Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Making Matters...But So Also Sustainability (Part 2)

The following is the second instalment of a three-part recount of the symposium Making Matters: Sustainability and Craft Practices held at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery January 19, 2003.

Arlene Gehring, "Elemental Connections"

Independent Canadian curator and writer Arlene Gehring focused her attention on a recent exhibition she curated at the Ontario Crafts Council. Mounted between September 27 and November 12 2007, Elemental Connections: An Exhibition of Sustainable Craft brought together artists and craftspeople from across the country whose work makes handmade use of naturally-occurring and, in one sense or another, renewable materials. A comprehensive list of the artists that took part in the exhibition appears below.

One of the first things Gehring pointed out was the range of approaches artists in the exhibition have to the whole idea of craft. Elemental Connections did not privilege only the aesthetically- or conceptually-innovative. Sure, there were works that blurred the presupposed boundaries between craft and art, either by using recognized craft materials in non-traditional ways or by producing traditional craft objects in unorthodox ways. And many of the contributors clearly thought and made not only outside established traditions of craft production, but some also embraced both suggestive and subversive themes. With the stark and precise presentation sense of a true-blue ornithologist, Tara Bursey (http://www.tarabursey.blogspot.com/) fashions physiologically-correct replicas of actual bird wings using onion skin. The wings at once seem to flutter against the paper they are mounted to, and to stain it. Chantal Gilbert's (http://www.chantalgilbert.com/) Bestioles series, in which she mounts her handmade pocket knives onto armatures resembling insect bodies, merges exquisite craftsmanship with a kind of sci-fi feminist-surrealism to produce irresistibly threatening fetish objects.

But Bursey and Gilbert's contemporary and thematically-driven use of craft methods and materials were not the only approaches witnessed in Elemental Connections.
Given the underlying premise of the exhibition - craft demonstrating the knowledgeable interaction between the artist's hand and naturally-occurring and renewable media - there was, for Gehring, no reason to exclude craftspeople working in what she called "older traditions." By older traditions she was referring to those whose work reflects the unsullied application of established techniques - bowl-turning, or weaving for example - toward producing the mostly functional objects commonly associated with those techniques - bowls, baskets, etc. Examples of such works in the exhibition included the turned burl-bowls of Don Stinson and the woven kelp-gourd bowls of Anne Boquist.

However, most of the pieces stood somewhere between the unorthodox and the older traditions, incorporating both. The corn dollies of Daniel Kramer, for example: woven since Antiquity out of the last sheaf at the end of harvest as a way of containing the field's spirit, corn dollies were then ploughed back into the earth the following season to ensure prosperous harvest the following year. Seen today, they resonate as at once a sort of harbinger of potential environmental collapse and also remind us that powerful symbols can come from the most modest of means.

Apart from the craft and art work she introduced, my interest and curiosity was piqued also by a two-part claim Gehring made (which was subsequently reiterated by the symposium's keynote, Eric Nay). Gehring stated that an ideal "common cause" exists among craftspeople to produce objects that are environmentally sustainable. She then went onto say that, at its root, "craft production is inherently about environmental sustainability." I was, at first, confused and incredulous; was she saying that there are no craft methods and materials that are ecologically invasive or detrimental to the biosphere in some way? The very fact that craft materials cannot always be obtained locally, and that some materials and by-products are notoriously toxic seems to cast doubt on this assertion. One artist in her own exhibition, Paul Grey Diamond (http://www.martenarts.com/Artists/artist.aspx?workID=bio&artistID=59) fashions beautiful turned wooden vases using Banksia seed pods, which, Gehring herself claimed, are only obtainable from Australia; surely the energy required to import of such an exotic material might form the basis from which one could argue that the work is not, strictly speaking, inherently sustainable. In all fairness, although this is a legitimate question, I think it doesn't get at the crux of what Gehring intended.

What I think Gehring meant when she linked craft necessarily to sustainability was that, considered at its anthropological root, craft knowledge is fundamental, basic, essential: it is a knowledge gained from working with one's own two hands on and with the earth. In other words, it is a knowledge embodied, and therefore a knowledge borne from the body's interaction with the direct and immediate environment. With this sort of knowledge comes a keener sensibility about the value of resources.

At least I think that's what Gehring meant.

This sounds well-and-good, but it also makes me a bit uneasy. Gehring is not simply offering a contingent definition of what craft happens to be; she is making an aesthetic value judgement about what good craft ought to be. Or rather, she is building the ethical obligation to make craft environmentally sustainable into the sensual or aesthetic appreciation of the craft object. Given her understanding of what craft is, any object manufactured in ways, or using materials, which contradict the sustainability clause is simply excluded from the possibility of being good craft. Are we really ready to exclude all objects made using some form of petroleum by-product from the pale? What about inherent toxicity of some of the materials inherent to particular craft traditions? Moreover, would it be possible to draw hard-and-fast lines between things made by hand and those disconnected from the hand? I couldn't help but feel that what Gehring was trying to offer up with Elemental Connections was a radically puritanical understanding of craft. This is not necessarily a negative criticism of either her or the exhibition. The pieces and the curatorial selection of those pieces seemed exquisite. I'm more intrigued than anything that someone has the wherewithal to insist on a necessary connection between the value of something as craft, and the way that something was produced.

Elemental Connections included work by Anne Boquist, Tara Bursey, Karen Cantine, Joanna Close, Paul Gray Diamond, Phyllis Erwin, Mary Fox, Chantal Gilbert, Andrea Graham, Vivienne Jones, Daniel Kramer, Nancy Latchford, Ryan Legassicke, Julie Lockau, Les Manning, Kirk Mceathron, Catherine Paleczny, Bernadette Pratt, Ann Schneider, Don Stinson, Ione Thorkelsson.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Making Matters...But So Also Sustainability (Part 1)

Throughout 2007 Canadian art galleries and institutions spearheaded exhibitions and events in honour of craft professionals, and toward shining a brighter critical light on craft practices. The year culminated in the major three-day conference, NeoCraft, held in Halifax back in November. On January 19 2008, as a belated addition to Canada Craft Year, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery played host to the one-day symposium Making Matters: Sustainability and Craft Practices. Co-partnered with the Ontario Craft Council, and contemporary to a pair of its own craft-centred exhibitions (Makers Return and Craft Convergence) Making Matters participants explored the history and economics of craft production in and around Owen Sound since the late 1970s, unpacked the discourse surrounding the meaning and significance of the handmade object, and posed questions related to the environmental sustainability of craft practices. Below is the first of three or four summarizing accounts I'll be posting about the symposium.

Sandra Noble Goss, "A History of Makers"
The first speaker was Owen Sound jeweler and artist, Sandra Noble Goss. Today she runs Goss Design with her husband Andrew, but between August 1981 and January 1986 she was a founding member in the fabled and fated Makers group, a collective of jewelers and metal smiths, ceramic, wood and textile artists, painters and photographers who ran a gallery that sold original works of art and craft in downtown Owen Sound. Goss provided an historical account that, I think, serves as a case study of the universal challenges faced by any sincere, creative and critically-minded individual or group desiring to eke out a sincere, creative and critically-minded living in small-town Ontario in the early 1980s - or perhaps today, for that matter.

Makers started with 14 founding partners, each of whom forked over the initial investment money required to get the business off the ground. There were also 10 associates, members who exhibited and sold work in the gallery but did not carry the same degree of responsibility for gallery operations. Most were in their 20's and 30's, many with young families, and all were in the trial stage of kick-starting artistic careers. Most were also relative newcomers to Owen Sound, and lacked the sort of oligarchical and nepotic connections that could have given them a leg-up. They worked as a collective, trading volunteer hours bookkeeping, manning and cleaning the gallery, striking and mounting new solo exhibitions on a break-neck weekly schedule, hosting openings, composing membership newsletters and all the while making new work to show and sell. From Goss' description, the running attitude of the collective seems to have been a paradoxical combination of stubborn integrity and ad hoc practicality. None denied the enterprise would be a hard row to hoe, but the partners, all children of the post-Massey Report culture-revved Canada of the late-1960s, believed firmly that people have at least a latent appreciation for original works of art and craft - a latent appreciation that could be enlivened with enough exposure. One attempt to garner greater attention from the town was to mount a fish/fishing themed exhibition, Splash, during the annual salmon derby. Goss chuckled as she recalled how it was reasoned that the fishermen, or at least their wives, would surely be lured by the cross-marketing.

However, it didn't turn out this way. Not much did. The gallery never made money, volunteers began to burn-out in droves, and several of the original partners backed out, leaving 11 at the end. Added to all this was the economic climate of recession in the early-1980s; the harsh perception that art and craft are expendible luxuries coupled with the harsh reality that people in small town working class Ontario faced hard times and simply didn't have much disposable income. Goss ruminated that had Makers been able to hang on for another few years they may have benefited from the eventual economic upturn. As it stands the collective disbanded and the gallery disappeared in early 1986. Of all founding members, only two - Sandra and Andrew Goss - are still working in their Makers-era field.

On paper, Goss' account read like a confession of youthful naivety, a testament to absent acumen, a litany of heart-aching failures. But reflecting on the number of artists and craftspeople living and working in and around Owen Sound today - many of whom were associates in the gallery - I can't help but rationally reconstruct the Makers experiment as a huge unwieldy tree that, when it fell, nonetheless helped level the road to future artistic endeavours in the town. At the very least the demise of Makers helped ground its founders and forced them each and all to take a long and hard look at their personal priorities. But, more positively, spearheaded by the original DIY generation, Makers created a scene, and out from this a legacy of creative stickwithitness that continues to hum today. The Makers troupe faced challenges with tenacity (that it was sometimes consolidated sometimes divided matters little) and with a glorious abandon that speaks of resolve and committed belief. Much has changed in Owen Sound since the early 1980s, not the least being that the city was designated a "cultural capital" by the federal government in 2004 - a not unremarkable feat for this tough little Tory-blued/blue-collared port of under 25,000 people. I'm not sure who could have foreseen such recognition in 1981, but its very clear that Makers played an important role in establishing the conditions that make it a reality today.