What Do Artists Know?

When Skill Becomes Attitude

1. John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007). I come to this conversation as a specialist in the history and theory of craft. For me, the question of what artists know is inseparable from the question of skill. And the main thing to say about skill is that, almost uniquely among the variables in artistic production, it cannot be had easily. Art school is a very brief experience. Even a full-fledged master’s student will have spent only five or six years learning how to make art, and will have spent much of that time traversing many different studio disciplines, and perhaps studying academic subjects too. Just for the purposes of comparison, prior to the collapse of the guild system apprentices were expected to train for seven years at one specific trade before they were considered professionally qualified as journeymen. Further progression to the status of a master could take a further seven years, or longer. Ars longa, vita brevis. We simply cannot expect art school, as it is currently structured in Europe and America, to raise people to a professional standard as makers. The culture of art education is too firmly committed to breadth instead of depth. Given this, there are four options for students: wait to go to art school until they have already learned fabrication skills; be prepared to learn many of their useful skills after graduation, somehow making a living at the same time; make art that doesn’t require skilled making; or hire someone else to make their art for them. It is not surprising that most artists these days opt for one of the latter two courses of action. They either make work which places low demands on making, like word art, amateurish video, sloppy sculpture, or found objects; or they resort to outsourcing, with all the costs and compromises that entails. In his important recent book The Intangibilities of Form, British art theorist John Roberts has offered a theoretical model for understanding this reality.1 He envisions artists as operating in a triangular terrain whose vertexes are marked skill, deskilling, and reskilling. The first of these refers to any direct crafting of an object, like painting with a brush or carving with a chisel. The second is the artistic habit of producing a work through an act of selection or conceptualization, as in Duchamp’s readymades or Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings. And the last refers to the reframing of artistic practice along the lines of other occupations, such as business management or institutional critique. The reskilling artist still functions as a “producer,” but in the sense that term is used in the film industry. In such a climate specialization itself comes to seem suspect, or even anti-intellectual. WHEN SKILL BECOMES ATTITUDE Glenn Adamson 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 198 9/14/12 1:18 PM assessments 199 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars. One feature of Roberts’s terminology is that it implies that skill is a static category, while deskilling and reskilling (as is implied by the gerund forms) are active. This accords with the commonplace assumption that craft is rooted in tradition. From this perspective, the artisanal aspect of “what artists know” is what they have learned from those who came before them. Deskilling and especially reskilling, by contrast, seem like the routes to innovation. They are the active ingredients in forming contemporary practice, as de Duve uses that term. This was very explicitly framed by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen at the first What Do Artists Know? Seminar: “Along with this idea of practice comes the idea of dematerialization. So we’re not talking any longer about materials or objects, but forms of practice and how to change them.” As Marta Edling noted, this results in “the loss of the . . . manual production of a thing called art.” From this perspective, good old craft skill seems like an anachronistic friction , a difficulty or even an inconvenience that artists face in trying to realize their ideas. At best it could be viewed as an anchor, in both a negative and positive sense: both a drag and a firm pivot. Yet I wonder if there might not be a way of conceiving skill in more active terms. Here Christopher Frayling’s discussion of the term “attitude” is a help. He comments that the work on socializing someone into her self-image as an artist could be an instance of attitude: the art school...