Craft Beyond the Binary

There is a proposal to be made that craft is a way of looking and living that is learned through material or process specificities, but not contained by them. For me the dominant binary conversation of what is craft versus what is “Art” has become increasingly less interesting to the point where I no longer believe in it. It has become an us-versus-them debate, a process of othering or building false hierarchies which often seems to be driven by capitalism and colonialism. My curiosity lies in how to think and see with craft outside these constructed binaries. 

Mark Newport, Mend 6, 2016. Embroidery and mending in muslin, 43 x 33 cm. Photographer: Tim Thayer. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

The images illustrating this article are from Desire Paths, an exhibition showing the culmination of a 2020 Center for Craft Curatorial Fellowship in Ashville, N.C., undertaken in collaboration with artist, educator and friend Lauren Kalman. The exhibition statement reads: 

“Desire paths,” a term taken from urban planning, are lines trodden in the landscape when constructed walkways do not provide a direct or desired route. Through action, repetition, and intentionality, desire paths create modifications to the landscape that allow for a body to move toward a horizon. The exhibition includes traditional craft media, performance, video, and interactive web-based work. Through this variety of media and performative tactics the makers in Desire Paths consider how we view, value, and ascribe meaning to a body/the body/the other’s body. They show us the power and agency held in the body and present us with crafted visions of the body that confront and expand expectations. The makers in this exhibition use the medium of craft, and the action of crafting, to produce powerful representations and counter narratives to dominant culture. [1]

Curated by matt lambert and Lauren Kalman. Desire Paths, 2021. Photo: Black Box Photography, COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR CRAFT.

Kalman and I both approached this endeavor as makers. During the process, we were transparent that we had no formal education as curators. When we began, I was enrolled in the now-closed MA program in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, directed by Namita Wiggers. [2]

My practice is one of polydisciplinamory, a concept described by artistic researcher Natalie Loveless which entangles making, writing, curating, collaborating and performing. [3] It investigates queer and decolonial theory as tools to broaden the definition of craft outside a capitalist production-driven model. It unpacks the need to compile multiple narratives to produce what critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli refers to as a "thick understanding," one that deconstructs singular historical, often colonial, narratives. [4] I examine the meanings and discourses that emerge after a single object is made, and what it means to put it in dialogue with other objects, people and institutions. What different meanings can be extracted on relocating and relating? Craft knowledge enables us to unpick objects to see bodies and participate in constructing systems of empathy while expanding historical narratives. 

Curated by matt lambert and Lauren Kalman. Desire Paths, 2021. Photo: Black Box Photography, COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR CRAFT.

Queerness can create space to enrich conversations around possibility and equity around historical narrative. I approach my research as a way to create movements and configurations that function as maps or remappings that explore the possibilities of space making for non-dominant narratives. As social activist bell hooks states:

Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live... the imagination is called forth in the reconstructing and the re-envisioning of self and possibility. [6]

Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz locates queerness as a state of becoming that is always located at the horizon:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now´s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something. Is missing. [7]

Craft can — and does — confront and disrupt history; it is no longer only written by the victor. Craft is a way for the queer body to imagine possibilities of the self and how we live and breathe today, tomorrow and in the silenced narratives of the past.

Indira Allegra, BODYWARP: Ravel, 2020. Archival pigment prints, 10 x 15 cm. Photographer: Kimi Mojica. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Desire Paths brought together makers in a process of kinship making. Kinship comes from how queer, displaced or marginalized people often must find community outside of normative family and institutional systems. Kalman and I explored how to host a gathering of works from makers, artists and collectives that we understood to work with or through desire. The works we featured presented different perspectives and methods of navigating dominant cultural systems. 

Virgil Ortiz’s “Puppy Play” and Tiffany Parbs “attached” offered visual illustrations of desires. Product-based collectives Rebel Knell and Piki Toi showed how making objects could sustain marginalized makers as profits from the sales support housing and education for creating self-sustaining business practices, thus using the systems of consumption to build stability. 

Piki Toi Collective, Tahi, Toru, and Wha, 2019. New Zealand Kauri, redwood, paua shell and waxed cotton. 4.4 x 15.8 x 0.86 cm. Photographer: Lauren Kalman.

All the objects in Desire Paths relate to a particular desire, but differed as some represented where they were, some mapped how they would get there, and others pinned where they wanted to end up on a path. The objective of bringing these works together was to offer visitors a chance to wander or cruise the exhibition with minimal direction to create their own desire paths. 

Cruising as a curatorial strategy has been deployed to offer the viewer and institution to become part of the work. One other recent example being “Every Moment Counts: Feelings of AIDS” curated by Ana María Bresciani, senior curator and Tommaso Speretta at Henie Onstad Art Center in Høvikodden, Norway. [8] Cruising is not about setting a predetermined path for a visitor but is about creating a space for visitors to make their own navigations within a space. Cruising is directly related to desire as it is about moving and pausing, resting or stopping when there is an impulse or want to do so. It is not about getting to a destination, but it is the journey and navigation that should be enjoyed. It is a way to remove an ending and beginning from a show, it creates an open endedness that visitors can take with them and connect what they have experienced to things outside of the gallery walls. 

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, AIDS Is Good, Business for Some, 2011, and Side Effect No. 16 (Truvada, Tivicay), Side Effect, No. 10 (Stribild), and Side Effect, No. 2 (Truvada, Isentress), 2015. Photo: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter/ Øystein Thorvaldsen.

Curation as an act of gathering involves more than just presenting a grouping in the exhibition, or working from a specified meaning. Curation can generate multiple understandings, interpretations and dialogues. Curation can resist the impulse to force marginalized makers or fields into a system that demands conformity. 

Other examples of this are the restrictions of application forms for many craft happenings, shows, awards and research grants that require singular objects, a singular maker or the connection to a singular geography often defined through colonial construction. 

Craft, when approached as a companion to view the wider world, offers a way to think with  and through material. It exists outside of the continuous production of consumable objects and the creation of work  to appease institutions. It does not take as its final objective the indulging of a fixation on newness of physical objects. There is a chance for curation to invite audiences to examine how things are in relationship to each other. This thinking raises questions of singular authorship and counters a growing belief in individualism.

Curated by matt lambert and Lauren Kalman. Desire Paths, 2021. Photo: Lauren Roquemore, COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR CRAFT.

Craft also creates a conundrum through the term “mastery” for its implications of dominance and control. Postcolonial theorist Julietta Singh asserts that there is an “intimate link between mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous.” [9] This fixation on the singular author promotes systems of control, meaning “mastery requires a rupturing of the object to be mastered, because to be mastered means to be weakened to a point of fracture.” [10]

Returning to collectivity brings makers, visitors and curators back into the communal systems of craft that many makers learn through. It requires communal trust built through dialogue and reexamining the hierarchies and economies of everyone’s positions in every project initiative. This may seem like a taxing proposal, but what it does is initiate a system of care.  It is a way to prevent mastery from something that turns “inward to become a form of self-maiming, one that involves the denial of the master’s own dependency on other bodies.” [11]

Craft has a responsibility because it constructs our physical world. Craft imagines futures for ourselves and others.

Cannupa Hanska Luger and Rory Wakemup, Mirror Shield Project: River (The Water Serpent) on-site performance organized in collaboration at Oceti Sakowin camp, Standing Rock, ND, December 2016, Drone video image still. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

Desire Paths looked at the possibility of living and resisting, illustrated by the work of Mark Newport which questions acts of care through the processes of mending and Cannupa Hanska Lugars’s Mirror Shield Project which provides instructions and illustrations of ways to protest and resist.

This way of working posits that curation is research through compilation. It  also allows for the makers’ work to be in constant movement, reassembling and forming constant re-mappings connected to a “singular” [12] work that, through the curator/researcher, is set loose to be in shifting constellations. [13]

Gabriel A. Maher, Technologies for Seductive Criticism, 2016. Jayson Haebich (Programming | Software Development), Michele Vescio (Sound Artist | Sound Design), Dazed Media (Collaboration), Funded in part by Creative Industries Fund NL. Video, projection, interactive web GL. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

At the time Desire Paths was conceived, there was an intention to expand the physical terrain of the project by involving additional venues that could also engage their own curatorial approaches and develop programming. Visitors could then produce their own routes within the gallery and to other sites, extending opportunities for individual map-making and cruising. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 restrictions, the project was condensed to only one performance of Ardor by Ben Gould, live-streamed from Roxbury, NY.

Ben Gould, Ardor, 2021. Live, virtual performance: forged steel, ice, electrodes, modified electric nerve simulator. Clothing by Gabriella Lacza, Photographer: Chris White. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

In her book Wilful Subjects, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes that when “you stray from the official paths, you create desire lines, faint marks on the earth, as traces where you or others have been. A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave their footprints behind.”  [14]

As an exhibition, Desire Paths documents and archives willful footprints. The exhibition desired, in relation to Ahmed’s statement “to give space for participants’ desires, rather than to dictate them; the space not only to show a part of their desire line, but to also begin to draw lines between these willful subjects. [15] These lines are sure to become entangled, revealing a complexity that occurs when stepping off the sidewalk. A willful entanglement.” [16]

Craft is more than material or process — it is a way of looking at objects, their becomings and their relations.

Curated by matt lambert and Lauren Kalman. Desire Paths, 2021. Photo: Black Box Photography, COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR CRAFT.

Desire Paths finds ways to think with crafts and see how craft can welcome others in. This expansion is vital to add to the stability and case for the value of craft in educational institutions. Craft allows for wandering, for cruising and for world-making. The act of wandering off the path allows for the exploration of other possibilities, it is a way to consider existing or making outside of a set standard, a path that has already been made. 

The act of wandering off the path allows for the exploration of other possibilities; it is a way to consider existing or making beyond a predetermined route. What I propose is not in opposition with or in competition to other ways of approaching craft. Rather, it is a way to diversify how we engage with craft, and to think outside the binary. 

[1]  Lauren Kalman and matt lambert, Desire Paths: Curatorial Fellowship Series 2020 (Ashville, NC: Center for Craft, 2020), 7.
[2] I enrolled in the inaugural year of the MA program in Critical Craft Studies at Warren Wilson College, a two-year low residency program that emerged from the recommendations of a 2016 Craft Think Tank. Unfortunately, in March 2022, Warren Wilson College announced its plans to close the program stating, “the pandemic and the economic slowdown combined with shifts in the graduate school market have made it increasingly difficult to meet our enrollment goals.” https://www.warren-wilson.edu/programs/ma-in-craft/.
[3] Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
[4] The act of re-mapping as a method of thickening to form historiography or history as a multi narrative. The concept of thickening can be found in anthropology and <i am specifically referencing the work of Elizabeth Povinelli. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
[5] The act of re-mapping as a method of thickening to form historiography or history as a multi narrative. The concept of thickening coming from anthropology referencing the work of Elizabeth Povinelli. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
[6] The New School,” bell hooks – Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body, Eugene Lang College” YouTube video, 1:55:32, May 7, 2014. https://youtu.be/rJk0hNROvzs
[7] Muñoz José Esteban, Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
[8] “Every Moment Counts – Feelings of Aids,” Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, accessed July 5, 2022, https://www.hok.no/utstillinger/hvert-oyeblikk-teller.
[9] Juliette Singh, Unthinking Mastery Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2AD), 9.
[10] Ibid. 10
[11] Ibid.
[12] Singular here does not have the implication of individual ownership which is in relation to Jean-Luc Nany’s concept of the Singular-Plural, in which The I is not prior to the we. It is a proposal for abandonment, for exposure to each other to build community without spectacle or searching for authenticity. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Constellation building is in reference to Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
[13] Constellation building is in reference to Dianne Chisholm, Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
[14] Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 21.
[15] “I consider willing as an everyday experience and social activity.
I explore willing as a project form, as how subjects aim to bring certain things about.” Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1.
[16] matt lambert, “Movements of the Wil. lful: Wandering with Possibilities and Potentials,” in Desire Paths: Curatorial Fellowship Series 2020 (Ashville , NC: Center for Craft, 2020), pp. 9-15.

This article was published in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of Studio Magazine.