Craft Performs

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Craft Performs NAMITA GUPTA WIGGERS

The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things.

Although the term difference has now taken on a vast set of associations (principally because of the special use of the term by Jacques Derrida and his followers), its main virtue is that it is a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories: classes, genders, roles, groups, and nations. When we therefore point to a practice, a distinction, a conception, an object, or an ideology as having a cultural dimension (notice the adjectival use), we stress the idea of situated difference, that is, difference in relation to something local, embodied, and significant. This point can be summarized in the following form: culture is not usefully regarded as a substance but is better regarded as a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference.

Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference.

Arjun Appadurai1

Fig. 0 Performance of Anne Wilson’s Wind-Up: Walking the Warp at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, 2008

To make something “by hand” is culturally relevant once again. From scrapbooking to knitting, sewing to DIY furniture, food preparation and gardening to home decorating, from the popularity of garden and design shows on TV to the tens of thousands who flock to the Maker Faire and Burning Man each year, it is difficult to argue that expressing creativity through one’s hands is dying out. Alongside this proliferation of making, the sheer number of books, articles, journals, films, conferences, dialogues, Web sites, workshops, and blogs that regularly emerge addressing historical and modern, contemporary and global craft leaves one breathless from efforts to keep pace. Despite this rich and diverse abundance, with many hands and voices contributing to the dimensionality of craft, our understanding of how to discuss craft as a terrain of situated difference is nascent at best. By focusing on spaces, places, and ways in which visual practitioners perform craft today, we can enhance our understanding of the easily overlooked craftscape.

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Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft picks up the dialogue at one of the murkier junctures. Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver’s use of the word performative as an organizing concept for an exhibition of work by artists, craftspeople, and designers immediately connects their individual practices to broader questions around performance art and performance in art. Performative impulses in craft are notoriously difficult to discuss, largely because they are easily masked by the never-ceasing art-versus-craft debate.2 Through renewed critical attention to craft, however, the work of the visual practitioners in Hand+Made also begs a critical question: where and how is craft performed?

In many ways, the contemporary art museum is the newest and perhaps most challenging site for the location of craft and the deployment of craftbased practices.3 Over the past several decades art practices have continued to migrate out of the white cube and into such spaces as the street, the art fair, and the home, essentially moving into sites already inhabited by craft. More specifically, craft has continuously dwelled and thrived in such public and private noninstitutional settings. Looking outside the spaces recognized as art’s domain reveals deeply embedded performative aspects of the practice of craft, uncovering ways in which the artists, craftspeople, and designers in Hand+Made are engaged in a practice that merges concept and craft, performance and objecthood.

A potter works with clay on a potter’s wheel, raising a deceptively shapeless mound into a hollow form that evokes the foundational structure of similar vessels lining the shelves of his or her booth at the arts and crafts fair. A fascinated crowd grows, some lingering to take in the slow raising of the clay, while others watch briefly, then move on to other things. The potter casually laughs, chats, and looks up, making eye contact while working with a nonchalance and facility at the task before him/her. Dirty hands dripping with clay, the potter provides a quiet spectacle of making that masquerades as an on-site studio.

This public craft performance at an “arts and crafts fair” is less about making an object or demonstrating how the potter on view makes a specific object than it is about the sleight of hand derived from repeatedly making the same kind of object. The potter immersed in craft as a practice makes a kind of object not once or a few times, but hundreds, even thousands of times. The performance of making an object at a fair is seductive, a “magician’s trick” of raising clay in which viewers willingly suspend their disbelief and allow themselves to make associations between the vessel they see being formed and the work on display. In other words, the performance is a vehicle through which the potter provides an illusion in which audiences perceive that they have witnessed the making of an object like the finished objects in the booth. In actuality, what was witnessed is an exercise executed over and over throughout the day as the potter repeatedly builds and destroys the same clay mound. By bringing a portion of the process of making into a public sphere, the potter also turns the public viewers into voyeurs who think they are seeing the private space of the studio.

It is this performance-on-the-street tradition from craftwork that Gabriel figg. 0 ; p. 00 ), in Craig engages through The Pro Bono Jeweler (2008–10; see fi which he fabricates jewelry in public. The space required to fabricate a basic

Fig. 0 Gabriel Craig performing Pro Bono Jeweler, Richmond, Virginia, 2009

piece of metal jewelry—a ring, for example—is much smaller and more compact than that required to trim, dry, glaze, fire, glaze, and refire even the simplest of ceramic mugs. Where the potter in the imagined scenario above is, perhaps inadvertently, perpetuating the illusionistic sleight of hand of the street magician, Craig’s own street performance is a demystification of the simplest of processes.4 His demonstration-on-the-go simultaneously puts understanding of the process of making into the hands of passersby, connecting demonstration to conversation and personal agency. The rings he fabricates and then gifts to onlookers serve as souvenirs by which the wearers/recipients may better understand their own choices—both what they choose to purchase and the ways in which they may choose to use their own hands in the future to make rings of their own.

Here is where Craig’s performance actively and more self-consciously employs the latent performance potential of a crafted object. Perhaps the potter’s demonstration moved someone in the audience to purchase a piece; maybe it is a mug. The mug functions as an object awaiting use, a connection-inwaiting and a souvenir of an experience.5 Each time the owner uses the mug or invites a guest to use it, it serves as a reminder of a story to tell: “We saw the potter throw clay,” or “We saw the potter make a mug just like this one.”

The illusion that the observer—and now the owner of the mug—has seen the process of its making is further perpetuated; the performance of craft seen at the fair is imagined to mimic what happens in the studio. By contrast—and connection—Craig’s performance places the private sphere of the studio in the public realm of the street, turning demonstration into a social commentary, didactic lesson, and noncommercial gift in which the social life of an object carries additional meaning.6 The loop of performed making with the potter stops short at a limited verbal description for the viewer, while Craig’s loop becomes instead something closer to a start-to-finish description of the experience, in

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which the wearer and viewer might be able to transpose the experience onto other jewelry in varied contexts.

The idea of looping and making public a portion of a complex craft-oriented process brings us to Anne Wilson’s Wind-Up: Walking the Warp (2008; fi g. 0 ; p. 0 0). Here Wilson takes one of the critical steps in the fabrication of any woven textile and turns a solitary, mundane, but essential piece of process into a meditative, physical, and collective performance.

A group of women gather around a quilting frame. Some stitch quietly while others share stories as the work progresses. Prior to their gathering, each quilter pieced together squares using store-bought or inherited fragments from previously used garments or domestic textiles. Together they stitch through a three-layered sandwich of fabric and batting, conjoining the now-larger squares of fabric into a single quilt. Methodically the quilters’ needles move in and out of the fabric, the tautness and length of the stitches measuring and revealing each one’s experience with needlework.

It is a multigenerational group, and more experienced quilters pause periodically to guide the less experienced with the work, directing their stitching to ensure that the quilt—created to commemorate a milestone in a woman’s life, perhaps a marriage, a birth, or a new home—will move from being an object of use to being a family heirloom.

To understand the move Wilson makes requires understanding the actions and process that take place in Wind-Up: Walking the Warp. The structure of any weaving is contingent on the intersection or interlacing of two sets of threads at right angles.7 Traditionally the warp threads hold together the structure of the weaving, while the weft threads are interlaced up and down between, creating the pattern, texture, or image of a woven textile. The warp threads must be measured to the correct length for a project in a manner that keeps them from tangling and allows them to be wound onto the loom. To accomplish this, a weaver typically winds thread from a skein onto a cone, then winds the warp threads to the determined lengths using a warping mill. Once wound, the warp is then wound onto a loom to create the lengthwise threads through which the weft is passed over and under to create any woven textile, as can be seen in Christy Matson’s Sonic Structure I (2006–10; p. 00).

Wilson’s performance of craft process made public calls attention to one of the most common locations of craft—the private, domestic realm—which has been the site of the performance of gendered, social, and collective craft for centuries.8 It is here that traditions are passed down through a series of social and communal gatherings, the tedium of hard labor forgotten in the beauty of the final object, pleasure found in both process and sharing. By making what is typically a solitary process public and collective, Wilson ties her work to both the collaborative and communal processes of constructing textiles such as quilts and to the conceptual tradition of Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967–68).9 While Serra’s list of action verbs is being explored once again in this moment of renewed interest in Minimalism, Conceptualism, and materialbased practices, it does not fully address the specificities of craft-based practitioners.10 Serra sought a means, a manifesto to move away from the idea of working toward the making of an object—or the preconceived idea of what he

wanted to make.11 In other words, he sought a means of undoing the stepbased process upon which craft relies. Serra’s list provides a useful way of thinking about how an individual’s actions affect or cause an effect upon a material—any material—but the resulting objects and events and the kind of actions that form the basis of his list function differently than actions employed in craft practices. When you look at a Serra piece executed according to an action verb—for example, to fold—your focus is on the effect of the action on the material. But if you look at the verb list through the lens of craft-based practices, it leaves you scratching your head. How do you reduce “center the clay on the potter’s wheel” to a simpler action? Or describe the action of placing a piece of wood on a lathe? Or communicate the full potential of possibilities in the deceptively simple action “to stitch”? What Wilson does here that links Serra to the conceptual aspects of her practice is to recognize the performative potential in the simple action verb to wind. But she does not execute it by herself. Instead she turns the action into a collaborative and collective process, thus tying the concept back into craft practices, textile-based works in particular, as carried out in the home.

It is 1976, and the entire country is deeply immersed in a celebration of the United States Bicentennial. For those of us in elementary school, this means trips to any number of “colonial villages,” where history is preserved and interpreted through idealized historical re-creations of life from a particular moment in time. On one such trip we watch a blacksmith forging metal.

His period attire and hairstyle seem excessive in the heat and a poor choice for the strenuous task in which he is engaged. Working to make the iron bend to his will requires movement back and forth between a hot, glowing fire and an anvil where brutal hammering shapes it, followed by the hissing quench of water to cool the object being forged. The work looks, sounds, and feels physically exhausting, particularly when the result is something as simple as a horseshoe or nail. The experience becomes frozen in time in my child’s mind as an antiquated process, part of a bygone moment.

Here is where craft is performed as history, as something that happened in the past. And this is where Theaster Gates executes a complex dislocation of multiple representations of the past, identity, and history (see f ig. 0). The retelling of history as a performative practice, as employed by Gates, is a retelling of a buried and nearly forgotten history—that of the unknown artisan(see p. 00 ). Gates, as a contemporary artist of African American ethnic identity who has studied ceramics in Japan, draws us into a rich and layered performance of craft as past history and historical revision. We understand the work being performed to be that of Theaster Gates; he is named and fully identified. In his performance Resurrecting Dave (2009), he deliberately references one of the few African American craftsmen from the past whose name has survived through history: Dave the Potter. But Dave the Potter, who was a slave, is not fully named. So in the invocation of Dave’s name linked with his own, Gates establishes his own connection to the myriad unnamed or unknown craftspeople of the past.

It is here too that Gates simultaneously invokes the history of The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, Soetsu Yanagi’s book translated by

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Fig. 0 Performance of Theaster Gates’s Temple Exercises at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2009 Materials: wooden conveyor pallets, public address system, musical instruments, DJ gear

Bernard Leach and popularized in America during the 1950s by a nationwide lecture and workshop tour.12 The Mingei movement, with its celebration of art and beauty from the simplest of folk traditions, espoused aesthetic values in objects made by anonymous craftsmen working in long-standing folk traditions. Gates reminds us that a celebration of an anonymous Japanese craftsman as the producer of a ceramic vessel is steeped in Japanese ceramic tradition. This imagined folk artisan inhabits a very different history than the unknown slave, who was not even considered human and whose presence in history is overlooked, erased beyond the ability to celebrate the works of his or her hands. Gates’s “co-location” calls attention to the richness of the embodied experiences of the performance of craft as history, as he draws sound, the physical presence of the body, ethnicity, and globalization (how many other unknown craftspeople are there?) into a new conversation. He challenges us to reexamine not only historical village reenactments but also the history of race (the “Black Question” versus the “Yellow Question”) and the humanistic and cultural value that we place upon craft objects and those who make them.

The works in Hand+Made bring out multiple ways in which embodied difference is practiced at this moment. The artists, craftspeople, and designers represented in this exhibition are trained to practice in a range of ways, to work conceptually and materially. But there is more being performed here than the manipulation of materials, more than a materially driven practice. These visual practitioners do not inhabit a liminal zone between art and craft. They are the executors of their projects from concept to performance, idea to object, an important point of difference that allows the work to move through and between categories, to be many things all at once. They are deeply immersed in a range of practices that enable a certain kind of boundary crossing in which their performative impulses can be understood from a range of viewpoints.

From my perspective as a curator in a museum dedicated to craft, I see ways in which the works “on view” reveal practices that connect deeply to ways in which craft performs—physically, culturally, historically, and materially. It was, however, a challenge to look through craft versus through art history. This essay seeks a shift away from the comfortable space art historians and contemporary artists easily inhabit to instead connect vernacular craft practices that operate concurrently outside the museum and gallery environments with the conceptual and material practices increasingly surfacing in museums and galleries today. In this way, the richly layered cultural dimension of craft may be revealed and critically engaged. As Shannon Stratton states: “Craft is something we do. It is active, it is acting, it does.”13 Now is an opportunity to rethink craft and, through this exhibition, to consider how craft performs.

NOTES 1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 12–13.

2. For a recent discussion of this centuries-old war, see Garth Clark, How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts (Portland, Ore.: Museum of Contemporary Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2008).

3. For a discussion of cultural productivity, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). I would like to recognize Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton for this idea of the deployment of craft in a conversation related to their project Gestures of Resistance for the Museum of Contemporary Craft in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, January 2010.

4. Anne Marie Oliver’s essay “Red Rabbit: David Eckard’s Prestidigitation” and the piece about which it is written contributed to my thinking about the relationship between the performance of craft and the street magician (Call + Response, Museum of Contemporary Craft in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/call/pairings/eckard.html).

5. For a discussion of the souvenir as an object that communicates experience, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

6. For an exploration of ways in which people attach cultural value to objects through exchange, see Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

7. See Anne Wilson, “Notes on Wind-Up: Walking the Warp,” http://www.annewilsonartist.com/ pdfs/wind-up2.pdf.

8. See Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984), and Joan Livingstone and John Ploof, eds., The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).

9. Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself,” The Ubu Web Anthology of Conceptual Writing, http://www.ubu.com/concept/serra_verb.html.

10. Kate Mondloch, “Verb List Compilation for Three Artists: Jane Aaron, Lauren Kalman, Mark Hursty,” Elusive Matter, Museum of Contemporary Craft in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, http://museumofcontemporarycraft.org/pdf/ 2009_11_elusive_matter.pdf. Mondloch, Anthony Elms, Anjali Gupta, Judith Leemann, and Shannon Stratton have reported that the use of Serra’s verb list as a tool to understand and address current interests in materially driven practices has surfaced in their students’ writing and in conversations with artists and curators (conversations with the author, 2009–10). Discussions with them contributed to my questions about the relationship between Serra’s list of action verbs and a comparable list for craft-type actions.

11. “The verb list allowed me to experiment without any preconceived idea about what I was going to make and not worry about the history of sculpture. I wasn’t burdened by any prescripted definition of material, process, or end product” (Richard Serra, in Kynaston McShine, “A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra,” in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007], 27).

12. In 1952 Yanagi, Leach, and Shoji Hamada introduced “the Mingei Movement to the United States through a series of lectures and workshops held from Los Angeles, California, to Black Mountain College, North Carolina. The Mingei Movement inspired the nation, prompting a shift in the way artists worked with clay: West Coast stoneware was replaced with new clay bodies, molds with potter’s wheels and colorful glazes created from local sources replaced with muted earth tones, wax-resist designs and painterly applications of glazes. The introduction coincided with a counter-culture fascination with Zen Buddhism and East Asian ideas, including such explorations as Alan Watts’ version of American Zen on his Berkeley, California, radio program and the writings of Beat Generation icons Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder” (Namita Gupta Wiggers, “1950s: The Decade of the Northwest Ceramic Annuals,” in Unpacking the Collection: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Craft [Portland, Ore.: Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2008], 30).

13. Shannon Stratton, untitled lecture presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the series From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production, April 1, 2009, http://www.shannonstratton.com/from-trash-to-spectacle-lectur/.