Craft and the Dream of Fine Art: Building with Franz West and Jerry Thomas

Franz West, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, October 26-November 30, 1996, and April 21-May 22, 1999.

Jerry Thomas, Global 33, New York, May 2-May 26, 1998, and February 10-March 8, 1999.

Prelude

In the midst of the completion and contemplation of two paintings haunting me for a couple of weeks with their holy effervescence, it occurred to me that, surely, the fabric of an artist's reality is not porous. Within the shadow of creation, the hands, eyes, and heart are sealed beyond reconciliation by focus, a turning of experience to gesture, statement, or performance. Each action may perhaps be taken as metaphor, a seal stamped in dim light. The trivial may become drama of biblical proportions; indeed, tragedy simply becomes another chapter in a tome conceived and birthed by exploration and, perhaps, divination. Mishima comes to mind: kneeling resolute before the window leading to the balcony, the assembled troops shouting him from a last testament of antiquated glory, the steel of the sword taking his life with three strokes to the neck (the blade in his belly only weakened him). Or Hemingway, a drunken god in the Gulf's steaming sunset, a callused paw through thinning gray hair, the tumor of literature curling a trigger in the Idaho basement.

In a like sense, the inherent lack of understanding in regard to an artist's intent acts as a curtain drawn across the twilight of our age. The grace of a mysterious form is replaced by the social or political platitude, with its easily digestible conceptual mores. It would seem we are to accept mediocrity in an inane effort to lift the herd from its mire of conformity. In Point Counter-Point Aldous Huxley mused on the beauty of intellectual generalities. We have since come to dismiss the mind capable of assessment; we have come to dismiss the artist capable of the most honest expressions of creation.

With this dismissal we have lost a grip on the characteristics of craft in relation to contemporary art and performance. I'm not speaking of the pedantics of "folk art" or the art of a recherché "outsider." I'm speaking of craft in the sense of a disciplined understanding of material and methodology, an understanding of the difference between a picture frame and the work it houses. Baudelaire wrote of "labor by which a reverie becomes a work of art." If I may flow back to Hemingway: the young Ernest gained an understanding of concision in prose through the trials of journalism--as studied a craft as smithery, tennis racquet stringing, or the tracking of animals. This mastery of craft led to the eventual stylistic adventurism he became known for, well before his all-too-publicized pyrotechnics of masculinity. The contemporary American sculptor Christina Bothwell immediately comes to mind as well--the precision of an old-world artisan matched with the sensitivity of a poet of lyrical extremes. Two artists, one European, the other American, each at differing stages in their respective careers--Franz West and Jerry Thomas--convey this lost sense of craft within the dream of fine art.

Understand that a militant primitivism is but a reaction to a strident modernism.

Execution

In two shows at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York (Fall 1996 and Spring 1999, with a span of three years between them), the Austrian artist Franz West addressed these points, bringing to conclusion discussions of metaphor and democracy, sans placarding. In these exacting exhibitions, West exposed both the pretentious impotency of fashion and the blood of what it is, in fact, that creates--not art--but the artist as individual, the artist as craftsman. With a complete disregard for traditional understandings of what constitutes a singular work, West manages to wrest preconceptions from our consciousness and, in turn...