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Introduction to Issue 2.1

March 22, 2009 in Editorials

Editorial Introduction

As the Journal of Modern Craft enters its second year of publication, it seems an appropriate time to go back to basics. And so, after a year of trying to push the boundaries, this time round we offer a series of writings that go right to the heart of “modern craft” and its interpretation.

In articles by Tom Crook, a historian and theorist of nineteenth-century modernity, and Nicolette Makovicky, an anthropologist and material culture specialist, we are treated to two such methodological inquiries. Crook’s subject, the Arts and Crafts Movement, could not be more familiar to readers of this journal. By reframing the Movement as an ‘alternative modernity,’ however, he breathes new life into that subject. Crook’s account gives us new tools for understanding well worn aspects of the Movement like the debate over machines, medievalism and other forms of historicism, and the growth of interest in indigenous craft traditions from around the world. Of particular interest is his use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘dialogics,’ in which opposing positions and processes are seen as producing one another through continual interrelation, rather than resolving dialectically into new, stable syntheses.

Makovicky’s fieldwork among lace makers in contemporary Slovakia has led her to make a closely parallel argument. Just as Crook warns against seeing the Arts and Crafts Movement as either modern or anti-modern, Makovicky refuses the false choice between understanding ‘traditional’ craft either as a fictional construct, or as a fragmentary and threatened anachronism. Rather, she presents the choices made by individual lace makers as conscious responses to modernity, in which change and tradition are constantly reintegrated into one another. Especially when read together, these two essays exemplify this journal’s ambition to chart new methods in the study of modern craft, both by turning over old soil and ploughing new fields.

Much the same could be said about the prominent place given to British ceramics in this issue. Art historian Penelope Curtis outlines an unexpected comparison between the most famous name in English pottery—Bernard Leach—and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. For many decades these two figures lived near one another in St. Ives, a small town in the west of England, but a notional art/craft divide prevented scholars from drawing connections between them. Interestingly, readers may feel that of the two, it is Hepworth who seems the more committed to the form-giving possibilities of handwork; but in any case, Curtis shows how the vessel form that forms the heart of studio ceramics can be seen afresh as it moves across disciplines.

Ceramics is also the focus of this issue’s Primary Text and Statement of Practice. In pairing David Queensberry and Alison Britton, we have intentionally taken a step back into the politics and possibilities of the 1970s. At that time Queensberry, a leading designer within the ceramic industry, was Britton’s tutor at the Royal College of Art. Despite his emphasis on functional design, she and many of his other students (including Carol McNicoll, Jacqueline Poncelet, and Elizabeth Fritsch) set off in a diametrically opposed direction. Britton turned to handbuilding, pattern and decoration, and fragmentary composition to forge a powerful new postmodern sculptural idiom. Now, thirty years later, it is Britton who teaches ceramics at the Royal College of Art. Her statement, written with the benefit of hindsight looking back at a long and successful career, describes her studies with Queensberry as the beginning of a journey of formal and conceptual experimentation.

Queensberry, too, has stuck to his guns. We have reprinted a talk he delivered back in ’75, in which he expresses alarm at the direction that young ceramists seem to be taking. In a new preface to this lecture, he reaffirms his convictions, arguing that the global transformations in production that have happened since make the teaching of design skills more important than ever. Queensberry’s and Britton’s positions reprise the old debate: should craft be oriented to design or fine art? But both write in full awareness that those two frameworks of reference are themselves fluid and unpredictable. 

The issue’s final article brings to our pages the work of Julia Bryan-Wilson, one of the most exciting new scholars working at the intersection of art and craft history. The lesbian identity politics that she locates in the work of Harmony Hammond might initially seem distant from modern craft’s fundamental concerns, as discussed elsewhere in this issue. But it is telling that Hammond, too, sought to break down false distinctions: “between painting and sculpture, between art and women’s work, and between art in craft and craft in art,” as she put it. In Bryan-Wilson’s analysis, Hammond looked to craft not as a reassuring source of identity, nor simply as a tool of Feminist critique, but rather as a means of queering seemingly stable oppositions and thus opening up new discursive possibilities.

Finally, we have the pleasure of announcing two new initiatives at the Journal of Modern Craft that are intended to embody this spirit of ongoing dialogue. This issue is our first to include a Response to a previously published article. We actively encourage such contributions, and hope to be able to feature other commentaries by our readers in future issues. Also, we are glad to be able to announce the launch of a new website at www.journalofmoderncraft.com. This new digital interface will carry selected content from the journal, and will also provide useful links, blog posts, and an open forum to which all our readers can contribute. Academic publishing is a slow and careful affair, and any scholarly journal—no matter how multiple and inventive—runs the risk of instituting a new orthodoxy. By actively promoting dialogue through printed and digital means, we hope to avoid this, and thus to do justice to the subject of modern craft, which is always on the move.

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Review of ‘The Object Of Labor: Art, Cloth & Cultural Production’

March 15, 2009 in Books, Reviews

By Jasleen Dhamija

'The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production' ed Joan Livingstone and John Ploof, School of Art Institute, Chicago Press 2007

The Object of Labor is a publication, which brings out the very quintessential elements of creativity in a very wide sense, not only for those who create, but also those who use it creatively. My initial response to the publication was of dismay at the rather over-crowded cover, with a collage of unattractive images. The main title also struck me also as incongruous. In fact, neither the cover design nor the title does justice to the wide and excellent coverage offered by this publication.

The Indian theory of aesthetics is based on the rasas, the very essence of emotions and of creativity. The Rasik or Rasika, the one who derives the very essence of pleasure, is an essential part of the process of the act of creation. Thus art is expressive of the holistic view of life and the editors say so correctly. “Originating with the history of survival, cloth manufacture and its accompanying division of labor, expands to impact all spheres of culture and power” and go on to say “crossing between arenas of function, craft, art, and ritual, the meaning of cloth from its most banal to its most splendid form affects our daily lives and welfare in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, invention and technology, commerce and work”.

The book comprises of a range of articles written by people with varied backgrounds from folklorists, interdisciplinary artists, writers and curators, cultural activists, anthropologists, designers, media specialists, educationalists and community workers. In addition there are practicing artists, whose sensitive creative expressions are excellently reproduced. The most evocative is the work of Anne Wilson, entitled “Damask”. This is a sensitively created embroidery on the textured damask fabric with the use of hair. Darrel Morris “I mean this” is an extraordinary expression of contemporary art forms using embroidered forms and textures to make powerful statements. The two expressions are so distinct and yet each appeals to our sensibility.

The other interesting contribution is by practicing artists and researchers, who combine the knowledge of the practice and the years of research on the subject as in the case of Janis Jefferies and her article “Laboured Cloth: Translation of Hybridity in Contemporary Art”

The contributors span many cultures as does the location of the study. The article on Sujani of Bihar is written by a team of writers, including Viji Srinivasan, an Indian socio-economist and activist, Laila Tyabji, a designer and organisor of the crafts sector, who heads one of the most important NGOs of crafts in India, Skye Morrison, a Canadian folklorist, designer, educator and curator and Dorothy Caldwell, a texture artist, teacher and curator, whose work incorporates North American Stitching. It is an interesting study of the work of women who were initiated in this work by Viji, as a means of income generation. Viji used the Sujani tradition, which belonged to Dharbhanga, a culturally rich area of Bihar, which has very strong Maithali cultural traditions. They took inspiration from the Maithali tradition, but the women carried this tradition into the contemporary world interpreting their lives creatively.

Amazwi Albesifazane echoes the voices of women gathered together in an embroidery project. Peer groupings of women work together and speak of the hidden and repressed aspects of personal, cultural, and political history. This difficult process is facilitated by trained coordinators drawn from the geographic area of operation for whom the conditions and the culture is familiar. This historical information is written in the original indigenous language, then translated into creative work and is presented by Andries Botha, a sculptor and cultural activist.

Sadie Plant’s “Ada Lovelace and the Loom of Life” is a superb piece of research and writing, which looks at the origin of weaving and brings us to an appreciation of jacquard loom weaving being the origins of the computer, which has revolutionised the world today. It comes as a surprise that in the mid nineteenth century it was a woman Lady Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who was a mathematician and who made an extraordinary contribution along with Charles Babbage, who created the first fully automatic calculating machine. The publication is full of such gems of information.

The consistent theme of this books is the quest to retain identity following major upheaval. This preoccupation is not limited to those disposed and driven away from their original habitat, but also those whose land is always changing. Immigrants are very distinct from nomads. The immigrants initially negate their traditions, while nomads surround themselves with expressions of their cultural traditions, so as to demarcate their own space. The very fact that amongst the nomads of Iran the mobile tent has the same name as the women’s outer cover, the chador, indicates the importance of defining their own space with the use of a fabric.

This publication touches upon a number of subjects and is a pleasure to own. Every time one opens its pages some new insights enliven the mind.

Jasleen Dhamija is an Indian craft writer and author of Living Tradition of Iran’s Crafts, Handwoven Fabrics of India, The Woven Silks of India and Indian Folk Arts and Crafts

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Review of ‘What’s the Use of Art: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context’

March 15, 2009 in Books, Reviews

By Alison Carroll

 What’s the Use of Art: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context ed: Jan Mrazek & Morgan Pitelka, University of Hawai’i Press, 2008

What’s the Use of Art is a collection of nine scholarly essays by Western experts, plus an introduction and conclusion by the two editors, on valued cultural objects in India, Japan, China, Indonesia and Cambodia. It is held together under three groupings: Functions, Movements and Memories, though these slip away in reading the density of the essays themselves. More useful is the general overlay of the question of function and value of the objects, and how these are maintained both within these particular cultures and by outsiders, including of course the cultures of the writers.

As Morgan Pitelka says in the introduction, the objects of these Asian cultures are exemplars of the broader question of value of objects from different places, especially those which tend to ‘describe and value’ others (see Chapter 1).

Questions on the complexity of value weave throughout the book, with the different focuses – from Japanese disposable temple ceramics, to potent keris in Bali, to Angkorian royal inscriptions – and continually challenge our own positions. This was more rewarding than the more awkward overlay of the more truly Western concern with the art/craft nexus. These are objects of value, no matter how they are described, or used. Perhaps a better title than ‘objects of use’ might have been ‘objects of power’.

As some of the essays discuss, e.g. on Angkorian inscriptions, the word and idea of ‘art’ is long used in Asia, though in many places, such as Japan, the currently used word is a quite modern invention. While the newness of such words is often raised as an example of Western intervention, the discomfort with ‘art’ vs ‘craft’ rarely receives the emotional heat of such discussions in the West. I remember a leading Pakistani artist and curator, when asked about the situation of craft vs art in Pakistan, replying that there were many greater issues for debate and concern there than this.

This then is a concern of this book: that the debate about these cultures is so removed from those cultures. Where are the scholars, or at least the debate, from within these cultures? At least interviews with practitioners. A poem by Australian Aboriginal poet Anita Heiss comes to mind:

Aboriginal Studies
You ‘study’ us /Observe us /Analyse us /Write about us /You philosophise
/and scrutinize us /You lecture about  /and separate out /You debate and speculate,  /evaluate and investigate. /But who is it for, /If not for us? /When most of us  /can’t even read what you write /And don’t even  /know your words are in print? /And your royalty and lecture fees /benefit only you? /Do you really do it  /to educate others? /Really? /Now come on,  /Seriously – /Be honest, /You enjoy being  /the Patriarch or Matriarch /of your chosen field –  /The study of Aborigines.

Who indeed is the audience for this book? The complexity of the English for a start will preclude most (though not all) Asian readers. Surely this is an irony for a book about value and context.

Another concern is that it is a book about visual cultural objects with such poor visuals: no colour, small poorly reproduced b x w illustrations and not enough of them. When the authors are describing an object with great focus, let us all see it and try to evaluate its presence for ourselves. After the long story of Ganga Devi in Chapter 3, it would be good to see what she had actually done, as it would be to see Nyoman Erawan’s Ancient Time in context of Balinese symbolic belief, in Chapter 9.

As Pitalka says, there are multiple contexts of these objects and they change, including their place within museums. However, there is the implication that these objects find no adequate context outside their own, a thread through the book of regret towards change, and a note that these objects have had power that is unique to them (and stronger in Asian cultures than elsewhere, and something that is misunderstood elsewhere), that this power is being lessened and that this should be arrested. A memory of temps perdue.

Such positions immediately raise responses in the reader: I can think of the 18th century Korean scholar’s room recreated in the National Museum of Korea as a truly wonderful experience, furnished with treasures unlikely to be encountered by any but the very few elsewhere, or the tea-ceremony room in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where ceremonies do take place, or the installation by Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto For those who are poor, for those who are suffering, made in 1991 and placed at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1993, which led to visitors both Indonesian and non-Indonesian leaving flowers in memory of loss of all sorts. Further, in this context, Mrazek’s words about the “exclusive visuality of the modern art object” (p.300) seems to preclude such works as Dadang’s from such descriptions.

Perhaps another way through this complex area for non-Asian readers is to have threads in the book – like the power of objects in Asia – linked to Western experience: lessening the exoticising ‘other’ element of the discussion. For example, other cultures, including Western cultures, do venerate objects. Think of those saints’ bones or flecks of holy cloth in European reliquaries, or the feet of Christ figures worn smooth in Italian churches with the prayers of the faithful. Think of the carrozas or special carriages in Manila streets, where the Virgin and her attendants, reclothed in new and splendid raiment, come out into public view, living in the hearts of all there.

The performative, the issue of the importance of time, and the process of cultural action is an area, I think, of difference in ‘Asia’ compared with the West. This is touched on in the book, and it would have been good to have more, or done more vividly. But a book about objects perhaps is antithetical to this. The importance of performance was strongly brought home to me watching Aboriginal artists from Arnhem Land in northern Australia make a sand painting in a Tokyo plaza. The two Aboriginal men ‘smoked’ the piece and slowly created their imagery in the trucked-in sand. It had strength and importance to them, and to the watching Japanese it was totally understandable: the process of doing was understood and respected. The Anglos watching were much less comfortable.

And indeed perhaps the degree in Asia of the belief in the power of objects or spirits themselves is a matter of difference from the West. I curated an exhibition for an Adelaide Festival Beyond the material world, where I asked contemporary artists from Asia whose work included a sense of the unseen powers of life to make new works, and published interviews with people in Asia about their belief in a strongly spiritual world. The leading artists from Japan, Korea, China, Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia all produced key works that had their acceptance of the ‘non-material’ unselfconsciously inherent within them. I suspect it would be difficult to have the same result in the West.

The individual chapters of this book are full of their own spirit, crafted with love by their authors and much of this is conveyed to the reader. I wished, for example, I had known what the inscriptions on the temples of Angkor had meant before going there, as they brought life to those huge, seemingly impenetrable faces. It is good to have access to essays of such knowledge, care and affection: objects of value themselves.

Alison Carroll is Director of Asialink Arts, University of Melbourne

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