Colloquium : The Deskilling and Reskilling of Artistic Production

November 14, 2013 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. with reception to follow

The formal lecture series portion of The Deskilling and Reskilling of Artistic Productionproject brings together some of the leading practitioners and thinkers within the outlined field of research. The lectures will act as a framework for the subsequent research activities of the participants, providing focused zones for idea exchange, research input, and debate. This lecture series is intended to be a generative think-tank for gathering data and exchanging ideas, and as such cannot be focused explicitly on the production of new academic writing. The series is designed to function as a cornerstone to the research interests of Concordia’s newly formed Drawing Lab, one that will extend the Drawing Lab’s research concerns to a broader community of artists and researchers studying the implications and outcomes of artistic deskilling.

SCHEDULE OF SPEAKERS

10:00 -10:05      jake moore welcome and introduction of the lecture series

10:05-10:20       Luanne Martineau opening remarks

10:20 – 11:20     John Roberts
Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour:
                            Reflections on Its Recent History

11:20 – 12:20     Candice Hopkins
Handmade

12:20 – 1:20       LUNCH

1:20 -2:20         Ezra Shales
The Fountain of Youth and the Empire of Modern Craftsmanship

2:20 – 3:20       Kirsty Robertson
No One Would Murder for a Pattern:
                           CRAFT, IP and Skill in Online Knitting Communities

Coffee Break

3:35 – 4:30       Elissa Auther
Craft and “How-To”  Skill in the Work of Josh Faught

4:30 – 5:30       Shannon Stratton
                            Looks Like Work: Depicting the Pleasure & Pragmatics of Skill

5:30                   RECEPTION

DESCRIPTIONS

John Roberts
Art and the Problem of Immaterial Labour:
Reflections on Its Recent History

The debate on immaterial labour and art has garnered an enormous amount of attention recently, yet curiously there has been little substantive discussion about its history and assumptions. Indeed, its terms are taken to be de facto self-evident, in a way very similar to the rapid acceptance of the notion of the ‘dematerialisation of art’ in the 1960s neo-avant-garde art world. In this paper, therefore, I analyse the concept therefore via two questions: is it coherent as a concept? And if so, what is its status in relation to the production and reception of contemporary art and the debate on deskilling and reskilling?

John Roberts is Prof. of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, and the author of a number of books, including The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso 2007) and The Necessity of Errors ( Verso 2011). His Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press) and Revolution Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso) are to be published next year.

Candice Hopkins
Handmade

Research towards mounting the exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada resulted in a reconsideration of the role of the handmade with regards to Indigenous contemporary art. This presentation will trace how Indigenous ideas of the handmade diverge from modernist craft traditions (except in areas of appropriation), and will consider how and why and how these practices are different. For many Indigenous artists, the handmade is not simply something that is made by an artist but something that is finely made, for these artists there is no false distinction between art and craft. The artworks presented pry-open the still limited definitions of aesthetics and art through culturally-specific material practices.

Candice Hopkins is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture are published widely she has lectured at venues including the Witte de With, the Dakar Biennale, and Tate Modern. In 2012 Hopkins presented a keynote lecture on the topic of the “sovereign imagination” for dOCUMENTA 13. Her recent curatorial projects include Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years a multi-site exhibition in Winnipeg co-curated with Steve Loft, Jenny Western and Lee-Ann Martin and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art co-curated with Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde, the National Gallery of Canada’s largest survey of recent Indigenous art. Hopkins is curator with Lucia Sanroman, Irene Hoffmann and Janet Dees, on the 2014 SITE Santa Fe biennial exhibition, Unsettled Landscapes.

Ezra Shales
The Fountain of Youth and the Empire of Modern Craftsmanship

The still alternating currents in art schools between the vilification and sanctification of theFountain (1917) are in a curiously parallel relationship with Vilém Flusser’s mercurial and provocative comparison of the factory and school.  This talk examines the patterns in rhetorical and narratological strategies that assess the relationship between craft and the factory. Where is the bandwidth of artistic production? Is the determination of which recipients are endowed with the honorific of “craftsmanship” deserving of closer analysis or a healthier dose of skepticism?

Ezra Shales is Associate Professor of Design History at Massachusetts College of Art and Design whose research and teaching are focused on the productive confusion that lies at the intersection of design, craft, and art. His research threads through site visits to manufacturing facilities as often as archives and museums. His book, Made in Newark (Rutgers University Press, 2010) examines the exhibitions and demonstrations of handicraft held in the public library, schools, department stores and municipal pageantry of Progressive-era Newark, New Jersey, and the ways that the power of making related to the fashioning of vernacular identities. He has contributed articles to the Journal of Design History, Design and Culture and the Journal of Modern Craft and numerous exhibition catalogues. Shales is currently working on a book titledThe Shape of Craft for Reaktion that shifts the discussion about craft to including contemporary manufacturing and anonymous labor.

Kirsty Robertson
No One Would Murder for a Pattern:
Craft, IP and Skill in Online Knitting Communities

This talk looks at a community where it might be assumed that sharing – of skills, patterns, materials etc. – regularly takes place. The term “knitting and crafting communities” brings to mind images of quilting bees, pattern sharing, and women’s collaboration. However, a close look at online knitting communities shows that these collaborative images are more romantic than realistic, and that often, community expectations of individual ownership have become more stringent even than IP law. Ownership and market access are key. Pattern making and distribution are heavily regulated, and shaming is regularly used to hold participants to the community norms. Drawing on an extensive survey of participants in online crafting communities, coupled with analysis of a series of other objects and sites (among them a murder mystery novel centered on the theft of patterns, an analysis of concerted attempts by the Cowichan nations to have their trademarked indigenous sweaters protected during the 2010 Winter Olympics, and a fight on the popular site Ravelry over the trademark of the term “Knitting Olympics”), this talk traces the robust discourse of IP rights used to bolster knitting community norms. What is striking is that IP law is invoked as authority for a system of norms based on community needs and wants quite distinct from those defensible in court. In short, the talk looks at a community where makers are also purchasers, and where skill is defended as a marketable value, even when that defense may act against the best interests of the community as a whole. Skilling, reskilling and deskilling are examined here as they intersect with the marketplace, with intellectual property rights (or lack thereof) and with competing community values.

Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: New Economies of Protest, Vision, and Culture in Canada. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and creative economies. Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011, and her tri-authored volume Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday will be released by Oxford University Press in December 2013.

Elissa Auther
Craft and ‘How-To’ Skill in the Work of Josh Faught

This paper addresses the thematization of how-to or DIY skill in the fiber-based work of contemporary artist Josh Faught. It was in reference to Faught’s casual, seemingly amateur style of making that the term “sloppy craft” arose, a moniker that cleverly encapsulates the artist’s ambivalence toward the value of virtuosic skill long prized within studio craft circles. Through an examination of Faught’s 2012 installation “Longtime Companion,” my paper explores the aesthetic and social meanings behind the artist’s unique approach to everyday skill and its relationship to art.

Elissa Auther is an associate professor of contemporary art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her publications include String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). She is also an independent curator and the co-director of the pubic program Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

Shannon Stratton
That Looks Like Work:
Depicting the Pleasure & Pragmatics of Skill

Skill can be deceiving, and as is often said, the most skillful of practitioners make what they do look easy.That Looks Like Work: Depicting the Pleasure & Pragmatics of Skill is an attempt to address a recent aesthetics of skill or work as it emerges from the renewed celebration of the “hand-made” or “hand-crafted.” From artists “performing” the labor of craft, to institutions emphasizing “hands-on” opportunities for co-making, from the you-tube tutorial to the “open studio,” the opportunities for looking at making are increasingly prominent, stressing the time of labor, the somatics of making and the poetics of tacit knowledge. Alongside opportunities to witness production (whether live or recorded), is the evolution of the term DIY into a kind of aesthetic of production, where small-scale manufacture of everything from sausage to gin perpetuates a romance with the narrative of the self-styled work life that has turned the tradition of the mom-and-pop business into fashion.

For some, the hand-crafted thing communicates concerns about materialism and a disposable culture, for others, attitudes about buying local; DIY grapples with heroic ideas about assumed agency gained by working with one’s own hands. The look however, of the hand-made or hand-crafted, is just as important, as it becomes the short-hand for the values of a consumer looking to communicate their politics through the materials and things they circulate socially and surround themselves with privately. How the picturing of labor and skill is signifier today, along with the aesthetic categories that have come to attach themselves to the look, or even glamor of hand-made and DIY production is the subject of this talk.

Shannon Stratton is a writer and curator in Chicago, IL. In 2003 she co-founded and is the current Director of threewalls, a not-for-profit venue for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. In 2010 Stratton was named one of the top 5 most vital people in the visual arts in Chicago by NewCity. In 2011 she was a fellow of the NAMAC Visual Arts Leadership Institute and a finalist for the Chicago Community Trust Emerging Leader Award. Stratton was one of nine leaders in the arts featured in the Chicago Tribune’s 2011 Chicagoans of the Year and named one Chicago’s Visual Vanguard in Newcity’s 2013 “Art 50.” Recent projects include Resonating Bodies at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Gestures of Resistance, curated with Judith Leemann, at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. Current work includes editing a forthcoming volume of seminal art-writing in Chicago since 2003 and the exhibition Urcraft at James Madison University in 2015. Stratton teaches in Art History, Theory & Criticism and Fiber & Material Studies departments at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was appointed Critical Studies Fellow at The Cranbrook Academy of Art for fall 2012. In 2013 she was a recipient of the Alberta College of Art Board of Governors’ Alumni Award of Excellence.