STORIES FROM THE ARTS 67
Separation of the arts
Art historian Larry Shiner (2001) points out that art as we
understand it in Western culture is a European invention, a part of
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, believed to be universal. The
separation of art from craft and aesthetic from utilitarian has become
institutionalized. Now, for example, in Chicago, objects of fine art,
things for aesthetic looking, generally reside in the Art Institute of
Chicago, while artifacts, objects of utilitarian or ritual use, reside in
the Field Museum of Natural History. Shiner calls for a reuniting of
art with craft and art with life. While there have been many efforts
to heal the bifurcation of art and craft, such as art movements of the
1960s, performance installations and land art, Shiner feels that we
remain in the eighteenth-century view of art. He calls for an older,
broader understanding of art that would include grace, imagination,
invention and skill, and would combine meaning and use.
Like Shiner, poet, educator, potter and philosopher, Mary
Caroline Richards (1973, 1989, 1996), emphasizes that handcraft
is not separate from the so-called fine arts. She says, “All the arts we
practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life” (1989, p.41). She
sees writing and all of the handcrafts as expressions of care, caring
that comes from our bodies and their sensations and also from the
heart and the spirit. The arts, including all of the handcrafts, are a
matter of awakening to the materials and to soul. Handcrafts, she
says, bear witness to the soul qualities that flow through the artist
and are manifested in the physical materials. Richards was a longtime
member of the faculty at Black Mountain College, the experimental
liberal arts college that existed from 1933 to 1956 in western North
Carolina. Today Black Mountain College is considered to be one
of the most innovative experiments in the history of education and
the arts. At Black Mountain College the arts were considered to be
central to the education of a whole person.
Contemporary art critic Suzi Gablick (1991) also looks at the
relationship of art and life. She questions the roots of the aesthetic
structures of a modernist, elitist view of art, especially the passive,