Raoul Goldini

On the World Crafts Council 6 held in Mexico 1976

1976 Raoul Goldini:

..."First of all, I think that many mistakes, wanderings and dead ends, many failures, flamboyant excesses and banal servility to market demands could be avoided if the old truth were repected [sic] regarding relations between craftsmanship and the artistic work of art.

Naturally, craftsmanship does not always have to result in artistic products--such ambitions to produce art at any cost have even made some handicraft products ridiculous. But it is also true that every art contains in itself a craft component and the knowledge of this craft is the 'conditio sine qua non' in art. Therefore, without recognition of work in the creation, and without recognition of the tradition of shaping, the creation is in a vacuum of mere ephmerality; it does not and it cannot become that part of the artistic tradition which surpasses the dubious popularity of the moment and which endures beyond its time as part of the spiritual inheritance of the human conception of the world. In that sense, it is indespensible to reaffirm craftsmanship, and the profession if you wish, because it is the only way to overcome and conquer both the craft and mere professionalism of the profession...

...many fashionable and mainly snobbish contemporary producers think that their contemporaneity and revolutionarism are most clearly manifested in the complete denial of any tradition, and therefore they 'rebelliously' refuse any 'old-fashioned' form and even the conception of art itself which is, ostensibly, connected to a former vanished world which was petrified while insisting on the traditional demands of a world long dead. However, the esssential mistake of these 'innovators' is in their inability to see that the tradition cannot be overcome by being belowabove its universal and artistic horizon.

...one can become a part of the tradition only when one has overcome it and not while living in its shadow. One becomes a part of the tradition while creating something new. But this--if it wants to be really and not only apparently new--has to be new in relation to something that already existed in the tradition, it has to start from the objectives achieved in order to surpass them.

This ability to surpass, this longing for the new and the unknown is not an unimportant matter... This is the essential longing to which the whole talent and the whole personality of the artist are directed, all the riches of his enthusiasm.

...The relationship with the artistic tradition is the relationship corresponding to the creativity which has always been in its essence the denial of mere living and existence, which was 'a slap in the face of existence' (Camus), even when it seemed only a realistic reflection and image of this world. Therefore, the positive relationship with tradition (which at the same time means the possibility of a serious surpassing of tradition) is the genuine and not verbal revolutionary relationship with the existing world which only art will make suitable for man to find the reason for his existence in it." (31, 32)

Goldini, R. in Glass volume 5 number 3, "World Craft Council, report on the glass workshop", April 1977, published in Portland, OR.