College Art Association Conference 2008

Gestures of Resistance: Craft, Performance and the Politics of Slowness, a panel co-chaired by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leemann, was included in the 2008 College Art Association Conference in Dallas, TX.

Panelists and papers:

Kelly Cobb: The 100-Mile Suit: Costume as an Exercise in Regionalism

Patricia J. Keller: Doing Time: Women, Hand-Spinning and Quiltmaking in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1800-1880.

Rod Northcutt: Making and Faking: Industrial Distillation of the Crafted Mark

Bibiana Obler: Michael Rakowitz and the Anti-Craft Tradition

Christopher Whittey and Kristine Woods: Un-Express, or, Delivering Slowness as Political Ploy

Session Proposal: 

Gestures of Resistance: Craft, Performance and the Politics of Slowness explores the repetition and durational labor at play in both contemporary performance and handicraft work, endeavoring to investigate and expose the gesture of handicraft as a radical reassertion of agency and restoration of integrity. Already durational, when made public or considered as performative, handicraft becomes politically charged, an active resistance to contemporary spectacle, mass-production and uniformity.

Recent studio practice has embraced traditional handicraft as a means for conceptual art. Textile and fiber departments in particular have become increasingly popular as young artists embrace traditional craft methodologies, most notably knit and crochet, as a means to explore prescient issues of identity, subjectivity and labor. With an interest in recent fiber practices that utilize (but are not restricted to) the connection between time/recording and craft (ie. Anne Wilson), public acts of crafting (ie. Knitta, Church of Craft), costuming and disguise (ie. Forcefield) and political activism through craft (ie. Cat Mazza, Lisa Anne Auerbach), Gestures of Resistance will postulate a new theory of handicraft as performative: active, public and affective rather than passive, private and obsessive.

We propose an open investigation of these themes, inviting proposals that explore the following ideas: How is labor framed within both performance and handicraft disciplines? What happens to perceptions of the ‘craftsperson’ and craft ‘practice’ when that work is made public and performed, rather than remaining private? What changes when we view handicraft’s repetitiveness through the lens of durational performance rather than through that of obsession? What quality of attention is generated by durational work? What of boredom, what of obstinacy, what of resistance or refusal to make something beautiful or useful? How does an investment in slowness – in terms of time and labor – shift perceptions of logic and value? Does the nature of performance allow relationships to the crafted object to shift, allowing for a more generous understanding of desire, one lodged in life rather than in the fetish object? How does handicraft fail to meet its utopic, political promise or become merely folded back in capitalism? How does it stubbornly succeed?

An audio recording of the panel is available for purchase through the CAA Web site. 

Paper Abstracts

The 100-Mile Suit:  Costume as an Exercise in Regionalism

Kelly Cobb, The Maryland Institute College of Art

The 100-mile suit is a literal examination of the question "Where did you get your outfit?," A fiber-to-finish costume project inspired by initiatives in sustainability such as the 100-mile diet, community supported agriculture, local car-share transport and creative collectives. The costume exists as a regional act and durational collaboration, mapping labor and raw material, bringing performance art sensibilities to an every day object as a symbol of connection.

Intended to be the introduction of a dialogue about resources and community, the 100-Mile Suit was originally developed as part of a museum exhibition focusing on local communities and collective gestures. The project utilized the gallery as a production space where the community could view the process of making, talk to the makers and touch the materials.

Twenty-three farmer/crafter/artists worked some 506 hours to complete the suit. Each person volunteered their time, skills and energies, working on the various components of production, in addition to their typical daily routines and schedules. In this way, the suit reflects the honest, organic structure that developed between these individuals; a physical signature of a collective at a specific moment in time.

Doing Time: Women, Hand-Spinning and Quiltmaking in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1800-1880

Patricia Keller, University of Pennsylvania

Before mechanized spinning, each yarn in every textile was spun by hand; in western cultures, that hand was most often a woman’s, as here the work of spinning historically was ascribed to women. Hand-spinning is a durational process; the spinner’s skilled handwork inscribes the time of the spinner’s body upon the fibers transformed at her wheel. Development of mechanized spinning rendered the ancient, gendered, and meaningful activities of fiber processing and hand-spinning obsolete within the lifetime of one generation of women, resulting in discernable social/cultural dislocation. Data from probate inventories reveals this early 19th-century dislocation constituted a significant cultural disruption in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, fostering some women’s compensatory appropriation of quiltmaking as a new household craft. Reasserting women’s meaningful and traditional role as producers of significant cultural material, quiltmakers mediated cultural disruption resulting from technological change. Quiltmakers aesthetically and symbolically reconfigured cotton fabrics produced by industrial mills, processually relocating/recapitulating the durational disintegrative and reintegrative processes necessary to transform fiber into yarn (natural material into cultural material), processes inherent to the production of hand-spun yarns as much as to pieced and appliqued quilts. Rural Pennsylvania quiltmakers literally and metaphorically re-inscribed the durational nature of hand-spinning upon the quilt.

Making and Faking: Industrial Distillation of the Crafted Mark

Rod Northcutt, Rochester Institute of Technology

Most consumers are familiar with the signs of careful, obsessive time spent by a craftsperson in the form of specific marks of workmanship of risk, yet these are also seen on mass-produced products fabricated via workmanship of certainty—where their application was not the product of performance and did not drive the form. While suggestive that consumers are happily fooled, it is more likely that the marks of time-based craft processes comprise appreciable visual codes that are read both on conscious and sub-conscious levels. The event of making and agency of the maker could be what is signified, however there is an abstracted appreciation of craft codes without a reference to time at all.

The reading of these attributes drives consumption of both craft and manufactured commodity. The decoding of the marks is investigated both on the conscious level  (marks are understood and are reference to process) and on the sub-conscious level (marks become signs decoded without distinct allusion). For the latter, there is consideration that this lack of tangible reference creates simulacra and establishes a definitive synthetic style in which the making-based reference becomes primarily decorative. This attraction enables participation in what has been called sympathetic virtuosity or vicarious craft.

Michael Rakowitz and the Anti-Craft Tradition

Bibiana Obler, Johns Hopkins University

Michael Rakowitz’s Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series consists of some fifty handmade replicas of antiquities looted from Baghdad's National Museum in 2003.  The makeshift objects – cobbled together with Middle Eastern food packaging, newspapers, and glue – evoke their lost counterparts with surprising efficacy.  Despite their inadequateness, these substitutes, representing a fraction of the approximately 7,000 missing works, must have taken hours to assemble and required painstaking effort to mimic – with poignant imperfection – metal, stone, and pottery. 

It may seem that Rakowitz, like any number of contemporary practitioners, is interested in craft as redemptive or therapeutic, but it is important to note that he is wary of exaggerating the utopian potential of the handmade.  I take Rakowitz to be a representative of an avant-garde tradition of “anti-craft” practice, which traces back to the Zurich Dadaists’ admiration for and divergence from the ideals of William Morris.  By “anti-craft,” I do not mean that these artists shun craft; rather, their embrace of it represents a critical negotiation of the pitfalls and promises of modernity.  Rakowitz continues this work: in acknowledging the limitations of small-scale interventions into global politics, he seeks to locate a position for art in the social sphere. 

Un-Express, or, Delivering Slowness as Political Ploy

Christopher Whittey and Kristine Woods, Maryland Institute College of Art

Through a time-consuming and erratic epistolary conversation we are attempting to analyze the ramifications and efficacy of the concept slowness.

Discussing cultural and theoretical models in which slowness is a tactic we have engaged in a dialogue using the US Postal Service as our courier. Relative to the now naturalized speed of electronic communication, our temporally frustrated exchanges will no doubt reflect research, digression and consideration not typically accommodated by currently dominant modes.

We anticipate discovering that, to the degree to which slowness can be considered effective as a communicative/resistive device, this efficacy rests largely on the shoulders of convention and, as such, reflects nothing more than a nostalgic cultural anxiety with the present.

Self-reflexively we are interested in conducting a meta-critique such that the delivery of our findings will itself performatively function as a critique of said delivery models. In front of a projected ‘visual hypertext’ collaged from material referenced in the letters, we will read as much of the epistolary conversation as can be accommodated in the time allotted by the conference. It is likely that the speed of the fragmented media will be more comfortable for an audience than the laborious performance of the letters.