"GOING BEYOND FANTASY"

Art has no clear-cut borders and the definitions given for art are not consistent with one another, and therefore it is liable for debate. In this situation, could we consider ‘handicrafts’ as a branch of art, with an aesthetic position? Since handicrafts possess a comprehensive and dynamic nature, could they be regarded as ‘art’, per se?

We might even embark on the assumption that handicrafts are neither art nor craft or industry, but resting on the borderline of the two, due to their functional property, and thus establishing a bilateral interaction between art and craft. There is a strange paradox in the essence of handicrafts. On one hand, emphasis is laid upon the necessity that an object crafted by hand should be something that can be used in daily life, and hence this utilitarian aspect leads it toward technicality and enjoyment of industrial characteristic. On the other hand, underscoring the fact that there should be a mere aesthetic aspect for crafts and they are to be conceptual actually transforms them into an art. Negative attitude and judgment about handicrafts, so to give them an inferior position compared to art, are to a great extent related to their utilitarian aspect and application in daily life of mankind in a certain era of history. Sabrina Gschwandtner mentioned the fact that the strongest point of craft is simultaneously its weakest point, and it can be utilitarian in a way that a painting can never be. Though it seems that the nature of crafts has transformed and experienced changes after the industrial revolution, the artists and art critics still consider an inferior state for them, out of the domain of art. This treatment is only because of the utilitarian application of crafts and the method of their production.We should therefore ask if the functional attribute of a certain object contradicts its being regarded an art. In other words, is an object of handicrafts empty of any artistic aspect and should be placed among industrial objects, only because of its potential for production? If it is so, then how did Duchamp place a readymade industrially made object in the same context used for exhibiting artistic works, without even making the least alteration in it, and hence turning that product into an object of art? Similarly, the other way around, there are artists who have merged certain components that are found in the domain of handicrafts into their works, and the final products made by them are considered art works.

Therefore, another question arises and becomes inevitable. In case an art work is put in an industrial context, would it be changed into an industrial product? Today, many art works are likewise produced in a large scale. However, their quality of being produced does not make them industrial products, nor are they objects of craft. Is it the kind of production process which makes a product an art work and the other a craft? What is eventually a craft and how should it be?

As far as the form is concerned, there is a void in each and every system, plus some unresolved or ambiguous issues which nonetheless pave the way for this very same system to remain integrated. In the dialogue of art, the existence of handicrafts as objects of art is not accepted. Hence, crafts seem to be an unresolved case and a vacuum in art. Crafts are somehow ‘the real’ in the reality and symbolic sphere of art which could not take form. Abstract separation of handicrafts from their conservative and recessive traditional dialogue requires, in the first place, the making of a gap within this same dialogue. Therefore, above all, it is needed that crafts act against their own inferior state and deny their current position. For handicrafts to be considered as art, they should manifest themselves as a cleavage created within. In other words, it is not a case to be treated as external. It is, on the contrary and in essence, an inner dialectic: a separation and difference that occur inside the above mentioned dialogue. The distinction is to be made between the parts and components that have the tendency to become art and those that are prone to stay in the same resilient dialogue and are finally susceptible to become industrial.

In spite of all the questions that exist about the nature and essence of handicrafts, this exhibition seeks to take a radical look at the prevailing view to the crafts, so to make the borders between them and the fine art less obvious; the borders which were established as per the traditional definitions that are still found in our time. In this way, that is, by putting the utilitarian disposition of crafts aside, laying more stress on its aesthetic aspect and through adoption of conceptual thinking, we aim to render a different reading of what has so far been expected from handicrafts. With the importation of elements of indigenous art, constructed by sub-cultures in different periods of time and in various locations of Iran, along with a proper and conscious merging of same into an unfamiliar context and through a method of creation different from the traditional ones used for functional arts, the artists have ventured an aesthetically melancholic creation of their past cultural memories and recollections in a new context.