questions about the position of
women, women’s work, and
labor in contemporary society.
But for curators Leemann
and Stratton, something subtler
is going on, with elements bor-
rowed from the Slow Food
movement. Asked about “resis-
tance” in the title of their exhibi-
tion, they explained that what’s
being resisted is efficiency, that
these artists’ performances are
attempts at escaping “a kind
of scripted way of being in the
world.” Just as the Slow Food
movement aims to draw atten-
tion to the ways food is pro-
duced, Leemann and Stratton
are interested in “noticing” what
Lam calls “the overlooked” -
in her case, the “rudimentary
textile actions” that take place
on the way to making the fin-
ished product.
But if the dematerialization
of the art object, to use critic
Lucy Lippard’s phrase, swept
fine art 40-some years ago, it’s
new to craft. At the end of these
performances, there may be
no object at all, or none that
endures in the institutionalized
space of exhibition or the eco-
nomic space of collecting.
When Lam, for example, fin-
ishes an
Ironings
performance,
she recycles the resulting sculp-
tures for subsequent perfor-
mances by un-ironing and
re-ironing, though not before
inscribing the date of the iron-
ing on each piece of cloth to
record the number of ironings
it has been through. The object
becomes a marking of time
rather than space. Meinolf, too,
embroidered dates along the
edge of the cloth he produced
during his
Social Fabric
project.
It may not have been displayed
the way a traditional weaving
might, but as an object (the
cloth folded like a book, along
with the artist’s field notes and
a Polaroid of the artist in action),
it was eventually acquired, as
The Pro Bono Jeweler
performance series
involved setting up shop
on the street and making
rings for passersby.
Below: For
Occupation
(2010), Ehren Tool built
a bunker out ofbags of
porcelain clay, which
he then threw into a
series of cups.
Bottom: Travis Meinolf
and his portable loom in
2006. In
Social Fabric,
he
engaged people in both
aesthetic choices and
production of the cloth.
ІШглігі
an object, by the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
Some maintain that the object
is central to craft’s identity.
Glenn Adamson, who directs
graduate studies at London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum
(and writes a column for this
magazine), says, “I think of craft
as necessarily involving mate-
rial engagement and normally as
involving objects that ‘survive’
the process. This is a way of
distinguishing it from other
sorts of skilled work (such as
banking) and also more specifi-
cally, skilled material processes
that don’t leave behind a resi-
due (such as sports or music).”
It’s perhaps no accident that
a number of process-focused
artists and curators are coming
out of graduate programs where
ideas are as important as objects.
They are aware of fine art
movements, from conceptual
art in the late 1960s to relational
aesthetics as practiced by artists
such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose
art form includes making and
sharing meals with museum
visitors. Meinolf, in particular,
was inspired while at California
College of the Arts by instruc-
tor and conceptual artist Ben
Kinmont’s dish washings, in
which the artist washes dishes
at a collector’s home, leaving
only a signed sponge as evidence
of the action. Kinmont’s actions
address the question of just
what art is: If art, as Kinmont
seemed to suggest, is what an
artist does, it’s not hard to see
how Meinolf and others have
come to view craft primarily as
the verb that it is.
+
Lisa Radon is an artist and writer
for publications including
art ltd.,
Textile,
and
Surface Design
Journal.
She’s written essays for
exhibitions andprojects at the lum-
ber room, T U Contemporary,
Half/Dozen, and the Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art.
072 american craft dec/jani2
O ccupation
photo: Heather Zinger /
S o cia l F a b ric
photo: Erin Allen /
P ro B on o
photo: Amy W eiks
