ESSAY
The craft of looking by Steven ten Thije

When I sit down to write a text, it is almost a rule for my desk to be in total chaos (virtually without exception …– certainly that’s the case now. Amongst a chaotic mountain of books, letters, visiting cards, small change, pens, keys, sweets and a tangle of wires connecting all the computer equipment together, there is just enough room for a keyboard and my two hands which start to type in a slightly cramped fashion. However, it also seems to be a rule that during the process of writing, the chaos is reduced in an almost magical way, the books find their way back into the right place in the cupboard, the papers disappear into files or the wastepaper basket and all the small bits and pieces are returned to drawers or become neatly arranged on a by now almost empty desk. It has become clear to me that this physical process in which material things arrange themselves takes place in parallel with the arrangement of ideas in a text. However, recently I have also started to feel that this applies to more than my desk. Is it possible that this domestic dance between me and my things contains a trace of a more general dialogue taking place between a person and a thing during the writing process, and perhaps even more generally during the creative process? And could it be that it is precisely this dialogue which plays a central role in creating and looking at art?

These are questions which are certainly worth asking in our age. For decades, it has seemed as though our world is becoming increasingly immaterial. The arrival of the PC and then the laptop and now the tablet and the smartphone allows for an ever further- reaching colonization of everyday life by the internet, and supervises the transformation from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. We are no longer under the spell of objects, but of information; our economy does not run on things, but on experiences. This development also seems inevitable in the arts and is self-evident as a cliché. Art no longer (only) consists of beautifully designed objects, but of concepts. The work of art is not a thing, but an experience. This development is almost a century old and goes back to the proto-conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who elevated an ordinary urinal to a work of art in 1917 by dating it and signing it “R. Mutt” (a phonetic pun on the German word Armut). This first “readymade”, as Duchamp called it, can be seen as the symbolic first stone which was used to smash the windows of the sacred house of the artist as a craftsmen – as a competent manufacturer of things. After Duchamp, artists were no longer makers, but thinkers, apparently far removed from the thing.

Nevertheless, in recent times there have again been signs indicating a return of “the thing”. Possibly not (only) in the form of a romantic “back to nature”, but rather in the form of new “dialogue” with the thing. The development took place in two areas and with people like the philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek who drew attention to what things “do”, and what they tell us. In addition there are people like the cultural sociologist Richard Sennet, who recently made some strong arguments for the restoration of craftsmanship and particularly focused on the role of people in the wordless “dialogue” between man and materials which takes place during the creative process. Both of them open up an interesting perspective on the situation today, which also helps to achieve a new relationship with this increasingly immaterial art.

Let us reflect on this briefly, starting with Peter-Paul Verbeek. In addition to a long series of articles, he has also already written five books in which he is concerned in every case with our relationship with technology and design. I can’t remember very clearly how I came across him, but one of his books found its way onto my overcrowded desk and was a silent witness to this “discovery”. In this first book, “De Daadkracht der Dingen” (What Things Do), he describes the western tradition of thinking about technology, particularly in the work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. In his analysis Verbeek tries to show how this tradition is inadequate for us to grasp the complex and unpredictable impact which things have on our lives. He states that these thinkers tend to totalise the attitude which is needed to design something – in order to make an instrument. For example, Heidegger describes how modern technology tempts people to view the whole world as “raw materials” which can be processed. In one of his examples, a dam changes our view of running water, which is now no longer confined in a river, but has become potential electricity which can be harvested. Verbeek does not completely disagree with Heidegger but agues that this perspective is only half of the story and that these thinkers run the risk of forgetting what things really do. The things which surround us are not only passive projection screens for our own ideas but also actively change our reality themselves in an unexpected way. He gives the example of the microwave, which was in the first instance intended to accelerate the cooking process, but had the unintended side effect of changing the whole eating pattern of families because everyone can now eat when they want to. The machine which was created in order to gain a bit of time has unexpectedly achieved a change in patterns of social behaviour. In Verbeek’s opinion this effect is not the exception, but the rule. Ignoring this effect of things means that we constantly fall into the same trap by thinking that we have total power over things so that we get a shock every time that things do more (or less) than we expect them to.
In his argument for craftsmanship, the cultural sociologist Richard Sennet confirms this analysis, but places the emphasis on the role of the person while he is making something. Sennet wishes to show that much more happens during the physical exchange between man and matter than mere passive design based on a preconceived plan. In this way, Sennet contrasts craft with theory. To this end he refers to the etymological relationship between “theoria” and “theatron”, which literally means “a place for seeing”. A theoretician is someone who understands something by looking at it, but not by doing it, like someone who goes to the theatre, while the craftsman actually learns to understand (and innovate) by doing things. New forms and customs emerge as a result of small, practical adaptations in the creative process. This does not mean that there is no reflection (or theory of “looking at”) during the creative process, but that it is part of an organic process in which acting and thinking alternate in a rhythmic way.That rhythm ensures a better balance between the person and the thing, and according to Sennet this balance is under threat in our increasingly virtual world. It is a balance which also has an ethnic component, because cohabitation requires both the practice – a craft – as well as a theory.

These two perspectives require renewed attention for the complex and wordless dialogue which constantly takes place between the person and the thing. As it becomes ever more conceptual, art seems to have forgotten this dialogue, but this is just an illusion. Art may have left behind the fetish-like adulation of the thing, but not because the thing no longer has anything to say. As for Sennet and Verbeek, dialogue has a central place in the practice of contemporary art, and this means devoting attention to both sides of the coin– reflection and experience. It should be added that looking is itself more complex than was suggested above. It is not merely passive, but has an active element – something you have to do. The craft of looking means “listening” to your eyes while they conjure up concepts from the visible world – what you can see. For the viewer this appears to mean that you have to work harder than in the past, when it was still possible to surrender to the (passive) admiration for the “master”; nowadays the viewer is invited to participate in a dialogue in which he must be active himself in order to hear what things are saying. It may sound strange, but it means that it is precisely this “conceptual” art that turns the museum from a theoretical place “to look at things” into a place where you have to “do” something.

PS. I’m rather disappointed to find that when I looked away from my screen, my desk was hardly tidied up at all. Is this the exception that proves the rule? Perhaps. But yesterday I suddenly found myself in the garden building a wall, something I had been postponing for months. And so you see, the dialogue between the person and the thing remains unpredictable, precisely when you are expecting it.

Steven ten Thije is a research curator at the Van Abbemuseum and an academic employee affiliated to Hildesheim University.


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