It’s not that kind of catamaran.
Kate, Joe, and Sean working on Mon Tiki’s akas, March 2012
About a year and half ago I took a day off from building Mon Tiki, caught bus into the city, and went to an art opening at a gallery in the mid-twenties near Fifth Avenue.
The opening was for a quilter, or an art-quilter, I’m not sure what he’d prefer. My purpose for being there was to meet my publicist (Hunter Thompson had a lawyer; I have a publicist) and my publicist is also an accomplish crafter, so she wanted to see the show.
At-any-rate, the opening was more or less what you’d expect from art-quilting. Very long on meta, or irony or something; not especially long on execution, which is to say if you’ve seen real quilting from real quilters you wouldn’t have been especially impressed, or at least I wasn’t.
Usually I don’t make any effort to keep these sorts of opinions to myself, but not tonight. Tonight I resolved to be on good behavior. I made an effort to find aspects of the artist’s
work I could comment on positively, and failing that I made small talk.
And so it was I found myself making small talk with a tall woman with a stylish haircut, stylish jeans and a stylish scarf who said she was also quilter. I mentioned that one of my carpenters was an artist himself, and furthermore, he was a Mennonite, and that as I’m sure she was aware, quilting was very important in Mennonite culture, and he was quite curious about the show and wanted a full report.
“Oh, it’s not that kind of quilting,” she said, and in all honesty I can’t remember a single thing she said after that.
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I’m telling you this because earlier this evening I removed “filmmaker” and “writer” from my twitter bio, and as I was doing so the above related events came to mind.
What other kinds of “quilting” are there then?Report
What I believe the woman in question was alluding to is the long-running argument about what constitutes Art vs what constitutes craft, and that a Mennonite quilting circle produces works of craft; where as she and the quilter who’s works were on display in the gallery we were in produced works of Art.
My (admittedly uncharitable) take on this distinction is that Art requires a sort of self-conscious awareness of the great Meaning of what one is doing; that Art is a sort of social sorting of the maker of and audience for a work, rather than any meaningful comment on the aesthetics of the work itself. Hence urinals, bags of garbage, or even cans of human feces, properly contextualized, can be recognized and celebrated Art.
I’m breaking no new ground in say this, either personally or in social criticism generally. The above has been said by others before, and better.
What is new is the evolution of my own class-consciousness and concerns. At the outset of my transition from creative profession to service worker I worried about how I would feel about a) no longer enjoying the prestige of being a creative professional, and b) whether there might be aspects of the social power dynamics of being a service worker that rubbed me the wrong way. I feel another installment of the Thermomixed Up series of posts coming on… 😉Report
This makes me like craft better than art. Or better to say, I see no reason why art would be superior to craft if it lacks the quality of craft.
(Full disclosure: I have a quilt–I suppose by now it could be called an heirloom–made by my Mennonite grandmother.)Report
James,
I totally agree.
Anyone who needs to sneer in order to prop themselves up, generally isnt’ worth much.Report
Is writing about how you no longer identify as a writer some kind of performance art thing? Maybe it’s just performance craft.Report
By the way, my comment was meant to be playful not jerky.Report
I didn’t think you were being jerky, Jonathan. My wife and I both laughed! 🙂Report
Oh good. Also, I would love to see the Thermomixed Up series resurrected.Report
My thought on reading the woman’s reaction to your comments went to a friend of mine who is legit Mennonite, works at a quilting shop, and makes amazing quilts. Some of them are what I think you’d call art quilts (makes far more sense to hang them on the wall than to keep them folded up next to the couch; I’m pretty sure she’s had some gallery shows). And the workmanship is, of course, excellent.
Unless there’s something I’m missing about what qualifies a quilt as an “art quilt”…Report
Well, at the Fiberarts International, they had a pair of knit socks… made out of glass.
Of course, I doubt anyone there would have the chutzpah to dismiss craftart.Report
http://wp.fiberartinternational.com/exhibition/Report
I just read about this young woman who was gunned down in Detroit in (what appears to be) a(nother) case of self-defense gone horribly wrong. Not surprisingly the incident is profoundly colored by race.
I am reminded that privilege is not just access, it’s also protection; and certainly the desire for protection was a big part of my motivation to set my filmmaking in the privileged class of art. No wonder people say things like “It’s not that kind of quilting.”Report