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hand and the value of know-how. Like Enzo Cucchi, who had ceramic tongues pop out of his paintings, or gave them ceramic frames, before going on to producing sculptures in the same material, often in the shape of a vase, aided mainly by craftsmen in Castelli (Abruzzo) but also in Vietri (Campania), where he created, with Ettore Sottsass, one of his famous works. However, to validate the initial premise, it should be noted that even Cucchi did not dirty his hands with clay, since his works were physically made by the artisans. So in terms of the practical creative process, there does not appear to be much difference between a neon by Fontana or Kosuth and a sculpture by Cucchi. Needless to say, when we see an artwork made in neon words we do not immediately associate it with the work of an artisan. But we do when we see a ceramic vase or a sculpture in wood. We should also ask ourselves why we are not inclined to associate craftsmanship with a marble sculpture: could it be the noble nature of the material? In any case, a transition took place between the 1970s and the 1980s, and at the end of the decade artists were no longer ashamed to extol the qualities of craftsmanship. Of which, on the contrary, they demonstrated to be proud both in their statements and in their work. The Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti anticipated this process in the arts when, back in the early 1970s, he began to create his works with tapestry and Afghan carpet weavers. He celebrated artisanship, which is why, in this age of neo-craftsmanship, many artists see Boetti as a point of reference. Luigi Ontani, another example in this tradition, employed Indian artisans for some of his photography works and Ceramica Gatti for his mostly life-size sculptures, which depict himself in different and amusing roles. Many other artists are following in the same steps. Celebrity artist Jeff Koons, for example, is known for his ceramic artworks and his wooden sculp-
tures, which are in fact made by the craftsmen of Val Gardena, whom Koons outsourced the erotic sculptures of himself with Ilona Staller-Cicciolina as well as animal and flower sculptures; nor did he disdain marble cats carved by the artisans of Carrara, dog-shaped porcelain vases and Kamasutra glass sculptures. These and many other artists draw heavily on craft knowledge, Italian in particular, of which our peninsula abounds in its numerous artisan districts with elevated quality and productive output. And, as mentioned earlier, this trend is not limited to traditional crafts like pottery and woodwork, but it embraces also modern crafts, including neon working, mannequin sculpting by film industry artisans and animal embalming for Cattelan’s taxidermy artworks - all of which were made in Italy. Some artists push themselves as far as the Orient: Ontani went to Bali to let Balinese artisans carve his visionary pule wood masks, and Belgian artist Wim Delvoye travelled to Thailand to have his full-size Cement Truck, bulldozers and excavators baroquely sculpted by Thai craftsmen. Yet in recent years the most monumental work is perhaps Sunflower Seeds by the controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, made and decorated by hand, were spread to form a 10-centimetre carpet weighing 150 tonnes over the vast floor of the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern in 2010. At the end of the exhibition, the gallery bought eight million seeds for its collection. This mammoth project involved 1,600 craftsmen from Jingdezhen, an area renowned for porcelain crafts, in the creation of an installation consisting of 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds to represent the 100 million victims of the Mao era: a work that expresses 100 million common threads between Artisanship and Art.
This page, Wood in the city ceramic made in Castelli by Benito Melchiorre for the exhibition curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Civitella del Tronto, 2014. Opposite page, Ugo La Pietra’s original sketch.
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