The newest issue of the Cahiers métiers d’art/Craft Journal has just come out, and it features an extended essay-length version of the text I wrote about the Craft Off series. The text discusses three performance-based works by Wednesday Lupypciw, Suzen Green & Ryan Statz, and David McCallum & Dory Kornfeld, as well as how traditional and gendered conceptions of craft are addressed and reconfigured in these works.
I just got back from a whirlwind trip to the annual NCECA (National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts) conference, held in Seattle this year. I was there with the other members of The Brick Factory (a performance collective we formed during a residency at Watershed last summer). We presented a series of live performances over the course of 4 days as part of the Project Space exhibitions. Performances ranged from ceramic-themed reworkings of well-known historical performance art works, new original works created specifically for NCECA, and a few off-site interventions. For more information and documentation, check out The Brick Factory website, where we will be adding more posts soon.
“In Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies for Craftivism, Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch provide a brief international survey of activities which seek to deploy craft for the purposes of protest. Knitting, and other textile arts traditionally associated with communal crafting, plays the leading role. The concept of the ‘revolutionary knitting circle’ recalls the 1970s feminist use of a similar group exchange as a form of consciousness raising. Black and Burisch also cite the AIDS Quilt project of the 1980s as an important precursor for the present moment. So much for precedents, what about the future? Clearly, efficacy and identity are interwoven in this essay, which takes for granted another 70s concept–that the personal is political–and offers real-world strategies for [maintaining] the efficacy of symbolic craft. It is too early to say whether craftivism will have staying power in the cultural imagination, like the Arts and Crafts, studio and countercultural craft movements before it. But there is little doubt that Black, Burisch and their peers have breathed new life into this old set of ideas.”
-Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader
Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art has been reviewed in BUST Magazine, Bad at Sports, American Craft, Liminalities and will go to its second printing at Duke soon.
For a copy: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Extra-Ordinary/
A series of performances by Wednesday Lupypciw, Suzen Green & Ryan Statz, and David McCallum & Dory Kornfeld. Presented as part of the M:ST 5 Performative Art Festival, Calgary, AB, October 2010.
This series brings together a group of artists whose hybrid practices incorporate craft and performance. Numerous recent craft projects and exhibitions have emphasized the ways that craft can be used to build community (either as a political tool or as a relational project). In contrast, the projects in this series use the performance of traditional craft activities like knitting and weaving to address ideas of competition and self-interest or to place their creators in a position of advantage. The projects in this series all involve the live creation of new craft works, and thus reveal links between the repetitive and time-consuming actions of crafting and durational performance art practices. Taken together, these performances provide a means to rethink relationships between craft, domesticity, traditional gender roles, and distinctions between the private and public spheres.
A publication accompanying this exhibition, featuring an extended curatorial text “Crafty Advantage: Craft, Performance, and Competition,” was published by M:ST in 2011, and a journal article “Craft Off: Performance, Competition, and Anti-Social Crafting/Performance, compétition et métiers d’art asociaux” was published in the Cahiers métiers d’art/ Craft Journal, Volume 5 Number 2 Spring 2012.
Reviewed by Dick Averns for Akimbo, Oct 11, 2010.
BackTalk
Presented as part of the 42nd Annual NCECA conference
(co-curated with Robin Lambert)
Michael Flaherty
Carole Epp
Shannon Isfeld
Lia Tajcnar
The field of contemporary ceramics has long relied on strong ties to the techniques and traditions of ceramic history for the basis of its conceptual investigations. Due to the richness of this past, ceramic artists have no shortage of historical material that can be mined, referenced, and reworked. Like any specialized field with a long and respected history, ceramics has developed its own unique and sometimes-insular collection of methodologies, mythologies, dogma, cult figures, celebrities, and in-jokes. While this prevailing regard for history no doubt reveals a certain measure of respect for what came before, it has also opened up an irresistible opportunity to take these dearly-held beliefs and to crack them open, poke fun at them, to investigate, question, and talk back.
Groundswell: Emerging Ceramic Artists in Alberta
This exhibition brought together the work of Chris Faulkner, Tyler Fritz, Robin Lambert, Carmen Schroeder, Andi Silver, and Cathy Terepocki, six emerging artists involved in the Alberta ceramics community. The exhibition took place at the Triangle Gallery (now Contemporary Calgary), from March 17 – May 5, 2005 and accompanied Form & Fire: Aspects of Modernism in Alberta Ceramics.
Image credits: Clockwise from top left: Andi Silver, Carmen Schroeder, Cathy Terepocki, Chris Faulkner, Robin Lambert, Tyler Fritz
Nicole Burisch 