Heart Held
Hayes Raffle, 2003
Paper, "Folk Art" Acrylic
Heart Held combines
distortions of the kitsch and banal in a mockery of precious craft
methods. Raffle appropriates how-to lessons from Donna Dewberry’s Complete
Book of One-Stroke Painting in a grotesque interpretation of
everyday craft instruction. Raffle has painted a simple heart shaped
paper box
white and has blistered the paint with extreme heat to create a texture
both sensual and frightening, asking the viewer to question their
relationship to the banal. |
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The
opened box reveals a blatant reference to the two-tone recipe from
Dewberry’s “Basic Leaf” ridiculously applied as globs
of paint, rather than the prescribed gradient blend. While a quick
glance at the painting technique suggests a childlike crudeness, this
apparent innocence is belied by subtle cracks that cleave the spare
lines of color in the painted surfaces. A simple leaflet form of a
young sprout is mirrored in the top and bottom of the box. |
| These sprouts reference
both the nascence with which Raffle regards his source materials (and
possibly his art materials, as well), and points to a self-referential
tension between craft and art that is thematic of this work. Raffle has
indeed incorporated a certain craft in Heart Held, although it is not
the one that will be easily found in art store prescriptive books, nor
is it a style designed for the bourgeois mantelpiece. |
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Heart Held points
to works by both Koons and Gober in which everyday objects are appropriated
in a work of art and craft techniques are applied to reinterpret the
meaning of the object. While Koons recontextualizes craft and product
vis-à-vis art world celebrity, Gober internalizes the craft object
to claim ownership over the object and its environments. Like Gober’s
hand-crafted plumbing fixtures, Heart Held is a sincere appropriation
of the object through its physical reinterpretation. On another hand,
Heart Held intentionally mocks a kitsch culture of art-making and raises
questions of status and value in the arts. Craft is exposed here as a
tool for sarcasm. An amplified application of materials, processes and
techniques has lead to the destruction of the precious and resulted in
Raffle’s poingnant reinterpretation of the banal. |
