RosettaStone: CRAFT A primary, secondary, and annotated source reader for functional craft. By: Randi O'Brien

This is an annotated evaluation of the following:
Craft and Art, Culture and Biology. by Bruce Metcalf

Bruce Metcalf, “Craft and Art, Culture and Biology” in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, ed. Peter Dormer, 67 -82 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997)
Reviewed by Randi O’Brien
It takes immense dedication to effectively balance the roles of maker and writer. Bruce Metcalf is certainly a key model when looking to artists who are able to clearly articulate significant meaning and understanding in their field as well as retain the integrity of making. Craft and Art, Culture and Biology is one of a hundred plus articles written throughout Metcalf’s career, published in 1997 this is a mid-career article.

Metcalf clearly and articulately navigates through the mine field of the art versus craft continuum. Withinin Metcalf’s article his primary objective is to address the ineffective standards for comparison of art versus craft, through the different biological and social context in which craft and art are rooted. He engages this argument through two secondary points of view that promote larger understanding of the theoretical and historical context of craft. Metcalf opens with the first of his two standpoints by addressing the importance of craft retaining its materiality regardless of the philosophical tendencies of art. Craft as a class of objects needs specific characteristics and limitations: handwork, traditional craft materials (post industry), and context. While Metcalf argues that it is necessary for craft to address these characteristics, he also emphasizes the “elastic quality” of these terms. Although Metcalf uses the word limitation as a synonym of craft, he smoothes the water through an evaluation of dematerialization in post modernism. Concluding that craft limits are not negative in effect, yet the limits of material, technique, and context that post modern art lack is the supporting and defining structure of the craft world.

Metcalf further addresses the ineffective standards for comparison of art versus craft, through different biological means of hierarchies established in the art and craft worlds. Metcalf addresses intellectual thinking as a primary faculty of post modern art, and further questions the legitimacy of placing biological intelligences in hierarchies, for example bodily intelligence versus linguistic intelligence, or mathematical intelligence. The basis for Metcalf questioning is founded in the research of Howard Gardner, who places biological intelligence not in hierarchies, rather in separate divisions. Gardner’s research revises “the standard hierarchies of mind over body”, and suggests “that there is no biological basis for placing the various human intelligences in a hierarchy”. Metcalf concludes; through various reference to neurobiologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, that craft cannot be compared to an art world that places its values in verbal and logical cogitative abilities” because craft is a universal human nature that uses bodily intelligence equally to logical intelligence. To fully understand the capacity of craft one must evaluate craft through bodily intelligences as well as logical inteligences.

Metcalf’s main arguments are clear and convincing, and through his use of outside sources he develops an argument that contributes to methodological and theoretical debates in both the art and craft realms. This article is a valuable perspective of the difficulties between art and craft comparison.