The Artist Craftsman

BY MARIKA JOSPEHSON

“Artists” in Plato’s world existed before a concept of “Art” developed as we understand it today. He speaks largely of poetry and painting as opposed to art (even though painting is something we associate inextricably with art now). If craftsmen were one step removed from Truth, painters were another step removed completely. A painting of a chair for Plato wasn’t good for any practical end; it was a copy of a real chair, which was a copy of an ideal chair. Painters were a kind of abstraction from Truth.

Now, a bad painter certainly is that. Think simply of the paintings of alleyways in France and Italy reproduced for art supply stores with a minimal amount of work and competence. But Plato means paintings that are even more skilled (a portraitist who can reconstruct the precise contours of a human face, for instance); for him, even these painters are not doing anything that will bring us closer to Truth. If painting—and to extrapolate a little, if art—is simply a mirror of the world it won’t teach us anything about the world. “The imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates,” writes Plato in Socrates’s voice.

As the West progressed into a Christian (and then post-Christian) world with painting tied to religious experience, and then to everyday experience, and then into an exploration of an abstract inner landscape, and beyond, the purpose of painting, and art more generally, took on many new guises that Plato could not have imagined. The spiritual frescoes of Giotto, the dramatic Biblical Renaissance scenes of Caravaggio, the impressionistic landscapes of Monet, and the color fields of Rothko—these pieces of art could never accurately be described as mere copycat paintings. Indeed, they each in their own way attempt to draw us into an active reflection and dialogue about our experience in the world. They do precisely the kind of work that Plato would have made the highest ideal of the Philosopher Kings: they attempt to communicate a deeper truth about our everyday experience.

So, there are certain painters who create something that communicates an essential truth about the world. I call this art, in contrast to Plato’s imitative kind—art as we know it today. The kind of art that we travel thousands of miles to see (to Venice, say, every other year), to commune with an expression that helps us understand something profound about our existence. If a craftsman is to become an artist, then, he or she should create something that can accomplish the same end. If he can do this, even a lowly chair maker can be a powerful communicator of truths within our everyday experience.

Enter Gustav Stickley. “Art,” wrote Stickley in the first edition of The Craftsman, his journal on the art and craft of furniture making, “will be regarded not as something apart from common and every-day existence, but rather as the very means of realizing life.” Stickley’s emphasis on using wood, rather than industrial materials like plastics, refocused our attention on the simple beauty of sitting in a chair made of original organic materials, with all of their natural colors, shapes, and contours. His craft—his art—revealed a deep-seeded connection between ourselves and the natural world with which we commune (the form of furniture and the contours of our body; our magnetism toward trees), using an object that is deeply enmeshed in our daily experience.



Likewise, we would be remiss in not calling René Redzepi of Noma an artist-craftsman whose culinary masterpieces (transitory, perhaps, like the work of Andy Goldsworthy), have transformed the way we think about food—of food being connected to a place—especially for Danes who inhabit the world of his ingredients. Though his materials are not typical of art as we have known it, he puts them together in new ways to express something distinct about a place, to help us realize something new about our world.

I would also hesitate to call what he does “cooking,” and perhaps this is what is missing in Baratta’s offhand answer to a relatively simplistic question. A master lasagna maker, though he may make the most perfect representation of classic lasagna, is perhaps what we might call the master crafts-man in Plato’s terms. He has recreated to the best of human ability this one (idea of a) dish—but what more does that dish tell us about the world? Perhaps nothing at all. And that is why he is not an artist but a master craftsman, a master cook. Redzepi, on the other hand, pushes the boundaries of a traditional craftsman; he creates something brand new, rather than a copy, in order to show us something new about the world. Something that communicates a deeper truth about our existence. He is a Philosopher King.

I would guess that the real art in Redzepi’s craft is in part that it has a Proustian effect, and this may in fact be the peculiar power of food as an art. I watch in fascination as people—especially locals—drink beer we make at Scratch from plants that grow in our forest or that grow well in our climate. Their eyes glaze over for a moment, as layers of flavor and aroma unfold and expand. Some say they remember something their grandmother used to make, or something they haven’t had in fifty years. Others say they remember a walk in the woods—woods from which we gathered the ingredients to make a particular beer. A long-time light beer drinker, who was born and raised and still resides among the cornfields and soy beans of the lamentably typical southern Illinois landscape, now makes it a point to sample every new beer we have on tap. He came into our brewery several weeks ago and described a walk he had recently taken through the woods, describing the aroma of a native tree that blossoms in the early summer, how fruity and tropical it seemed to him. “I thought,” he said wide-eyed and intent, “you need to make that into a beer.’”

If we’ve captured the essence of the forest or the essence of a plant—something about the comfort it provides, or the profound connection we have with it in nature—I would say that we, too, lowly beer makers, are more than mere crafts-men. This is a peculiar art, and a rare one at that, an art that we might say was discovered by Stickley and one embodied only by craftsmen who transcend their craft: It is an art capable of communicating truths through the very means by which we realize life.

MARIKA JOSPEHSON is a co-founder of Scratch Brewery