Sloppy Craft

Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts

Elaine Cheasley Paterson, Susan Surette, Elaine Cheasley Paterson, Susan Surette

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472533074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Sloppy Craft: Postdisciplinarity and the Crafts brings together leading international artists and critics to explore the possibilities and limitations of the idea of 'sloppy craft' – craft that is messy or unfinished looking in its execution or appearance, or both. The contributors address 'sloppiness' in contemporary art and craft practices including painting, weaving, sewing and ceramics, consider the importance of traditional concepts of skill, and the implications of sloppiness for a new 21st century emphasis on inter- and postdisciplinarity, as well as for activist, performance, queer and Aboriginal practices. In addition to critical essays, the book includes a 'conversation' section in which contemporary artists and practitioners discuss challenges and opportunities of 'sloppy craft' in their practice and teaching, and an afterword by Glenn Adamson.

PART ONE

Explorations of Postdisciplinarity through Sloppy Craft

In her Foreword to this volume, artist Anne Wilson suggests that the coupling of “sloppy” with “craft” sets up an enticing “binary of opposites” that demands attention and provokes discussion and may even flip hierarchies of value. The first part in this volume includes chapters that use “sloppy craft” in this original context—to describe a consciously deskilled aesthetic, as elaborated on by Wilson in her Foreword—yet weave into this initial understanding parallels with queer theory, gendered labor, and processes of reskilling.

For Glenn Adamson, the postdisciplinary world that “sloppy craft” inhabits is one in which “no one activity has any more right to be called art than another” and makers are free to call themselves whatever they like, or to not call themselves anything at all.¹ This questioning of identity—self-imposed or culturally constructed—is Irish scholar Joseph McBrinn’s point of entry into recent discussions of sloppy craft within a textile or fiber context.

Taking as a starting point the complex relationship between amateurism and sewing from which sloppy craft emerges, McBrinn asks us to consider “sewing amateurishly as a performative and queer act.” In his essay “Male trouble,” the interconnections between sewing, amateurism, and gender are examined by McBrinn as a means through which to investigate the textile origins of the term “sloppy craft” and bring to light the crucial place that gay, or queer, self-identification plays within the work of artists such as Gavin Fry, Fernando Marques Penteado, and, in particular, Josh Faught, the original “sloppy” crafter.

The dematerialization of the craft object that frequently accompanies current considerations of craft, while not new, has been used recently to position craft as a methodology, as a form of knowledge and as performance. Given this turn, it is worth noting how second wave feminist art strategies may be read as informing much contemporary “performative craft” showcased in exhibitions such as Gestures of Resistance and Hand+Made. As American art historians Elissa Auther and Elyse Speaks explain, several of these are also woven into the “sloppy” work of Josh Faught in a moment of recuperation. Reflecting upon studio craft, feminist and conceptual art, and queer theory to contextualize the sloppy craft aesthetic, their “Sloppy craft as temporal drag in the work of Josh Faught” lays the groundwork for its broader relevance within contemporary culture. Building upon scholarship at the intersection of craft and queer theory, Auther and Speaks advocate here for a “queering of craft” through strategies embodied in sloppy craft.

In his initial forays into postdisciplinarity, most notably in his 2008 contribution to Crafts (reprinted here as a postscript to this volume), Adamson acknowledges that craft is challenging given its continued relationship to certain modes of making, many of which, he contends, retain their value in the cultural field precisely because of their difficulty and requisite skills. Indeed, that same year, craft theorists Liesbeth Den Besten and Jorunn Veiteberg proposed deskilling as a methodology for questioning the nature of craft itself, especially when craft is understood as skilled production, which is often the case.²

This strategy is explored by Canadian curator Denis Longchamps and coupled with reskilling in the context of Canadian craft practices as these relate to a sloppy craft aesthetic. Longchamps’s chapter, “An impression of déjà vu: Craft, the visual arts and the need to get sloppy” moves us away from textile and fiber, to present the ceramic work of French-Canadian artist Laurent Craste. Craste’s deconstructed porcelain forms are used to reinterpret the recognizable object and its attendant histories, including those of French Sèvres porcelain and sloppy craft within the Quebec artistic milieu. In this close study of Craste’s work within a Canadian visual and material context, Longchamps argues that skill remains important, even when artists are “getting sloppy.”

Much as conceptual approaches in fine art practices have always depended upon an audience fluent with, or at the least familiar with, painting and sculpture, the effectiveness of these conceptual approaches to craft depends upon an audience educated in the materials, processes, skills, history, and even consumption of studio craft, or what ceramic theorist Jo Dahn rightly refers to as their cultural competence.³ Indeed, a lack of such competence within scholarship in related disciplines often hinders a more extensive and richer reading of sloppy craft. These chapters, on the other hand, open up for fruitful discussion the convergence within some sloppy craft practices of design, decorative art, craft, and art within postdisciplinarity. Are Faught’s interiors sloppy design as well as sloppy craft? Is the work of Craste or Basque sloppy decorative arts, or part of the deskilling and reskilling of interior design and the decorative arts?

Through their contributions to this constellation of meanings for craft, which includes the discourses of skill (viewed as encompassing deskilling and reskilling), process, materials, and materiality alongside concerns for gendered labor, professionalism, global economies, sexuality, and identity, as these relate, or not, to a discrete object, the chapters in this first part explore and explode the notion of “sloppy craft” as it was first introduced by Anne Wilson and Glenn Adamson.

Notes

1    Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2010), p. 586.

2    Liesbeth Den Besten, “Deskilled Craft and Borrowed Skill,” and Jorunn Veiteberg, “Stealing Skill,” papers from the 2008 Think Tank: European Initiative for the Applied Arts conference SKILL, thinktank04.eu (accessed September 15, 2012).

3    Jo Dahn, “Elastic/Expanding: Contemporary Conceptual Ceramics,” in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p.169. Dahn is specifically referring to conceptual ceramics, but the principle of her remarks can be extended to craft materials in general.

1

“Male trouble”: Sewing, amateurism, and gender

Joseph McBrinn

The American director John Waters’s 1974 Female Trouble was one of the first in a series of films to establish the campy, outlandish, and monstrous domestic characters and situations that attracted both recognition and notoriety. In Female Trouble the everyday suburban life of the lead character, Dawn Davenport (played by the transvestite Divine), is transformed into a life of crime and ultimately violence, carnage, and murder by a rather mundane incident endemic in late twentieth-century consumer-driven society. She doesn’t get what she wants for Christmas. But, as Dawn’s parents tell her before she explodes into a rage and attacks them, “nice girls don’t wear cha-cha heels.” Waters’s highly distinctive “vulgar, sophomoric, sloppy, [and] subversive” style of cinema has more recently been “adopted, improved and made profitable,” in a process of slow co-option by the mainstream movie industry.¹

Waters’s amateurish aesthetic and subversive subtext had, however, already, rather surprisingly, been co-opted by feminism. In 1990, Judith Butler defined “female trouble” as “that historical configuration of a nameless female indisposition, which thinly veiled the notion that being female is a natural indisposition. Serious as the medicalization of women’s bodies is, the term is also laughable, and laughter in the face of serious categories is indispensible for feminism.”² Butler singled out Waters’s Female Trouble and its creation of a female protagonist (no matter how sloppily the role was played by a transvestite) as directly relevant to contemporary feminism:

Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates. Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize “the natural” in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex.³

Although many women shared Amelia Jones’s conviction that “from a feminist point of view, it is worth being wary of the ways in which masculine performance can be too easily recuperated into rather predictable and self-serving clichés of male artistic prowess,” Butler’s deconstruction of gender’s taxonomic instability reflected a wider shift in thinking about gender.⁴

Indeed by 1988, “female trouble” aside, Constance Penley and Sharon Willis had already posited that “the idea of masculinity itself is both theoretically and historically troubled.”⁵ They further suggested that through approaching the study of masculinity “from an explicitly feminist theoretical and historical perspective” it would be possible to deconstruct the oversimplified assumption of “gender polarization, where all women are victims and all men are unimpeded agents of patriarchy.”⁶ We can update Butler’s use of Divine and Waters’s Female Trouble as a historical moment that exposed the mutability of gender performance by exploring the work and celebrity of British artist Grayson Perry. Although better known as a ceramist, he has also worked in textiles, such as embroidery and quilting and even dressmaking, placing these on a par with his pots, limited edition prints, and performances.

In October 2000, Perry held a “coming out ceremony” for himself at the Laurent Delaye Gallery in London, where he made a short speech to friends and family about “coming out” as a transvestite. For the occasion he made and wore a special “Coming Out Dress” made from silk satin, rayon, and lace and hand-embroidered. It is, Perry said, a “classic little girl dress” using “pretty sugary colours” to embody “frilliness and sissiness—the absolute antithesis of macho.”⁷ In 2003, when Perry won the prestigious Turner Prize, he attended the ceremony dressed as his transvestite alter-ego Claire in the very same dress. In a subsequent interview in the Guardian newspaper, Perry stated that one of the joys of having a dress hand-sewn “is that it is almost a political statement. It’s a way of rebelling against capitalism which makes money out of gender identity by supplying you with the consumer goods you need to support that identity.”⁸

There is a multitude of other examples of male artists appropriating not just the gender-bending rhetoric of drag but more particularly the rather abject amateurism of needlecrafts to explore this slippage between gender construction and lived reality. Being a man and working with historically feminized craft techniques may be a double bind of acceptance and rejection, but it is undeniable that it has brought some men such as Grayson Perry enhanced visibility at some of the most prestigious international platforms in the art world. For example, consider the case of Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s film installation and small portraits of female celebrities made of metallic thread stitched onto photographically printed canvas, sometimes shaped into embroidery hoops, shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale;⁹ or the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s installation Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, which consisted of a series of headless life-size mannequins dressed in exquisitely stitched clothes, made in an affective homespun manner like Perry’s baby-doll dress but using faux-authentic African batik fabric, and arranged in a scene of sexual debauchery to highlight the exploitative colonial tourism of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. And like those of Perry and Vezzoli, the fabrication of this installation, although arguably reliant on professional outsourced labor, plays in its most basic (fabric) form on the rhetoric of amateurism.

The description of Divine and Waters’s cinematic collaborations as “vulgar,” “sloppy,” and “subversive” uses terms that often circulate around men’s engagement with various needlecraft activities, revealing anxiety, even today, in relation to the materialization of gender construction. Although the term “sloppy” was notably use...