The artistic quality of the crafts began to be questioned, as the collision of estheticism and practicality surfaced following the emphasis on the strong will of establishing oneself as the thinking subject and on the originality of thinking which was...
The artistic quality of the crafts began to be questioned, as the collision of estheticism and practicality surfaced following the emphasis on the strong will of establishing oneself as the thinking subject and on the originality of thinking which was a product of rationalism in modern times. The fine arts recognizes its aesthetic quality and practicality as two separate qualities. The critical minds of the modern aesthetics recognized only the pure thinking activity as art, and destroyed the wall separating the artists and those who appreciate their works of art, so that the creation and impression became the same aesthetic experience to them. For this reason creative experience, the artist's unique experience of creation was largely neglected. Also such a position in which 'hands' and machine were equally treated posed an obstacle to the skill development of the crafts.
Crafts involves a laborious work by hand and offers an opportunity to create things through a process of fingering and fabricating the materials. The dichotomy based on the notion that crafts is a physical activity rather than a mental activity, and therefore is not pure, is something we should avoid to understand the true nature of crafts. It can also not be a proper understanding of the crafts, if it is seen as a mixture of physical and mental activities and for this reason, 'it is art, though it is not absolutely pure'. This is because any notion recognizing the separation of spirit and matter will fundamentally narrow and distort the sphere of crafts.
Crafts concerns itself with a bodily activity originating from the body which is seen as a combination of spirit and matter, in which case the body is an original cognitive organ of the embodied consciousness. The act of creation is performed in a state in which those systemized concepts based on a process of conscious thinking are not yet formed. It is an act of opening a new world leading to an activity of perception, understanding and mastery of those concepts of which linguistic conceptualization is not yet made.
The artistic quality of crafts lies in the process of materializing such perception by means of production by hand. For this reason skillful hands are required to gain a creative experience. Repetitive training may enable the emancipation of self, attaining a state of completely being unconscious of one's self and creating a new world in which all the object are unified as the principal body of creation. And that is the new birth for the artist and the work as well. crafts reveals the truth, that is the birth of a new meaning, such an original technique, and we may call it the materialization of art.
The skill of crafts is a product of numerous anonymous craftsmen accumulated skills. It is atypical skills that coexist, are shared and handed down. Also It is common skills that form a part of our daily life and are established in the course of our lives. The body is unable to form a conscious judgement nor forecast nor determine the object with certainty. It is therefore imperfect, unfinished, and progressively changing. For this reason the way the body recognizes the world can be to ‘live' by body.
The skill of crafts is formed in "le schema corporel", in which the perceptual experience, that is, the cognition process of the body, is accumulated. le schema corporel is a structure of the body formed by leading the unification of the object and the surroundings because of the body's being characteristically incomplete. Being skillful in production and the dexterity in using the tools may mean that production le schema corporel has been established, and the body may undergo a creative experience by way of le schema corporel. le schema corporel acts as a restriction imposed by the body that has duplicity, utilizing its own duplicity, and the body can be liberated from its own duplicity by being subject to such duplicity. So le schema corporel can be like discomfort that one needs in order to get freedom. It is 'not being conscious' in order to be genuinely conscious and 'giving up self' in order to meet the truly pure self. For this reason, gaining an experience of creating a work of art without restrictions in crafts requires the le schema corporel of production, that is, production skills.
The creation in crafts becomes practicable by a medium of the body which possesses an attribute of both the principal body and the object and which is a mixture of matter and thinking. The body's quality of being a medium can be a place of original experience where a new meaning is created by putting together the contradictoriness of all the duplicity and double-sidedness. Since the incomplete nature of the body and its quality of being a medium leads to creative activity in crafts, one must gain productin le schema corporel which can be turned into a medium along with the tools, and make it to serve as a chance for creative activity. The artistic quality of the crafts absolutely depends on the production skills the creative power of the skillful hand.