NON-FIXIONS
Kathryn Shriver
MFA, Drawing & Painting
Thesis Support Paper
April 27th, 2017
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford: Berg, 2007
“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.
Berry, Allison. “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/.
Burri, Alberto. 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.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Sharecom.ca. http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html
Greenberg, Clement. “Necessity of Formalism.” New Literary History 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1971):
171-175. JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/stable/468386).
Jirka, Robert. “Trade Bead Migration into North America.” Published online.
http://www.academia.edu/769174/Trade_Bead_Migration_into_North_America.
Labelle, Marie-Louise. Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian
Collections. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of History, 2005.
Masanti, Louise. “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position.” In Extra/Ordinary: Craft and
Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek, 59-81. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011.
Michelli, Thomas. “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/.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Northern, Tamara. The Sign of the Leopard: Beaded Art of Cameroon. Mansfield: William
Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, 1975.
Shales, Ezra. “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.
Stella, Frank. Mas o Menos, 1964. Metallic powder, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 418 cm. Paris,
Centre Georges Pompidou.
Waters, Sera. “Repetitive Crafting: The Shared Aesthetic of Time in Australian Contemporary
Art.” Craft + Design Enquiry, Vol. 4, (2012): 69-87.
Kathryn Shriver
MFA, Drawing & Painting
Thesis Support Paper
April 27th, 2017
- PREFACE: NON-FICTION
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
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
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
- Interlude: A Short, Incomplete, and Biased History of Glass Beads
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
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?
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
Adamson, Glenn. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford: Berg, 2007
“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.
Berry, Allison. “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/.
Burri, Alberto. 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.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Sharecom.ca. http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html
Greenberg, Clement. “Necessity of Formalism.” New Literary History 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1971):
171-175. JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/stable/468386).
Jirka, Robert. “Trade Bead Migration into North America.” Published online.
http://www.academia.edu/769174/Trade_Bead_Migration_into_North_America.
Labelle, Marie-Louise. Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian
Collections. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of History, 2005.
Masanti, Louise. “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position.” In Extra/Ordinary: Craft and
Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek, 59-81. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2011.
Michelli, Thomas. “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/.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Northern, Tamara. The Sign of the Leopard: Beaded Art of Cameroon. Mansfield: William
Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, 1975.
Shales, Ezra. “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.
Stella, Frank. Mas o Menos, 1964. Metallic powder, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 418 cm. Paris,
Centre Georges Pompidou.
Waters, Sera. “Repetitive Crafting: The Shared Aesthetic of Time in Australian Contemporary
Art.” Craft + Design Enquiry, Vol. 4, (2012): 69-87.