This paper was originally presented at a symposium called 'Consequence of Material,' held at Red Deer College, Alberta, Canada, June 11-13, 2004. The organizers of the conference asked us to consider whether weighty or unintended consequences might attach to a maker’s use of particular materials or processes. The materials from which objects in the world are made do comprise semiotic ciphers of class, gender, ethnicity and power well beyond the simple facts of their physical constitution. Throughout time, certain materials have been respected and associated with power, authority and prestige. Legitimacy is accorded to objects rendered in bronze or precious metals above those made from clay, sugar or other less costly materials despite the fact that, historically, valuable metals were far more likely to be melted down--and the work destroyed--by rulers in need of ready cash. In such cases, unintended consequences of using rich materials resulted in 're-purposing' of a particularly dramatic and devastating sort. In my paper, I consider examples of artists who work with craft materials. I examine theoretical paradigms not often associated with these materials to see if models arising in disciplines other than craft can be useful in considering the semiotic power of craft materials and processes.
David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s analysis of new technologies, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 1999), stresses ways in which new media 'refashion prior media forms.' They claim that the familiarity and 'naturalness' of new media derive from our familiarity with earlier forms of representation. The authors ground their discussion of VR, Digital Imaging and the World Wide Web in an examination of historical artifacts such as photography, film and television. Despite their focus on new media, Bolter and Grusin propose much that is useful to thinking about craft.
Craft functions today in a cultural space defined largely by theories relating to visual--even immaterial--art. While this places craft at some disadvantage, the heterogeneous nature of craft practice enables it to interpret and adjust much of this theory to its own purposes, as, indeed, it must. As Paul Mathieu writes in 'The Space of Pottery,' 'Craft has always been inherently political, open to change, and aware of contemporaneity; it still is. . . . I believe it is essential to confront the art world in the language it speaks, to address the problem on its territory' (28). This statement arouses some antipathy, a response that only makes sense if taken as prescriptive or doctrinaire. Clearly, not all practitioners wish to confront the art world, and not all seek to legitimize their activities according to a system that devalues them. However, for those wishing to contest that field, to engage with the politics and economics of representation and commerce, the confrontation is inevitable. My investigations are motivated by a desire to develop better strategies and models for leveling the ground on which the fray takes place.
The model developed by Bolter and Grusin centers around the 'twin logics of remediation: immediacy and hypermediation.' Immediacy refers to the Western fantasy of direct access to the real, an idea that gained precedence in the Renaissance. Bolter and Grusin trace a progressive desire for immediacy in the visual arts: since the 12 th or 13 th century, artists have attempted to present ever more realistic renditions of visual reality. Linear perspective introduced in the 15 th century created an almost magical means to represent alternative reality beyond the picture plane. The effect was further heightened by the use of oil and a painting style that erased all trace of the artist’s touch. In the 19 th c., photography produced an even more convincing image of reality such that people imagined Nature herself were creating the image, as in William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844-46). Motion pictures heightened the experience of 'being there' even further, as now Virtual Reality recreates that experience with such improbable situations as piloting jet airplanes or traveling through the blood stream (23-25 or so). As the authors explain, immediacy characterizes many technologies, all of which have in common a point of contact between the medium and what it represents. They write, '[A]t no time or place has the logic of immediacy required that the viewer be completely fooled by the painting or photograph [with the possible exception of trompe l’oeil]' (30). Immediacy operates as a paradox--promising unmediated access to the real while simultaneously pointing to itself as the portal through which that access is negotiated. In fact, the pleasures of imagining unmediated access would dissipate were one actually to be deceived.
The logic of hypermediacy works in opposition to immediacy. Hypermediacy calls attention to the distinctive qualities or constructedness of a given medium. W.J.T. Mitchell characterizes this as a visual style that 'privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and. . . emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object' (qtd. 31). Bolter and Grusin write:
If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space. . . . In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy (34).
Historically, one might point to examples of illuminated manuscripts, in which text and image intersperse to form unified messages, or to 17 th c. Dutch paintings, which integrated maps, mirrors, artworks and other visual signs within a single image. In most cases, the new medium is embedded within the framework of the old, just as the new technology of mapping is embedded within the more established technology of oil painting and linear perspective. Encyclopedias in the 18 th c., similarly demonstrate modes of hypermediacy, while in the 20 th c., collage and assemblage fulfill this model of textual and visual presentation.
Marshall McLuhan stated that the 'content of any medium is always another medium.' In his examples, the form of the original medium is subtly incorporated or represented in the new, as with the aforementioned seventeenth-century’s meticulous representation of maps. Bolter and Grusin call the representation of one medium by another 'remediation,' which they argue characterizes new digital media (45). In more obvious or naïve forms, the new medium is seen as improved--but not significantly different from--the original. In more sophisticated forms, remediation calls attention to the gap between the representation of the new and the old medium, upon which the new is seen to improve. Web encyclopedias and dictionaries copy forms of print-based versions, but they expand them through links, hypertext and multi-media. More aggressive remediation--such as one finds in music sampling, 'refashions the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy' (46).
Douglas Gordon, the Scottish conceptual artist who plunders film archives to restage entire classic films such as Hitchcock’s Psycho as a slowed-down 24 hour continuous stream, typifies remediation in contemporary art. In its original, the film is experienced at 24 frames per second, and, with its classic Hollywood editing, it presents a seamless experience of dramatic reality. Slowed down to one frame per second, plot and continuity are lost as the film progresses through a series of discrete black and white photographs. In I wonder when I stopped dreaming that I was gonna be a movie star (2000), Calgary artist Arlene Stamp selected several seconds from an 8mm film clip of her mother as a young woman turning to flirt with the camera, illuminating the clip with electronic diodes and hanging it as a continuous horizontal strip. The poignancy of the mother’s revealing gesture is heightened by the disjunction between the original moment, the several-second film clip and its remediated presentation as a static artifact.
Remediation also occurs when the new form completely cannibalizes and obliterates the original, minimizing discontinuities between the two forms. The original is never displaced entirely, and, in fact, it may return to remediate the new form. Websites remediate and absorb the information of television--as with the CNN or CBC websites--yet television news now incorporates computer forms such as the crawl, open windows and the use of the video phone to remediate the web itself (47). Mediums can also borrow--repurpose or refashion--examples from within their own history, such as when paintings incorporate images of other paintings. In contemporary ceramics, Jeannie Mah depicts Sèvres tea cups on her elegant, paper thin porcelain cups. The borrowing can be a form of homage, a critique or a rhetorical device that helps us reinterpret older media. What becomes clear is that all mediation is a form of remediation. Media constantly comment upon, reproduce or replace other media, and they operate within webs of cultural meaning and social relations (55). Mediations construct reality and exist as 'real artifacts' in the world. They do not represent a decay or perversion of reality but are forms of reality in and of themselves.
If the goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other--usually older--media, and all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can be understood as a process of reforming reality. I would like to turn my sights in the other direction--see how 'old' media remediate, refashion or rehabilitate new media, and how they refashion the reality of a media-saturated world. I am interested in questions such as 'Do hand made objects problematize concepts of reality and mediation? If VR is seen as constructing a multi-sensory world, does it address the body so as to create a 'more real' reality than does craft? Or is craft uniquely placed to mediate the reality of the body--to reform or refashion the overdose of virtual reality we presently experience? How do craft objects participate in the 'twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy' that define all other media and art forms? What might this remediation look like in actual practice, both historically and in contemporary work?
In its ability to simulate other materials, clay has long played a role in remediating other materials and objects. Its tendency to accept and preserve impressions parallels photography’s ability to retain the impression of light falling on objects in the visible world. In the 19 th c., photography was likened to a plaster cast; an important early photographer, Hippolyte Bayard, made a career of photographing such casts (Lowenthal). In Denmark, I observed a curious series of 19 th c. artifacts in which photographic portraits were attached to 3-D models of faces to produce almost hallucinogenic impressions of living beings. In these objects, an earlier form of portrait--bas relief--remediated the new medium of photography to stunning effect.
In describing the early invention of pottery, archaeologists speculate clay-lined baskets set too close to the hearth caught fire, vitrifying the clay and preserving the imprint of the basket. Later, decoration simulating basketry or other textile designs reinforced the relationship between baskets and pots. As metallurgy developed and came to be associated with elite containers, ceramics adapted to imitate metal forms--from rolled handles to rivets--to burnished metallic surfaces. Roman Arretine wares were formed in molds often taken from more expensive repoussé metal originals. In the 19 th century, luster wares mass-produced for middle-class markets imitated costly silver--and its less costly imitation--electroplate.
Nineteenth-century industrial production churned out low-cost consumer goods in great abundance, a phenomenon that raised concern among design reformers, class-conscious conservatives and social activists alike. For theorists like Pugin, Ruskin and others, the very notion of cheaper materials imitating more costly ones smacked of deceit, bad faith and an attack on the social order. William Morris did not believe that new materials rehabilitated the old through acts of remediation, but that they lowered taste to the least common denominator across the board. The influence of these philosophers and critics undermined notions of craft materials remediating in a positive way, a situation that continues to infect late modernist values dominant in many areas of craft practice.
The social, religious and moral values originally underpinning this argument have lost currency, opening the way for creative and critical remediation in the fields of craft. I will look here at three representative examples of remediation, each of which serves to clarify aspects of this creative and critical strategy. The examples I have chosen are:
- Penelope Stewart, whose mimicry of classical architecture through printed images on fabric returns architecture to its fabled origins in textiles, with the effect of undermining tropes of stability, authority and timelessness.
- Marc Courtemanche, whose ceramic chairs perversely remediate the technologies of wood turning and furniture construction to question values of function, sense perception and the relationship between works of craft, art and 'mere real things.'
- Anne Ramsden, whose installations of broken--and carefully repaired--commercial crockery raise questions of history and truth as generated by scientific archaeology and museum/curatorial studies.
- Jane Kidd, who meticulously recreates fragments of ancient historical textiles in order to validate the importance of disciplinary skill and knowledge in an era more attuned to interdisciplinarity and de-skilled production.
Penelope Stewart’s monumental fabric installations make literal Gottfried Semper’s assertion of weaving as the origin of architecture and tents as the earliest constructed shelter. Semper writes:
As the first partition wall made with hands, the first vertical division of space invented by man, we would like to recognize the screen, the fence made of plaited and tied sticks and branches, whose making requires a technique which nature hands to man, as it were. The passage from the plaiting of branches to the plaiting of hemp for similar domestic purposes is easy and natural (qtd. in Rykwert 30).
Semper’s text is relevant here to Stewart’s series Sentinels (2001). Façade reproduces a neoclassical landmark in Toronto. This building was once home to the University of Toronto’s Department of Household Sciences, the first building to which women were admitted to study at the University in 1908 (artist material). The image is silk-screened onto silk organza measuring 13 feet by 14' 6' and suspended before an identical image fixed to the wall. Excess fabric crumples as it meets the floor, contradicting the impression of stable columns and supporting walls. The doubling of the image creates a strange moiré or hologram effect, which, paradoxically, grants it volume and physicality only to undermine that appearance as the fabric sways at any breeze. This apparently simple and straight-forward presentation belies the conceptual complexity of the work.
Stewart focuses on buildings in crisis--those faced with demolition, decay or simple neglect. Their precarious state stands in contrast to the authority of their architectural style and innate grandeur. As Gary Michael Dault writes:
[T]he architectural ideas incarnated in the work . . . are real architectural ideas and have been with us throughout cultural history: ideas about classical style and scale, structural ideas about pillars and proportion, eloquent ideas about capitals and corbels and other modalities of architectural decoration.
Stewart’s organza installations remediate both photography and architecture, one medium 'new,' and the other as ancient as civilization itself. She photographs buildings, gridding and enlarging sections to screen onto fabric. Photographs both embody instantaneity and memorialize time; they simultaneously document the 'real existence' of the structure and immediately date it to the precise moment of the photograph’s making. They are instantly 'out of time,' historical memories. While appearing to testify to reality, they mark the impossibility of seizing what slips ever beyond the grasp. In this installation, the interplay of stability and instability operates in the perceptual space between the mobile fabric and immobile trace.
The scale of the work and indexical representation of reality approach immediacy: as Stewart describes columns, 'The optical illusion of volume created by the spacing of the two layers allows the viewer for a mille second to believe that these soft floating images are actually solid structural forms' (artist material). That something as feminine, insubstantial and technologically primitive as silk organza might deliver the experience of immediacy comes as an ironic shock. The momentary visual paralysis and confusion generated by the moiré effect locates the illusion in the body rather than in a technological prosthesis, as is common to VR or video games. I would argue that the craft-based materiality of the work insists on the active physical presence and bodily perception of the viewer, placing it at odds with much of the 'high tech' utopian dream of reality beyond the body. This situates the work in the context of optical experiments conducted in the 19 th century, which located the sense of sight in the contingencies of the body, as discussed by Jonathan Crary. In a sense, it is a 'cheap trick,' but I use that term advisedly. Craft has always thrived on an economy of effects that utilize the experience of the body to more fully engage--not simply re-present--reality. The sort of immediacy promised by hand made craft objects is one of bodily experience and sensory engagement, not simply one of illusion.
Stewart’s work further remediates an older medium, architecture. She engages the rhetoric of classical architecture, focusing on cropped details of capitals, corbels and bosses, yet her use of feminine tropes based in sheer, light weight fabric and hand-made facture renders these images of authority and power deracinated and bereft. Traditionally, architecture and monuments were tied closely to specific sites, meanings and commemorative acts. They drew authority from the civic and political power that marked these sites as significant and worthy of commemoration. Stewart’s installations are nomadic; they can be dissembled and re-installed with minimal effort compared to the original. They mark our culture’s essential rootlessness and addiction to constant change, conditions generated by consumer economy and global capitalism. The irony embedded in her choice of this particular structure is compounded by her revealing its current use is as a Club Monaco retail store and Ombudsmen’s office, twin services of commerce and government. As she writes:
These buildings were grand gestures of our domestic autonomy and independence, metaphors of what once had been core values of citizenship, stability, democracy and community. . . . The building articulates the tension between our shifting ideals and values (artist material).
Stewart questions the role of collective official memory and the symbolic burden of architecture in a world where such memories and values are increasingly products of politically charged messages and highly mediated illusions. The recent and widely televised funeral of Ronald Reagan provides an instructive example of such politically charged and mediated illusions, as journalists and broadcasters alike exerted great pains to suppress any other than patriotic memories of Reaganomics or the Iran-Contra affair. Stewart locates the construction of her illusions well within the perceptual apparatus of the body, thus grounding both skepticism towards accumulated meanings and hopefulness that individual perception and mediation can provide a basis for establishing some sense of common ground, shared memory and community.
Marc Courtemanche’s ceramic chairs embody Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that 'the content of any medium is always another medium,' and they fit Bolter and Grusin’s definition of 'remediation' as 'the representation of one medium by another' (45). Courtemanche’s chairs borrow the 'content' of wooden chairs, scrupulously reproducing not only the visual appearance of the original chair, but also--as closely as possible--the mode of production. How do we define the 'content' of a chair? One could point to function--the chair exists to support a seated individual. Archaeologists and material culture specialists term this the 'technomic' function--the strictly utilitarian purpose for which the object is intended (Deetz 50-51). Of course, chairs do more than this, which is one reason they come in so many styles, forms and materials. Many designate the class and social standing of the individual who owns them. Some, such as original Marcel Breuer or Charles Eames’ chairs, identify their owners as sophisticated connoisseurs of modern art and design with large amounts of disposable income. Others, such as wooden rockers, connote pioneer spirit or homey sentimentality. Older style office chairs, with their straight backs and rigid angles, suggest Protestant work ethic and maintenance of an 'on task' attitude, although modern office chairs make concessions to comfort, ergonomics and progressive attitudes towards work force labour. These connotations of chairs--still in the realm of content--are referred to as 'socio-technic' aspects (Ibid.). These represent the social standing, identity and social presence of their owners and/or users, making possible the culture of display. Courtemanche boldly appropriates this content, selecting the chairs he copies with great care.
Are Courtemanche’s chairs actually chairs? Or are they sculptures of chairs? Can they be both? Courtemanche states that his sculptures 'resemble' chairs, but they are not duplicates (1). These chairs differ sharply from replicas of older, functional wares produced by modern-day furniture makers, gunsmiths or potters, who carry on traditions out of respect for their integrity, skill and historical value. Henry Glassie discusses a number of traditional potters who make 'amazingly exact sculptural representations of useful pottery' (34). Despite being closely based on authentic, functional examples, these pots differ from their originals. They are used differently by the city people who buy them today than were the originals by their farmer forebears. The replicas--or amazingly exact sculptures--are consumed for their symbolic values, as metonymic ciphers connecting modern urbanites to their perceived indigenous roots. Courtemanche’s chairs hold no such symbolic, nostalgic value, and the fact that they are not 'used' connects them more to sculpture than to the original chairs on which they are based.
Courtemanche employs techniques such as wedging together or layering different clay bodies to simulate the appearance of actual wooden chairs (email May 7). Interestingly, these techniques date from at least the early T’ang Dynasty in China and found wide application from Japanese neriage to European industrial production. However, the works are not 'trompe l’oeil' (2, 26). The chairs momentarily confuse--but never deceive--the eye, and thus they are unlike the eye-fooling sculptures of artists such as Marilyn Levine (18). Levine’s masterful simulation of leather boots, jackets and other objects places them in the utopic realm of visual art (website). Despite being constructed from slabs of clay much as one might mold fabric, the illusion of their reality vanishes at first touch. Courtemanche’s chairs are more ambiguous, more subversive, in that they broadly simulate not only the appearance, physical sensation and function of a chair (they can be sat upon, albeit with great care), but also the methods of production that go into making a chair. Returning to the two terms defined at the beginning of this talk, immediacy and hypermediacy, we might classify work by Levine and others as courting immediacy--the illusion of transparent access to the real. In contrast, Courtemanche’s chairs call attention to their essential heterogeneity or hypermediacy. As Bolter and Grusin write, 'In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy' (34).
In simulating modes of production appropriate to the working of wood, Courtemanche approaches the perverse. There is no reasonable explanation for turning, lathing, biscuit-joining, dowelling and/or screwing together components of clay just as one might stock pieces of lumber. He uses these methods despite the fact that this way of working counters all known properties of clay--its lack of integrity in an unfired state and tendency to shrink, warp or crack when fired. Yet these chairs are more than simple demonstrations of unimaginably stubborn loyalty to known ways of working materials. It is through this insistence on process that his chairs embody 'chairness' (24 passim), which permits him to stake a claim to craftedness and to a fundamentally different relationship to representation than that occupied by traditional art.
By treating clay exactly as one might wood, Courtemanche remediates the medium of wood through clay to produce an entirely new understanding of both clay and wood. The simulation of carpentry techniques forms part of the content of the work, and in this, he moves beyond those who select these techniques for practical or structural purposes. In his perversion, he causes us to re-think the degree to which everyday objects are as much products of their material properties as they are of design, tradition or aesthetic intention. Nineteenth-century materialist philosopher Gottfried Semper maintained that forms of objects as they exist in the world might be analyzed under two aspects: their intended use and the materials, tools and processes through which the objects are made ((Rykwert 30). As we live in a world surrounded by objects produced by industrial processes, often from industrial materials by industrial workers--if not by robots--we lose consciousness of these materials, tools and processes that so dramatically and intimately shape our lives. A wooden chair made by a skilled carpenter elicits praise, but rarely wonder. A ceramic chair made exactly as such a wooden chair might be made elicits confusion--possibly even anger--and it causes us to rethink our relationship to the material world.
What intrigues and brings these works into my discussion of remediating craft is that they are not content to be 'mere art.' Courtemanche’s single-minded pursuit of process and craftsmanship introduces critical content and conditions into his work. Paul Mathieu argues that ever since Duchamp, 'anything can be art.' However, given defining conditions of process, tradition and function, not anything can be craft. Mathieu asserts craft is 'more than' art (2001, 15). Courtemanche cites Arthur Danto’s discussion of art works and mere real things and his claim that art both represents itself and refers to or connotes something else (24-25). Danto calls this quality of art its 'aboutness.' Courtemanche writes, 'I am positioning my sculptures between [art and mere real things] to generate questioning about how my chairs can be classified and experienced. The space I am creating is a port for all not-quite utilitarian objects, not-quite art objects' (21). This space is unique to craft, for which a relationship to function has always been central, even if that function be largely symbolic or ceremonial. Courtemanche creates an 'in-between' space; his crafted objects remediate both the everyday world of utilitarian objects and the symbolic world of art, calling both into question through an act of critical bridging. In this process of remediation, these works 'reform' reality--construct the experience of the real anew.
Anne Ramsden’s mammoth project, Anastylosis: Inventory, similarly mimics production modes from an external discipline, archaeology. The title refers to the practice of reassembling existing fragments of architecture in such a way that the original is made legible, but all repairs and new materials are clearly distinguishable as additions ( Vacharopoulou). It thus incorporates political and philosophical perspectives on the reconstruction of the past. As such, Ramsden’s use of this term relates her work to Stewart’s in that both point to problematic tensions between public and personal memory, material culture and identity. The project includes various components dating back to 1998. Ramsden spent five months collecting china from retail outlets serving a range of economic and social classes. She selected objects that most clearly conveyed the personal lifestyle, fantasies and identities of those targeted to consume them (Ramsden 7). She displayed these objects on commercial metal shelves reminiscent of back rooms in museums or showrooms. The collection represents an excerpt of what was available, a 'sort of contemporary inventory of what distributors offer their customers. . . . an inventory of everyday objects that reproduce an aspect of domestic life' (Lacroix 12/16). Each individual item reflects the intersection of utilitarian function with market-driven consumer culture, and each partakes of both timeless archetype and time-sensitive consumer fashion.
Ramsden subjected each object to a double maneuver, breaking it by either deliberately dropping or hitting it with a hammer, and carefully repairing it with coloured glues. The glue marking traces of damage indexed the colour of the original object: white objects were repaired with red glue, blue with green glue and so forth. She grouped her purchases by colour, a classification system she deemed to be both precise and objective (Ramsden 8). Classification by colour rather than function differentiates her display from a conventional museum, rendering the objects decorative, harmonious and subject to their aesthetic appearance in the domestic environment (Lacroix 17). Between complementary acts of destruction and reparation, Ramsden arranged and photographed the shards. By exhibiting photographs of pieces whole and fractured, she reveals the complete cycle involved in producing the final work.
Archaeology legitimates its reparative work by collecting and preserving artifacts that time, happenstance and forces of nature have brought to ruin. Ramsden undermines her claim to this sort of legitimacy by manifesting her own complicity in the destruction. Opposing 'faux' to 'real' archaeology as ironic imitation, her claim is not to scientific neutrality but to a critique of that claim (Ramsden 7). Her simulation of museum display and archival obsession lays bare the politics and hubris attached to any reconstruction or representation of the past. Museum goers are presented regularly with histories and artifacts deemed worthy of repair and resurrection, and history is recreated from the perspective of the victor. If we required any further demonstration of this simple fact, we need look no further than the controversy, accusations and counter-accusations that swirled around the looting of the Baghdad Museum during 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' just over one year ago.
How might we see this project as an extended act of remediation, and what might that say about the consequences of materials and processes in terms of craft practice? It is significant that the subject of Ramsden’s extended meditation is commercial crockery. These sorts of objects occupy an extremely liminal zone in terms of contemporary culture. Despised by studio ceramists, ridiculed by counter-culture, overlooked by serious museologists and yet prized by consumer-conscious--generally female--collectors, this class of commercial ceramics exhibits a superabundance of signs, a surplus of residual semantic value to the attentive reader. As Laurier Lacroix writes, '[T]hey are objects whose primary purpose resides in being sought out, then bought and taken home to be used. They are not yet the comforting objects to which we attach fond memories' (16). Ramsden’s feigned neutrality towards classification has the effect of rendering the objects more naked, more abject and more vulnerable in their isolated and obviously damaged state. Our familiarity with both the class of objects, household crockery, and the material, ceramics, collapses the distance we might ordinarily cultivate towards art objects.
Here, we might point to the state of desired transparency--immediacy--promised by new media, yet these objects go one step further because they actually are real. In fact, it is not at all clear if they are the artworks or 'mere real things' mentioned by Danto and cited earlier by Marc Courtemanche. At what point in their trajectory did they stop being 'real things' and become art objects, artifacts that refer beyond themselves to 'something else'? Was this at the point of purchase, when the objects entered into a commercial exchange between the retail outlet and the artist, or did it take that initial act of violent destruction to convert them into works of art? To foreground this ambiguous state, Ramsden includes large-scale photographs of the objects in their broken and repaired state. The photographs further decontextualize--literally flatten--the objects by floating them against a black background, arranged as a pattern that obliterates any reference to original identity, function or physical dimension of the objects.
Much like Courtemanche’s perverse and stubborn determination to replicate wood working processes in clay technology, Ramsden perversely pursues museological techniques of restoration on objects that can not possibly be worthy of repair. Museums collect and preserve objects rendered rare through the passage of time or valuable through the use of costly materials and provenance. No one questions the time or expertise devoted to patiently assembling an Athenian kylix or Sung Dynasty celadon. In the case of oriental ceramics, connoisseurs in China or Japan lovingly repaired rare pieces, marking the repair with a thin line of gold. The repair spoke to the value and uniqueness of the object and to the veneration accorded it. Ramsden perversely mimics this with her clearly visible coloured glues. Equally perverse, the exchange value of the original ceramic object--even of a rare or valuable collectible--is exponentially increased through its being broken, repaired and resurrected as an art object.
If we reconsider the ways in which remediation functions, we can see this work performing on all three levels. These artifacts remediate activities of archaeology, museology and professional history writing; they 'mediate the mediation,' not to reproduce or replace the original, but certainly to question and comment upon it (Bolter and Grusin 55). These remediations are themselves as 'real as the reality they purport to mediate'--they are 'real artifacts' in their own right. And they perform this remediation out of a desire to refashion or to rehabilitate other media--most notably, archaeology, history writing and psychoanalysis--through critique. Through these interventions, our own concept of the real is reformed and forever changed.
The highly artificial nature of these artifacts is further enhanced by the process of anastylosis itself. Calling attention to the constructed nature of the repaired artifact is central to the ethics of the process. Reacting against earlier generations of archaeological reconstruction that attempted to 'erase' the distance between past and present, to construe the reconstructed artifact as a fetishized fragment of an imagined past, archaeologists and conservators of world heritage sites debate vigorously about the ethics, logistics and scientific legitimacy of transforming historical landmarks into tourist Meccas or propaganda tools (witness Saddam Hussein’s reconstruction in situ of the Ishtar Gate) . Having subverted the logic of museum display and called into question the legitimacy and neutrality of professional archaeology, Ramsden releases her objects from this particular discourse by investing them with psychoanalytical charge.
This charge--or resonance--is most apparent in the series Anastylosis: Childhood. In this reconfiguration of her archive, she selects commercial children’s china with images of Tintin, Bunnykins and Le Petit Prince, among other figures. Not only does this work highlight the commercialization of bourgeois childhood, a process begun in the 17 th century but given real impetus in the 19 th, it also unleashes hidden wells of nostalgia or terror many of us harbour towards our own childhoods. As Melanie O’Brian writes:
Like the scars of memory, the gold veins running through the plates only draw us into a fascination with the objects themselves. While one’s eye is drawn to the details of text and image on the plates and bowls, the viewer can not disregard the wounded or abused state of the dishware. The dishes are not only conspicuously repaired, but there are places in which chips are missing, spaces which haven’t been entirely filled in. As we all have histories marked by painful events, the broken china becomes a symbol of shattered memory, broken childhoods, imperfect ideals.
Here is where craft materials and craft objects--in the full range of their richness from hobbicraft to industrial simulation--speak with consequential voices. Just as Gaston Bachelard related the levels of a house to various states of consciousness, domestic spaces bear uncanny analogy to our psychic architecture (94-95 passim). Ceramic objects witness the most intimate actions of our lives--from the legitimized sexuality of the wedding trousseau to the excessive indulgence of personal display, from the pleasures and tensions of the family dinner table to the angst of the sick room. Ceramic objects witness our existence as they support and enable our progress through life. Precisely because they occupy that liminal, hybrid or 'not quite' zone between intentional art objects and real things in the world, their acts of mediation exhibit social, political and psychoanalytical charges that occur rarely outside of craft media. Their relationship to the body, to the family, to the domestic and the commercial ensures an on-going series of tensions, recognitions and complex responses.
Jane Kidd’s tapestries remediate through fabrication, a strategy that modifies the various positions described by Bolter and Grusin. In her Handwork Series, she reproduces fragments of historical textiles in order to validate the importance of disciplinary skill and tacit knowledge in an age more attuned to interdisciplinary exploration and de-skilled production. Kidd borrows the form of ancient Andean burial cloths, Italian silk velvets and Renaissance verdure tapestries in order to reinterpret or refashion the content of these textiles within a contemporary context. As previously mentioned, borrowing can be a form of homage, a critical or formal rhetorical device that helps us to reinterpret older media (Bolter and Grusin 55). Kidd’s borrowing amounts to far more than simple homage, although that is involved, and considerably more than creative or expressive 'repurposing.' Motifs do not circulate as signs severed from their original context to float as 'free signifiers,' and she does not naively imagine that her contemporary tapestries provide transparent gateways to the perception of ancient--supposedly 'more spiritual' cultures. She employs appropriation as a critical strategy to focus attention on the original textiles. Her interest in anthropological data manifests itself through these works, but this interest is marked by hypermediacy and remediation. I will explain.
Kidd’s Handwork Series: to the bone, in the blood, from the heart (fragments 1-9) (2001-02) consists of nine individually framed tapestries. Each incorporates representational imagery of a hand or forearm rendered as an anatomical fragment juxtaposed against a broader field of traditional cloth. Kidd’s simulation of both the structure and appearance of traditional cloth constitutes a political gesture; each tapestry functions as a proposition or example in an extended argument regarding the status and value of skillful hand labour in the contemporary world. Her works make assertions about the relationship between such skill and a culture’s ability to conceptualize and integrate personal and collective experience. The insistent presence of the hand in each work proclaims its central role as the agent of cultural remediation. Kidd’s appropriation of the structure--the actual form of the tapestry weave--as well as the image of the textile constitutes an operation of hypermediacy, the calling of 'attention to the distinctive qualities or constructedness of a given medium.' Following W.J.T. Mitchell, these works privilege 'fragmentation, indeterminacy and heterogeneity. . . process or performance' over the finished work (qtd. Bolter and Grusin 31). Her remediation is aggressive as described by Bolter and Grusin: she 'refashions the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of multiplicity or hypermediacy' (46).
By way of example, I will examine just one of these works, fragment 2. This work replicates a number of distinctly different techniques used by Andean weavers: a Paracas embroidery of the Early Horizon Period (600-175 BCE), a Wari tunic with interlocking wefts from the Middle Horizon Period (CE 500-800) and a Chancay double and painted plain weave of the Late Intermediate Period (CE 1000-1476). Andean makers strive to weave cloth whole, to avoid cutting or piecing fragments to produce a shaped garment, and to imbed symbolic patterns into the structure itself. This integrity is perversely countered in a Chancay double weave sampler that resembles the portion replicated in fragment 2. In this example, a small bag is emblazoned with twenty-one distinct patterns, each containing a single repeat, in double weave, which reverses the pattern of the other side. Such objects exist as mnemonic devices and as displays of sheer technical virtuosity (Stone-Miller 143-44).
The Wari tunic fragment demonstrates a high degree of formal abstraction and variation resulting from collaboration among groups of weavers (Stone-Miller 104-05). Close formal analysis of Wari tunics reveals a system of individual variation within collective constraints. Intentional variation functions as a creative strategy appropriate to the nature and aesthetics of the production itself (Stone-Miller 41). The tunic is constitutive of a wider social organization of skilled labour in addition to weavers, including those raising animals and those harvesting, spinning and dyeing the wool . The Andean social system sustained creative collective activity through giving it meaning and value (Stone-Miller 17). Kidd's allusion to these masterpieces poses questions about the status of hand made objects in cultures other than our own. Intrinsically, the textiles are of little material value, yet their importance in terms of conceptual and technical sophistication, semiotic richness and sheer beauty was such that they occupied a central position in the Andean cosmology and in social, political and economic systems.
As I have argued, the 'marking the presence of the older media' through fragmentation and heterogeneity renders these works political. Kidd has spent a lifetime studying, viewing and collecting examples of historical textiles. She has noted their complexity, semiotic richness and technological innovation, stressing that all are products of a human hand working in synchronicity with an attentive mind. By reproducing these fabrics--literally bringing them into being in our time--she elicits sharp contrasts between the regard extended to these works by their respective cultures and the lack of regard for skillful hand making in the contemporary world. She explores multiple layers of meaning embedded in these fabrics and demonstrates their role in synthesizing cultural beliefs, power struggles and collective experience. She validates Peter Dormer’s assertion that 'It is not craft as ‘handcraft’ that defines contemporary craftsmanship; it is craft as knowledge that empowers a maker to take charge of technology' (Dormer 140). Without the active deployment of skilful making, that empowering knowledge is lost, as is an important link to past cultures. The activity of making is both a process and a performance; making generates meaning through being actively performed in real time, using real materials with real consequences. The insistence on indeterminacy and heterogeneity pries open an ethical space within which multiple choices and solutions might be vetted, what David Pye calls the 'workmanship of risk' (qtd. in Dormer 138). Kidd’s multiple acts of remediation through craft ground process and performance in a skillful hand and living body rather than any virtual extension or prosthetic device, however immediate or 'true to life.' Through these acts, Kidd progressively shapes reality and our experience of the material world, of time and history and of trans-historical human values and beliefs. The remediation of these historical fabrics forges connections between intelligible bodies and reservoirs of human skill and intelligence in ways that no virtual technology could ever do.
The examples I have discussed here demonstrate active remediation on the part of makers using craft materials and processes to interrogate, re-purpose and remediate aspects of contemporary culture, disciplinary knowledge and new media. Why do I feel this topic is important? Is remediation simply a sexier way to describe appropriation or representation in its multiple forms? Perhaps, although the currency of the term challenges me to extend the discussion beyond new media to a consideration of craft. In this, I concur with Paul Mathieu, that craft must contend with art on its own terms as the dominant discourse while maintaining a sense of its essential difference. What I find attractive about these concepts is the way they re-configure the fields of art and craft. What remediation opens for those of us interested in craft is a model whereby art and craft co-exist in a structure of inter-penetration and inter-dependency. Just as the computer and the internet remediate film and television, only to be remediated in turn by those same media, art and craft maintain a symbiotic relationship with regards to contemporary culture. Craft, with its roots in function and the everyday, has long bridged the divide between art and life that continually eludes the utopian grasp of art. Ontologically, craft both presents--and represents--the real; it is both immediately, transparently real, and it represents the real through formal abstraction, surface image and conceptual presence.
Contemporary craft has grown through its struggle for 'equality' to art. If, ultimately, this is a false aspiration--the value of craft is independent of its status as art--contemporary craft practice has nonetheless become more sophisticated, self-reflexive, self-critical and self-aware over the past several decades during which this struggle has taken place. Understanding craft’s capacity to remediate its own history, 'real life,' the world of art and new media assures me of craft’s ongoing strength, flexibility and power to sustain critique.
A Note on Images
In order to view works by artists discussed in this paper, I recommend the following websites:
Penelope Stewart: Centre for Canadian Contemporary Art http://www.ccca.ca/index.html. Please search under Penelope Stewart.
Anne Ramsden: Centre for Canadian Contemporary Art http://www.ccca.ca/index.html. Please search under Anne Ramsden.
Jane Kidd: Stride Gallery, http://www.stride.ab.ca/index1.html. Please search Archive, 2003, Jane Kidd, September 5- October 4, 2003.
Marc Courtemanche: TBA
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Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Courtemanche, Marc. Not Quite. Unpublished paper in support of Master’s Thesis, University of Regina, 2003. Photocopy.
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