Craft as critique in experimental animation

As a moving image art form, experimental animation blurs the boundaries between art and craft, intangibility and materiality, conceptualism and sensuousness in wide-ranging and thought-provoking ways. This chapter considers experimental animation alongside the concerns of craft as a physical, artistic and critical practice. It focuses in particular on issues of (im)materiality, the act of making and the significance of skill—the last of these especially as it relates to what craft theorists call “sloppy craft” (Wilson 2015, xxiv), or the purposeful application of imperfect technique as a subversive practice and form of social critique. Drawing from art history and craft theory, the chapter reveals some of the complex ways that craft undergirds and shapes our understanding of experimental animation as an art form.