The problem is that “place” itself is a constantly shifting term that is not confined merely to static physical geography. Recent scholarship on the concept of the global emphasizes that overarching, transnational movements are built through (and in turn inflect) local cultural agency. To study this mutuality, metaphors such as the network, the narrative, or the imagined community have been proffered. So have distinctive methodologies such as the micro-history, in which a person or object is used as a lens through which large-scale movement can be brought into focus. The writings of the postwar Marxist theorist Henri LeFevbre have been influential in this context. His project was to understand how place was a means through which capitalist modern culture produced and reproduced itself. The seemingly neutral medium that we traverse is, in LeFevbre’s account, always politicized, always filled with ideological content. We cannot help making space into place, and place makes us in turn.

In light of such theoretical accounts, the certainty that one often encounters in discussions of craft’s rootedness seems badly in need of revision. This issue offers several contributions to that effort. We lead off with a short report by our own Digital Editor, Kevin Murray. In past months, he has been building the Journal of Modern Craft website into a lively forum for scholarly exchange. His discussion here, in the same spirit, summarizes the results of a “south–south” conversation held in Chile recently, at which Australian, Asian and Latin American craft specialists convened. Murray’s probing consideration of this debate introduces themes that will reappear throughout this issue. As he suggests, being faithful to tradition is never easy, and sometimes not even preferable as a way of empowering “local” craftspeople.

This issue’s articles by Lily Crowther and Suzette Wolfe Wilson show how the study of craft upsets our geographical instincts. Crowther argues that the early twentieth-century British studio craft movement found its most hospitable milieu not in the traditionrich rural landscape, or the innovative city center, but rather the much-despised suburbs. In her case study of Camberwell, a residential area of South London, the very characteristics for which craft is usually seen as an antidote—homogeneity, consumerism, and institutionalization—were precisely the variables that permitted studio practice to thrive. Wolfe Wilson’s study of contemporary activity in Jamaica shows us that craft is not necessarily compatible with a healthy relationship to an underdeveloped environment. “Traditional” making is not necessarily sustainable, as it exacts too great a toll on the island’s limited timber and mineral resources. She argues that it is only through an informed, globally aware strategy, in which local materials are used in a manner fully cognizant of the possibility of imported substitutes, that Jamaican craft can be rendered truly sensitive to its locality.

Patricia Ribault’s Statement of Practice for this issue offers another method for studying craft and place: the technique of comparison. Though primarily a theorist, Ribault has a background as a glass blower, and has completed residencies around the world. Her article is a prime example of passionate argument drawn from direct experience. She juxtaposes three dramatically different situations in Italy, Afghanistan, Tunisia, all of which present their own challenges for glass production. Like Wolfe Wilson, she argues that even in the most hallowed craft sites, “tradition” cannot be regarded as sacred and inviolable. Curiously it is Sadika Kamoun, an artist and impresario working in Tunisia—where there is no recent history of glass-making to speak of—whom Ribault sees as having achieved the most successful relationship with her surroundings, through a creative mixing of techniques and tools picked up through her own global travels.

The issue also includes several contributions that concern craft’s role within design practice. Often, in collaborations between designers and artisans, the latter are considered to provide local depth and authenticity. (The designer, presumably, provides cosmopolitan sophistication and knowledge of international markets.) Again, our authors suggest it is not always so simple. Both the innovative Droog Collective, who re-branded our concept of Dutch design in the early 1990s, and the contemporary “digital guilds” described by Amanda Parkes and Leonardo Bonnani, center on a more recursive relation between conceptualization and craft skill, in which the latter seems to be the most innovative element within the design process.

This topic is also explored in depth in this issue’s Primary Text, an extensive survey of leading designers’ attitudes to craft circa 1959, taken from the pages of Zodiac magazine (an organ of the Italian product design firm Olivetti). As Catharine Rossi notes in her introduction to the text, “Craft offered both cultural legitimacy and a means of production to designers in the context of a rhetoric of industrialization that fell down when confronted with reality.” As we read the various designers’ views, we cannot help but notice how much geography informed their ideas about “cultural legitimacy.” What Italy or Scandinavia had to offer to international markets, for example, was entirely dependent upon their national skill bases, as much as some designers may have hated the idea. The Zodiac texts were published exactly half a century ago, but the questions they raise have never been more pressing.

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

The Craftifesto was written by Cinnamon Cooper and Amy Carlton who started the Chicago DIY Trunk show, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

At the American Craft Council Conference Creating a New Craft Culture, keynote speaker Richard Sennett spoke briefly about the distressing doctrine of user friendly and intuitive products which, he believes, perpetuate laziness and the disinterested use of a “thing.” I began to wonder if “the hack” of material goods, or what I then understood to be “hacking,” was an individual’s direct reaction to this need for involvement in the goods we consume; goods which we supposedly desire to be unable to fix. I wondered if what I considered to be an act of making something had been co-opted by this new social condition and redefined simply as assemblages or detournements. Had the same social and technological forces that had combined to create a culture of hackers also influenced the characteristics of the so-called DIY craft movement? How were these makers and hackers functioning under an umbrella of political activism and craft?

To begin to construct a critical discussion of what is currently termed the Maker/Hacker movement, it is necessary to consider the creation of the Internet and open source technology to establish a starting point for the current social condition of connectivity. These ideas are significant to us today because the current trend of hacking consumer products, or being a maker/hacker, is directly linked to the creation of the Internet and the communities of software hackers who initially formulated the beliefs, politics, and ethics which developed as a result of its creation.

While “hacking” has always existed in some form, for our purposes, the clearest foundation of the Maker/Hacker movement is found in the tinkering of ham radio operators and the modding of cars in the 1920’s. In 1969, the earliest incarnation of the internet appeared. The 1970’s saw major universities utilizing email applications to connect individuals. This development later gave birth to a community of computer and software hackers who operated under the philosophy of hacker ethics; a ideology which included collaborative working methods, open exchange of information, and challenging bureaucracies who sought to limit this free exchange of information. In 1991, The World Wide Web first appeared, making our current social condition of connectivity a little less than 20 years old (Chandler). This period also produced the new media boom, or the creation of self-authoring software, which allowed individuals to edit their own photographs and videos, blog, and create web pages. These advances in technology resulted in a lasting cultural and structural impact. Society embraced the heightened sense of interactivity and self-authorship desktop computing allowed. By 1999, new media, the dot-com boom, open source technologies like the Linux operating system, and hacker ethics officially reached the mainstream.

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Blue Footed Bobby (an IKEA Hack + old suitcase) by leel

Today’s privileged moment of interconnectivity and self-authorship has given rise to makers and hackers, both of which function within the ethos of post-production, and utilize the internet as the expression of supposedly subversive and avant gardist creative endeavors. Without this distinction, I would have to believe that I’ve been both DIY and a hacker all my life without knowing it; I’ve been subversively undermining capitalist society when I fix an appliance, sew clothing, knit a scarf, and wire up my rusted out muffler. I did all of these things, often in creative ways, but never thought to post them on online forums so an unlimited number of anonymous browsers could see that I had indeed done these things. Without a community, or network, the Maker/Hacker movement in its truest and most modern form could not exist. Online communities, such as Hack a Day and IKEAhack, enable individuals to operate dialogically by freely dispersing information to large groups of people quickly and easily. Hackers place their ideas into the public domain to collaboratively build an idea and democratize user innovation, helping to drive a user centered marketplace. DIY makers become “hobbypreneurs” who embrace notions of ethical consumerism and create niche markets and customized products (Intuit). Makers connect with customers both online and through events such as Maker Faire; networks become the most important source of meaning. Various forums, such as Etsy labs and craftzine.com, provide a place for free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and skillsets. This being the case, the internet serves to amplify our own social tendencies as humans; both hacking and DIY become a theater of production where an audience is both needed and required, where the individual work is not as important as the collective effort, and where the network, not the work, has aura.

Are the notions of a bottom up capitalism which promotes ethics over profits through hacking and making idealistic? Has the methodology of these movements become an aesthetic or a trend as it has been appropriated into the marketplace? Is the hacking of consumer goods and the DIY craft community acting critically, politically, or disingenuously?

These questions reflect a difficulty in ascertaining intent amid a flurry of websites, books, terms, films, articles, and lectures on this subject. It becomes challenging to tell practice from practicality; to tell social from cultural from economic. This fluidity promotes what Lane Relyea calls a “premature triumphalism.” This outcome plagues many social movements whose 1960’s style utopianesque rhetoric creates an artificially heightened sense of expectations. At the ACC conference, I repeatedly noted that the DIY discourse suddenly merged with Feminism, the Green movement, and the Bicycle movement without clearly articulating this tenuous relationship. Certain parties believe a revolution is coming; their social system has been identified as superior if only for the short term. A critical observer recognizes the “premature triumphalism” Relyea cites. Victory has been claimed too soon.

Post-production allows an escape from interpretations, as well as an escape from the critic, as artists opt for experimentation and construction over deconstruction. Along these lines, French philosopher Bruno Latour notes that the present day role of the critic is “…not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles…[the critic is] the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” ( Abstract Hacktivism 28). My experience at the American Craft Council Conference showed me that DIY embraces such a doctrine: democratic and judgment free. For the Maker/Hacker movement to put itself forward as a subculture, as culture jammers, as grassroots activists of the everyday, as purveyors of ethical consumption, as writers of craftifestos, as creators of craft mafias, as yarn bombers, as something inherently political, they show that within this craft conversation there is something lacking. It is the political undertones which both groups embrace that have earned them the labels of Hacktivism and Craftivism respectively. The addition of the “vism” denotes the political and points to the missing element: An important component to any successful political movement is debate and criticism.

While cognizant of activist minded work such at Cat Mazza’s Nike Petition Blanket, in considering the Craftifesto by Amy Carlton and Cinnamon Cooper, I am struck by the appearance of a remixing of feminist theory, the heavily female demographic of DIY, and the use of women’s handicrafts such as knitting and cross stitch. I submit that much of DIY and Craftivism are operating under the assumption that “the personal is political.” This phrase, which was taken from a collaborative essay by Carol Hanisch in 1969, is often misinterpreted to mean that every personal choice, action, and inaction is fundamentally political. Considering the embattled quote in context, I interpret the phrase to describe women’s acts of consciousness-raising as a method to understand and challenge various power relationships. It was through these realizations that women could begin to recognize the potential for change, gain voice, and enact their own liberation. The mid 90’s saw this phrase become a slogan as it was co-opted by conservatives to promote personal sources of social change which resembled (but did not challenge) ideological structures and social values already in place (Hill Collins 170). This change in the definition of the personal is political, marked a change from Hanisch’s Marxist ideals of group struggle to an acceptance of individuals working within capitalist structures to profit in the marketplace. This shift resembles the creation of bottom up capitalism, of ethical consumerism and the creation of elitist niche markets by “hobbypreneurs”, of hackers and makers collaborating with large corporations to produce trendy new goods. Opportunistic semantics hide an ahistorical consumption of goods, handmade or otherwise, which are not necessarily political, subversive, or avant garde. Shopping as activism functions as borderline slacktivism. Anything existing in the mainstream cannot be subversive. True avant gardism lasts only until recognized.

In a generation of people who have come to age within a social condition of self-authoring software, interconnectivity, immediacy, social networking, and gadgetry, and are now faced with increasingly sophisticated and miniaturized technologies presented to them in uncustomizable goods, I postulate that what maker/hackers are really doing is bringing the condition of the everyday into plain sight by transforming the previously disregarded. Their approach to online forums and collaborative working methodologies highlights a fundamental human need: our propensity to form communities. These are not necessarily critical spaces. Hacktivism, which supposedly creates a conscious awareness of commonplace consumer goods, works within the formulaic design trend of sampling. The “handmade” often becomes a gimmick in this realm. Instead of embracing the entire spectrum of Hacktivism, Craftivism, and DIY as automatically political or subversive, we need to reintroduce a discussion of process and practice with vocabulary that provides a framework for reflection and self-criticism. DIY is a lifestyle and a trend; it is part of consumer culture. If we accept without question that it is indeed political or hermetic, we are complicit in activism as novelty; we forgo revolution for modification.

According to Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas, authors of the recent book Abstract Hacktivism, in this moment of interconnectedness, we must go beyond Derrida, beyond binary oppositions, and beyond Baudrillard’s simulacra. I conclude that we must begin to think relationally instead of oppositionally. This is not a struggle of the old versus the new or the institution against the individual but a call for a critical discussion of craft, a dissection of semantics, and an attempt to intelligently quantify a moment socially, culturally, and artistically. We need more than a building up; we need criticality. We need to be able to deconstruct what is built, we need to act responsibly, and we need to be able to (and do) make value judgments about how we use information, what we make with it, and how what we make functions in the world.

BARB SMITH received her B.A. in Fine Arts and Art Education from Purdue University in 2003 and her M.A. in Photography and Related Media from Purdue University in 2005.  After teaching jewelry, metals, and design at Purdue University for three years, she moved to New York to study under Jamie Bennett and Myra Mimlitsch-Gray at the State University of New York-New Paltz. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Metal in 2010.

Works Cited

Chandler, David L. Who ‘Created’ the Internet? It’s a Tangled Web. The Boston Globe. October 2000. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/nett20.shtml. Accessed 12/6/09.

Hill Collins, Patricia. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Temple University Press, Feb. 2006.

Lane Relyea: Bricoluer as Entrepreneur. SMAC: scribemedia art culture, May 27, 2009. Accessed 12/15/09. http://www.smac.us/2009/05/27/lane-relyea/

Research Brief: Today’s Hobbyists are Tomorrow’s Hobbeypreneurs. Intuit Future of Small Business Report, Dec. 2009. Accessed 01/11/10. http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/ifosb_hobbyists_report.pdf

Von Busch, Otto and Karl Palmas. Abstract Hacktivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture. http://www.scribd.com/doc/21277/Otto-von-Busch-AbstractHacktivism. Accessed 12/6/09.

Photo by Photo by Kerianne Quick

Faythe Levine teaching students to embroider at the University of Champaign-Urbana, 2009. Photo by Kerianne Quick

This makes it very difficult to define and talk about what is going on within our community, especially when talking about topics such as skill and quality. I often like to remind people that D.I.Y. is not just an aesthetic, but for a lot of us, D.I.Y. is a lifestyle, a decision making process that overflows into all of our daily choices.

This past September I spoke at the American Craft Council Conference “Creating a New Craft Culture”. What I didn’t realize when stepping into the conference was that a large part of my presence there was to define and surprisingly to me, defend D.I.Y. craft. When making my film Handmade Nation, this was not my agenda. My number one goal was to produce a film about the people around me making amazing things, focusing on this incredible supportive creative community. In a way I have found myself a permission giver to many. I am more than thankful that I have been able to tour, talk and educated about D.I.Y.  I have found that it is difficult for me to defend something that I am fully immersed in, and actually feel like doesn’t need defending. As I stated in my talk at the conference to 300 ACC members, educators, curators and students “Whether you like it or not, it’s [D.I.Y.] there.”

Dying workshop with Kathi from Chicks on Speed

Dying workshop with Kathi from Chicks on Speed at "Viva La Craft"in Hamburg, Germany where Handmade Nation premiered, 2008. Photo By Faythe Levine

I have realized I do walk a fine line. First and foremost, I promote, some would even say preach, that making something with your hands is empowering, powerful and in my opinion political. I truly believe that in this day and age if people are turning off their TV’s to make a creative decision, even if it’s one I am personally uninterested in, it’s a positive exciting step in the right direction for humanity. Here is the tricky part; I am a very selective curator and collector. I constantly tell people that their work isn’t “good enough” or the “right fit” for a project I am working on. I always end rejection with a positive note “good luck on your creative path” or suggest another show or gallery that may be interested in their work. When I lecture I always try to let people know I was turned down for 95% of my grant applications for Handmade Nation and still get rejections from film festivals weekly. One persons opinion only goes so far, only means so much.

After the past three years of interviewing, traveling to shows, galleries, boutiques and doing Q&A’s and lectures I am thankful for everyone I have met. My community has doubled, maybe tripled in numbers. This has allowed me to become a hub of networking. I recently had a friend ask if I knew of anyone who did custom velvet painting, I did and passed along the contact information hoping she would get a commission. D.I.Y. is about community, sharing and support. The most frequent feedback I get after a screening of my film is “I am inspired to go home and make something”.  That is what it is all about, not just the over saturation of owls, deer, apples and uncountable piles of cuteness that one can choke on at an indie craft fair. And with that said, most people have a sweet tooth and are always looking for more, just not this collector. I am in search of the strange, weird and oddly beautiful.

To summarize, staying focused, setting goals and moving forward. These are the skills that D.I.Y. are based on.

On The Midway at ArtScape booth by Stefani Levin

On The Midway at ArtScape in Baltimore. "Things To Put On Your Face" booth by Stefani Levin, 2008. Photo By Faythe Levine

In my next blog entry I look forward to discussing the demographic for Handmade Nation, and if there ways of expanding it, as well as my opinion on the future of D.I.Y.

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While the New Wave DIY/Alt Craft scene (as brought to light by Faythe Levine’s Handmade Nation movie) has been going strong the last 5 or 6 years, it has just recently in the last couple of years started to turn the head of the studio craft world, and as witnessed at the recent ACC conference in Minneapolis, really spun some heads Exorcist style. Myself being active in both camps, especially living in the Bay Area where Alt Craft is really prominent (and inclusivity is more the norm), was somewhat unaware of the tensions forming between. But seeing it from a different angle, especially as studio crafters are struggling to make it in this economic climate, makes me realize how all the more important it is to bring these two craft worlds together, break down the stereotypes, misconceptions, and naïveté. Help each other to progress in order to move craft forward in the 21st century.

What DIY has going for it that studio craft desperately needs is infectious enthusiasm for making, that everyone can access their inner crafter and put it out there into the world without judgement from others. The scenario of “you too can make a …”–granted not everyone will be good at it, but the fact that the average consumer is being engaged in craft and realizing that handmade has more personal value than goods Made in China. People begin to understand why handmade items are priced higher than WalMart, appreciate the skill it takes to make something special, and in turn be happy to open their wallets to purchase craft goods. As Rob Walker so succinctly stated during his marketplace presentation, “The mistake people (i.e. crafters) make is in thinking that the most important story is their story, but it isn’t…best when your story is relevant to other’s (i.e. consumer’s) lives.” Today’s consumer is more conscious of where products are made and if they are environmentally and socially responsible. This is where makers and buyers share some similar lifestyle values.

Other reasons for the success of DIY is that they align themselves with various areas of Design and fully embrace new technology. Graphic designers play a big role in marketing and promoting the fairs and events as well as selling their 2D artwork at the fairs. Fashion designers too are included in this mix, often times showcasing many designers work in onsite fashion shows. Craft shows with an entertainment aspect—music, food, and performances. And most importantly, DIY utilizes the web to its full potential, spreading buzz through social networking, blogs, websites, tweets, etc. This is where studio craft needs to catch up fast and get on the 2.0 train or be left out in the cold.

If studio craft can pick up and run with these points that make DIY successful, and in the meantime offer wisdom to DIY on how to be professional artists in the business world, we’d help elevate each other and craft to new heights. This realization has inspired me to attempt to bridge the gap in a symposium that I am organizing for the Metal Arts Guild in 2011 since the West Coast has such a rich history and larger population of both studio craft and DIY.

Websites:

• blog.rewarestyle.com
• www.rewarestyle.com

The opposition between craft and DIY relates quite closely to the current issue in the Journal of Modern Craft, which considers how the current politicisation of craft engages with the history of the craft movement.

As a flavour of the new position, here’s a reflection on the conference written especially for JMC by craft blogger Harriete Estel:

The D.I.Y. movement is reinventing the American Craft scene in its approach to the marketplace.  The D.I.Y. ‘ers grew up with the Internet and know how to connect with a wider audience.  They engage their community and the general public with their accessibility and enthusiasm in the making of handmade objects.  By empowering artists to reach out and be found by any person interested in their media or work, the Internet demolishes the monopoly of the traditional gallery and the limitation of available pedestal space.  Art and craft no longer needs to be a rarified environment.  All studio craft can benefit from this new dynamic and all should embrace this new potential.   The Internet and the D.I.Y. movement have forever expanded the art and craft universe.

That’s quite a challenging position. It resonates well with Faythe Levine’s contributions to this site. You can read more of Harriete’s views from her blog here.

Handmade Nation in Austin with covered pipe installation by Knitta' Please!

Handmade Nation in Austin with covered pipe installation by Knitta' Please!

For those who may not be familiar, I started shooting Handmade Nation in June 2006, the book (based off of research from the film) was released by Princeton Architectural Press in October 2008, and the film was released in February 2009 and the DVD will be released in November. The first three screenings were Milwaukee WI (where I am based), Hamburg Germany, and New York. The immediate feedback was and continues to be very positive. The audience, regardless of location, consistently talks about how they feel inspired, ready to go home and finish a project, re-organize their studio, start a class or for those who are not of the creative breed, support more artists. A lot of people tell me they leave feeling like they were a part of something much larger then they had realized. Overall, the general feeling is of empowerment. Empowerment to me is what craft is all about. Making choices and using those choices to create something.

Handmade Nation screening at Viva La Craft hosted by Chicks On Speed at Kampnagel Theater

Handmade Nation screening at Viva La Craft hosted by Chicks On Speed at Kampnagel Theater

Since February, Handmade Nation has been shown in over 6 countries and over 20 states in America. The dialogue discussed at the Q&A’s following the film are always fairly consistent. People are very interested in how I selected who was featured (I worked with people I knew and admired for the most part). The age long debate about what is art and what is craft and more specifically, the idea that our generation is less concerned with defining ourselves and more concerned with community. Race, class and gender politics come up sporadically as does the discussion around third wave feminism. More recently discussion around the economy and how it has effected makers whose income is based on the sales of their work.

And, what has surprised me most is that more often then not, older viewers are defensive about not being represented in the film. To this I always reply in one way or another, that the whole point of this film is to show that a younger generation of makers, my generation, are here doing things different. The point is not about ignoring what came before us, but acknowledging that things move forward and grow. Handmade Nation is a single step in that direction, educating and documenting a small slice of what is happening today within the larger art, craft and design community.

Handmade Nation in Milwaukee, WI

Handmade Nation in Milwaukee, WI at the Oriental Theater

In 2004, Brooklyn-based artist Ginger Brooks Takahashi initiated a series of quilting forums called An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail, the title taken from a protest poster she found at the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society archives.  In the spirit of a quilting bee in which the quilt both facilitates conversation and contains the residue of it, participants across the U.S. and Canada contributed to the making of a quilt depicting personal slogans and decorative vignettes of bunnies caught in various modes of erotic engagement. She writes on her website, “I see the history of family and community quilting as harnessing possibly the foremost political activities: community-building and dialog, creating a sense of belonging for those who participate. The quilting forums are symbolic of the same ideals upheld by my own queer community. While redefining these traditions, ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail’ brings the spirit of this shared experience to an extended community.” She continues, “The end product is not the piece, but rather the process—the informal gatherings and invaluable dialog between friends and strangers.” In some ways, this project can be read as the lighter, sweeter, and generationally “post-AIDS” postscript to that masterwork of relational queer craft The NAMES Project.

In her collaborative performance and site-specific installation series Knitting Nation, Liz Collins explores the notion of knitting during wartime and simultaneously reveals aspects of the textile and apparel manufacturing process in time-based events with costumed knitters working on manually operated knitting machines. She describes these events as “a type of ‘happening,’ drawing spectators into the buzz of activity, where the sound and motion both stimulate[s] and transfixe[s] the participants as well as the audience.” In June of 2008, she presented “Knitting Nation Phase 4: Pride,” an homage to and reconstruction of the original rainbow pride flag made by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978 to symbolize the diversity of the gay community. Created by an army of uniformed machine knitters, Collins’s knit rainbow flag ascended the steps and hill of a public park in the center of Providence, Rhode Island over the course of six hours. An important component of this project was a massive survey Collins sent out asking, “How do you feel about the rainbow flag?”

Indigo Girls is a “craft-action dye happening and social sculpture” that Brooklyn-based artist Travis Boyer has been performing since December of 2008. For this event, he invites participants to come and dye whatever they like in a natural fermentation indigo dye vat: clothes, art projects, wood, leather, etc. Boyer writes, “The results are gratifyingly positive; the craftwork is non-age- or skill level-discriminant…Indigo Girls is a party about auto-fashion empowerment, creativity, identity, pedagogy, and camaraderie. The technique is ancient and cross-cultural. It is ecologically green and non-toxic. The process of dying marks the dyers; it stains our hands and costumes but also facilitates profound illumination.” Boyer’s use of the term “costume” and his inference of personal transformation seems appropriate here in relation to this particular process in which material transformation figures so heavily: wet cloth emerges from the vat an unearthly neon green and transforms before one’s eyes into blue upon its exposure to oxygen. Items of clothing are given “new life” as participants engage in a process of personal reinvention through creative self-styling.

Onya Hogan-Finlay presented a riff on Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party called The After Party in conjunction with the traveling exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the VIVO Media Arts Centre in December of 2008.  It was billed as “An All (gender) Inclusive Weekend Package: Un-packing the pants of vaginal imagery in feminist art.” The press release reads as manifesto, here are some excerpts: “This series of happenings will take shape through your participation. Read on, sisters! In the spirit of Feminism, The After Party will host a series of events in Vancouver: A Thursday night group walk-through of the WACK! exhibition at the VAG (Vancouver Art Gallery), followed by a day-long hands-on cardboard craft workshop and two temporary installations at VIVO’s Friday night Riot Grrl event, a Saturday brunch, and finally, a Sunday bonfire at Wreck Beach. [The weekend] will have the feel of something between a debauch Feminist clubhouse, Santa’s workshop, and a DIY cardboard utopia. This work will respond both to WACK! and to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-1979) which featured place settings honoring women icons and aimed to ‘end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.’ Objects will be suspended like mobiles from VIVO’s ceiling or will join an assemblage of limited edition multiples on a table to stage a wild “after-party” scene a.k.a The After (dinner) Party installation. Cut-up some cardboard, cut out the patriarchy, and let’s make this happen together!”

And the list could go on. In June of 2009 Sheila Pepe invited participants to dismantle a crocheted environment at Austin’s testsites space and to re-crochet it into objects and garments for themselves. One could read this project as a re-doing and un-doing of Faith Wilding’s famous “Womb Room” of 1972, activating the shelter created by the work into a truly fertile space of productivity. Lee Maida presented a body-weaving event in which participants were literally woven together with fabric tape reminiscent of the seats on Shaker chairs as part of the project Sessions: Con Verse Sensations organized in upstate New York by Katerina Llanes as part of her thesis project for the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies. Boston-based author Greg Der Ananian and artist Jesse Kahn have been hosting a series of public needle-working sessions for gay men called Nine Inch Needles. Also in Boston, Gina Siepel’s ongoing project The Boy Mechanic invites participants to craft a practical or fanciful handmade object from the book of the same name first published in the early 1900s.

There is a burgeoning academic and curatorial discourse surrounding this topic. Of particular note is the recent IASPIS (International Artists Studio Program in Sweden) project Craft is Handmade Communication. With a focus on fiber practices that address recording/marking time and craft, public acts of crafting, and political activism through craft, the Gestures of Resistance panel at the 2008 College Art Association conference in Chicago postulated a theory of handicraft as performative: active, public, and affective rather than passive, private, and obsessive. That same year, “Handmade Utopias” (chaired by JMC Editor Glenn Adamson) focused on extreme cases in which the handmade has been linked to the idea of Utopia—whether by individuals, communities, or governments, and on how contemporary practitioners employ the handmade to create new social configurations.  There was a Queering Craft session hosted by CAA’s Queer Caucus for Art at the February 2009 conference in Los Angeles, which included panelist Julia Bryan-Wilson. The foremost thinker in this arena, she has produced important critical work exploring these ideas including the article previously published in JMC 2:1 “Queerly Made” which links Harmony Hammond’s floor pieces to more recent instances of queer craft. This CAA panel was echoed by the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society’s “Crafting Queer” panel discussion in April. A “Queercraft” exhibition was mounted in conjunction with the former, and an exhibition called Threads was organized as part of this year’s National Queer Arts Festival, also in San Francisco, for which I served on the curatorial committee.  Upcoming in 2010, another CAA panel will ask “How is ‘Queer’ Art Relational? How do ‘queer’ practices and tactics…enact a different version of so-called ‘relational aesthetics’…the ‘art’ of crafting protest, dialogue, community, political action? How does ‘queer’ (art)work enact an aesthetics of the relational that is critical of normativity in all of its forms?” It will be interesting to see how these relational queer craft practices and the accompanying conversations around them evolve beyond myriad re-workings of traditional crafts and craft history into something truly new, like a phoenix.

Photograph by Christina Linden

Photograph by Christina Linden

A couple of weeks ago I received in the mail a long-awaited copy of Native Funk & Flash (Scrimshaw Press, 1974), ordered over the Internet when my local used bookstore, though familiar with this vintage gem, was currently out of stock. An expressive visual record of the particular union of craft and counterculture that so flourished in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 70s, its simple, direct cover features a close-up shot of the voluptuous ass cheek of author Alexandra Jacopetti, emblazoned with a large, three-headed phoenix charismatically embroidered on faded denim. (“This is my version of the phoenix, with three heads because there are so many ways of looking at things,“ she writes in the book.) Her handiwork is accentuated by the placement of her hand above a macramé belt, a section of her torso in black knit silhouette, and wisps of waist-length wavy hair that hang down as she leans forward against what appears to be a Berkeley “brown shingle” Craftsman home. An exuberant rainbow, echoing the red, orange, and yellow flames out of which the phoenix is apparently rising, further frames the scene. I was originally introduced to this special volume several years ago when my friend Liz Collins, artist, knitwear designer, and professor in the Rhode Island School of Design Textiles Department, showed me her treasured copy. And I was recently reminded of it by Elissa Auther, associate professor of contemporary art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, who I met at the panel discussion titled “The Aesthetics of Counterculture” which she organized for the 2009 College Art Association conference in Los Angeles.

After recently relocating my home and studio from New York to the Bay Area in order to join the faculty of California College of the Arts (formerly Arts & Crafts), I have been anxiously attempting to trace the history of the California Arts and Crafts movement and the legacy of early West Coast utopian communes in order to glean the ways in which the handmade seems perpetually to characterize this region (from Slow Food to home-brewed biodiesel, from old school Studio Craft to DIY Craftivism). There is a pronounced sense of civic participation here, in general as well as within artistic circles, as an abundant array of projects in the “social practice” arena would seem to demonstrate. And while New York has better fashion, the Bay Area has the history of Art to Wear, as well as that particular brand of craftastic drag, a trajectory one can easily trace back to the legendary San Francisco theatrical troupe the Cockettes, whose members Scrumbley Koldewyn, a musician and performer, and the notorious queen Pristine Condition are featured in Native Funk & Flash—the former in a performance suit made entirely of crocheted doilies, a look that pre-dates Nick Cave by several decades, and the latter in a hyperbolic pioneer dress complete with patchwork and calico ruffles that would be the envy of Paul McCarthy.

I’ve often wondered how something like folk music came to signify radicality in the 60s. It would be as if suddenly everyone saw making quilts as the coolest and most politically exciting thing to do. Considering that working within a historic craft tradition could be considered one of the most conservative kinds of making (think of the “authentic reproductions” of historic preservation, or Living History), how then can the traditional, the historic, the local, the indigenous, or the handmade, come to signify radical counterculture? In Native Funk & Flash, hand embroidery embellishes classic American work denim—symbol of blue-collar hard work and casual, youthful defiance—with fantasy landscapes, moons and stars, castles and mosques, penises and vaginas, psychedelic abstractions and smoking joints. Jacopetti writes, “Many of us have hungered for a cultural identity strong enough to produce our own versions of the native costumes of Afghanistan or Guatemala, for a community life rich enough for us to need our own totems comparable to African or Native American masks and ritual objects.” Later, she speaks of “the art of costuming” and the “fantastic ability to achieve an effect, rivaling the scary old shamans of past times for sheer outrageous impact.”

Although the logic of these words seems dated, if not totally flawed and naïve, they capture a cultural impulse, a “hunger” for taking the construction of identity into one’s own hands, using needle and thread, and for enacting that identity publicly, shamelessly. I’d like to discuss a flurry of recent projects that utilize traditional craft practices, especially textile techniques like quilting, knitting, dying, and weaving, that take Roszika Parker’s now classic text The Subversive Stitch a few steps forward toward the radical, the relational, and the queer. Part quilting bee, part drag-fashion performance, part nostalgic return to 60s counterculture, and part something else TBD, these generative projects present a more contemporary take on interactivity and social reciprocity and perhaps better reflect our own current times of war and economic recession. Since 1974, the Civil Rights movement, multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, identity politics, feminist and queer theory, and performance studies have better articulated, advanced and complicated our understanding of the performativity of identity. These artists are looking for new words to describe what would have been called a “happening” or a “social sculpture,” though their work wouldn’t be legible without those precedents.

[to be continued here]