Reskilling

Since World War II the boundaries of all artistic practice have been repeatedly challenged, but currently there seems to be a pressing sense of the need to “rescue” the “making” of art and its mediums. Making now occupies a strange territory wherein it’s both fundamental and peripheral. Post-studio practice (the rejection of the studio as a socially relevant seat of practice) and high production values transformed art at the end of the last century, bringing to near-completion the slow deskilling of studio practice. With deskilling came a degradation of work, a suspicion of craft, and a premium on time. Through deskilling, studio mastery became synonymous with tedium and lack of intellectual rigour, and despite the avant-garde’s socialist sympathies, deskilling distanced modernism from labour altogether.

Many artists working today are engaged in a form of parasitism between ideas of the central and the peripheral — the Town and the Country — incorporating craft’s techniques and mediums into their art practice as a shared vernacular language. The role of craft within this moment of post-studio art practice is, in many ways, the articulation of a desire to locate a believable and sustaining continuity between medium, community, and message and a rejection of what has been called the “trash and spectacle”¹ 1 - “From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production,” Public Lecture Series,Department of Fiber and Material Studies, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Spring 2009. of current post-studio production, by seeking a more direct and intimate model of material and social engagement.