» Issue 04/2010: Making & manufacturing
The Danish professor Søren Kjørup held a lecture at the opening of Kunsthåndverk 2010 (Norwegian crafts 2010) – an annual crafts exhibition initiated by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts, shown at The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo.
Kant, Art and Craft
Text: Søren Kjørup
Translation: Francesca Nichols
Photo: André Gali
Published: 25 Nov 2010
Essay on Emmanuel Kant’s aesthetics. Previously published in the catalogue for ‘Kunsthåndverk 2010’, Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts’ annual exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo.
Is it possible to discuss craft and art in the same breath without insisting upon the essential difference between these two types of activity and works? Many would say no, and most of them would solicit support for this no from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Because many consider Kant, with his book Critique of Judgement from 1790, to be the originator of the modern concept of art that excludes craft from the kingdom of true art.
In the current debate, this point of view has been forwarded among others by the Swedish artist and art theoretician Lars Vilks, even in the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts’ own periodical Kunsthåndverk (in the article ”Between art and craft”, 1999, no. 1, pp 27-30). In his own endorsement of this view, for example, Vilks refers to Kant in the following way:
Art’s distinguishing characteristic was among other things that it did not serve any practical purpose, that it was a totally free and groundbreaking practice. One of the results of this in art history is that it consists of the ”higher” art forms, such as painting, sculpture, etc. Applied art exists as ”lower” art forms; functional art in its various forms. In effect, craft is a hybrid of handicrafts and art. It has a functional use and should at the same time exist as an aesthetic object. In other words, it is impure. (Page 27)
And Vilks finds this historical schism in the situation current during the late 20th century, at a time when ’high’ art has totally liberated itself from the physical material and become conceptual art:
It is difficult to see that craft has any place – other than as a chance element – in this art’s contemporary situation. (Page 30)
But Lars Vilks and his many like-minded associates are mistaken – at least when it comes to Kant and his book regarding judgement. And as an extension of this, also with regards to the aesthetic and artistic possibilities inherent in what we call craft.
And, yes, you read correctly: the book regarding judgement – not art! Even if we concentrate on the section of this extensive tome that is relevant for a discussion on art and craft, the theme is not about art, but taste. The question that Kant attempts to answer with his philosophical analysis is this: what is it that allows us to use our ”taste” to ”judge” whether something is ”beautiful” (to use a somewhat old-fashioned word). In addition, the subject of our ”judgement” is far from just works of art; it is also nature and everyday objects and phenomena in our environment.
As we know, the experience of beauty is something very subjective, so how can it be that we still pass aesthetic judgement and assume that it also has relevance for others? This is one of the questions that Kant grapples with. Kant’s reply is related to the fact that the experience is conveyed through language, which is something we have in common.
Another question has to do with what it is that characterises the experience of beauty. Kant’s response here is that our aesthetic pleasure in an object or a phenomenon is independent of whether or not we are able to possess this beautiful object; in other words, our pleasure is ”disinterested”. And Kant follows up by saying that we experience beauty as though it has a purpose, even though is has no definite purpose: the experience of beauty is an experience of ”purposiveness without purpose”. Yet it is worth noticing that this last, very famous formulation is not a definition of art in any way; it is in fact a description of the aesthetic experience.
There is a good reason why there is very little mention of art, or visual art in particular, in Kant’s book: In addition to his philosophical and natural science literature, Kant was familiar with a number of works by fiction writers but he had almost no chance of becoming acquainted with significant visual art. He was born and grew up in Königsberg in East Prussia, where there was little art to be found, and he remained there for the remainder of his life. He left the city only for small excursions in the vicinity and for a few years working as private tutor at nearby estates. Music, incidentally, he tended to view only as disturbing noise coming from a neighbouring house.
There are, nevertheless, a few paragraphs about ”art” in the book about judgement – among them two pages (of the book’s nearly 350!) about ”art in general”, yet they are not about paintings and symphonies and such, but about all productive activities that require special competence (as we might speak of the art of fencing or the art of cooking). And throughout the text, what is referred to as ”art” is an activity; not works, not the results of the activity. This also applies to the two or three pages that discuss what constitutes ” beautiful art”: products of human activity that appear to be created by nature. And it applies to the 16 pages about the role of the ”genius” in artistic creation and the 13 pages about how one should categorise the fine arts (and here, finally, we meet painting, poetry, music, etc.) – but that is, in fact, all he has to say about ”art”!
What these rather simple observations show is that Kant’s Critique of Judgement is not in the least about art as we understand it, but that Kant’s thoughts belong to a period before the modern concept of art arose (and to an even greater degree, before the modern concept of craft arose).
What might be confusing here is that the book was not published till 1790, while it is commonly believed that the modern concept of art arose already during the Renaissance, or at the very least that it became clearly established around 1750. But one must not forget that great transformations in fundamental phenomena, theories and activities take time, among other things because they are dependent on many developments beyond the world of thought itself (with regard to art for example the development of the art market, the institution of art criticism and art museums). And this type of development expands slowly, both geographically and with regard to what they cover. One might well argue that the visual arts gained their new status during the Renaissance in Italy, with artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael, but that other arts developed more slowly, and that it actually took several centuries for the new concepts within the broad sphere of art to reach Königsberg and the aging philosopher Immanuel Kant, to whom art was a foreign discipline.
As we have mentioned, Kant devoted a handful of pages to the division and grouping of the various forms of art (namely, in the book’s lengthy paragraph 51, which I quote from here (see endnote)). Here we find a primary division into three categories, namely between the verbal arts (rhetoric and poetry), the visual arts (sculpture and architecture on the one hand, painting on the other) and, finally, music.
There is nothing sensational about this. It resembles our present day view, aside from the fact that rhetoric is included as an art. But if one examines the details of Kant’s discourse, one encounters surprises. In a traditional art historical overview one often finds architecture alongside of sculpture and painting and, as mentioned, Kant also includes architecture – with one small reservation, namely that architecture’s functional purpose causes ”the aesthetic ideas” to be constricted, albeit without disappearing completely. And then he concludes his discussion in this way:
… temples, splendid buildings for public assemblies, even dwelling-houses, triumphal arches, columns, mausoleums, and the like, erected in honourable remembrance, belong to Architecture. Indeed all house furniture (upholsterer’s work and such like things which are for use) may be reckoned under this art; because the suitability of a product for a certain use is the essential thing in an architectural work.
In other words: While traditional art history stops at the buildings, Kant includes all of the various types of handcrafted objects that contribute to the functions of the building in his concept of ”beautiful art”.
Similar surprises appear in the description of painting. It falls in fact into two categories: actual painting and – ornamental gardens! In a long footnote Kant admits that this might sound strange, but both here and in the main text he explains more closely what he means about this ”ornamentation of the soil” with ”grasses, flowers, shrubs, trees, even ponds, hillocks and dells”, all of which are ”only apparent to the eye, like painting”. And it doesn’t end there:
Underpainting in the wide sense I would reckon the decoration of rooms by the aid of tapestry, bric-a-brac, and all beautiful furniture which is merely available to be looked at; and the same may be said of the art of tasteful dressing (with rings, snuff-boxes, etc.). For a bed of various flowers, a room filled with various ornaments (including under this head even ladies’ finery), make at a fête a kind of picture . . .
As we can see, Kant saw no essential difference between what today we would all divide into art and craft. We are inclined to see painting and architecture on one side, and mausoleums, furniture, porcelain, wallpaper, fashion, jewellery and bric-a-brac on the other, but for Kant it was all one (and again, together with the art of gardening, which we tend to forget perhaps because it is not a subject in art schools and rarely enough in schools of architecture).
But, wait, haven’t we got caught up in a detailed description of something that Kant would have delegated to second place; that is, as a kind of ”lower” art as Lars Vilks claims to have interpreted Kant (in contrast to ”higher” art, for example painting)? And what happened to the Kantian ”purposiveness without purpose” that others often refer to as the distinguishing characteristic of real art?
No, we are not in the lower ranks of art, for the sentence that I have just truncated reads in its entirety like this (with Kant’s own italicisation):
For a bed of various flowers, a room filled with various ornaments (including under this head even ladies’ finery), make at a fête a kind of picture; which, like pictures properly so-called (that are not intended to teach either history or natural science), has in view merely the entertainment of the Imagination in free play with Ideas, and the occupation of the aesthetical Judgment without any definite purpose.
Critique of Judgement is a copious work, even if we confine ourselves to the parts devoted to taste, beauty and art, and it is not by any means clear-cut (something that Lars Vilks has in fact commented on). Yet it is not in Kant’s work itself that the modern concept of art was established and craft differentiated from ”art”. That this belief has nonetheless become widespread is due to the fact that one can find the germ of conceptions here that have later become determining for art.
It is the idea of an aesthetic experience as being purely subjective (although Kant emphasises that an aesthetic judgement requires universal validity). Further, there is the idea of art’s autonomy – art for art’s sake – in that Kant describes the aesthetic experience as disinterested, and claims that the work carries its purpose within itself. There is a germ of artistic formalism in Kant’s reference to the formal features of works as being the most decisive. As is the very idea of art as being sublime, contemplative, like ”the free play of ideas” that we have just seen in the quotation above. And finally there is the idea of the artist as a ”genius” who disregards the rules by creating them himself or herself out of his or her own nature.
But it isn’t until the 19th century, with the Romantic conception of art, that all this unfolds in earnest. Therefore it isn’t until the 19th century that a distinction is made between ”high”, mainly refined, masculine art and the other, ”lowly” aesthetic enterprises and products, usually associated with popular culture, concrete skills and feminine qualities. And it isn’t until the second half of the 19th century that any of these other marginalised activities are released from a negative orientation, that is, of not being real art, to become positively valued in their own right; namely, as functional art or craft. This does not occur merely in opposition to an ephemeral, romantic concept of art, but also in opposition to the new industrial mass production – a resistance that one can see in the English Arts & Crafts Movement.
Kant cannot be used to ”prove” that craft does not have a place in the realm of contemporary art, as Lars Vilks wished to do a little over 10 years ago. In fact, he can rather be used to open up to an opposing evaluation. Because Kant’s ideas are rooted in aesthetic concepts dating from before the great schism between art and craft, he can be used to show us that it is possible to imagine the aesthetic sphere in a different way than was popular during the greater part of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today there are few who continue to believe that ”beauty” is the only aesthetic quality worth discussing, yet Kant reminds us that there are a wealth of others to consider.
In my presentation above I have elegantly jumped over the fact that Kant uses as much energy to discuss ”the sublime” as an aesthetic quality as he does ”beauty”. By this he means a quality we primarily find in nature, namely the thrilling pleasure (or likewise horror) that we experience when we are confronted with something that seems to overwhelm our ability to comprehend, as for example the firmament or imposing mountain ranges – or, if you will, something man-made such as the pyramids or St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. But in the process Kant also discusses a number of ”lower” qualities such as the delightful, lovely, joyful or pleasant, alongside of the oft repeated attractive and emotional. And he appears quite modern when he goes as far as to outline an analysis of social play and games and lists the ”affections” that we encounter there: hope, fear, joy, wrath and scorn.
Finally, it is worth considering that Lars Vilks, in his article of a little over 10 years ago, first and foremost pointed to the path leading from his reading of Kant to modernism (with its formalistic idea of purity), and further, to conceptual art. Today it would be natural to follow the narrative even further, to relational art; that is, to ”higher” art’s focus on everyday issues, concrete questions, reality. In a way, it was a focus on social situations, processes and objects that Kant included in his pre-modern evaluation of the aesthetic sphere and his placement of ”beautiful art” therein. Or for that matter, it was a focus on a basic situation – which has been that of craft the whole time.
(Translations of quotes in this article are taken from: KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT Translated with Introduction and Notes by J. H. Bernard, 2nd edition, Macmillan, London, 1914.)
Overview from Kunsthåndverk 2010, the annual crafts exhibition initiated by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts.
Kari Dyrdal: Jaquard Kort. From Kunsthåndverk 2010.
Kristin Opem: Untitled 1 & 2 (2010).
from Kunsthåndverk 2010.
Overview from Kunsthåndverk 2010, the annual crafts exhibition initiated by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts.
Liv Medbøe: Work in progress (Bowles) (2009). From Kunsthåndverk 2010.
Astrid Sleire: Renewaloop (Renewal & Loop) (2010). From Kunsthåndverk 2010.
Jim Darbu: The Jan Dabu Adventures (2010). From Kunshåndverk 2010.
Nora Olafsdatter Krogh: Goshawk, Lynx, Sangsikade, Salamander(2009). From Kunsthåndverk 2010.
In foreground: Sidsel Hanum: Oval 5, 6 & 8 (2009). In background: Katrine Køster Holst: Letter to someone I know (left) and Åse Ljones: Tablets(2010). From Kunsthåndverk 2010
The Danish professor Søren Kjørup held a lecture at the opening of Kunsthåndverk 2010 (Norwegian crafts 2010) – an annual crafts exhibition initiated by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts, shown at The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo.