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- Title of Abstract:
Finding A Home : Excavating the Cultural Space my Craft Objects Inhabit. (Ref #198)
- Date:
- 26-10-2006 10:53:16
- Status:
-
Unsuccessful
- Rating:
- 4
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Details:
- The Craft world?s push towards increased theorisation may have underpinned the emerging interest in and dominance of an ?ideas driven? Craft Practice. We could describe this as a practice where ideas, in a sense, precede objects and where the objects themselves operate as illustrations of those ideas. These practices, which typically describe themselves as operating at the boundaries of Craft discourse, have come to dominate our degree courses, craft galleries, journals and conferences. They have filled that cultural space. Those of us whose practise sits firmly in the centre of the Craft world may be left with a sense of cultural homelessness.
Nature of the Research and Methods Used:
?Finding a Home? is a research paper which aims to find, explain, support and clarify the cultural space my work inhabits. It is not looking for a new space. The purpose of the project is to excavate and re-examine the ideals and values supporting the intellectual framework through which it can be described. For this paper I propose limiting the investigation to key texts which reveal some conceptual challenges when attempting to locate ideas or emotions within my Ceramics .
Main Findings:
§ Philosophical frameworks: The Fracture Between Thought and Things
Plato is well known to construct clear hierarchical oppositions between ?reason and the senses? through his banishing of the poetic and ?parts of the soul? described in his Republic. However it is his work on ?forms?(?the highest subjects?), for example truth and beauty that highlight a clear separation between object and idea. Here we find that beauty can only be understood through thought, not through things and that a closeness to truth is not possible in the world of things. This prior notion of separation underpins later philosophical investigations of aesthetics and art.
This location of a deep rooted fracture between ?thought? and ?things?, responsible for Heidegger?s location of ?truth? in a painting but not in a cup, may explain the challenge I encounter when trying to locate ?thought? in my things. The ?truth-other? creates a fundamental and hierarchical rift between a notion of ?knowledge? and a physical and experiential ?knowing?.
§ Religious and ethical considerations: Towards an ?Otherness?
Within the monotheistic, Judao ? Christian cultural history of the West, the nature of the relationships we form with certain kinds of objects is limited by a fundamental and embedded morality attached to these things. Biblical texts set up a peculiar relationship between Man and man ? made things. Beauty or perfection can only be recognised via a notion of ?God ? other?.
Later, through our persistent notion of the immorality of any relationship with man-made things (I feel naughty buying new shoes) Freud is able to hit a nerve. The popularity of Freudian theories has allowed suspicion of our motives to seep into a description of our relationship with all things. But has Freud?s ?Fetish? object been taken too literally?
(Notes and Bibliography available on request)
Reviewer Comments: