COMMENTARY

Art/Craft
High/Low

BY ANN MacGILLIVRAY

Is it art? The enduring question has been asked since the Renaissance, when, explains Parker and Pollack in their book Old Mistresses, high art began to take place in the academies and decorative art was relegated to craft workshops. The academies eventually banned women from learning in their patriarchal halls claiming they could not be exposed to nude models; but as history has shown the truth was a much more complex matter.

The divorce between the creative forms of art and craft became complete in the mid-nineteenth century and thus was established the hierarchy in the arts. This division endured with few exceptions until recent times; only the last two decades have seen some breakdown of the structure. As the history of women artists is recorded, reasons for the art/craft division have come to light in such books as Lucy

Lippard's From the Centre and Get the Message, and Hess/Bakers' Art and Sexual Politics. The result of these studies and the evolution from the patriarchal titled "modernist" to the "post-modernist" period has brought change. The once insignificant has become significant and slowly the art/craft quandary is recognized as a matter of culture. Feminism has exposed the prejudiced historical concept that one form of creativity is less valuable than another.

Women artists recognize the importance of craft that has been relegated to the decorative and domestic. Their art has slowly been raised from the floor to the walls, taken from the home/ studio and placed alongside "high" art in the gallery context. As with other issues under patriarchal constraint, the change is taking years to achieve. We are fighting battles in all arenas that still discriminate against women and their art: gallery and museum spaces, art colleges, grant agencies and in the public domain.

This discrimination lends itself well to continued division by the capitalists. Mass production of crafts by Third World artisans, mostly women in the textile trade, is only one example of discrimination for imperialistic profits. High art at high prices is still the code entrenched by a large number of male executors and consumers. The calculated promotion of ethnic values and goods encourages a desire for the more intriguing "high" art and incites a fantasy that can be satisfied with affordable "decorative" art products.

The inherent contradiction of the affordable and available ethnic crafts is a matter of economic hierarchy. Eskimo carvings and African artifacts are examples. When a creative product is manipulated by the entrepreneur to be "original" (i.e. controlled quantity), the price is raised and the product then enters the high art forum of gallery or museum. Culture determines artwork's place and, as in the original dilemma, the patriarchy excludes/ includes whatever/whomever it desires.

The importance of the art created by women, while having been excluded from the "higher institutions" is presently being acknowledged. An example is the recent research and writings that have brought rich sources of needlework to the forefront and given them overdue recognition. Articles of decor and ritual now in museums are breaking the boundaries once imposed on them and the post-modern discourse, recognizing interrelationship of art and craft, has discarded many of the distinctions made by its predecessor, the modernist movement.

As a woman artist who began twenty years ago as a weaver of functional articles and who continues to use textiles in my work, it occurs to me now to question the value of being allowed to play with the "big boys". As Lucy Lippard states, "Some women, however, have realized how unsatisfying success can be in an alien world with an alien value structure."

Ann MaCllivray was a production weaver in Nova Scotia before going back to school. Much of her art centers on feminist and political concerns in Central America where she spends much of her time. She has just completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at York University