Object Subject with Ian Beckett

By Ian Beckett

Part of my work at the IMRC is as a lab technician, where I provide resources and information to those looking to use the equipment IMRC has available. I am also a graduate student in the Intermedia Masters of Fine Arts program.

The IMRC is a place where technical skills collaborate with artistic production. Part of artistic production stems from theories and ideas that an artist has. They consider the ideas and then move forward to produce art reflecting this idea. The artist then produces what they see or feel using tools and materials. Craft or skills has a complicated relationship with art. Without some ability, i.e., craft, the artist can be held back from producing what becomes the art. This, however, is seen as a way to relegate craft to a secondary or lower position in relation to art. I believe this to be incorrect and unhelpful. The conversation about what is or is not art is complicated. Art is transcendent as art helps us reach a place beyond measurement, or art allows us to find the very measure of ourselves and our universe. These declarations are useful, important, boring, and irrelevant. Creative production has concrete and abstract relationships with art and craft that move, respond, react, and reflect in confusing and illuminating ways. The joy of craft and art and the relationship between the two or of the two or the difference or sameness of the two’s definitions make art, craft, skill, creativity, and expression invigorating, satisfying, concerning, and reassuring. Creative production is a process that humans undertake to express their freedom, and with that freedom comes responsibility. The universal and particular of our shared and individual experiences are made more coherent and interesting by the messy, beautiful, ordered, and ugly processes of creative endeavor. Understanding that understanding may be complicated, aspects of understanding may be limited. That experience in itself is an aspect of art, and examining the practical and the poetic and the relationship they share and the differences they represent is part of a communication that creative expression provides.