Tension headaches

Our fiber art group just scored two huge garbage bags full of old doilies and tablecloths in a variety of techniques -- crochet, tatting, hairpin lace, cutwork, bobbin lace, embroidery and who knows what else.  As we sorted through, contemplating what we'll do with them, I noted how some were obviously made at less-than-expert level craft.

And I thought, as I have so often in the past, that in every single fiber art, the key to mastery is control of tension.

Check out this cute little crocheted doily, made in granny squares.  The white is tighter than the pink, hence the 3-D effect.

When I first learned to crochet, taught by my mother-in-law, I made a fairly large afghan.  I was proud of how neatly it was done, flat and even -- until I finished and tried to fold it up.  Oops -- one end was a good six inches longer than the other!

What had happened, of course, was that as I got more comfortable with the yarn and the stitch, I eased up on the tension and the finished fabric got more expansive.

I have taught many beginners how to crochet, sew and embroider, and have watched myself try to learn knitting, weaving, felting, macrame and many other techniques.  In 99% of the cases beginners' work is too tight.  We clench up on the needle or hook or whatever tool we're using, we pull too hard on the thread or the yarn, we hang on too tight to the underlying material.  We grab that quilt in a death grip and resist the pull of the sewing machine; we wrap the french knot so firmly that we can barely pull the needle through; we tug the weft through the weaving so hard that the selvages bow inward. 

(Weavers may correct me on that last remark -- I think some beginners err in the other direction, leaving the weft too loose so the selvages are uneven and loopy.  But that's the other 1% of tension headaches.)

The problem usually disappears with practice; we relax, we learn to let the yarn flow easily, we develop muscle memory so all the stitches have the same tightness throughout the whole work.  In knitting parlance, we automatically maintain the right gauge without having to stop and measure all the time. 

That's not to say we can stitch in oblivion.  It's still good to stop every now and then, lay the work out flat, check how it's coming along.  Note whether your afghan is still the same width as when you started.  Check that the second sock is the same size as the first one.  Make sure your seams are smooth, not drawn up in a ruffle.  Look at the back of your work and see that the threads are well-behaved, not forming tangles and knots. 

It's not just the sewist that can have tension problems -- the machine can too.  In my experience, Bernina sewing machines, which I love, adore and have used exclusively for almost 30 years, have one achilles heel, and that's tension control.  I have had to learn tricks to keep them from spoiling my work: avoiding threads that the machine doesn't like, making sure the bobbin thread matches the top thread so if it's pulled up too far, it will be less visible. 

All these issues are part of mastering the craft of our art.

 

Breaking all the rules

I've been writing a lot about drawing recently, but that doesn't mean I haven't been putting in my hours at the sewing machine.  Still making acres and acres of distressed white quilting for flag-type quilts, and I want to tell you how liberating this process is!

For some time I have been feeling more and more constrained by and impatient with the traditional quilt format with its perfect piecing, flat batting, beautiful quilting and neatly finished edges.  Too bad, in a way, because I have long ago mastered the skills necessary to execute that format flawlessly.  But I have lately been feeling that the perfect quilt-police-approved technique is like painting yourself into a corner of the museum -- quilts over there in the corner, "real art" out here in the middle of the room.  And also, as I get older and more decrepit, it's physically harder to do the perfect technique on work as huge as I like to make it.

So this spring I'm in rebellion, and feeling quite frisky about it.  Instead of making a huge top and sandwiching and quilting it, I'm making modules: small units, each one sandwiched and quilted. I start with a rectangular piece of miscellaneous fabric as a backing and lay it upside down on my worktable.  Some of my backs are old fabric recycled after decades as home furnishings; some are bits of piecing that never made it as far as a quilt; some are small pieces of fabric left over from other projects or rescued from the grab bag.

these used to be a pillow

somebody's discarded block, sashed with somebody else's leftover fabric

Then I go to my box of leftover batting -- all those strips and bits cut off from larger quilts that I can't bear to throw away.  I lay them out to cover the backing, pretty much.  If there are gaps between pieces of batting I might plug them with an even tinier bit of batting, or I might just let the gap be.

I do the same thing with the top layer, finding miscellaneous fabric to fill the rectangle.  I pin the sandwich together so it won't fall apart on the way to the sewing machine, then stitch as needed to hold all the pieces together.  I might toss down some random threads or fabric bits for added texture, and eventually I progress toward stitching a regular grid over the top of everything.

After the modules are complete I'm joining them at the edges.  You might have used this technique as taught by the quilt police, where you place the two modules face to face, stitch along the appointed seamline, then flip the larger piece over and make a neat binding to cover up the back of the seam.  I have done it this way too in the past, but no longer.

Instead, I butt the two modules together and stitch back and forth over the edges until the two pieces are melded together.  Sometimes one of the modules has an overhanging piece of fabric that I can overlap, or sometimes I lay down a narrow strip to bridge the gap before I start stitching back and forth.  Or not.  The joins might disappear into the overall texture of the quilt, or they might stand out because of the dense stitching -- I don't care.

can you spot the horizontal join? of course you can

This is giving me a quilt with a big chip on its shoulder, which suits me just fine.  It's the antithesis of nice.  It's thumbing its nose at the conventions of the quilt police, opting for impact rather than technical perfection.  And I can't tell you how happy I am making it.

IHQ 2 -- really sloppy work

What I'm finding as I go through the "International Honor Quilt" boxes is fascinating, so I'll share some of it with you as I work.  My first observation is that much of the handwork is truly bad.

I wasn't aware of the IHQ project in the 1980s but I would have imagined it to be a magnet for accomplished needlewomen to show off their skills while honoring somebody they admire.  And there were obviously many people like that; I'll show you lots of examples if you stay tuned.  But there were also a lot of women whose desire to participate far outran their sewing skills -- and that didn't stop them.

Which I find admirable, in a way.

So often needlework is judged solely on its technical quality -- look at all those dull, boring and artistically empty works that win blue ribbons at the state fair because they were quilted at 24 stitches per inch or knitted on size 0 needles -- and many people think their goal is simply to get better at the stitches, rather than getting better at the aesthetics.  Many people, for instance, have been sewing or knitting or whatever for decades and it has never crossed their minds to work without using somebody else's patterns.

So I might have imagined that women without excellent sewing skills would have shied away from the project, embarrassed to submit work that wasn't up to Quilt Police standards.  But clearly I was wrong.

If I were feeling pessimistic I might take this as bad news, another nail in the coffin of needlework as fine art; if needlework displayed in a museum or gallery looks like amateur hour doesn't it make it harder for us serious artists to be taken seriously?

If I were feeling cynical I might make comparisons to the postmodern practice of sloppy craft, in which Famous Artists are free to do slapdash work, but I don't believe that these panels are in the same ballpark.  The Famous Artists are trying mightily to Make Art, whereas these ladies were just trying to make a statement about somebody they admire.

I've always been a snob about craftsmanship, practicing it myself and admiring it when I see it on others' work.  So I'm conflicted about the occasional lousy craft I'm finding in the IHQ panels. And the fact that these panels are so obviously earnest and sincere somehow makes it worse (apparently my thinking has been corrupted by the pervasive irony that hadn't quite taken hold when the IHQ was made).

I hashed this out at great length last week during a road trip with my art buddy Marti Plager (we've done a lot of good art thinking on more than a decade of road trips).  After much back and forth, Marti said, "Well, Kathy, this is just something you're going to have to come to terms with."  And she is so right.

What do you think?

Clawing your way out -- or in

I've been reading a book by Glenn Adamson, "Thinking Through Craft," in which he grapples with the question of the difference, if any, between art and craft.  Unfortunately, there is a difference, at least in the minds of the High Art world.  Craft is somehow not only different from but inferior to art, in these minds, and those of us who work in the "craft" mediums such as ceramics, glass, wood and fiber have a hard time being regarded as "real artists" in the way that painters and sculptors are.

Adamson writes about the discipline of ceramics shortly after mid-century.  You might want to substitute "fiber" for "ceramics" and see if the discussion rings true.

But first he talks about Robert Morris, one of the so-called Process Artists who really didn't want to be like the Abstract Expressionists.  He quotes Morris as saying, "When I sliced unto the plywood with my Skilsaw, I could hear, beneath the ear-damaging whine, a stark and refreshing 'no' reverberate off the four walls: no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience."

Adamson continues:  "It was from this attitude that Process Art, the most craft-like of the twentieth-century avant gardes, was born.... If Morris was a sculptor who did not want to make a modern sculpture, then the story of ceramics is primarily that of potters who did not want to make pottery.  Of course, both of these efforts were doomed to failure.  Ceramics, defined as such, could only continue to be ceramics, and for the most part, those who work with clay have remained identified as craftspeople rather than contemporary artists.  Process Artists, meanwhile, despite their seeming attempts not to, made modern art objects that were revered as sculpture.

... The two groups were traveling in opposite directions and, in some sense, each was striving for the other's condition -- the one vainly trying to claw its way to the category of sculpture and the other trying to escape from it."

Interestingly, Morris tried to claw his way out not just with plywood but with fiber, making many works out of draped or piled felt that were regarded as sculpture, just as the first generation of "fiber artists" were trying to claw their own way in to being regarded as sculpture.

Robert Morris, Brown Felt, 1973

I find it both amusing and discouraging to think of two groups of people desperately headed in opposite directions.  The grass is always greener...

And yet the High Art world does this all the time, arbitrarily awarding designations that are difficult to escape.  Get your MFA from Yale as a painter, and you can subsequently have as many New York gallery shows as you want in whatever medium and technique you choose.  Make quilts, if that's what floats your boat, but make sure you aren't too meticulous about the craft techniques.  You might even want to have your mom do the actual sewing.

On the other hand, start out making quilts for your bed or your children, and become so accomplished that your work comes off the bed and onto the wall, and is aesthetically stunning, but you'll never get that New York gallery show, even if your quilts look just like the guy's in the previous paragraph.  Or far more likely, even if your quilts look a whole lot better than the guy's in the previous paragraph.

Go figure.


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I'm cross-posting this to Ragged Cloth Cafe, a blog about art of which I am one of seven regular contributors.  You might like to check it out.

Art reader's digest

glass vase by Carlo Scarpa, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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From the New York Times last week, a review by Roberta Smith of a show of Venetian glass:

Craft.  Decorative. Functional.  Well made.  Words like these are often used to keep objects in their place, carefully segregated from the realm of art.

These may spring to mind as you (see this exhibit) ... But they will most likely be shorn of their pejorative power or simultaneously elevated and transcended, and to a revelatory extent.  If you are open to it, this exhibition can radically reshape your ideas about form, beauty, originality and art for art's sake.  Nothing could be better for a time when such concepts are often viewed with suspicion. ...

With a painting, you can ignore how it was made and cling to subject matter for meaning; these glass works force you to think about how form and process achieve meaning on their own, without a clear-cut narrative, or a hushed relationship to, say, abstraction.

Ultimately, though, a substantial narrative does emerge.  It's about discipline, curiosity and risk, and a seductive, volatile, magical medium pushed to extremes.  These objects can't help being meaningful, out of sheer force of aesthetic personality.

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How nice to read such words about craft, from one of the premier art critics in the U.S.  It would be nice to read similar thoughts about fiber.  I'd be happy if somebody had those thoughts about my work.

Art reader's digest

from an exhibit review in Embroidery magazine (published in the UK), September/October 2004, by Angela Hesketh:

"While some of the work in (the show) is irreverent, the search for 'content' often upstages the medium and some of the work could have been better executed.  When content is championed over the handling of the chosen medium, it raises a further debate -- that of the value and status of textiles as an art form."

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Do we agree?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would the critic say that emphasis on content and possible poor execution call the value and status of painting as an art form into question?

Suppose the works had been paintings -- would a critic even bring up the issue of execution?

The whole thrust of contemporary art is to value content over technique -- does textile art deliberately want to distance itself from this historical development?

Crabby about craft

One of the popular fault lines between traditional quilting and what I hate to call art quilting is the issue of craft.  Traditional quilters, so the cliche goes, care far more about perfect workmanship than they do about design, while artists supposedly are willing to settle for inferior technique.  I don't think that's a fair generalization, and exhibit 1 for the prosecution is not, as you might expect, evidence of superb craft from art quilters.  No, today my gripe is with inferior craft among the traditional crowd.

I showed you some photos a couple of months ago of a quilt that my sister and I made for her grandson. She had it quilted by a longarm lady who worked with her local quilt shop, but it came back to me to put on the binding.

The last time we had such a situation, I was crabby with the longarm lady because the quilting stopped so far from the edges of the quilt.  I had to spend an hour meandering swoopy curves to fill in the outer three or four inches before I could even start on the binding.  This time the flaws were somewhat different.

 Yes, there were places where the quilting didn't come very close to the edge, but I used the largest empty area to put in our initials and let the rest stay unquilted.

I wasn't happy with the pleats caught into the quilting, or with the bearding on the back.

And then I realized that the backing fabric looked awfully familiar.  Sure enough, it was the same 90-inch- wide fabric that I had bought some years ago at a quilt show from a vendor who specialized in longarm quilters.  I used it as the back of a huge quilt that's now touring in the Color Improvisations show, and in fact had used a few leftovers from that fabric on the front of this new quilt, which you can see in the photo with the pleat.

With the earlier piece, which I free-motion quilted, I had a terrible time with skipped stitches, which I attributed to the backing fabric.  I suspect it's a tightly woven fabric with a lot of sizing, which should be great for longarm quilting, but it sure didn't work out very well on the baby quilt.  Or maybe it was a dull needle.

I'm disturbed when the purveyors of a service that should be of the highest quality let you down.  And I'm sure it's not just my sister's jobs that got done with not a lot of attention to detail.

Perhaps some of the problem comes with the computer programs that guide the quilting -- the program doesn't know how to take special care at the edge of the quilt to make sure the stitching goes all the way out.  One might think that's what the longarm lady could tend to personally, but not this time.  Or the last time.

Perhaps it's a flaw in preparation -- an extra couple of inches of waste fabric could have been stitched around the edges of the quilt to stabilize them in the frame, thus preventing pleats at the corners and allowing the computer-driven stitching to extend beyond the edges.  (It's much easier to apply binding if the top is quilted all the way to and off the trimmed edge, rather than ruffling out in the last inch or so beyond the stitching.)

Perhaps this is just a mediocre quilter, unwilling to take the time to get the details right.  But if so, she's enabled by the quilt shop that keeps recommending her to their customers.

I don't know enough about longarm quilting to put my finger on the problem, but I know enough about craftsmanship to be disappointed.  Since so many people outsource their quilting, I wonder whether there's a whole world full of quilts with pleats and bearding and ruffles.  If so, then maybe over the years that old cliche about traditional quilters having such great technique will go away.

But to end on a cheerful note, I was happy with the quilting pattern -- a frog, to echo the frogs at the center of each log cabin block.  And once or twice, the quilted frog was perfectly positioned outside the printed frog!  Maybe the longarm lady was attending to detail after all.

Snobbery

When I wrote last week about having bought some fabric at the Big Fabric Store, somebody posted a comment that read, "I am surprised that given your disdain for anything not up to your standards of "art," that you would use sub par fabrics like those you find in that 'Big Fabric Store'....  considering the time and effort I put into my work, I wouldn't consider using low quality fabric."

I replied that fabric quality isn't all that important to me, for a couple of reasons.  First, most of my piecing uses  quite tiny bits, which doesn't give bad fabric all that much opportunity to misbehave or look limp and cheesy.  And second, I never wash my fabric, before or after construction, so there's no opportunity for it to bleed or fray.

But the comment got me to thinking about snobbery.  We all are snobbish about certain things, totally laissez-faire about others.

I'm not very snobbish about materials, beyond never using polyester batting.  I'll use the cheapest fabric I can get away with, which means innocent till proven guilty.  (On occasion I've cussed at certain faults of low-end fabric, but high-end fabric has its faults too, including the price tag.)  I love Aurifil thread, but am willing to use Coats & Clark if that's a color I need.  I own a huge supply of a relatively low-end machine embroidery polyester thread, which I use for quilting, because it works better in my machine than a lot of higher-priced specialty threads.

I'm a bit more snobbish about my tools.  I love my Berninas and am spoiled by their performance and features; once took back a lower-price machine, highly recommended by many quilters, after owning it five days and deciding it was just too clunky.  I've never had the urge to see if needles other than Schmetz might work just as well.  I won't touch those cheap, small, dull-from-birth seam rippers.  I have great lighting above my worktable and my machine.  But I buy mid-range irons, content to replace them when they die, and mid-range scissors (I am a snob about having many, many of them so one is always within reach).  And rather than invest in a gorgeous studio, I have a jerry-built operation in which a card table is an essential part of my sewing surface and the design walls are just panels of insulation board propped against the wall.

But where I'm a real snob is about process.  I believe passionately that piecing is far more elegant than fusing, that it's essential to be meticulous about pressing, that a quilt should lie flat on the wall, that the corners of a faced quilt shouldn't be any thicker than the middle.  I believe that when you get stuck on a project you should put it up on the wall and wait for the fabric to speak to you.  I believe that you can and should work on several things at once. I could probably think of many other examples.

Once a big discussion broke out on the Quiltart email list about people who still regard hand quilting as aesthetically and morally superior to machine quilting and whether such traditionalists deserved to die.   My take was that they were wrong about hand quilting but that I could cut them a lot of slack about love of process.

Many people love or hate process as much or even more than they do product.  For example, fly fishermen on foot in hip waders feel superior to guys in boats, who in turn feel superior to those in boats with sonar.  Bow hunters feel superior to hunters with guns, who in turn feel superior to guys who drive their pickup trucks out and blind deer with spotlights.  Cooks who make their own pasta feel superior to those who buy fresh pasta from the grocery store, who in turn feel superior to those who buy pasta in boxes, who in turn feel superior to those who have Domino's bring over some penne primavera.  People who do their own taxes in pencil on paper forms feel superior to those who use TurboTax, who in turn feel superior to those who go to H & R Block.

I bet every one of us has our own little process prejudices somewhere deep inside, whether they have to do with quilting, hunting, fishing, cooking or what have you.  We all love to feel superior to somebody else, and process is probably a less harmful criterion for making such judgments than gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or others of the more popular rationales.

What are you snobbish about?  What don't you care about?  I'm sure your mileage will vary.

The juror thinks -- why worry about technique?

Earlier this week I wrote about my recent experience jurying a quilt/art show, and talked about what should be shown in the detail shot.  Lisa Call responded with a great question:  "Why are you looking at technique for an art show? Why does it matter how it is made? Painters don't submit detail images when they enter juried shows. Why not do away with the detail show requirement all together and judge the work solely on its artistic merit?"

I had to stop and think about it before I could figure out the answer.  I did some research.  Maybe they don't ask for details in painting shows, but when I looked back in my files at the last couple of all-medium museum shows that I have entered, one wanted detail shots and one didn't.  Presumably painters would have submitted details too in that first show. 
If Lisa is right that painters generally don't submit detail shots, I wonder why not.  Having looked at bazillions of paintings in museums all over the world, I know that sometimes the up-close view of how the paint is applied makes a picture more interesting than I first thought when I saw it from across the room.  Wouldn't jurors benefit from a closer look at such works, and wouldn't those painters' chances of getting into the show improve with a detail shot?

I think that artistic merit can be judged from across the room (aka full-view images) but when you look at it up close you can be seeing artistic merit as well.  And we do scrutinize painters' techniques when we enjoy their art -- think Jackson Pollock's spatters vs. Gerhard Richter's mirror paintings vs. Jasper Johns' encaustics over newsprint, just to mention three that come to mind immediately. 

But I don't want to talk about paintings, I want to talk about quilts, because the show I was jurying was limited to quilts. 

As a juror, I cop to a lot of curiosity about how things are made (as opposed to how well).  Before I start to evaluate a quilt's quality, I like to know what I'm looking at.  I think this is a valid idea for a juror to entertain, because so many quilts that want to be art are so heavily influenced by technique, and certain techniques have almost become cliches.  If so, whether or not the techniques are well executed is almost beside the point; more pertinent is whether the piece has some originality.

But OK, I also like to know about craftsmanship, which I think is what Lisa is questioning.  I think the rules are different in quilt shows than in all-medium shows.  I'm not talking about Quilt Police rules (although some of the most prestigious art quilt shows do impose rules that may seem a bit arbitrary) but the unwritten rules about what standards should apply in shows that see quilts as art.

I think much as we might like our work to be regarded solely as art, and even though some shows and organizations are dedicated to having quilts seen that way, we have not yet totally escaped the craft tradition of our medium.  Yes, Tracey Emin or Louise Bourgeois can make a quilt that is welcome at the Tate Modern even though it may be baggy, lumpy, crudely sewed and downright sloppy in its execution.  But that same quilt is probably not going to get past the first round of jurying at Quilt National (or any of the other serious art quilt shows -- I use QN as shorthand for the big leagues) .

To a certain extent that's a good thing.  People who walk in the door to see Quilt National or Visions or a SAQA exhibit are probably expecting a high level of craftsmanship as a given, and then want to find artistic merit as well.  Poor craftsmanship in these venues tends to reflect poorly on the whole field.  Since I have seen many, many of Lisa Call's quilts in person, and know them to be meticulously crafted, I have to think that she values this quality as much as I do.  We know that if we showed a quilt that was baggy, lumpy, etc. it would give many people an excuse to not like it; they would be so distracted by the poor execution that they might not even look at the artistic merit.

Lisa and I both know that we could choose to abandon the quilt circuit and attempt to show our work solely in all-medium venues, and if we did, maybe we wouldn't have to spend so damn much time at meticulous piecing and quilting because the greater art world doesn't know the difference or care.  But having chosen to enter QN we know that good craft gives us extra points.

I think the moment when quilt shows decide that artistic merit is the only way to judge, and craft or technique means nothing, is the moment when we don't need quilt shows any more.  What would be the point?  We might as well go up against the paintings and the sculptures instead of restricting ourselves to the limited competition of quilts.  

What do you think?

The Jane Dunnewold extravaganza -- part 4 -- bad screen printing

A week or so ago I took a workshop from Jane Dunnewold on screen printing, which taught me just enough to be dangerous.  I am wary of learning new techniques in one's later years (artistic years, not necessarily calendar years).  Not that learning is bad, but once you have achieved sufficient mastery of some techniques, and are busy on a body of work that uses them well, you may be better off just staying in your studio and using the skills that you already have. 

The alternative -- learning a new technique or buying a new piece of equipment -- can distract you, break your artistic focus, and set you off on a course where instead of making substantive work, you play with your new toy, trying to master the skill and meanwhile making lots of practice pieces that you can't yet be proud of (aka procrastination).  I've generally tried to resist this temptation, but the prospect of spending three days hanging out with Jane won out and I found myself in possession of two screens, a squeegee and a flour-paste resist recipe that allowed me to make great scratchy letters.

In the workshop I made a bunch of copies of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, simply because I have always loved the words to this majestic and thrilling poem, and I happen to know all three verses by heart, convenient when you want something to write and you're away from your reference materials.  But that got me thinking about the Civil War and prompted an idea and next thing you know, I was mixing up a new batch of flour paste at home to write the words to Dixie.

So back to the part about being dangerous.

I am itching to make something substantive.  Since I finished my three Quilt National entries in August, I haven't found anything to sink my teeth into.  I have made four decent pieces, but none sent me wildly off to do another in the series.  I toyed with several ideas but again, none generated enough enthusiasm to get me into the studio.

I loved the flour-paste writing, and the Civil War idea, and got up Friday morning knowing exactly what I wanted to make.  Only problem, I am really bad at screen printing, despite Jane's masterful teaching.  I can make a screen, pour out some paint and pull the squeegee across it, but haven't put in the hours to learn how to do this well.  My few prints look pretty bad, complete with smudges, smears, areas that have too much paint and areas that have too little or none at all.

Then to top it off, when I went to wash out the prints I had made in the workshop, the paint smudged (we were working in tempera paint, not fabric paint, so we knew it wasn't going to be permanent, but many people got better results from their washouts than I did).  And when I made the new set of prints at home, I ended up with awful impressions (I think I inadvertently moved the screen between passes of the squeegee).

So what should I do?  Slit my wrists?  Hold that thought for three months while I embark on a crash effort to improve my printing technique?  Some people might take that approach, but I am hot to make a real quilt, good enough to show in public, and I want to make it NOW. 

As I was ironing out my Battle Hymns and noticed how the paint had run in the wash, my first thought, being Grandma's good little perfectionist girl, was dismay.  But then I realized I kind of liked the messy, edgy, worn effect.  It went with the messy, edgy, worn quality of the writing itself, which was why I was so drawn to the flour-paste technique in the first place.  And after all, I want to portray the awful reality of war, not parade ground spit and polish.

Then I got to thinking about bad screen printing as a technique in itself, and how it worked so well for Andy Warhol.  It fit his message, too, conveying the raw, sloppy, crude quality of tabloid journalism, the perfect way to portray electric chairs and murder victims. 

I decided to use the messy prints, just as they are.

So what does this mean to my screen printing career?  Will I ever use it again?  Will I ever put in the hours to learn to do it right?  Is it a good idea to use a new technique before you know what you're doing?  Will Jane disown me as a student?  Is Grandma turning over in her grave?  I don't know. 

I do know a couple of things.  First, that I think bad technique is working for me, in this particular situation.  Second, that it's not at all distracting (aka procrastination) to learn a new technique if you bypass that nonproductive mastery stage and cut to the chase.  I'm sewing up a storm and feeling great about it.

Craftsmanship -- good or bad? Part 2

I wrote last week about craftsmanship and whether we as fiber artists should perhaps value it a little less than we do.  Some of the comments under that post made me realize that I did not make my point clearly enough.

When we're talking about traditional quilts, then craftsmanship is generally the most important element to be judged.  Yes, traditional judges like pleasant design and will take off points if a quilt is butt-ugly, but what they really like, I suspect, is lots and lots and lots of tiny stitches, points that match, perfectly stuffed binding with stitched miters at the corners, and no thread ends.  Even in modern quilt shows, such as the big ones in Paducah and Houston, which have "art" or "contemporary" categories, design may be equally important, but craftsmanship is still a huge issue. 

That's the major reason, in fact, that I no longer enter shows like Paducah or Houston.  Not that my craftsmanship is shoddy -- au contraire -- but I don't want to be in shows where it is just as important as design.  I want to make work that is seen as art, not craft.  When your chosen medium is fiber and especially when your chosen format is the quilt, that's a hard objective to achieve.  One critical step in working toward that objective is to avoid places where you're in with traditional crafters.

I have identified a relatively short list of juried quilt shows that seem to focus on art more than on craftsmanship, such as Quilt National, Quilt Visions, and a few smaller shows, that I would like to be in.  Nothing against the more traditional quilt shows (in fact, I'm kind of sorry about passing up a chance to go to Houston this week, because I've always loved attending that show) but I don't want to enter them any more.   I want to play in a different ballpark, one where if you know what a mitered corner is you keep it to yourself, and it is in that context that I pose the question of how we ought to regard craftsmanship.

I've been keeping my eyes open as I read art reviews to see how the critics discuss craftsmanship.  Here's yesterday's New York Times:  "And where other artists might have chosen to delegate the manual labor, she was intent on doing the bulk of it herself..."

 

Do we detect a whiff of disapproval because the artist DIDN'T delegate the manual labor?  Or if not, at least a mild gee-whiz surprise?  Think of other artists who famously delegated the manual labor in their work.  The most prominent may be Donald Judd and his hands-free perfect manufactured minimalist boxes.

In fact, this spring there was a whole conference, in Portland OR, called "Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication."  The conference promotional material said it would focus on "issues of authenticity and fabrication that continue to have lasting implications for artists today..... The simple question of how one maintains the integrity of the work even while at the same time taking advantage of skill sets of different people is a question that is at the heart of many different contemporary practices including designers, architects, historians, film makers as well as artists."

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1993

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1984 

Other contemporary sculptors also delegate the actual making of their works to others.  Think Richard Serra and his huge Cor-Ten steel ellipses, Jeff Koons and his shiny metal balloon-dogs.  When you see the work in a museum, there's only one name on the wall sign, and it sure isn't the actual maker.

Richard Serra, Band

By contrast, in the fiber art world the artist is expected to make every bit of the work, or at least the important part.  If I want to enter Quilt National it's OK for me to hire somebody to quilt my work, but not to piece it.  (Which is another fascinating subject for discussion, but not today.)  And many of us fiber artists wouldn't have it any other way.  We love the making, and most of us greatly value the skill and craftsmanship we put into that making.  And in even the most prestigious quilt/art shows, such as Quilt National and Quilt Visions, the jurors and judges generally share that mindset.

So are we shooting ourselves in the foot?  By refusing to separate the idea from the execution, the plan from the fabrication, the concept from the craftsmanship, do we as fiber artists distance ourselves a bit from the mainstream art world?  I wish I knew.  What do you think?