writing about Betty Helen Longhi in the Winter 1994 Issue: "In expressions that directly portray metamorphosis, rebirth, and the elusive mystery of beauty in nature…". And here's Janice Hatch-Keaffaber on Rita Deanin Abbey's work in the same issue: "…a bold gestural statement in porcelain enamel on iron…". (Italics are mine.) These key words distill complex ideas about the nature of art, and in doing so, they beg the serious question as to what art is. So, when a writer claims that a work is "making a statement", it's assumed that art is supposed to make a statement in the first place, and that we all know it.

These kinds of words are highly condensed symbols for an entire paradigm: art sound bites. (A paradigm is an example or pattern that serves as a model.) So, a single word, statement for example, points to a model for what art is supposed to be and do. For the model to be reduced to a sound bite, the paradigm has to be widely disseminated, and a lot of people must assume that they understand it. We must agree that art is, in fact, a statement: a variation of an expression, framed as a declaration. Furthermore, we assume the artist has something to say, the art is saying what she has in mind, and the audience can figure it out.

Paradigms like art-as-statement do not appear out of thin air. Usually, they emerge in art writing, often associated with a movement that is trying to dissociate itself from the recent past. While I'm not enough of a scholar to trace the lineage of how statement appeared in the art world, I would bet that it first appeared in the sixties, when a generation of young painters and sculptors started making a new, reserved, and highly intellectual art. Later, they were called the minimalists. These artists wanted to separate themselves from Abstract Expressionism, with its noisy rhetoric of heroic and tortured emotion. Because expression, as word and as paradigm, was so closely tied to the work being rejected, minimalists needed another word to describe their project. Thus: statement. Within a generation, the word lost its specificity, and art in general was conceived of as a statement.

Even as these buzzwords lose the pointedness of their original intentions, they still carry meaning. If art makes a statement, one can't escape from the way it is a declaration. Art is presented as a solution to a problem, or an answer to a question.

Occasionally, the language changes, and we see new models of what art is supposed to be. In the past two or three years, a new word is appearing in craft writing. Now craft is supposed to question art (and craft that aspires to the status of art) no longer makes a declaration. It interrogates.

So, here's Dorothy Spencer in the Fall 1993 Metalsmith: "Ebendorf's conceptual approach to jewelry-making, which questions the nature of adornment itself, explores alternative concepts and materials". Later she says that Ebendorf is "…continuing to question the old established definition of jewelry". (Italics are mine.) Given the tone of the rest of the review, it's clear that the author approves of all this questioning.

This is relatively new. The purpose of art has not always been to interrogate. Art once reflected the values of the larger culture, or at least of the patrons who commissioned it. Only as artists became independent of any system of patronage, could they engage in criticism. Goya's series on "The Disasters of War" and Daumier's political cartoons are early examples; in the twentieth century one can cite George Grosz or Ben Shahn as artists who questioned the power structures around them.

However, I suspect the current idea that art asks questions is rooted in the sixties, when the generational motto was, "Question authority". With the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and with feminism, adherents were taught to be suspicious of received ideas about the way things were supposed to be. If old ideologies masked injustice, the thinking went, then those ideologies had to be examined, taken apart, and preferably replaced with something more humane. Of course, the business of questioning appealed mostly to those who thought there was a problem in the first place. However, it was the presence of injustice that ultimately justified the questioning.

By 1995, the subjects of interrogation have enlarged considerably. When such questioning is done, there's a subtle assumption that the question is deserved, and that when the question is answered, life will be more just. So, when Dorothy Spencer approves of Bob Ebendorf's questions, she is assuming that there's something wrong - or at least something maladjusted - with received notions in Western jewelry. In the review, Spencer notes that Ebendorf uses cast-off articles like beach glass and pottery shards, and thus he " . . . reaffirms the value of that which otherwise might be without value". Contrasting Ebendorf's jewelry with a presumed dominant cultural idea that values only precious metals and gemstones, and comparing it to supposedly marginalized cultures (like many African and Oceanic cultures in which jewelry is made of local materials and found objects) Spencer concludes that using certain mundane materials is good for contemporary jewelry. Even though the remarks are framed as questions, value judgments are made here.

The paradigm of craft-as-interrogation is gaining power and acceptance, and may someday supersede craft-as-expression and craft-as-statement. At this moment, craft that questions often makes an implicit claim to being avant-garde. But beware: the idea that art must ask questions makes its own set of assumptions - which themselves aren't usually available for questioning. And especially when "questioning" is reduced to a sound bite, the subtle political nature of the enterprise is obscured.

Bruce Metcalf asks questions about jewelry and other things in Philadelphia.

By Bruce Metcalf

Metalsmith Magazine – 1995 Summer

In association with SNAG‘s

Metalsmith magazine, founded in 1980, is an award winning publication and the only magazine in America devoted to the metal arts.