Papers
Untitled
Suzie Attiwill
June 2004
When I was asked to write something on 'What's in a name? The role of language in defining practice' for the online forum I had no hesitation in accepting as the word craft and its use is one which I have supported, advocated and thought about continually over the last decade from various positions: as artistic director of Craft Victoria, as a curator and writer, and now as a doctoral candidate in interior design. Interior design is another name/word that I have had a similar intense relationship with and gone into battles over proposed renaming as interior architecture. As I write I have a sense of the potential enormity and complexity of this issue lapping at the edges of this 1000 word text. (I was thinking that the discussion/argument about interior design becoming interior architecture links up to similar issues of power and hierarchy that debates about craft and art are stirred by; interior design and craft have both been relegated to a lesser status than architecture and art in accounts of twentieth century Western culture. This thought then linked up to discussion about craft and design - and the movement of craft towards to design while interior design moves away from design in name - and the forces producing this movement). 'Oh no' - I hear you think - 'the complexity and repetition of what in craft has often been a futile dialogue!' 'Plus the fact of having a forum to discuss the role of language will create endless threads of debate and as it is taking place in language, isn't a role already assumed?'
I have skipped the word practice here because language is a practice and there is a craft of language. The distinction then is not so much language and practice but perhaps something along similar lines to distinctions made between text and image, the relationship between language (as written texts and spoken words) and things (objects, materials, techniques). The philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes this relationship as an 'audio-visual battlefield'.1
Given that this introduction has consumed one third of the allotted word count, I want to 'cut to the chase' and focus on the two points for discussion - one to do with names and the other with the role of language in relation to craft - and conclude with an invitation.
First point then: 'What's in a name?' There has been, and continues to be, discussion about the use of the word craft as a name for a practice, a set of objects, an organisation and a person. For many, the word is undesirable because it is perceived as lacking appeal - both sex and market. When I worked at Craft Victoria there were many discussions about the use of the name craft in terms of the organisation and the magazine. How both were difficult to promote because of the name craft. I imagine this discussion continues. The former Cicely and Colin Rigg Craft Award is now the Cicely and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award for these reasons. Few people call themselves a craftperson or their work craft preferring instead terms such as artist or designer, again often citing market imperatives and directives. (A side note here is the trend among young artists to find names other than artist to distinguish themselves and what they do from the current dominant model of artist as exhibitor.) The debate over the name craft continually focuses on what to call one's self and what it is that one does i.e. it is practitioner and object focussed. This process of self-identification is endemic in the current climate of practice, to the point where it seems a self-given. Yet it does not necessarily follow that if one calls oneself an artist one produces art. External forces as well as intentions produce art. What's in a name does not necessarily have to be identity. Names make connections, they gather diverse things together in a singular way. This is different to naming as self-identification - where the question 'what's in a name?' focuses on questions of whether or not it is or is not craft, whether it is good or bad craft, i.e. whether it conforms to an existing model or idea of craft. I am interested in the use of names and craft as a point of singular intensity which produces a collective endeavour and invites participation rather than a name which identifies or represents craft. The question might be: What gathers around and connects with a name?
To the second point - 'the role of language in defining practice' - follows on from this. Language's role becomes one of participation; it participates in shaping rather than defining craft. Processes of identification produce a relation of definition between language and practice/objects - the former interprets the latter. In contemporary craft practice in Australia, the maker's intention is usually considered primary and as the original meaning of the object; this then gives language the role of interpretation and representation (re-presentation). The power struggles that this produces are documented in many journals and also evident in how institutions ritualise language through processes of what can and can no longer be spoken and written about.
Craft (like interior design) does not have the plethora of critical texts and theoretical texts that have proliferated around art and architecture throughout the twentieth century. The prevalence of Platonic thinking evident in these texts where the idea (Ideal) is privileged over the physical may explain the marginalisation of craft with its emphasis on materiality, making and tactility. I don't see this as a gap where the role of language for craft is to compensate and make good (and thereby put craft in league with art and architecture as a critically defined discourse). Instead it provokes a much more interesting task - to write and speak in languages that pick up on craft qualities.
There are existing examples which could be sketched in here - and it would be exciting to see a discussion thread become a site for the gathering and proliferation of examples. The role of language shifts from one of identity and self-identification, based on inclusion and exclusion, to one of addition and production. This is not necessarily a benign relationship - it might be combative, parasitic, contradictory or collusive. Any relationship involves power and, as cited above, the relation between seeing and saying is an audio-visual battlefield. I would argue though that relations of creative potential are more desirable than ones of hierarchy and authority.
- Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, in particular chapter titled Strata or Historical Formations: the Visible and the Articulable (Knowledge).
