David Clarke, silver vessel and salt

David Clarke, silver vessel and salt

He says ‘The conservativeness of the discipline really pushes me to become more creative, challenging and playful. It is essential to keep this discipline alive and forward thinking. Combining other materials such as salt and lead has been important to really attack the silver physically.’[3]

Rather than relating to abstract thought both the writer and the maker express their interest in the action, in the situation itself. They assert that in creative engagement reflection changes essence, it becomes part of the realm of play and of hypothesis.

Artistic works, informed by abstract ideas, are not in themselves the illustrations of those ideas. ‘Imagination’ Kundera says, ‘which, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought. The dream is only the model for the sort of imagination that I consider the greatest discovery of modern art’.[4] Rather than creating a fusion of dream and reality, Kundera uses what he calls ‘polyphonetic confrontation’, novelistic counterpoint to unite philosophy, narrative and dream within the ordered unity of his stories.

A perfect example to illustrate this is Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia.

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The image[5] I use here is the last screen-shot from the film, an exquisitely crafted scene that re-values utopian dreams and their failure, melancholically examining the decay, detritus and diffident survivals of historical modernity – a metaphor of loss and an attempt to visualise utopian nostalgia.

Palimpsest of creation, form, narrative, disintegration and re-integration stand in stark contrast to Modernism’s ideal of the purified form and autonomous object. They allow forms of the past to emerge and to coexist, sometimes as fragments or ruins, alongside a riot of other references (including those of modernism), while searching for a new sense of identity and meaning – like I saw emerging from the layered cosmos of ornamentation in this stunningly impressive graffiti from Metelkova in Ljubljana, Slovenia by an unknown artist.[6]

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[2] Kundera, M. (1986: 28) The Art of the Novel, New York: Grove Press

[3] http://www.caa.org.uk/exhibitions/coming-soon/david-clarke.html

[4] Kundera, M. (1986: 83) The Art of the Novel, New York: Grove Press

[5] The strange line in the middle of the image is because I had to scan the image from a book – so much for the usefulness of the web…

[6] Metelkova is an internationally renowned alternative culture community in the centre of Slovenia’s capital. A self-declared ‘Autonomous Culture Zone,’ Metelkova Mesto occupies the former ‘Fourth of July’ military barracks originally commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian army back in 1882 and completed in 1911. The space consists of seven buildings and 12,500m2 – making it a sort of city within a city – comprising a former prison, several clubs, live music spaces, art galleries and artist studios.

http://www.ljubljana-life.com/ljubljana/metelkova

I prefer a different methodological engagement when I am in need of ordered structures and an understanding that makes sense, however fraudulent and in flux. Aesthetic experience, in my view, is constituted within the hermeneutic continuity of human existence and can therefore only be appropriately discussed in this wider framework.[i] Categorisations like craft, design and art are rendered useless when considered as being characterised as intuition, indeed as a world-view, Weltanschauung – literally an intuition of the world. This does not simply mean that creative practice justifies its own claim to truth over and against scientific knowledge, insofar as the free play of imagination tends towards ‘knowledge in general’. It also means that the “inner intuition” in play here brings the world – and not just the objects in it – to intuition.[ii]

Gadamer stipulates that hermeneutics are to be understood in a comprehensive way, including all of art and its discourse. Like every other piece of text artistic work needs to be understood within such a context.[iii] Ricoeur concurs when he is saying ‘to imagination is attributed the faculty of moving easily from one experience to another if their difference is slight or gradual, and thus of transforming diversity into identity.’[iv] With regards to the meaning of creativity he points out that there can be no praxis, which is not already symbolically structured in some way. Human action is always figured in signs, interpreted in terms of cultural traditions and norms. Our narrative fictions are then added to this primary interpretation of figuration in human action; so that narrative is a redefining of what is already defined, a reinterpretation of what is already interpreted. The referent of narration, namely human action, is never raw or immediate reality but an action, which has been symbolised and re-symbolised over and over again. Thus narration serves to displace anterior symbolisation onto a new plane, integrating or exploring them as the case may be.[v]

The work I have chosen to exemplify the necessity of such a shift in theoretical and critical dissemination is W(E)AVE by Elana Herzog and Michael Schumacher, made in 2006.

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The work consists of deconstructed woven fabrics such as found bedspreads and carpets, all bringing different traces of histories of origin, use and aesthetic qualities into the work. The material work is interlaced with woven discrete audio events, comprised of sound waves and sound recordings of the making process.

The accompanying text from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,[vi] where the work was exhibited, tells us that ‘Herzog will transform the gallery in which the exhibition will be presented with a series of newly constructed walls. These walls, and those that line the gallery’s perimeter, incorporate reinforced gypsum panels, which, when exhibited, are installed flush with the surrounding walls.  Found textiles are attached to these panels using thousands of metal staples. Parts of the fabric and the staples are then removed, and sometimes reapplied, leaving a residue of shredded fabric and perforated wall surface in some areas, and densely-stapled and built-up areas elsewhere. The structure of the image is thus generated directly from the weave of the fabric. The progressively dematerialised image, articulated by metal staples and fabric residue, seems to be simultaneously emerging from and disappearing into the wall. During the period when Herzog was working on many of the panels included in the exhibition, Schumacher visited her studio with his recording equipment. The sounds that Schumacher captured include Herzog stapling, sweeping, and drilling, in addition to her dog Tanner chewing on a piece of wood. Back in his studio, Schumacher incorporated elements from these sounds with synthesized sounds, such as sine tones, and more traditional instrumentation, including piano, cello, and violin. Processed in his computer using Max/MSP software, the sound was organized into eleven discrete channels, in what Schumacher describes as a grid metaphor. Presented on eleven speakers dispersed throughout the space, the composition will evoke a “grid” or weave of audio experience unfolding through time.’

What I find important in the work itself, and in the text that frames the work, is that both describe the action that generated the work, a ‘presentness’ of making, the fantasticated[vii] image of crafted intuition.

[ii] Gadamer, H.G. (1986: 164) Appendix: Intuition and vividness, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[iii] Gadamer, H.G. (1960: 169) Aesthetische und hermeneutische Folgerungen: Rekonstruktion und Integration als hermeneutische Aufgaben, in Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen: Niemeyer

[iv] Ricoeur, P. (1992: 127) Personal Identity and Narrative Identity, in Oneself as Another, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

[v] Ricoeur, P. (1991: 469) The Creativity of Language, in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, Valdes, M. J. (ed.), Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf

[vi] http://www.aldrichart.org/exhibitions/past/weave.php

[vii] I borrowed this beautiful word from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses

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]

Nostalgia proved ripe for debate on June 26, when the University of Southampton Library and the Edinburgh College of Art organised a one-day symposium to explore the theme. Throughout the daylong conversation, focus veered back and forth along two axis. Nostalgia as a positive experience sat at one end of a line of thinking. Nostalgia as a negative mindset perched at the other extreme. A further contrast was the experience of nostalgia as an individual and intimate response to personal memory, versus the same sentiment considered on a national and even global scale distanced from first hand experience.

Slide carousels were definitively moved to the past with the first speaker of the day, Kevin Murray, speaking via skype about authenticity and craft. Murray’s thought provoking contribution explored “craft through the nostalgic lens” and introduced the British audience to Australian exhibitions and practitioners engaging with the theme. Whistling, milk bottles and the typewriter all found their way into the conversation. Murray spoke of a today’s “hypercapitalist world filled with material redundancy” and concluded that nostalgia acts as “both a retreat and a recovery”. Our testing of remote technology set the intended experimental tone for the day. Regrettably, one lesson to be gleaned from the experience was our inability as an audience to fully communicate to the speaker our engagement and enthusiasm – elements that are palpable when standing at the podium.

Linda Newington, Head of Faculty Services held an informal conversation with Tim Wildschut of the School of Psychology, both at the University of Southampton. Newington’s interest in nostalgia and knitting provided an accessible link to Wildschut’s research. In basic terms, Wildschut revealed that negative moods can trigger a nostalgic state of mind, but the result can leave an individual with “an increased sense of social support” which acts as “private self comforting”. Armed with this evidence that nostalgia is not indulgent whimsy after all, many speakers and participants expressed relief at the science Wildschut’s research illuminated. Curiously this point was returned to again and again throughout the day, suggesting the alleviation of much unspoken anxiety around the theme.

Carol Tulloch, a Reader in Dress History at Chelsea College of Art and Design, concluded the morning with a talk on her use of photographic archives to research dress history in Jamaica. Tulloch contrasted this experience with her more recent use of photographic collections inherited from her mother-in-law, drawing on Homi Bhahba’s notion of “fragments of history” to acknowledge that research “cannot gain all of the story”. But she also acknowledged that the “physical act of trolling through the photographic archives” she first used in Jamaica is an entirely different experience to the database dependent archival work many undertake today. “Unexpected finds” if nothing else, are often omitted when research is screened first through the tool of the digital database. So too is the slower pace with which the archival material comes to be known.

From Tullouch’s exploration of the recent past, conversation wound its way even further back in time to the Neolithic. Angela McClanahan, Lecturer in Visual & Material Culture at the Edinburgh College of Art introduced us to the Stones of Stenness, “a spectacular Neolithic henge monument located in the Orkney Islands, and the roles it has played in various forms of cultural production surrounding identity, ‘belonging’ and the construction of community over the last two centuries.” Recounting the “purposeful acts of curation, particularly romantic interpretations of the site as a Norse-Pagan ‘sacrificial’ ruin when it was taken into state care and interpreted for public consumption in 1906”, McClanahan tackled the question of nostalgia from the wide lens of the tourism economy and the identity as World Heritage Site. More recent controversy over the potential of a wind farm to be built visible to the site revealed yet another interpretation of nostalgia: a memory to remain static and unchanging despite of a local thirst for modernisation.

To conclude the day, I spoke with Textile Artist Clio Padovani about the role material and memory play in her current practice. Trained in tapestry, Padovani now works with video to create works that are in many ways ‘constructed’ as a tapestry would be assembled. The central role time plays in both weaving and new media were foregrounded in Padovani’s discussion of her practice. Here the spectrum of nostalgia was apparent in references to the artist’s Italian childhood, as well as a cultural nostalgia for the paintings of the great Italian masters, now reconfigured in digital works as ephemeral as the emotions they explore.

This event was modest in size, a detail that Linda and I felt, as organisers, to be crucial to both the audience and speakers ability to explore alternative and informal modes of presentation. We were lucky to enjoy the contribution of an engaged and questioning audience, who fed a lively and ongoing conversation throughout the day. But I wonder too, if the theme of nostalgia lends itself to this? Without feeling the need to be a subject expert, I sensed that everyone felt they had valid questions and comments to bring to the conversation, often based on personal anecdotes. Throughout the day, these contributions shed light on larger and more formal research topics introduced by the invited speakers. This event is one of two linked research days; the second will take place at the Edinburgh College of Art on July 24 and considers the theme of renewal. I wonder if the future will hold as much pause for thought as the past provided us with last week.

Collect, London (May 2009)

Collect, London (May 2009)

For the first time Collect was staged at the prestigious Saatchi Gallery, off the King’s Road, in a beautiful open and airy space, away from the usual places where crafts are encountered, exhibited, sold and sometimes bought. This Collect was hailed as being exhibited in a place of ‘fine’ (or other) art, therefore rated equally etc. etc. etc., a marketing ploy that played on all the usual insecurities. I will leave the more journalistic evaluation and celebration to others and focus on the dynamics that involve the crafts as a practice of meaning.

In my view, we need to be aware of the significance of the craft object as a commodity and at the same time explore the it as a dialogical device of differentiation and of meaning. In accordance with other theoretical thought systems, significantly semiology, we might regard the object as a sign, a sign by which human beings, individually or in groups, communicate or attempt to communicate. This applies to a lot of cultural manifestations like clothes, advertisement, food, music etc., and of course crafts are no exception. The object functions as a sign regardless of the maker’s intention, and it does so whether it has been mass-produced, is a one-off piece or a conceptual work. The reading of the object as a sign becomes especially interesting in cases where the maker is aware of the linguistic sign function of the object and integrates this awareness into his/her own artistic practice. These makers often develop work methodologies, which on a conscious level attempt to take control over the sign function of the object and intentionally play with the possible readings of the work.

The crafts practitioners I focus on engage in the development of creative working methodologies that enable the re-construction of signs and their creative and social function. Autobiographical and historical narratives need to be integrated into a process of making and desires need to be managed. This does not lead to the representation of the surrounding world ‘as it is’; it is primarily an artificial field of signs, which can be manipulated—a cultural artefact. It leads to an approach to artistic production as a tactical game of significations.

The structures and dynamics of culture production involve the crafts in a ‘double take on a double take’. Craft’s initial resistance to mass-culture makes it all the more attractive as a commodity. A market situation is generated where crafts has to simulate itself to be economically successful. Every maker knows how hard it is to sell objects that remain outside the standard territory of commodity signification, and so to achieve artistic autonomy.

Contemporary crafts practice occupies a curious place. On the one hand, we find mass or batch production, which simulates the machine-produced, repressing one-off creation in favour of simulating variation. This side of crafts is often considered successful practice because it works economically. On the other hand, we find crafts practice, which denies machine culture and nostalgically celebrates the hand-made, despite it being often economically unviable.

Crafts like every other art form needs curators, gallerists or project developers, who are creative themselves beyond the economic viability of their businesses and who are empathetic to the artist’s project and development, who are interested in cultural dissemination, view making as a relevant reflective language, or simply are easily bored by too much sameness. Only in such working relationships can makers resist becoming the makers of their own brand and can afford to remain creatively inquisitive and evolving. The other option would be to evade the gallery system altogether and to engage with other more guerrilla tactics to get one’s work seen and appreciated.

In polite Collect, Hans Stofer’s Off my Trolley stood out with an imagined soundtrack of The Clash. His piece of resistance was ‘in your face’, using punk and scatter-art strategies, a piece of work where nothing more needed to be said – the piece was the message…

hans-stofer-1-gallery-so-collect-09

hans-stofer-5-gallery-so-collect-09

hans-stofer-2-gallery-so-collect-09

…only in the context of Collect, it was one of the pieces that offered a resolute, if deeply nostalgic,  counter-position and resistance to the sameness of contemporary crafts commodity.

detail from Hans Stofer’s 'Off my Trolley', crucifix made from Swiss cheese

detail from Hans Stofer’s 'Off my Trolley', crucifix made from Swiss cheese

On the other side of the scale, Collect 2009 seemed to have lost the domestic, functional and delightfully usable, being replaced with ever more ‘modern’ table-sculpture. No question, some of these are simply impressive in application of skills, exploration of materials and scale. But objects of a more humble nature and objects that emerge from crafts practices that resist commodification seem to be difficult to bring to this audience. Given that the galleries that show at Collect are selected (apart from the fact that they need to be in a position to be able to afford participation) for the creative output of the artists they represent, the question arises if we are encountering another circle of homogenisation in the appreciation of objects – a collectively shared belief, a taste, of what constitutes ‘good’ crafts. Like all culturally established hierarchies this is difficult to resist, fundamentally non-contemporary and counter to maker’s passionate investment in artistic experimentation.

I am particularly mindful about the impact this might have in the creative practice of emerging makers who are only in the process of finding out what it is they are doing. The most frightening result I could think of would be the simulation of accepted appearance at the price of a self-reflective and critical practice, as difficult as this might be to bring to the attention of an appreciating audience.
On my way back from Collect, walking through London’s nightly streets, I saw these richly decorative historical crafts objects reflected in the window of one of London’s most cutting-edge gallery and found this image more eloquent than any of my words could possibly be…

jivan-astfalck-walking-through-the-night

Several issues are guiding the planning of these events. The first has to do with how we talk about textiles, the second is the current economic crisis. At a recent seminar organised by Lesley Millar to coincide with the exhibition Deconocida: Unknown I, along with all participants, was asked to stitch a nametag for one of the women who have died in the lawless Mexican boarder town of Juarez. I found stitching while thinking occupied the audience in a way I had not seen before and have begun to wonder why, at conferences, we allow ourselves to become so separate from the material we are discussing?

One objective of the Nostalgia & Renewal Symposia is to explore alternative approaches to how we talk about textiles. This may involve greater contact with the materials themselves. But it may also involve dynamic conversations, rather than scripted lectures, when exploring new ideas or any other suggestions that deserve a testing ground. Each speaker at the two events has been invited to reconsider the manner in which they communicate their ideas and use the events to trial new ideas. Many research budgets are looking a little thin on the ground in the current economic climate, but that need not be an excuse to stop talking. At both events speakers will be making contributions via the Internet. This system is far from ideal, but it does bypass the need for international airline tickets and years of planning before the conversation can start. Textile and craft has never enjoyed lavish financial support. I suggest that this may put us in a strong position currently to continue deploying creative thinking to the research challenges at hand.

Finally, the poetic nature of the two themes – nostalgia & renewal – has allowed us to invite an interdisciplinary group of speakers and, I hope, will interest an interdisciplinary audience. While it is difficult to conceal the central role textiles occupy in the research of many participants, it is our hope that a more eclectic conversation will suggest new ways we might approach textile research in future.

Dr Jessica Hemmings, Associate Director of the Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art

For more information, see previous notice.

In our contemporary culture we might regard any attempt to re-connect with a personal or cultural point of origin as nostalgic; we find ourselves much more in a world of shifting, flexible frameworks in which our origins, bonds, traditions, our sentiments and dreams, exist alongside other stories, other fragments of memory and traces of time. In such a world a creative practitioner, providing he or she is curious and sufficiently interested, might become a voyager, a person on a journey wandering or more likely meandering through the world of appearances, ideas, theories and histories. The abandonment of a carefully constructed cultural identity might become identity itself as much as making might become heterogeneous, counter-historical and hybrid.

On the other side of the spectrum we find utopian ideals, the hope for a ‘better’ world, and the passionate investment in the idea that objects have invested meaning. We find crafts objects of indefinable origin on sale everywhere, permeating crafts markets, mail order catalogues, department stores, fashion and gifts shops. Even in the face of the pressure to desire only what others possess and thus to succumb to what Jean Baudrillard has termed a culture of profound monotony[1],we want to distinguish ourselves as individuals. One way to attempt this is through the acquisition of objects, which via their symbolic assimilation mark us as individuals. Consumption is in this respect not only understood as acquisition, but as expression as well.

Anonymous handmade brass sink from Marrakech Medina

Anonymous handmade brass sink from Marrakech Medina

While seeming individualistic, consumption responds to the aspirations of the group and can be recognised as such. Baudrillard suggests that in an idealist-consumerist society, the lived and conflictual human relations are substituted with personalised relations to objects. The criticism of psychological regression implied in this suggestion does not make Baudrillard very popular with people who invest objects with deep affection and devotion, like most crafts people inevitably do.

He does, however, seem to neglect that there exists an interesting dichotomy between crafts commodity on the one hand and conceptually focused one-off crafts work generated by self-motivated studio practice on the other. Most crafts practitioners, whose studio practice I am familiar with, engage with the tension between the functionality of the object, its status as a consumer good, and a more ideas-based artistic agenda at the same time. This is never a simplistic equation, and it gets even more complicated, and indeed interesting, when makers start to simulate the visual appearance of banal crafts kitsch, sometimes using advanced technology together with the hand-made, and in an artistic somersault re-create the tired and clichéd object as an object filled with fresh meaning.

Ugglamedtapet by Frida Fjellman

Ugglamedtapet by Frida Fjellman

June 26 & July 24, 2009

nos· tal· gi· a

1. responsible for the resurgence of interest in knitting debated at In the Loop: Knitting Past, Present & Future, a conference held at the Winchester School of Art in 2008 and recorded in the University of Southampton Knitting Archive[1]

2. apparent in such diverse territories as archaeology and tourism[2]

3. explorations of memory and material in new media[3]

4. Jamaican photographic archives and the study of dress[4]

5. red shoes[5]

6. authenticity and craft[6]

re· new· al

1. state of mind that believes creative textile practice can emerge from the current economic crisis with renewed authority and conviction

2. evident in the renewed social conscience of contemporary craft[7]

3. synthetic hair sculptures and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, New Orleans[8]

4. creative process and the zeitgeist[9]

5. the curious phenomenon of manias[10] old and new

Nostalgia & renewal are defined by Jessica Hemmings and Linda Newington with shameless attention to their mutual interest in alternative approaches to the research of textiles. Further expanded definitions of the terms and their relevance to textile research will be debated at the following events:

June 26 @ Textile Conservation Centre, Winchester (nostalgia)

For bookings please contact Judith Horgan 02380 596986 / J.A.Horgan@soton.ac.uk

July 24 @ Edinburgh College of Art (renewal)

For bookings please contact Jessica Hemmings 0131 221 6199 / j.hemmings@eca.ac.uk

Cost £35 per day includes lunch. Concessions available £20 per day.

[1] Linda Newington, Head of Faculty Services in conversation with Tim Wildschut School of Psychology, University of Southampton

[2] Angela McClanahan, Lecturer in Visual & Material Culture, Edinburgh College of Art

[3] Clio Padovani, Textile Artist in conversation with Dr Jessica Hemmings, Associate Director of the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies, Edinburgh College of Art

[4] Carol Tulloch, TrAIN Senior Research Fellow Black Visual Culture, University of Arts London

[5] Hilary Davidson, Costume Curator, Museum of London (tbc)

[6] Kevin Murray, online editor of the Journal of Modern Craft (via skype)

[7] Deirdre Nelson, Textile Artist

[8] Loren Schwerd, Artist (via skype)

[9] Michelle Anderson Binczak, Editor of Bloom magazine

[10] Elizabeth Kramer, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Newcastle

Cabinet maker at Upper Canada Village, Morrisburg

In2.1 Journal of Modern Craft, a number of articles open up the issue of tradition in modern craft. So when is craft a manufactured nostalgia and when is it an active resistance to modernity? Please feel free to add your comments to the posts on this question. To learn more, you can read the print journal or download the selected articles:

• Editorial Introduction
• Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England by Tom Crook
• Support/Surface or Sculpture/Craft: Considering Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach by Penelope Curtis
• “Traditional—with Contemporary Form”: Craft and Discourses of Modernity in Slovakia Today by Nicolette Makovicky