Reworking the archive: Experimental arts, memory and imagination

Reworking the archive: Experimental arts, memory and imagination.
By Katherine Moline and Jacqueline Clayton
 
 

Onkar Kular, Noam Toran and Keith Jones, Lego farm, 2010

Photo: Diego Trujillo

 

 Abstract Over the past 50 years institutional critique has become a part of the contemporary programming of museum exhibitions produced by practitioners in design, craft and visual art. Challenges and critiques of orthodoxies in museology have developed in response to changing social practices. This paper considers two site-specific installations, I cling to virtue (2010) by Onkar Kular, Noam Toran and Keith R. Jones at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Pleased to meet you: introductions by Gwynn Hanssen Pigott (2012–2013) at the Museum of Anthropology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Both works invited visitors to engage with the artists’ invented arrangements and to attend to subjective responses as authoritative readings of museum display. In other words, they questioned institutionally directed interpretation and brought key aspects of globalisation into view. This paper first describes the installations, then places them within the framework of globalisation and the social imaginary proposed by Arjun Appadurai and Cornelius Castoriades. It discusses concepts of the heterogeneity of globalisation within the framework of the social imaginary evoked in the installations and analyses the works in these terms. The replaying of historical material in these works, we contend, questions the negative implications of globalisation. Further, the definition of interdisciplinarity framed by the social imaginary provides fertile ground for reconceptualising specialisation. When seen within the social imaginary, the experimental approach to curatorial and exhibition norms exemplified by the two installations provides intriguing models for intervening in the archives and histories of design, craft and visual art. Read full paper
 

 

Abstract from Reworking the archive: Experimental arts, memory and imagination.

Full paper published in craft+design enquiry:  Issue 6 2014, Craft.Material.Memory

experimental design, craft, archive, memory,  museology, globalisation

Les Tricoteuses: The plain and purl of solidarity and protest

Les Tricoteuses: The plain and purl of solidarity and protest

Liz Stops

 KNAG banner

Photo: Clare Twomey 2013

Abstract This paper focuses on the use of knitting as a protest tool by the Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG), a group formed to combat the development of Unconventional Gas Mining (UGM) in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. KNAG is socially and politically motivated, but not aligned to any political party. The group’s ‘Nannafesto’ emphasises care for community and country while protesting against corporate greed. I situate KNAG within a broad historical and contemporary framework of similarly motivated movements that have used knitting as a tool for social, cultural and ideological influence. I also elaborate on the act of knitting as a form of witness bearing, a means to facilitate calm persistence, a strategy for processing ideas and an instrument for reinforcing the threads connecting community. Read full paper

Abstract from: Les Tricoteuses: The plain and purl of solidarity and protest

Full paper published in craft+design enquiry: issue 6 Issue 6 2014, Craft.Material.Memory

Knitting nannas, political, CSG, craft, activism

Unfinished business: Craft and revivification

Unfinished business: Craft and revivification

Mae Finlayson and Karen Hall

Mae Finlayson, All my love, Anon. (stretched doily) (detail), 2013, yarn, pins and embroidery hoop, dimensions variable

Photo: Mae Finlayson

Abstract Reactivating incomplete and discarded domestic craft projects is an exploration of how such objects can mediate between presence and absence. Contemporary creative work that gathers and reclaims the unfinished projects acknowledges, extends and plays with their rich materiality as well as the dormant stories embedded within them. Using unfinished objects can be a way of speaking to loss and absence, and an assertion of the presence of other voices in the act of repurposing. A material dialogue, created through the trace of the hand and the repetitive labour of crafting, emphasises the potential within these discarded objects. The tension between the implied presence of the first maker and the displacement of the past through revivification is the entry point to nostalgia, a label that implies both being out of place as well as out of time. While nostalgia is often seen as an innately conservative practice, functioning as a reductive stand-in for the richness of the past, we take up Svetlana Boym’s (2001) argument that the impossible longing of reflective nostalgia can be productive, humorous and utopian. This essay explores the interplay of past and present in the process of finding, remaking and repurposing. Read full paper

Abstract from: Unfinished business: Craft and revivification

Full paper published in craft+design enquiry: issue 6 Issue 6 2014, Craft.Material.Memory

 

craft, unfinished, trace, materials, nostalgia