"Never Look a Gift Shoppe in the Mouth"
intones the inscription on one of Seattle artist Charles Krafft’s porcelain
collector plates. So, it should come as no surprise that the creator of delft
Disasterwaretm; took advantage of a gift -- in
the form of a grant jointly administered by the NEA, the Citizens Exchange Council,
and the Soros Foundation -- to travel to the battle-scarred remains of the former
Yugoslavia. His diplomatic mission to the Balkans was the topic of discussion
at the February installment of Reflex magazine’s superb Third Tuesday
presentations at the Two Bells Tavern.
Krafft has toiled for years in obscurity as a painter and writer in the Northwest,
earning himself the dubious distinction of being "The oldest promising
young artist in Seattle." Five years ago he joined a guild of lady china
painters and acquired the skills to launch a line of hand painted disasters
in delft. His career has since taken off like the space shuttle Challenger.
Collector plates are something we’ve all seen in souvenir shops, or
advertised in the back pages of supermarket tabloids and Sunday papers,
Krafft explains.After wading through the usual swill of bad news and lurid
gossip, you can usually find one of those limited editions of a maudlin portrait
or a rhapsodic pastoral scene to send away for. But you never find the pictures
of the gritty life most of us are living in the late 20th century on ornamental
china because no one would want to hang it on their walls, much less eat off
it.
While that may be true for many people,
a growing number of adventurous patrons soon discovered the twisted irony of
his Disasterware tm; resulting in a burgeoning
international reputation for this often overlooked Northwest master. His plates
debuted at the Davidson Galleries in 1991, and much to the artist’s surprise,
they were instantly snapped up by some of Seattle’s most prestigious collectors.
Following a few more successful shows in the Northwest, including a "Metropolitan
Mobile Museum" show mounted in the back of a traveling semi-truck, Krafft
turned to the traditional method of marketing these curios, creating a mail
order catalog that he sent to dealers across the country. The response was phenomenal.
He was commissioned to create a series of plates commemorating the tragic relationship
between the late Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson for permanent display at
their former Vermont estate, now a bed and breakfast inn. The catalog also generated
interest among some of America's most prominent galleries, and led to a one
person exhibit at the Garth Clark Gallery in New York. His work is currently
included in a traveling exhibit of printed pottery, and is slated for display
in London Crafts Council this Spring.
Krafft's quirky sensibilities eventually came to the attention of an equally
eccentric group of artists in the former Yugoslav Federation. Neue Slowenishe
Kunst (NSK) is a Slovenian artists collective whose activities were inspired
by the Socialists regime’s banishment in 1983 of the provocative Slovenian
industrial rock band Laibach. In response to the government edict, a group of
young artists, actors, designers and writers collectively called what their
activities Laibach Kunst, to keep the name of the band before the public. As
Laibach achieved international acclaim, they became a source of national pride,
and the ban was grudgingly lifted after four years. The rebellious collective
then became known as NSK.
NSK contains several diverse elements: LAIBACH, the Music Department; IRWIN,
the Painting Department; a Theater Department known as NOORDUNG; NEW COLLECTIVISM
Graphics; and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. In accordance with
the Eastern European trend of the time, NSK formally declared itself an autonomous
transglobal state in 1993, complete with their own passports, currency, postage
stamps, diplomats and embassies. To date, embassies have been established in
Moscow, Ghent, Berlin, Venice and most recently, Sarajevo. The primary purpose
of Kraftt's residency with the group was to help create commemorative china
for use at official NSK embassy functions and state occasions.
Krafft was on hand for the declaration
of an NSK State Territory in Sarajevo where Laibach performed two free concerts
at the National Theater of Bosnia coinciding with the announcement from the
U.S. of the Dayton Peace Accords. The activities included an art exhibition,
computer links to the NSK Electronic Embassy in Tokyo, and the issuance of 300
passports. As Krafft observed:
Keeping culture alive in a situation that severe becomes a means of sharing
in the dignity of purpose that is the real spirit of art after its pretensions
are all stripped away. NSK delivered a musical and conceptual payload that couldn't
have been more perfect for that time and place. They turned the city’s
trauma into a laboratory where the audience, without being patronized for its
plight, was invited to engineer its own understanding of the multi-media event
they were participating in. Outside the theater, the world media voraciously
harvested sound bites from war victims about the news from Dayton. Inside, new
citizens of an alternative mental territory were busy digging the loaded irony
of Laibach’s techno deconstruction of Serbian army anthems.
The effect of this event on Krafft was profound. The people of Sarajevo were
so isolated. It renewed my faith in art as a means of connecting people to contemporary
culture.
Krafft used the occasion of his talk at the Two Bells to announce that the NSK
painters group and three Russian guests will visit Seattle this summer for a
summit meeting. As part of Atlanta's international Cultural Olympiad, the group
will travel in two RVs to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. They
plan to engage local artists, writers and philosophers from different cultural
and political backgrounds along the way in discussions and actions which will
be linked by computer to their exhibitions in Atlanta and Rotterdam. The event
entitled TRANSNACIONALA promises to provide an important forum for a collaborative
exchange with this extraordinary group of visionaries.
Article by Larry Reid
Seattle Weekley Spone – “Best Show of the Year”
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