Non-Fixions Text

NON-FIXIONS

Kathryn Shriver
MFA, Drawing & Painting
Thesis Support Paper
April 27th, 2017

PREFACE: NON-FICTION

Formalism is, in a sense, very much related to non-fiction. It deals in facts, and though it is not uncreative, it grounds itself in a relationship to a sense of reality and distances itself from aesthetic fantasies. I define formalism in two parts. First, it is an approach to artmaking in which form is the only content; it’s empirical, and shrinks away from excessive metaphor, storytelling or subjective affect. Second, though I’m using a broad, ahistorical definition of formalism, the term irrevocably carries a weight that runs from the academic tradition of painting through Modernism to Contemporary Art. It has a reputation for cool detachment, elitism, and, often, irrelevance outside of the tightest constraints of art about Art.

I begin with these thoughts on formalism because it is an approach that allows me to focus on the rich material specificities of each form in a work and to set up relationships between the visual and sensorial qualities of these material forms as well as between their cultural significances. Formalism as a lens filters out a tendency to project figurative meanings onto sensual materials and keeps the focus on what is there—the less subjective, rich, sincerely expressed material qualities and semantic functions of different material forms. This consideration of what is visually there, together with its historical associations with seriousness and problematic exclusion, and its skirting of poetic symbolism, is the non-fiction of formalism.

NON-FIXION

In Non-Fixions, my main creative tactic is the conflation of methods and materials commonly associated with painting with those that most often fall under the category of craft or fiber art. This is a move to interrogate the discomfort that Painting (as an art historical monolith) has had with signifiers from practices that might be considered off-art, i.e. craft, design, fashion.

This is not painting co-opting something outside of its comfort zone (trash, advertising, kitsch, etc.) on its own terms, but it is a series of crafted works self-consciously trying out painting, investigating the nature of a painting in their own vocabulary and skill set. To do this, I’ve approached the object of a painting like a craftsperson, looking at its material components, namely the support structure (a stretcher, either made by the artist or purchased from a workshop) and the surface (a textile, usually commercially manufactured) as opportunities for making rather than as a given starting point. Crafting support structures and weaving textiles, I’m jumping off from a 20th century tradition (Alberto Burri’s stitched canvases,[1] Frank Stella’s shaped canvases,[2] the work of the Supports/ Surfaces group,[3] etc.) but disregarding its different specific philosophical projects. I’m instead interested in ways of complicating the construction and function of these basic elements and bringing them to the forefront of the work. This results in objects that at once defy and exacerbate the split between craft and art, unable to settle into a fixed position in relation to either side, but which also alert insecurities and discomforts that lie between the two. This is non-fixion: the unwillingness to adhere to a divide between creative categories, but an inability to exist beyond it. It considers the (non-fictional) historical baggage of craft and painting as categories but remains evasive, filled with contradictory ideas and shifting in its stance.

UTILITY

Perhaps the main point of friction between art and craft is differing positions to utility. Works of art, in the modern theoretical tradition, must remain autonomous, separate from everyday life, self-contained, and thus, in many senses, useless.[4] The history of craft, however, is embedded in the making of objects that populate our lives—furniture, utensils, jewelry—objects that are explicitly use-oriented and invite interaction. This history leaves a residue on all contemporary crafted objects, functional or not, in their “form-typological relation to functional objects.”[5] This means that any object made under the umbrella of craft in its materials, processes, or intended purpose has the quality, even if it takes on the role of artwork, of situating itself referentially in our collective consciousness in relation to a function and/or use value. Whether contemporary crafted art objects comply to, deny, or react against this residual utility, they are always in relationship to it.

The pieces I have made for Non-Fixions variously allude to and enact different levels of utility in order to press on this tension point and to examine the different behaviors and associations of my assembled materials and forms. Beyond the use of some craft-y media and an exploitation of the functional components of a painting (support and surface), I’ve also employed hanging fixtures that belong to the realm of home décor and the hardware store. These coat hooks, towel bars, and shelves, which are employed for their use as objects of display and hanging, become integrated as formal elements of the composition. Consequently, the way many of these works are composed are centered on how forms are collectively hung: pieces are assembled from unfixed and balanced fragments, rarely permanently adhered into one part. Sections of beading drape over frames, hooks hold elements together (literally and visually), works are propped, weighted, strung, effectively performing subtle usages just by existing, relatively non-fixed.

BEADS: UNSETTLING OBJECTS

The history of beads, my most pervasive material, is heavy with instances of transformation and contradiction, putting non-fiction and non-fixion to work together. Linked with histories of colonialism, femininity, labor, costume, and craft, beads upset dynamics of power, identity, value, and taste. They slide in and out of positive and negative associations, at once cheapening and elevating, able to function as both critical signifiers and rebellious agents of play.

Interlude: A Short, Incomplete, and Biased History of Glass Beads

Historically, the major effective function of glass beads has been as trade items. The early hubs of bead manufacture were in Egypt and various parts of Asia, with European glass beads coming later in the 13th century, from Venice and the present-day Czech-Republic.[6] European traders brought their varieties to Africa long after merchants from the shores of the Indian Ocean, but European beads were rare and expensive, and came in more colors and varieties.[7] Thus, new European beads created a demand which was quickly exploited by the colonizers, who exchanged them for passage into hostile territories, land ownership, and people for the slave trade.[8] The monopoly that the European colonials subsequently gained over the bead trade further played a major role in toppling traditional economic systems, and the abandonment of traditional dress in parts of Southern and Eastern Africa.[9] In the Americas, the coming of glass beads coincided with the arrival of Columbus, and were once again a currency of colonialism.[10]

Once introduced, beads were used in many colonized parts of Eastern and Southern Africa as replacements for natural materials as embellishments on clothing that served particular cultural purposes. For example, cowrie shells, which provided protection against the Evil Eye when worn, were substituted with white beads.[11] Similarly, in North America, beads were sometimes used in place of wampum and quill beads.[12] Even in Europe, beads adorning garments were in the tradition of more precious gemstones.[13] This identity as pretenders to more valuable, powerful materials gives glass seed beads an appealing role as references, place holders, and chameleons that point to more potent matter. From a second angle, however they read as neutralizing forces that replace and strip down cultural signification as cheap imposters which erase or at least defer cultural specificity and signification. So while beads hold ties to special and affective matter and cultural identity, they are also objects of erasure and emptiness, violence and transformation: unsettling objects of non-fixion. Continually appropriated and re-appropriated, the significance of beadwork shifts drastically with context. Beads currently play a role in creative statements of autonomy and identity in African feminist subcultures,[14] and are used to reassert the socio-political voice of women and African and Native American heritage in the work of artists like Nadia Myre, Teri Greeves, and Joyce J. Scott (to name a select few). At the same time, beadwork is simultaneously appropriated and exploited for the tourism industry and by insensitive clothing companies.[15] Thus glass beads continually shift in and out of conflicting positions, and while their significance changes, they maintain a continuous and connected historical dialog full of charged links and slippages.

LABOR AND VALUE

Augmenting this slipperiness, beads also effect material transformation with repeated labor and accumulation. As small, irregular units, they transform en masse into surprising and contradictory textiles. Additionally, they require a disproportionate amount of time and labor to construct relatively small sections of work. This means that beadwork makes little sense in our economy of efficiency: we live in a world in which time is spent rather than passed, and an economic return is noted for each expenditure.[16] As a skilled and artistic industry, craft has always been hyper-aware of its situation in regards to these socio-economic conditions, and beads, as symbols of wealth and status within trade history, complicate this situation further.

While a conversation on labor is so relevant to work which employs slow craft next to manufactured fixtures, I think of lessons learned from Ezra Shales on the overlooked craftsmanship that often goes into manufacturing processes.[17] I am not interested in reinforcing a dichotomy of the hand-made versus the machine-made, but in playing with relationships between different points on a spectrum from art making, craftwork, and manufacture in various iterations. When separate formal elements coincide, visually complicit in the same work, variously withholding, failing, or performing their potential for utility, they at first seem balanced and resolved together. However, the revealed contrasts in the making of each form begin to reveal the various levels of labor, utility, and contradictions at play.

CONCLUSION: AFFECTIVE MATERIAL FORMALISM?

To end, in keeping with the theme of Non-Fixions, I’d like to lightly unsettle my opening position on the empirical non-fiction of formalism. My own formalist approach might be better qualified as a material formalism, or even an affective formalism, in which formal qualities are inextricable from the cultural significations and affects of the materials that make up the composition. I have struggled to find a way to talk about the affective qualities of the beadwork I make, however, there is an affect described by Sianne Ngai in her book Ugly Feelings as stuplimity which I find helpful.[18] As a riff off of Kant’s sublime, stuplimity is the simultaneous experience of shock and (non-cynical) boredom in the face of an artwork that features extreme repetition and thickness of content.[19] I think of the more concentrated areas of laborious beadwork in my pieces as microcosms of this stuplime—enticing, repetitive, affecting sincere boredom.

What then, might be the affective experiences of encountering something familiarly useful, immediate, and manufactured next to something of the stuplime? This is my question for an un-fixed, vibrating affective materiality, read from the specificity of forms.

[1] Alberto Burri, Composizione, 1953, burlap, thread, synthetic polymer paint, gold leaf, and PVA on black
fabric, 86 x 100.4 cm., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

[2] Frank Stella, Mas o Menos (1964), metallic powder, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 418 cm, Paris, Centre
Georges Pompidou.

[3] Thomas Michelli, “Against the Art World and the World in General: Painting as Radical Critique,”
   Hyperallergic, last modified June 21st, 2014, https://hyperallergic.com/133814/against-the-art-world-and-
   the-world-in-general-painting-as-radical-critique/.

[4] Louise Masanti, “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position” Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary
Art, Ed. Maria Elena Buszek. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pg. 65.

[5] Masanti, “Super-Objects: pg. 62.
Masanti postulates craft objects as “super-objects” as they carry the interrelationships of Craft and the
integration with life and use value of Design, but are able to hold the conceptual motives of art objects
  while resisting alienation and an “autonomous” position removed from the context of life.

[6] “Beads and Trade,” The Stephen A Frost Trade Bead Collection, Illinois State Museum. Accessed
March 31, 2017, http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/anthro/beads/beads_trade.html.

[7] Tamara Northern. The Sign of the Leopard: Beaded Art of Cameroon. (Mansfield: William Benton
   Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, 1975) pg. 2.

[8] Northern, The Sign of the Leopard, pg. 49.

[9] Ibid., pg. 15.

[10] Robert Jirka, “Trade Bead Migration into North America,” pg.1 (Published online),
   http://www.academia.edu/769174/Trade_Bead_Migration_into_North_America.

[11] Marie-Louise Labelle, Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian
    Collections (Gatineau: Canadian Museum of History, 2005), pg. 30-31.

[12] “Beads and Trade,” The Stephen A. Frost Trade Bead Collection, Illinois State Museum. Accessed
  March 31, 2017, http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/anthro/beads/beads_trade.html.

[13] Labelle, Beads of Life, pg. 2.

[14] Labelle, Beads of Life, pg. 177.

[15] Allison Berry, “Urban Outfitters Taken to Task for Faux ‘Navajo’ Products,” TIME Magazine, last modified Oct.
   12, 2011, http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/10/12/urban-outfitters-taken-to-task-for-faux-navajo-products/.

[16] Sera Waters, “Repetitive Crafting: The Shared Aesthetic of Time in Australian Contemporary Art,” Craft
    Plus Design Enquiry, Vol. 4, (2012): pg. 76.

[17] Ezra Shales “Mass Production as an Academic Imaginary (or, if more must be said of Marcel,
   “Evacuating Duchampian Conjecture in the Age of Recursive Scholarship”),” The Journal of Modern
    Craft 6, no. 3 (2013): 267-274, accessed March 31st, 2017,
   http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174967813X13806265666654.

[18] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pg. 248-297.
   Exemplified by Ann Hamilton’s massive installations and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,
   Ngai describes the stuplimity of encountering something definitively within the human scale of
   comprehension that, though it entices and overwhelms us, outlives our attention span and bores us.

[19] Ngai, Ugly Feelings, pg.271, 280-282.

Bibliography

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     http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismdepts/anthro/beads/beads_trade.html.

Berry, Allison. “Urban Outfitters Taken to Task for Faux ‘Navajo’ Products.” TIME Magazine. Last
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Burri, Alberto. Composizione, 1953. Burlap, thread, synthetic polymer paint, gold leaf, and PVA
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  Age of Recursive Scholarship”).” The Journal of Modern Craft 6, no. 3 (2013): 267-274. Accessed March 31st, 2017.
          http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174967813X13806265666654.

Stella, Frank. Mas o Menos, 1964. Metallic powder, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 418 cm. Paris,
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