Let's define art (ugh, I know!) as engagement with craft. This seems to go against the whole story of Western art history since modern art… conceptual, minimal, and pop artists have shown that art doesn't have to literally be about The Artist using their hands to make an object. They can direct others (whether the others are human or digital), create situations, or frame our attention. I'm not disagreeing with these modes of creation but I have experienced a perverted version of them that makes me question their status as more sophisticated and as not being crafts in themselves.
In my MFA (again! ugh, I know!) my classmates and I joked that we were there to make powerpoints about making work that we never had to actually make. It felt like an amazing feat to actually produce artworks, but then there was nowhere for them to go besides back into another powerpoint. In this academic setting ("conceptual") art was reduced to a prop for talking about something else, usually a political topic, and to build up a CV. The actual encounter with art was secondary and perhaps not even necessary. After all, what if your experience in looking doesn't line up with the powerpoint? Better to keep it locked away. I'll assume it is what it says on the tin.
Maybe I'm being dramatic. Maybe my MFA experience was particularly unstable between grad strikes, covid, wildfires, power outages, and department drama. But, I've also been wondering about my own feelings about craft; how I've approached art since taking a photography class in highschool through two degrees in digital art and now starting to make work with my friends as a collective. Why did I used to think craft was embarrassing? Why did I think selling art objects was selling out? And that good art had to, somehow, be made outside of that market and its desires? These attitudes led me into the academic world of art; it took me a while to see that that world is just another market where instead of selling paintings you produce powerpoints, CVs, and diversity statements.
To start back at highschool, I was learning about art history for quiz bowl (think Jeopardy, but faster) and then started taking photography. Being both a budding gay boy and full of art historical references I didn't understand, I immediately felt that I didn't have the same goals and sensibilities as my classmates and teachers. I narrated this as their being too interested in straightforward, representational beauty as opposed to my attempting to grasp at feelings I didn't understand using references I didn't understand. This seemed to be bound in their insistence on craft, on the performance of a mastery of painting or drawing realistic, maybe stylized pictures. A fauvist cow painting or a photorealist charcoal portrait were at the top of the pyramid, something literally rewarded with cash prizes in local or national contests as well as admiration in the classroom.
Looking back, I had to squeeze my impulses into a palatable practice, making a series of photos that were aesthetically pleasing of small, household objects. My favorite critique comment was when I was breaking through that constraint back to something I didn't get when I copied a Sugimoto seascape image using pieces of foam board. I remember me, my classmates, and my teacher scratching our heads. It was pleasing to look at, but it was also maybe nothing. "The composition is very quick," said one girl, while slicing her hand across in a cutting gesture. I was set on a path where craft became an enemy, something that wanted plain clarity, anti-intellectualism, and local art fair marketability.
In college I found out about digital art and it seemed to be my art-craft haven. The art object being subsumed in code, files, the internet, screens and projectors, performance, and play seemed to get away completely from my constructed craft nemesis. There, there was no being dazzled by a beautifully rendered landscape, just raw ideas and creating. I was reading about 'new casualist' painting and 'athletic aesthetics', envisioned by people who seemed to be committed to using the internet as a platform for generating creative output. You couldn't buy or sell it at a craft fair. I became more experienced in people meeting my work with the confusion I was feeling, reveling in it failing to conform to the desires they projected onto it. I started reading critical theory that only gave me glimpses of understanding while adding layers of complexity into how I was conceptualizing my own work.
Despite all of these feelings I was having about craft and its representational, marketable, provincial qualities, I was never not deeply concerted with the craft of whatever medium I was using. What I didn't realize is what I actually had been fighting against was a stale framing of craft as a tool that magically produces exactly what you want it to. What I now know I do, at my most successful moments, is have some desire that feels specific but I can't place and try to figure that out while enjoying some creative process I also don't fully understand that feels compelling. This first felt more clear to me in making CUBEISM, a videogame which I accidentally started making when I just wanted to play with the virtual cameras in the Unity game engine. I was engaged in a wondrous process with a tool, slowly playing with it and seeing how it provoked responses in myself. I had no idea where it was going because I didn't even want to go anywhere with it in the first place. From the perspective of Digital Art or Videogame Development, it reads as amateurish and basic. People comment that it looks like a tutorial. These remarks try to dismiss it as uninteresting because there's a perceived lack of effort. It's too easy.
I was running toward digital art and seemingly away from representational craft not realizing I actually ended up somewhere that's an extreme manifestation of that impulse: videogames. I learned how people, including those who make abstract artwork in painting or sculpture, cannot stop themselves from policing videogames as a medium of computer graphics and programming mastery. We hand-wring over whether or not videogames are or can be art, and we mindlessly parrot the narratives game and animation studios have been crafting for 50 years about what computer graphics should look like and how they should be made. Which is, they should require a team of highly skilled and specialized professionals working on the latest equipment with a big budget. Even people who supposedly wish for another kind of game, especially in the queer games ethos, cannot stop idolizing and wishing to imitate this model. It is a level of masterful craft that is inaccessible and unsustainable. It has little tolerance for ambiguity or confusion.
I suddenly found myself in a position of having to defend my practice as a legitimate craft in the face of these impossible expectations. I've realized that art is actually about being present and spending time with the tool. I come to it with ideas, feelings, and expectations and then it dances with me in sometimes confirming me, sometimes delivering me a surprise, and sometimes refusing to play along. The tool is the whole point of the work. "The medium is the massage." Any words I can say about the work can only frame what I was thinking about before, during, or after I made it.
Going into my MFA I wanted to move back to making irl objects in addition to digital work. While trying to figure that out I also got caught up in the powerpoint model of art and was trying to predetermine what I was making and why. While it's important to follow ideas when, if, or especially because they aren't clicking into place, looking back it's hard not to see this so-called 'conceptual' imperative as distracting. Rather than being attuned to myself in relation to the material and process, I let in the powerpoint as a third force. I thought too much about my work as an art historical narrative that could be used to concisely apply to residencies, grants, and teaching positions. Ironically one of the big disruptors of that year, a massive wildfire approaching the campus that prompted it to be evacuated, had me waiting out of town with an existential crisis suddenly posed to me: how would I feel if this work left in the studio got damaged and disappeared? What was the point of it? Would I keep doing that kind of work?
Instead I returned to what was feeling good. Waiting out the fire I was crocheting lots of small sketches and playing games on my laptop. The straightforward process of making one stitch at a time is a satisfying contrast to the often non-linear and intangible process of developing a videogame. Plus, at the end you have a soft object you can hold in your hand. When I show it to someone they immediately understand how I made it, usually with a story about how their aunt taught them how to crochet once and that they should get back into it.
Now I have a job working in a digital art department, so I don't need to try and sell art objects or powerpoints and can just make art because I want to. But I'm also still trying to figure out how I could sell objects and powerpoints if the context is right. I think craft is about honesty, which is hard, and being willing to lose your sense of self to another thing, which is impossible. All of the various art structures seem designed to isolate people and make them enemies of one another. Rather than getting lost in powerpoints "imagining future becomings" I am trying to focus on crafting with my hands, using both yarn and on a computer, and crafting a supportive art community with my friends. I've found the best things in my art and my life came from commiting to a process that popped out, as if by magic, something I couldn't have imagined. And the work is work and it continues only as long as you continue it.