Bodylines

Justin Clemens and Mark Pennings'Cultural Theory and Crafts Practice published by Craft Victoria, can be recommended to both the timid or the sceptical for its accessibility and clarity. A central thesis is that craft throughout the romantic period of art making from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century - has predominantly been seen as suspect/inept/inferior to the fully mature 'embodied' and enlightened 'art' aka 'fine art' or 'high art'. In terms of the meta-narrative of romantic genius, the daring, the struggle and the heroic overtones of traditional modernism, 'craft' could only figure as a 'failure'.

Although in an alternative tradition such theorists as Pugin, Ruskin, Morris, Behrens, Gropius, Itten, wright, Le Corbusier, placed craft/design (despite the immediate vast diversity of style and approach) as revolutionary and salvationary against the limits of 'art' - elitist, decadent and capitalist they conversely also assigned a hegemonic position to art as the great shibboleth to be destroyed or outperformed. When the overreaching, colonial confidence of modernism became suspect, craft was well placed to expand into the critical void. Derided and degraded, long branded as the 'other', its space of dissonance became in the wake of postmodern cultural theory a position of empowerment.

This edition of Craft further explores the space pegged out by Clemens and Pennings. It follows on (whilst betraying the telltale marks of a different sensibility) from the stated aim of the previous edition of Craft to be proactively involved in writing and discussing craft rather than being passively descriptive or comfortingly hagiographic when documenting craftwork and makers. David Thompson indicated that 'the body' formed a bridge between craft and the contemporary theoretical writing that has engaged Australian scholars, writers (fiction and non fiction) artists and students in the past decade and a half. The following essays are not so much predicated upon a formal, attentive discourse around academic texts, but in that wise, surreal and growing space where theory impacts (loosely, unconsciously) upon popular culture and actions. Here the voices and opinions of makers flourish. In terms of Craft Victoria's advocacy and promotion role, these essays seek to add to the, still perhaps piecemeal, series of texts confronting that essentialist face of the Medusa: how should craft be written about in late twentieth century Australia? If the answers found in this issue may seem contrary or inconclusive, I am seeking to avoid the cliches that are frequently conjoined to the issue of 'writing about craft'.

When positing the difference between 'art' and 'craft', the presence of the body as an active agent is a distinguishing feature of 'craft'. Yet the multiplicity of bodies found in craft coalesced in a particular direction through the essays provided for this edition. It was no longer the space from where I intended to begin: the practical body of wearing and using. It was not the crafted bespoke body, the subtle responsive manner in which marks and media could answer the needs of different bodies in different contexts. What was arrived at was not how different bodies employed craft, but consideration of how craft could facilitate the realisation of different body identities and personae. Whilst these bodies are not the most comfortable or familiar in bodies in craft they reflect a radical positioning. Rather than being a mere serviceable utility, craft may be more challenging than fine art, in that craft's materiality enables its speculation to inhabit the same space as ourselves. Fine art's projects stay within their boundaries: they can be returned to the gallery stockroom, filed away in the drawer or between the pages of the never-to-be-consulted thesis. We can forget them. Craft - like visiting Aliens - demands the right to take up our living space, and remain there.

Borderlines

All of the bodies in the following essays have the power to offend both in themselves and in their relationship to craft I invoke their offensive potentials as a process of debate and reassessment about what is craft, to what audience does it speak, which subgroup's reality should it heed. Far from being 'irrelevant' to craft, these bodies expose frequently sublimated issues associated with craft. As Samantha Menzies and Sarah Drechsler outline, craft enacts emotional and moral rankings through which media and substances are tacitly judged. PVC, latex and rubber, when worked in small studios and group practices in Melbourne, facilitate craft-based skills, techniques, care and selection. Yet objects produced with these substances are seen as somewhat too 'edgy' and 'sordid' for craft. Conversely not sleaziness but technology disqualifies the internet as a site of craft values. If as Robyn Daw claimed in the last edition of Craft that 'materiality is fundamental' to craft, any practise that attempts to adjudicate this bare fact via other media or positionings is thus not craft. Should one still define the internet as antipathetical to craft's engagement with process and material, or should we heed Patrick Snelling's warning in the following pages that to ignore the internet and the options offered by technology is to risk devaluing craft and disempowering craftmakers? Could virtual reality and contemporary theory weave a space where the 'materiality', through which craft has sustained itself in the great art-craft debate, can be retained as a state of mind, as a conceptual paradigm, whilst craft is freed to explore the driving desires of the late capitalist, post-colonial era? Craft faces negotiating a future of techno, hybrid, popularist, media and entertainment driven aesthetics. When to collude, when to assimilate, when to critique, where to draw the line are questions that craft will increasingly confront.

The bodies of popular culture, of self-definition, of community identity are all born of desire and volition. The following essays suggest that craft makes the process of realising these desires and dreams more than a theoretical pose, a wank, an intellectual exercise, (all of which are frequently deemed in general usage to stand opposed to 'craft'). Realising these bodies through craft becomes an act of self-definition and claiming of ground. In the sense that definition - what is and what not - threads in and out of the following arguments, these bodies straddle the borderlines to police and violate the bounds of couthness and acceptability. Craft and attitudes towards craft, as well as the content of the positionings invoked by craft (and art and fashion) makers in the following essays, are also being explored.

If 'craft' can only define itself reactively against 'art', Australian artist David McDiarmid's gay sexuality may not cause as much offence as his comfortable, heedless morphing between art and a classically-defined craft. He (gleefully, one suspects) offended purist definitions. Craft was a constant given in his career. In his own words, McDiarmid ironically outlined the practical 'hands-on' base of his practice:
'One of my key functions, apart from attending too many tedious meetings, was to work with community groups in developing a profile for the annual parade in February. Typically a gaggle of queens would arrive wanting to print some t-shirts, and leave wearing tutus, fired up with visions of gigantic swans made out of shopping bags.' 1

Floats, accessories and costumes crafted for the Mardi Gras by McDiarmid as 'community art slave' were complex, drawn from craft objects, costuming, theatrical design, couture, puppetry and folk practices. Textiles, paper, synthetics, wood, plastics, moulding, sewing, overlaying, casting - McDiarmid undertook or led others through these substances and processes. His memorable Safe Sex float from the 1993 Mardi Gras overturned the art-craft hierarchy by outperforming a pre-existing painting with a three-dimensional manifestation of its subject.

Some craftmaking since the nineteenth century has been speculative and disruptive, rather than elegiac and supportive. Why should craft not be at home amongst the synthetic heaven of the disco as much as amongst mud bricks and scrubbed pine? The lines may be drawn widely, pluralistically in this issue, but the act of considering the boundaries represented here of craft, of bodies and their uses, meanings, identities and roles is part of the process of delineating what is craft. Even for the nineteenth century design theorists such as Ruskin and Morris radical political speculation became the logical end point in their investigation of the relation of craft, art and society. The bodies facilitated by craft are not indulgences or idle fantasies. Craft unleashes them as unsettling powers to make us consider what we are and where we sit in society. Without craft we would not feel the sting of their presence.

1 David Mc Diamid 'A Short History of Facial Hair' in J.J.Matthews ed..Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 1997 p. 94.

The Material Girl as Maker?

Initially the women's movement kept a low profile, but that changed in September 1968 when a group of demonstrators, led by the activist Robin Morgan, stormed the Miss America Pageant. They threw bras, girdles, false eyelashes, and other objects beloved of drag queens into a 'Freedom Trash Can' and crowned a live sheep outside the auditorium. M.G. Lord 1994.

Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around in its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Mary Wollstonecraft 1792.

A persistent strain of Western feminism regards the paraphernalia of dressing up and glamour as tools to enforce oppression. Thus the female body can pose problems for feminism. Rejection of elegant indulgence and display reads as a visible expression of a raised consciousness. Yet contemporary popular culture makes it increasingly impossible to regard the woman presenting, selling, a conscious 'look', herself as object of art and conceptual planning as much as desire, from overly feminine to butch, as only a victim. Singers - Suzi Quattro in black leather, Cyndi Lauper in her retro-chic, Madonna or the Spice Girls - have popularised ideas about power, identity, sexuality and narcissistic pleasure, hitherto generally refused mainstream circulation. Commercial cinema found new female stereotypes when Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct presented female villains who were compelling and elegant.

If one casts woman as victim, brainless doll, consumer, imprisoned in her mirror, pleasing the eye of man, the female maker stands in a curious yet powerful position. Is feminist debate irrelevant to her understanding of herself as craftworker and her engagement with materials and forms? Does her practice and her work extend contemporary feminism's acceptance of self-presentation? Anna Davern's bracelet of Barbie shoes or Jack Archer's rococo hair combs speak of adroitly getting out from under the yoke of 'exploitation'; the modern woman demanding to have her cake and eat it too.

What is a feminist statement of jewellery? What is Juliette's view? Is it that early feminism negated the idea of women's adornment - cut back beautification of the body - we are more than just physical objects? How does this concept relate to what occurred in the 70's with conceptual jewellery. There was an explosion of colour in jewellery and a revolution in ideas about the definition of jewellery What is happening now with feminism and its view of the female body? Are we really exposing more of ourselves? Are we really allowed to adorn again? When all around me I see jewellery returning to its old conservative ways.
Anna Davern

Yet constructs of creativity have been deeply gendered. Nineteenth century French bohemia cemented the roles of male genius and female model/whore/muse, which have remained viable throughout much of the twentieth century. Valerie Steele in Women of Fashion neatly traces the chain of classic modernist belief through the writings of major twentieth century designers and artists where the avant-garde and innovation are masculine traits and conservatism and reactionary visions are feminine.2

Where power is accorded to women through their appearance it activates the binary machine distinguishing woman from man. Thus the power of the body image is triggered beyond its personal effect on women's lives ... and conveniently carves out the reality of him and her. Him creator and patron. Occupied. Her: mirror bound, unsure. Preoccupied. She follows rather than leads Her ideals are his standards. 3

Separatism as an answer to sexism risks Compromising the way in which women's work is seen. Women makers are frequently angry that in an institutional or curatorial overview their work is immediately tagged feminist - diaristic, Community based, issue based. The implication is not real : women's work. Whereto the craft-art debate when genius - fine art, painterly, conceptual has been cast as masculine? Craft has frequently been cast as abject, feminine, not genius. Does making a stance for professional status as craftsperson therefore encompass a feminist action? Does making a personal/feminist stance for one's integrity as creative designer also infer that the preferred craft practice thereby becomes upgraded? In the process of considering the question of how does one write about craft, the idea occurred that craft writing and feminist discourse occupy a similarly troubling and contested space. Both disciplines are now very different to what they were 20 years ago and contemplating their shared histories makes us sensitive to shifting paradigms and the tension involved in resisting or ignoring them. We cannot go backwards, and sometimes to contemplate the present state of discourse in both feminism and craft is to contemplate pleasure.

My adornment is my voice. I will not hide and be silent.
Anna Davern

Female craftworkers, who fear neither the female body nor what Camille Paglia named as the ancient power of the whore, are currently based in Melbourne, reflecting how one may, as either maker or viewer, react to the sassy, sexy feminisms of the 80s and the 90s. In highlighting this oeuvre of work, I have selected makers whose practise and vision fit my frames of reference, and I have always not read their works as others do. The makers frequently do not start with a conscious choice to 'make' a 'feminist' statement through craft, nor do they attentively study academic texts to launch the enterprise, yet certain values and ideas are held in common to form a distinct and identifiable ethos.

The bodies invoked are various - some tangible, some imagined - but they are undoubtedly feminist, from the direct use of body parts in the work of Fiona Kwong and Nicki Hepburn, to the social conditioning explored by Nicola Cerini's fabric prints of 50s housewifes and handbags or Roseanne Bartley's meticulously crafted hair-rollers in precious metals. Some of the bodies are merely implied because the craftsperson is realising - as her no less adroit nineteenth century sister, the medium, materialised three-dimensional 'apports' as well as ethereal spirits from The Other Side the spectre of the female mind, disquieting as the body that contains it. Thus Pamela Irving consciously reduces Nolan by producing Ned Kelly dinnerwear and painting the outlaw's image upon a voluptuous, louche, fibreglass neo-rococo sofa. The whore bests heroic modernism, framing the terms by which the larrikin artist can be re-viewed:

You can't do that with your oil paintings, Darling!... It's naughty, rude, cheeky and, as the Jews put it, it takes a bit of chutzpah!
Pamela Irving

Likewise overturning conceptual processes, the fashion victim became dictator when jeweller Sarah Begbie displayed a series of identical dresses, the Control Frocks - named in homage of 'control' panty hose that discipline an unbound female body - at RMIT's First Site Gallery, crafted to her own size and taste. Her craft practice forges a space where the consumer can expose and usurp the couturiers absolutism.

I've called them control frocks. I wanted to control the wearer I was initially going to make t-shirts, but then that would leave what they wear on their lower half as a choice or an option, that's why I ended up making the whole dress. The dress is my size, it is something that is part of my style. It all evolved from the fact that when I make apiece I think this will look good on this particular outfit. This is taking it too further extreme, in that I have made the outfit, I've located the piece by stitching it on, which means that it can't be removed easily... it also makes it difficult to wash. It's also questioning wearability, durability why some fashion exists. The sizing and all the tabs on the back of the neck are there to make you aware of the fact that you're wearing something... you are aware of control because of the scratchy tags at the back of the neck all the time. I made the dresses. They are my size.
Sarah Begbie

The rogerer is rogered and Irving makes a tart (literally) comment upon the Australian art market:

the Georges clientele, that old money, they were hardly the kind of people willing to support the Kelly gang, but don't they just love Nolan.

Andrea Macnamara's Kitchen Conquest range of homewares decorated in Neo Bayeaux Tapestry motifs played upon the same feminine line of insouciant feigned ignorance of aesthetic proprieties, concurrently exploiting the perceived triviality of both female culture and the craft object to prompt consideration of roles and agency within society and aesthetic ranking.

Roseanne Bartley's Hot Ring - in allegorical speech of sweat and lust - and Tanis Douglas's Hairstyle - in direct speech of surface and sensation - avoid strategic misreading of masculine insight and rationality to go straight to the jugular: the unnerving touch of the sexual body itself. The female bodies in Nicky Hepburn's To Coin a Face evoke those of radical feminism, or even separatism. Oblivious, they exist beyond the masculine gaze or its no-name bargain basement line: heterosexual sleaze. Empowered and ribald - they are the anti-fashion body of 'fat is a feminist issue'.

Ideas and content link these works, diverse in appearance and media, as much as surface and shape. Feminism provides a convenient point from where to interrogate the content of craftwork and to acknowledge that craft can effectively speak of ideas. Viewing Fiona Kwong's jewellery from outside, heeding only the formal and visually obvious, shallowly misreads her pieces as mere provocative agents of shock. Reflecting a deeply ethical consideration of social preoccupations, Kwong rejects the 'grunge' label to describe the legible sexual motifs in her jewellery. Her work embodies serious, thoughtful comment about stereotyping sexuality and looking beyond also pass on messages about consent respect and safe sex.

Yet there is a range of responses in questioning the why and how of the representation of the feminine. Tanis Douglas claims the 'right' as a young person to challenge, to be 'in your face', to make people explore why they hold certain stances. Tanis also demonstrates that the craftmaker cannot be sequestered in the realms of the formal and abstract. Undoubtedly her fabrics made from human hair fall within the bounds of even the most conventional definitions of craft: the physical substance cannot be taken for granted, its texture and appearance must be confronted and the process - why and how that she made it - must be acknowledged. If assessing the Hairstyle's merits, the viewer constantly is thrown back via a conceptual shift onto his or her visceral emotional reactions to the work. Hairstyle is not craft and the body, it is craft made from the body.

Animal hair, fur and skin, faux or real, has long existed in fashion and yet the real human alternative is challenging to the wearer; people are somewhat repulsed by the idea of wearing someone else's bodily offcuts.
Tanis Douglas

Douglas breaks the strictures of those conventions that demand that women - and craft - always play a morally pure role, either as 'respectable' or as non-industrial.

Contemporary feminist cultural theories of embodiment and identity inform our responses to many craft pieces by women. Paula Hyland's embroideries of drag queens alert us to the constructed, arbitrary nature of gender signifiers, independent of bodily and genital dictation.

The lesson in transgression that we have from the transvestite as well as the female body builder is that gender ambivalence is traumatically unsettling to the culture... Even the popular narrative representations of cross-dressing may provoke disorientation, discomfort and shock. 4

Pamela Irving ironically plays upon women's magazines' obsession with the royal family. Princesses as guiding mentors to female behaviour and options are questioned in Irving's hand-built ceramic images of

Di... Di the omnipresent! This suffering, bulimic, skinny unbalanced princess of fashion Di is GORGEOUS!...
One of the great things about the Royals is their dysfunction. Charles didn't leave his wife for some young floozy no, he left her for someone just like Mum. Isn't that lovely. Onya Charles!!
Just imagine if all those mid life crisis men out there took Charles' prompting and left their wives for people just like their Mum. Wouldn't the world be a nicer place.
Pamela Irving

Jacqueline Archer's conscious subversion of fairytale imagery in her craft objects also invokes the princess.

The good pure selfless virgin, princess, Madonna /the bad selfish ugly character, if not person, witch, bitch jezebel This conditioning from youngest days is active in fairytale, folklore and religious story where the, on the most part passive female, is given as a positive role model towards moderate and docile temperament. The proactive female character tends to be rejected as negative and undesirable -with wanton appetites and questionable character.
Jacqueline Archer

Jewellers seem particularly attuned to feminist readings in that perhaps jewellery has always been deeply implicated as a signifier of heterosexual ownership, status and dependency of the female body, from the wedding ring to the illicit gift to placate a lover, to the 'slave' bracelet of the 1920s, the fraternity 'pin' of 50s courtship (unknown in Australia, except by frequent reference in films and novels) and the not-quite-acceptable conjoined nose and earring a Ia Gaultier. However this construct overrides somewhat radical jewellery's attempts to short circuit such elite associations in the 60s and 70s.

Fashion and its links to craft are another point where responses to contemporary issues of embodiment and gender identity can be clearly traced, especially through new theoretical readings of fashion that emphasise the agency as well as the abjection of the followers of the Fashion System. Begbie's implacable black dresses, with their hand-detailed metal plaques, sized for a tall skinny size eight who is nobody's bimbo, can be countered by the seductive whisper of Vixen's silks: 'I enjoy being a girl.' Forget the discreetly hidden expensive underwear, the Vixen girl wears the heart of the Victorian kept mistress, or King Edward's multiple lady friends on her sleeve into the office.

Fashion - like jewellery - at present seems to articulate these issues more clearly than other craft media. Its restless devouring of novelty means that it engages with new thought and theory - however superficially - whilst craft, through older definitions and practices, may seek to keep itself inoculated from the new. In terms of changing values and the bodily images spoken by craft, the investigation of how female craftmakers respond to issues of female identity, bodily stance and role playing; how they place themselves, their work and practice in terms of contemporary definitions of feminism presents a site that is contradictory, yet fruitful and insightful.

Footnotes

1 Unless otherwise noted, direct quotes are from informal commentaries, either textual or verbal, given to the author over the period May-June 1997 by craftmakers discussed in the article. I am grateful to these makers who shared their thoughts and opinions so freely. In order not to prioritise my voice as curatorial and to emphasise these voices as alternatives of equal weight to my own, I have consciously refrained from relegating these quotes to formal academic conventions of footnoting.

2 V.Steele Women of Fashion. Rizzoli, New York, 1991 pp 41-42.

3 P. Mayer 'The Automatic Pilot wears Size 6. A discussion on Body Image' http://www.spoiltMilk.aus/neridis/guise.html

4 J. Gaines, 'Fabricating the Female Body' in J. Guines & C.Herzog,Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, Routledge, London, 1990

Juliet Peers lectures in the fashion and textile department of RMIT

Article from Craft Vol 2. 1997