Response to Betsy Peterson on Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change
Raul Manzano
Raul Manzano
Folk Arts, Low or High Art?
In her article “Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change” Betsy Peterson brings to the surface popular culture expressed through folk arts, a discipline that is undermined and undervalued by the art establishment and relegated or categorized as a low art form. Like other art forms in the seventies and eighties craft work and photography did not have status of a fine art discipline. Only through avocation, protest, and demand, these artistic expressions were elevated to high art status. Photography has existed for more than a hundred years before the art establishment accepted it. Likewise, craft art was not considered an art form. The Feminism movement of the seventies led by artists like Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and Lippard utilized what was considered women’s work i.e. crochet, embroidery, china painting, pottery and porcelain to create their art. These craft practices were considered functional works and not works of art or one-of-a-kind objects. Women also utilized their bodies as a way to express themselves, claiming that female emotions and feelings are different than men. “In asserting the relevance of the personal in art, feminists contributed considerably to the death of modernism and to the birth of postmodernism” (Sandler 115) raising their voice, establishing dialog and more importantly gaining recognition. Similarly, “[f]olk and traditional arts can also create a space for dialogue that enables full and authentic engagement with others” (Peterson 1). In this regard, Peterson refers to the communal space as places where people gather to express concerns about their community and other related issues including local entertainment in the form of popular dance and or community traditions known as folk arts. It is here at these gathering places that Peterson asserts the importance and value of popular culture for social change, where people bring grassroots issues that relate to their own community. Unfortunately, says Peterson (paraphrasing here) “community arts and folk arts do not engage in critical dialog” (8) to be taken seriously. While efforts have been made to bring awareness and public support for folk arts and other social issues, there is more ground still to be gained. Nevertheless, Peterson is hopeful that change will come, “the folk arts remind us that is the little things, the cultural particulars, the specificity of adaptive response, that can enable a fully realized sense of cultural citizenship” (14). Just like “in 1972 Chicago, Schapiro , twenty-one women students from the program […] embarked on an ambitious communal effort called Womanhouse….[it] became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away” (Sandler 118). Folk arts will have its day too and the recognition it deserves.
Works Cited:
Peterson, Betsy. “Folk and Traditional Arts and Social Change.” A working Guide to the Landscape of Arts for Change. http://animatingdemocracy.org/webfm_send/39.
Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s. Colorado: Westview Press. 1998. Print.
Yes the drive to give folk art a seat at the table is an important one as it allows more voices, perspectives, and experiences to inform protest--in many ways we privilege who can protest and who can be taken seriously by dismissing the means in which they do it. So appreciating folk art shines light on the need for equality even within the protest/activist arena.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate Raul’s discussion of the way in which folk art has gained a claim to the status of “high” art, though I can’t help but notice that his example of Judy Chicago is an example of a white woman whose work has been largely within the formal “Art World”—though she and other white and non-white feminist artists certainly challenged the norms of that world and reinvented its spaces, as in Womanhouse. (Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film ! Women Art Revolution really does a great job of capturing this, but still – is Womanhouse that different in kind than, say, the Guggenheim?) It seems that folk art becomes high art when it is brought into those spaces of wealth and privilege wherein art, no matter how political in content, is cordoned off from every day life.
ReplyDeleteWhenever the high/low art distinction comes up, I always think of philosopher Ted Cohen’s work on the subject—a number of articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in the early 90s. Cohen’s take eventually comes down to this: if a person calls something “high” art, they mean that it speaks to something that person feels is essential to the human experience, whereas “low” art is something that you do not feel should necessarily elicit the same response from others. So, there’s a kind of problem here about folk art not being “fully human” until it is accepted by dominant groups. . .I think we still wait for those who claim aesthetic expertize—museum curators, art professors, established artists—to name something as art, which means that we miss the art all around us and continue to divorce it from everyday life. We see forms like the pow-wows discussed in The Anguish of Snails through a “cultural” lens rather than an aesthetic one and see forms like the formal portrait through aesthetic lenses (that is, following Cohen, lenses that assume a universal response) rather than through the cultural lens that might highlight the social function as a status symbol that such works serve.
What this separation misses—but that folk art itself doesn’t—is the role of aesthetic practices in defining and/or changing cultures. Values are transmitted – as when the redistribution of prize money in the pow-wow embodies “Indian attitudes about competition and selfishness” (97). To me, being recognized as “high” art connotation of being fixed—perhaps as Cohen says, feeling universal, but also of lacking life. I think the work of protest is much more likely to happen in those places where the label of "art" has not yet been won.