Popular air

The artisan movement has always lived longingly in the art world. For a long time, he has been like that distant cousin that you see from time to time without bonding much. Every time they have proposed to live with the artistic, the avant-garde has looked the other way. It even happened with the Bauhaus a century ago: a revolutionary act in that of looking at art and design with hardly any distances, which opened a gap through which the complexity of art that escapes definitions ran. A gap that was not large enough for a museum and a market always attentive to new airs. Some saw the artisan as the antithesis of the mechanical, which at that time had become the standard of the future. An old-fashioned job to which was added the tinge of the domestic and the feminine, which was always in the media gloom.

With the #MeToo behind the ear of the museum and the vindication of the crafts among the younger generation of artists, the craft embraces a renewed status in the art world. In recent years, it has gone from being a piece of poor fit to an escape route. Few fields are more valued, even beyond the artistic. It is the perfect business. The new luxury. And there are whys. In a moment of collective unrest, manual labor provides a firm anchor. It is thorough, regular and accurate. It gives us something to believe in. The complicated turned into possibility. A familiar mental field and a slow, conscious and genuine time away from the usual anxiety of contemporary life.

Trades are the new luxury. A thorough, genuine, regular and precise work that gives us something to believe in

First was ceramics, which in recent years has captured exhibitions, fairs and auction records. Although, in parallel to the clay, the fabric has gone, that countercultural world that today is synonymous with the ultramodern. The future seems to run through there, by a revaluation of the entredós, by a return to the multidisciplinary and by a non-alienating coexistence between increasingly hybrid formats where the value of tradition coexists without complexes with fickle times. Artists like Esther Merinero (1994) fit that idea perfectly. Art as a fossil, that image with which to question what kind of objects will be the mark of tomorrow. We saw it a few days ago at Aragon Park , an exhibition of 20 artists in a dilapidated building on the outskirts of Madrid. Also in the exhibition Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc . at the Kunsthalle in Basel, by the curator and artist Nick Mauss (1980). For those who know the New York scene, they will know that it is one of the heads that leads an entire generation, a tint that carries over to this show, which is still a celebration of the encounter with the other. Here the most special is Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014), a kind of dishonest seamstress who left a post-minimalist work of hoops, gathers and colored stripes that for years slipped from the story of history. Who knows if it was the weight of being Vito Acconci's wife. Narrative that will also update the Chert Lüdde gallery in Berlin, which will dedicate its first solo show in Europe to her in September.

'Shield III' (1967), by Lenore Tawney at the Whitney Museum in New York. lenore G., tawney foundation

There are names like those of Rosemarie Trockel, Eva Hesse, Ernesto Neto, Mike Kelley or Grayson Perry that circulate with a certain fluidity through the popular imagination, although many others run to achieve that meteoric race. This is the case of Françoise Grossen (1943), a textile artist known for her braided rope sculptures that Hauser & Wirth put back into circulation in 2017. Sheila Hicks (1934) finally entered the Pompidou in Paris in 2018, while Anni Albers ( 1899-1994) did so at the Tate in London, an art center that now looks at the work of another historical: Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), with an exhibition pending a new date. The heroic story of Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is a separate chapter: after living the confinement of a labor camp for immigrants, she traveled to Mexico to learn basket weaving with her six children and a lupus. Her dream was to be an artist, although the art world always called her an “artisan”, something that the David Zwirner gallery changed three years ago and even Google celebrated with a Doodle.

Asawa is now one of the great claims of the Making Knowing: Crafts in Art, 1950-2019 exhibition at the Whitney in New York. The entire floor that this museum dedicates to crafts is too small for such a great history, and even the exhibition makes waters in its attempt to rewrite this chapter of the revaluation of the considered low culture for years. Despite this, it opens the spotlight on the work of Lenore Tawney (1907-2007), one of the artists who revolutionized weaving in relation to sculpture. Same as Lee Bontecou (1931) with engraving. Another profile to rescue. Attentive to her plastic sculptures with shapes of fish, plants and flowers from the seventies and how they connect with the current ecological collapse and the imminent end of fossil fuels. It will be a matter of time to see her at the best biennials and fairs.

'Truth' (2018), by Josep Maynou.

In the hands of the new generation of artists, crafts are filled with filters and the fusion between formats dislocates any type of chronological logic, as when in June it always seems to be Thursday. Here are the vases by Milena Muzquiz (1927): an exercise in subjective scrutiny where the disorganized accumulation of elements seeks to imitate the contradictory function of the human mind. The importance of crafts as a cultural identity in today's global world is analyzed in the Arts & Crafts exhibition by artists such as Jorge Pardo (1963), Azra Aksamija (1976) or Olaf Holzapfel (1969), one of the most celebrated artists of the Last Documenta of Kassel. The works of the Mexican Pia Camil (1980), which currently hangs in the Clark Art Institute, speak of the decomposition of the Mexican urban landscape and a pressing critique of consumerism. Her textiles are always on the edge of ripping to question the fragility of what sustains us and what holds us together. A terrain that Josep Maynou (1980) also travels every time he combines performance, textiles, drawing and installations, combining popular consumer objects, teen, skater, African, festive, Yankee and folk. A fascinating bobbin lace.

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019. Whitney Museum of Art. New York. Until the end of 2020.

Pia Camil: See it revealed. Clark Art Institute. Williamstown. U.S. Until February 3, 2021.

Arts & Crafts. Between Tradition, Discourse and Technologies. Kestner Gesellschaft. Hannover. From October 2 to January 10, 2021.