Tate Britain | Turner Prize History

Craft & Skill

Denigrators of contemporary art often criticise artists for producing work that they have not made themselves. Of course many contemporary artists do make their own work (examples from past Turner Prizes include Tracey Emin, Keith Tyson and Chris Ofili). The accusation also falsely implies a historical divide between the unskilled artists of today and the painstaking craftsmen of the past and suggests that technical skill is one of the predominant features of any art work. Let us examine these two assumptions.

1. The golden age when craftsmen made everything with their own hands. This utopia has never existed. In the so-called good old days of the past there were workshop assistants to help artists create their original works. Just as we are ignorant of the names of the technicians who cut Damien Hirst’s cow in half and encased it in formaldehyde (Turner Prize, 1993) so we know few of the names of the assistants of the great Italian artists of the Renaissance.

In England in the eighteenth century many hard pressed portraitists used drapery painters to paint the costumes of their sitters, restricting their own output to the concept as a whole and to painting the face and hands. This means that when you admire a great lady painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the greatest part of the paint surface may in fact have been applied by his assistants rather than by Reynolds himself. Similarly today a Bridget Riley is conceived by the artist but entirely painted by her assistants.

Just as it is not the case that all artists of the past made their work unaided so it is untrue that all of today’s artists deal only with concepts and do not hand make their work. Take this year’s Turner Prize: Grayson Perry makes his own pots and the Chapman brothers are widely admired for their technical skills.

2. Technical skill is a determining factor in creating a work of art. It is their creative idea which drives artists. They make an object to express that idea and use the materials and methods which will best express it. So when Damien Hirst wanted to talk about the way we separate notions of meat as food from that of cows as living creatures who live, give birth and die as we do, he came up with the idea of showing a cow and her calf sliced in half and preserved in formaldehyde (Mother and Child Divided 1993). It would have been ridiculous to be prevented from realising his concept by the fact that he was neither a butcher nor a chemist. It made sense for him to use those people’s skills to help him realise his idea. It was, however, essential that the technicians should be highly skilled and able to express his idea to perfection.

Some critics of artists who do not make their own work feel that these artists are missing out on the beauty they find, for instance, in the details of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape. Yet beauty is not restricted to hand made objects. One of the most beautiful art objects of recent years was Vong Phaophanit’s Neon Rice Field exhibited in the 1993 Turner Prize. There may have been little manual skill required to fill a room with rice, create furrows in it and place neon tubes on top. Yet the rice was memorable in its perfume which could be detected from afar and in its appearance which expressed a political message about the use of agent orange in Laos and Cambodia.

The artist’s skill and craft can contribute to a work of art; it is not always its most important feature.

Tate Britain