Skip to page content...
View Submissions
- Please choose an option:
- Title of Abstract:
In the Making: Rhetoric of Craft (Ref #182)
- Date:
- 23-10-2006 21:22:08
- Status:
-
Accepted
- Rating:
- 8
-
Details:
- In the past decade the word ?craft? has been dropped from the names of several prominent cultural and educational institutions in the United States of America. Why has this word been deemed inappropriate or unwanted as a descriptor in the titles of these places? To understand why the word ?craft? has been exiled from the identifying names of these institutions, one must interrogate what ?craft? actually means. By unraveling the many definitions of ?craft? and the rhetoric that forms them, a web of hierarchies is revealed, and simultaneously unveils this contentious word?s connections with socio-economic status, race, gender, and queerness that lead some to see ?craft? as undesirable to identify, and simultaneously provides an empowering space for others.
This paper will aim to demonstrate how the contemporary rhetoric of craft was borne from the influence of a capitalist economic system and its employment of mass production to provide a better understanding of the many factors that stigmatize or empower this word. Concepts of means of production, division of labor, and alienation will be applied to analyze social relations largely conducted through the apparatus of language to understand how a rhetoric of craft that emerges from and functions within a capitalist framework becomes non-normative and ?othered.? Accompanying this investigation is an exploration of how the efforts of the arts and crafts movement, and subsequent movements that sprouted from it, contributed to the shape of contemporary rhetoric surrounding craft.
An examination of the rhetoric(s) of craft will then be used to understand how and why the many forms of ?craft? are pushed into stagnant, repetitive stereotypes that are fixed and subsequently denied growth. However, potential is created through these stereotypes to facilitate displacement of notions of categorization often applied to material and making, providing for dynamic hybridity that maintains the integrity of traditional processes. This disjuncture paves way for new progressive discourse of craft using ideas of queer theory as a potential template through its ability to represent diverse experience while avoiding rigidity and stagnation. Additional new discourse for craft through ideas of performativity of craft process(es) as a means of forming and claiming identity will also be discussed. The potential of new discourse will be illustrated through examples including (but not limited to) Josiah McElheny and Andrea Zittel.
Reviewer Comments: