As the year ends and I prepare to take a long vacation in Los Angeles, a veritable cornucopia of factors contributed to the incomplete state of “Framing, pt. 2,” the continuation of my last column. So, expect that on the 30th of the month and for now I give you the transcript of a lecture I recently gave (following Bryce Dwyer, another B@S columnist) this past Wednesday at The (New) Corpse Space here in Chicago. One of my favorite spaces in Chicago, it is also home to my friend and fellow Bad At Sports contributor, Caroline Picard. Have some swell holidays, and without further ado…

I want to tell you about my favorite preface, the preface to El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha, published with the first edition of its first book in 1605. It begins with Miguel de Cervantes, recently liberated from a five-year stint as a prisoner and slave in Algeria, paralyzed by his own inability to supply his book with a preface. By the time he’s established this premise, the first page of the preface is over, so, in spite of his histrionics, he’s actually doing pretty well. Soon, he’s visited by a friend who he describes as being “a pleasant gentleman, and of very good understanding. This friend, who, upon seeing our author in a state so pensive, inquires as to the cause of his musing. Cervantes responds by briefly describing the state of literature and book-hood at the beginning of the 17th century and expresses his own feelings of inadequacy as a participant therein. He claims to be “so much at a stand” about this preface, that he may simply make, and I quote, “none at all, nor publish the achievements of that noble knight.” His lament continues:

 

“I have nothing to quote in the margin, nor to make notes on at the end; nor do I know what authors I have followed in it, to put them at the beginning, as all others do, by the letters A,B,C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, Zoilus, or Zeuxis…My book will also want sonnets at the beginning, at least such sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquesses, earls, bishops, ladies, or celebrated poets.”

“In short, it is resolved that Senor Don Quixote remain buried in the records of La Mancha, until heaven sends someone to supply him with such ornaments as he wants; for I find myself incapable of helping him, through my own insufficiency and want of learning; and because I am naturally too idle and lazy to say what I can say without them.”

 

By this point, he’s two pages into a preface which is only five-and-a-half pages long, so you can sort of see where this is going. The anonymous friend laughs, slaps his forehead, and offers to, as Cervantes describes, “fill up the vacuity made by my fear and reduce the chaos of my confusion to clearness.”

 

If he can, in fact, “say what he wants to say without them,” the inclusion of these textual ornaments certainly needn’t be any source of incapacitating stress. “Concerning the sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies,” his friend says, the author ought to just write them himself and attribute them to figures so obscure, that “pedants” and “bachelors,” should they “backbite” him for it, will have no way to prove or disprove authorship. For the margins of the book, he suggests that really any Latin quote will do, given the language’s inherent and time honored gravitas, and that as a result, he says, “people will take you for a great grammarian, which is a matter of no small honour and advantage these days.”

 

“Then,” he continues, “to show yourself a great humanist, and skilled in cosmography,” and most importantly to get in some foot and end-notes, Cervantes ought to just surrender any act of naming within the book to work already done for him, scattered infinitely throughout history and literature. That is to say, if he is to have a giant, name it Goliath and add a footnote reading: “The giant Golias, or Goliat, was a Philistine, whom the shepherd David slew with a great blow of a stone from a sling, in the valley of Terebinthus, as it is related in the book of Kings, in the chapter wherein you shall find it.” Furthermore, if Cervantes intends to have a river, name it Tagus, a cruel woman, Medea, and if, his friend says, “enchanters and witches are your subject, Homer has a Calypso, and Virgil a Circe.” So invested is this friend, in fact, that he claims “there is no more to be done but naming these names, or hinting these stories in your book, and let me alone to settle the annotations and quotations; for I will warrant to fill the margins for you, and enrich the end of your book with half a dozen leaves into the bargain.” What a bargain, indeed!

 

Finally, with regard to Cervantes’s index or bibliography or, as his friend describes, “the catalogue of authors set down in other books, that is wanting in yours,” he needs only to find a book that has all of them – authors that is – and copy the list into the back of his own. “But though it served for nothing else,” he says, “that long catalogue of authors will, however, at the first blush, give some authority to the book. And who will go about to disprove, whether you followed them or no, seeing they can get nothing by it?”

 

Cervantes’ friend concludes that not only is the type of novel Cervantes has written of the sort that “Aristotle never dreamed of, Saint Basil never mentioned, nor Cicero ever heard of,” but additionally has nothing to do with astronomy, geometry, rhetorical arguments of logic, preaching, or any other discursive flourishes often found within the works of his contemporaries. Cervantes is of course totally blown away, thanks his friend profusely, and, all of a sudden the preface is over and the novel begins. Very convenient.

 

So, what or why is a preface and who is it for, what does it do? There are, I think, far too many answers, even within the preface I just described. One of the main things I think a preface, afterword, or index does, especially within Don Quixote is delineate. Within Cervantes’s novel, usually cited as the penultimate pícaro or picaresque, these formal ornaments become a pragmatic convenience, defining the edges of a wandering that might otherwise go on forever. Cervantes expresses as much in a description of Quixote as “quieting his mind [and] following no other road than what his horse pleased to take, believing that therein consisted the life and spirit of adventures.” Our own interface with this wandering is in part enabled by these exterior pragmatics, allowing us a point of entry, corralling the flâneur within the phase-space so that we may join him.

 

What Cervantes seems to be arguing for, however, is that a preface, and other formal ornaments of literature, constitute a sort of structural etiquette, certainly more so in his day than ours, though I can’t remember the last time I read an academic text without at very least an introduction. These structures of etiquette, these signifiers Cervantes has deemed empty and taken it upon himself to repopulate with his own hilarious jokes, are by no means always superfluous or always empty or even always merely etiquette, as proven by both the revelatory quality of his own preface and the wonderful parodic sonnets which close the book. In many ways, Cervantes’ preface is an argument against the empty signifier or the notion that any thing can be purely formal, purely structural, or purely ornamental. By dismissing their popular or polite uses, Cervantes identifies these trappings as containing potential. Although he mocks them, he is nonetheless still using them to serve his own purposes. By inserting his own polemic into the text, he latches his own agency to the wild persistence of meaning, a creature whose craftiness and hysterical insistence guarantees occupation wherever an entryway is left unguarded.

 

Structures of etiquette like these are usually only guarded by word and ritual, and our own power as forces of variability is, in even its most quantum instance, enough to break or at least restructure the contract. Take for example, Vladimir Propp, the Russian literary critic, who, in his 1928 book Morphology of The Folktale defined narrative as a structure of containment for the occupation of variable. The way in which he plugs variation into the 31 functions that make-up his narrative model may seem, at first glance, reductive or even oppressive, but the ways in which the narrative as a total-object is affected actually by the different combination, expansion, and contraction of these variables attests to the plasticity of the formal signifier and its potential as a medium in itself.

 

For Cervantes, who saw the unguarded structural etiquette of literary ornament as overflowing with Classicism for Classicism’s sake – a fitting partner for its decorative airs of erudition – the references which acted as the variables filling these formal structures were invoked by him with almost complete disregard, sarcastically co-opted to prove his own points and to play with the notions of the grave inheritance that they and their containers implicate. And yet, the use of these references is not, by any means, totally disrespectful. It’s much harder to make a joke about a subject you’re unfamiliar with, and through the voice of his friend in the preface, Cervantes establishes his own critical erudition while simultaneously poking fun at the authorial desire to flaunt that sort of knowledge. I guess in that way, it’s kind of like a Friar’s Club Roast and, actually, is even more like “Bohemian Rahpsody,” Queen’s multi-platinum 1975 single from A Night At The Opera, and, the UK’s third best selling single of all time. (After Elton John’s 1997 version of “Candle in The Wind” and that Band Aid song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”)

 

“Bohemian Rhapsody” occupies a fairly straightforward symphonic structure. It adheres to the recognizable and vaguely narrative progression of classical sonata principles in favor of the traditional verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-coda principle, which defines much of popular music and that Queen themselves were no strangers to. In the manner of the Friar’s Club and Cervantes, Freddie Mercury, an unabashed disciple of classical affect, appropriates the severity and bombast of structural symphonism for its use as a container, occupying and organically restructuring its hallowed and reverberant halls with the pummel of a group I think are the 1970’s most underrated metal band. (As a brief aside, I’d like to point out that it’s no coincidence Brian May, Professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University and also Queen’s guitarist, has had as one of his longest and best friends, Tony Iommi, guitarist for Black Sabbath.)

 

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” which, as most people on earth these days know, begins with a lilting acoustic piano and a harmony of infinitely multitracked voices lamenting the mysteries of life’s reality in a tense B-flat. Soon we’re whisked away by John Deacon’s bass, shuffled along by Roger Taylor’s drums and Mercury relays to us, his mama, the story of his putting a gun to the head of a man, his subsequent pulling of the trigger, therein killing said man. Next, we’re carried by May’s absolutely impeccable guitar solo and find ourselves, all of a sudden dropped in the sparse middle of the symphony, and perhaps what is its most ubiquitous movement; the operatic, or, Galileo Scaramouche part. It is here where we see most clearly the sort of structural playfulness and its relationship to classicism as Cervantes establishes through his own literary ornaments.

 

When Mercury asks 17th century Italian clown Scaramouche if he can do the fandango, we can consider this question rhetorical. Similarly, the invocations of Galileo, and Figaro, the barber of Seville, would seem to have little ability to actually participate in the world of killing a man with a gun or the world of shredding guitar solos. Nevertheless, our captive narrator summons them with shouts of “Bismillah,” an Arabic prayer invocation, no doubt picked up during Mercury’s days as a Zanzabari youth living in India and going by the name Farokh Bulsara. The band, treating the song and its structure like one of Propp’s open narrative models, play with a classical structure in resonance with a classical variable-subject by using names that sound right and make sense according to their structural context, detaching those references from their original conditions, and engendering an even more dramatic variability by way of their operatic cohabitation. In short, and once again, the repopulation of the classical signifier left empty. And, like Cervantes, it feels both critical and celebratory.

 

For the most part, these structural fixtures live at the edges of a text, defining our ability to perceive these edges and interface with them, adjusting and decorating their home-text’s larger meanings. Whether pragmatic or subversive, there is, implicit in their inclusion and variation, a potential for flux affecting the total object of the text, a game of pick-up sticks viewed in reverse, each stick put down affecting the fundamental structure of the whole. It is in this sense that any engagement with these structures is best done intentionally and with no small amount of celebration, because formal beauty is worth celebrating. I should hope that no one became a writer, artist, or mustachio’d rock and roll singer to adhere to obligations and to acquiesce to the polite etiquette of others, regardless of any inspiration this etiquette might have supplied. As Propp accidentally illuminated, even the most rigorous formal structures are only structures of tenuous meaning and their most monolithic shadows cast are still only shadows. And, though this meaning has the potential to grow huge and unwieldy, giving the illusion of rigidity or inaccessibility, we can be like Cervantes, Queen, or Paul Muad’Dib from Frank Herbert’s Dune, latching our grappling hook into the pockmarked shell of meaning’s lumbering sandworm and directing it towards a point of our own choosing. As Freddie Mercury says, or rather sings quite succinctly in the polite formal bookend to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” (and maybe we can even imagine it’s in reference to his own intrastructural agency)…

 

If I can to ask you to sing along with me:

 

Nothing really matters, anyone can see…
Nothing really matters…
Nothing really matters…
To meeeeeee

Entering the studio of Craft Mystery Cult, I was greeted by a plywood table festooned with ambiguous objects varying from crudely handcrafted clay bowls to scorched specimens seemingly pirated from the vault of a natural history museum. All three CMC members, Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, and Stacy Jo Scott, were seated around this collection, which I soon discovered to be ephemera from their collaborative rites and rituals. Removed from the context of performance, the reliquary expressed an internal coherence— the vernacular of the objects linking hand, to material, to detritus, suggesting a connection between everyday practices of making and the more mystical aspects of ritualistic activity. The tableau was presided over by the sanctified portraits of William Morris and Johannes Itten—the patron saints of craft and color, whose workshop-based practices inform the social and conceptual underpinnings of CMC’s activities.

The members of Michigan-based Craft Mystery Cult are all in their final year of their MFAs in fiber, (Dahl and de la Paz), and ceramics, (Scott), at Cranbrook Academy of Art. They established the CMC collective as a platform to explore issues relating to the history, economy, and conceptual framework of contemporary craft. On Saturday, CMC will orchestrate a performance at Roots and Culture that draws from their sacred text, The Hapticon. I interviewed Dahl, de la Paz, and Scott in their studio as they were making preparations for this event.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo: It’s my understanding that Craft Mystery Cult was officially formed over the summer in residence at Ox-Bow, but I’m wondering if you can elaborate on the CMC origin story. What strange and mysterious forces conspired to bring this collaboration together?

Jovencio de la Paz: I don’t know that I’d say we formed at Ox-Bow, I think it was prior to that through discussion and writing.

Sonja Dahl: I’d say we began casually working on this project about a year ago now. It really evolved out of issues that originated within each of our individual studio practices.

Stacy Jo Scott: Through a number of conversations, we realized that we had similar concerns in terms of how we approach work. It seemed like we had this shared desire to create a conversation that we weren’t getting otherwise—in other venues or in other forms. It was really from this desire to create a narrative to work from… By narrative, I don’t mean the Craft Mystery Cult narrative, I mean more of a framework for understanding our art historical lineage.

SMP: All three of you come from disciplines focused on object making, and historically, discrete object making through ceramics and fiber. Do you feel like academia, as well as the larger cultural framework surrounding craft-based practices of making, are perpetuating discourses that in some ways are no longer relevant; for example, the Modernist tradition of autonomy, or the postmodern tradition of critique? In what sense were you breaking free?

SJS: I think for me and my experience with ceramics, it’s almost coming from a different direction than what you’re describing. As artists making work at this time, the conversation is so steeped in the dematerialization of the object. The desire to make and have hands-on material, and the desire to see objects manifest from work is something that’s disappearing from the larger conversation. It’s difficult to have a position to work from that seems relevant when everything is becoming more ephemeral. In a way, we’re trying to consider what position objects and materiality still have; specifically, the hand’s relationship to material as a different source of knowledge that we aren’t taught to access.

JdlP: Much of CMC’s work deals with the creation of language; specifically, the kind of language that might be able to house what Stacy Jo is describing, which we refer to as haptic knowledge—the knowledge beyond language. In order to present that or to create a bridge between that and the viewer, we work to create an environment that utilizes strategies that may be familiar from other forms such as text, performance, ritual, music, things to serve as access points to that non-verbal space. We’re really using the notion of the craft workshop as a model for collaborative art practice, which is a reference that is very different compared to other collaborative art practices in that it deals with a very craft-specific mode of production. There are interpersonal hierarchies that are very different than other collaborative groups.

SMP: Going back to your practice that draws from text, music, and performance, I’m curious what you think can be gleaned from the interstice of ritual and craft? Did you approach the project with a preconceived relationship between mysticism and making, and how have your thoughts evolved throughout the past few months?

JdlP: I think a very simple way to describe it is that it’s sort of like a logic puzzle. We’ve created a framework that has a very specific language related to the occult and mysticism through rites and rituals. Craft serves as a parallel structure that is based on skill. Take the Masons for example: as you progress in skill, you gain knowledge in a more profound, spiritual sense. So there’s this parallel, and we were always sort of guided by both. We were interested in the work of Johannes Itten, and his spiritualistic approach to making and teaching.

SJS: One of our earliest references was William Morris, who is complicated, but one thing that he championed was this idea of human dignity—the worker and the maker have a sense of dignity that is lost in certain forms of industrial production. For me, mysticism related in part to humanism and highlighting individual agency rather than obeying the types of beliefs and laws that are passed down by mastery.

SMP: Can you describe some components to the larger Craft Mystery Cult project and articulate the relationship between ritual and performance to object?

SD: One of our performances at Ox-Bow: “In Commemoration of the Death of the Prophet William Morris” really brought together many aspects of our collaborative work at the residency. It brought together the component of collecting—we would visit each of the studios and collect material remnants of their processes, so we had the slag pile from the iron pour, fragments of glass and things like that. Those objects were collected throughout the course of the project, and we were also creating other objects both through the playful re-authoring of, for example, William Morris textile prints, as well as through various different ways of employing the symbology that we had created. We generated all these objects through various modes of making and collecting, and we funneled them all into this final ritual that involved a processional, the building of this pyre in the fire pit, creating a musical, auditory experience, which all happened at twilight. In the end, it really became this performed ritual for a number of individuals that brought together history and research, object making, collecting, the spiritual, bodies moving in space, music—all of these elements that we had been working on for the duration of the project. There’s a real spirit of play that we’re getting at with improvisation. Spontaneity can occur because of embedded knowledge and experience to some degree. We brought to this collective much of our own thinking and making, and because we come without own histories, the spontaneous and inventive moments can occur.

SMP: I find it interesting that this project evolved from reaction— a simultaneous response to your individual practices within a larger academic framework. If I’m understanding this correctly, it’s the interaction of the collective—the coming together of individuals to create a new body and a new interstice from which you can cultivate an alternative framework for making and its related embodied processes.

SJS: Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of that is we have this desire to make together. I come in with a set of skills that Jovencio and Sonja don’t have, so the way I use my skill in collaboration is in a way that they can also use, which means that the work itself is often quite basic like the pinch pots. Similarly, Sonja will lead in dying indigo since she has experience with that and Jovencio and I do not, and it’s these simplified processes that guides the making of objects…

JdlP: …and thereby the aesthetic that they express.

SMP: Is it from the aesthetic that you make references to meaning in a symbolic sense?

JdlP: I think it’s the implied process more than the aesthetic of the object. Pinch pots and one-dip indigo dye are very foundational.

SJS: That speaks to our interest in skill. We’re interested in that moment of skill that is extremely foundational—not skill in terms of mastery, but skill in terms of someones first encounter with the material. In that way too, the aesthetic that we’re developing is based on the desire to speak about that primary moment of skill.

JdlP: So the aesthetic appears always untrained, or primitive, as problematic as these terms are. We are interested in this notion of prehistory, which really relates to the realm of craft in that a pinch pot made tens of thousands of years ago is strikingly similar to a pinch pot that a high school student in a public school might make. That high school student and prehistoric person are somehow linked through the object, the aesthetic of which comes from this moment of foundational, or primal creation.

SJS: A lot of work that one might consider deskilled comes from the idea that a lack of skill is a stand in for authenticity, and I don’t quite buy that. I feel like what we’re doing is somehow different from that—not that that moment of primary skill is more authentic than mastery, but it’s about creating some kind of framework around that moment—that moment has a depth of meaning that isn’t about authenticity. It’s not that the primitive person is somehow more authentic than the teenager.

JdlP: But what’s important is that they share the same moment through making that object. That moment can be opened up, and what exists there isn’t authenticity but some sort of experiential knowledge.

SMP: I often have the discussion across a range of art practices about the concept of the moment of discovery, and whether you’re working in paint or performance, it’s all about discovery on some level for the viewer, and I suppose for the maker as well. Does that concept relate to what you’re speaking to?

JdlP: But it’s a very particular kind of discovery because it’s always available through rediscovery—it’s never exhausted, and that’s where the idea of ritual is also important. That moment is always exciting for whatever reason, which is part of the mystery, and I think that’s speaks a lot to where the aesthetic of our objects comes from. It’s interesting because the show in Chicago has nothing to do with objects…

SD: Before we get into Chicago, I’ve been wanting to mention that something I think about a lot in relationship to the CMC project is the spirit of approaching things with a sense of wonder. When we talk about using basic skill and that primary moment of discovery between body and material, there’s a sense of wonder there. You can appreciate that depth of knowledge of a maker’s body to their materials and their process through a sense of wonder, and I feel that a lot of my experience at Ox-Bow visiting all the studios was a process of cultivating that sense of wonder. To stand in front of the glass studio or the iron pour, or to see them open the raku kiln—there’s a sense of wonder and appreciation that’s very important.

JdlP: And I think it’s very difficult not to feel a sense of optimism through craft…

SD: Dare we say it!

JdlP: …because you’re encountering a moment becoming—a moment of creation—it is a generative moment. It’s very integral to that sense of wonder that you are witnessing a generative process.

SJS: And it’s already essentially performative. We can go see an iron pour, we can go see someone blowing glass, someone throwing a pot—that’s performance, and that’s ritual.

Craft Mystery Cult is coordinating a performance involving the recitation of five devotional poems from the Hapticon at Roots and Culture in Chicago, Saturday December 17, 7-9pm.

We are fast approaching the longest day of the year. On the other side of the 22nd of this month, the days will again stretch, grow long. As one day expands past the last, our definition for its bounds nevertheless remains the same. There is something about categorical tidiness that seems especially important to the theoretical order of our species. I want to ask, then, what happens when those borders start to bleed into one another? What happens when languages mix up and churn into hybrid concoctions? And what about something as sticky as race  or sex — where do we locate identity when bounding frameworks are under duress? Muddled with unknown elements. Under this light, the scaffold of our taxonomies become brittle, even arbitrary, for even the border plotted between species are suspect. In the forthcoming series I will talk to a number of artists about their ways in which they investigate hybrid forms of performance, language, science and art. At the moment the series is on-going, but as a kind of initiation I have asked a friend of mine (and Green Lantern author) Erica Adams to write a series of spells for hybridity. It seemed appropriate to use her words as an introduction to interviews I’ll be posting over the following weeks.

Spell to Swim a Great Distance

In the sign of Pisces, in the month of March, acquire a fish with scales the same color as the hair on your body. Place the fish next to your bed, so you may look at it upon waking, and it may look upon you as you sleep.

For one year, you must care for this fish, and for one year you must not shave or cut any hair upon your body.

Additionally, every night before sleep, you must tell the fish something you have told no living soul. The fish will become greatly sympathetic to you.

After one year, take the fish to the body of water you wish to cross, and let it free.

If the fish swims to the right, you must begin the operation again with another fish. But if it swims to the left, you may get into the water as well, while saying:

 

My mother’s water brought me to land

Your water brought me to sea

            May I be unto you, and you unto me

 

The fish will swim beside you, and you will see that its scales have turned to hair, and that your hair has turned to scales. And you will move through the sea as a finned creature, until you reach shore.

 

Spell to Change One’s Face

 

In the sign of Capricorn, on a Saturday, go to a field where three goats graze: one white, one grey, and one black. Pull from them three hairs and tie these three hairs to three hairs of your own, saying:

 

When I join one, I become one.

When I join two, I become two.

When I join three, I become as thee.

 

Bake these hairs into a cake which you divide equally among the goats and yourself. When the goats defecate, collect this in a jug and leave it nine days to dry to powder. Mix this powder with water and apply it your face at sunrise, saying:

 

When I join one, I become one.

            When I join two, I become two.

When I join three, I become as thee.

 

Do not wash your face or speak to any living person for three days. The mixture will dry on your face, and on the fourth day, you will wake with the face of a goat. This transformation will last for nine days time and cannot be repeated with the same goats.

 

Spell to Move about in Secrecy

 

This operation must be performed on a Thursday in spring-time, after fasting for three days. Find the burrow of a snake that has just lain eggs. Take seven of these eggs, and boil them.  Remove the shells, so that the insides remain undamaged. Upon each egg write the words:

 

What was becoming, I will become

                        So I may move, perceived by none.

 

Each egg must be inserted whole into the mouth. The following evening you will feel the top of your mouth itching, and there you will find a seam. Pull on the edges of this seam, and your body will split, revealing itself as smooth and pink, with red eyes and no arms or legs.

In this way you will be able to move about undetected for one night’s time. In the morning you will wake, restored to your original form. You must return to the snake’s burrow and leave seven gold pieces to replace the eggs you stole, as the snake will find you and kill you otherwise.

 

**all drawings were made in response to Erica’s texts by yours truly.

Top ten lists are a staple around this time of year. What they lack in shades of grey they make up for with enthusiasm. I could read them all day. My favorite top tens come from trusted sources, so when I cracked this month’s Artforum I went straight to Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh’s list of his 2011 top ten moments in music. Mothersbaugh avoids listing albums only. On his list, he includes a weird message on an answering machine cassette found in a Palm Springs thrift store as well as a cover band he saw play in a Tijuana restaurant. What really surprised me was his number five: the self-released album Bone Up from the Orlando-based electronic duo Yip-Yip. As Mothersbaugh says, “I’m a million years old, and I’ve heard a lot of music, but I’m always happy to be pleasantly surprised. Yip-Yip did that for me.”

Yip-Yip had already been performing live for a year when I moved to Orlando from my hometown in 2003. In the absence of a local artist-run gallery circuit like Chicago’s, live music filled the city’s niche for experimental culture. Playing in mutant black-and-white costumes behind pyramids of synthesizers, Yip-Yip was the closest thing to contemporary art I laid my eyes on in Orlando. They introduced me to the possibility that experimentation derived from the character of and in constant conversation with a specific place might breed something fantastic.

Yip-Yip, Live in Orlando, September 2011.

As media decentralizes, kingmakers like Artforum are no longer primary fountains of validation. That the magazine’s globalized gaze had turned to a commited local group like Yip-Yip was not what surprised and impressed me about Mothersbaugh’s top ten. Here’s what really knocked my socks off: Yip-Yip are always have been massive Devo fans. In a place like Central Florida, without widespread institutional support for things like experimental music, a pop group like Devo might be the only model to work from. Seeing one of Yip-Yip’s idols list them among his favorite things about music this year renews my faith in the stalwarts of local culture. Like Mothersbaugh, I’m pleasantly surprised.

Guest Post by Michael Milano

Among the many forms conceptual art of the 60’s and 70’s took, two major threads can be identified. The first, following Sol Lewitt’s definition of conceptual art in which the “idea becomes the machine that makes the art,”# is characterized by developing a set of rules or instructions that are then slavishly followed in the production of the artwork. The goal of this method of working is to limit or eliminate the subjectivity of the author by dividing the production of a work into two phases: a mental phase, which consists of planning, designing, and constructing a set of rules or system that will produce the work; and a second, manual phase, the physical construction of the art [object], in which the “execution is a perfunctory affair,” and where the “fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better.”# The second major thread of conceptual art follows Joseph Kosuth’s definition that art should question the nature of art. This thread, characterized by its use and reliance on language, accepts the imperative that art ought to interrogate the foundations of its own being.

Karen Reimer’s work has explored both of these threads of conceptual art, albeit through the use of traditional craft methods and materials. In 2008 Reimer exhibited “Endless Set” at Monique Meloche Gallery. Following Lewitt’s definition, it is a highly systematic work that obeys a pre-established set of rules. The work is a set of pillowcases, pieced together from scraps of fabric, with a prime number appliqued onto it. “Each pillowcase is made of the same number of fabric scraps as the prime number decorating it, i.e. prime number 3 is appliqued onto a pillowcase made of  3 scraps of fabric. The white fabric prime number is the same inches high as itself, i.e., prime number 3 is 3 inches high. As the prime numbers get larger than the pillowcases, the excess white fabric is folded back and layered over. As the prime numbers get increasingly larger, there is more and more layering and they more completely obscure the pillowcase made of increasingly smaller scraps.”# The pillowcases retain their conventional dimensions (20 x 32 in.), but as the white appliqued prime number grows in size and increasingly obscures the multi-color fabric fragments, the excess material folded back upon itself gives the works increasing thickness and the appearance of mere stack of white fabric. The work is theoretically open ended, running off to infinity as the prime numbers do. However “Endless Set” will inevitably come to an end at the point in which the fabric scraps that make up the pillowcase support become too many and too small to physically stitch together. “Endless Set” also fruitfully disrupts the goal of working systematically, as defined by Lewitt, which sought to eliminate expressive content and problematize authorship. Rather than eliminating the subject, the author reappears in the form of handicraft, complicating the delineation between mental and manual labor. In “Endless Set” the hand returns devoid of expressionism, and the author returns equipped with an ambivalence about authorship. Because it is important that the work is hand-made, but irrelevant whether the artist’s own hand made the work, Reimer has converted the author from a who to a what: an author is present, but their specific identity is negligible. In this way, Reimer allows conceptual art to be embodied as well as abstract. While the idea is still the engine, it is a hand that is the machine which makes the art.

On the other hand, Reimer’s current show at Monique Meloche Gallery follows Kosuth’s definition. The work again consists of a number of standard size pillow cases hand embroidered/embellished with either text or image. The majority of the works are text based, consisting of quotes from poet Emily Dickinson, scientist Richard Feynman, art historian John Ruskin, and author Mark Twain, among others. A central motif, whether pictorial or textual, is the flower–a quintessential form of domestic embellishment. Some of the of the quoted texts warn against using flowers or flowery language, consistent with early modernism’s negative assessment of ornament. For example, in the embroidered Mark Twain quote, “Don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. An adjective habit, a wordy, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice,” the words flower and flowery are highlighted in red and struck through. It is this floweriness that is at the heart of the work, revealing its logic and its relationship to Kosuth’s definition of conceptual art. Because it is non-utilitarian and decorative, embroidery is inherently flowery; it is a useless, lyrical embellishment upon a utilitarian form. Reimer, however, by her choice of texts creates work that is simultaneously an embellishment (embroidery on cloth, that is not structurally integral),  and an interrogation of embellishment (texts that question the function or justification of embellishment itself). Likewise, the treatment of the texts is not overly flowery, and yet their existence on the pillowcases can be described as nothing other than a flowery embellishment. In this context, the few works which actually picture flowers must be understood as tongue-and-cheek gestures, or at least “Sarcastic Flowers” as another pillowcase states.

Reimer’s work would be central to working out what a conceptual craft might mean. In this context, conceptual would merely mean that the idea is the most important aspect of the work; i.e. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” or that craft, like art, must questions its own grounds for being. And by craft we would not necessarily mean craftsmanship, skill, specialization, or a fetishism of the handmade. We merely mean that  labor (both mental and physical) can not be ignored; i.e. that it is integral to the content of the work. This is one of the things that a conceptual craft would have to offer the historical category of conceptual art: labor, whether mental or manual, is not negligible. The pillowcase embroidered with the Ruskin quote states: “I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was the maker happy while he was about it?” Conceptual craft, however, would ask: was the maker rigorous and systematic in their making? did the maker interrogate or problematize the methods and materials they are employing? is the maker’s labor part of the content of the work? Reimer’s art answers yes to all these questions. Whether working systematically within a set of rules or using traditional craft techniques to question themselves, the work of Karen Reimer is a conceptual craft.

footnote-ie stuff:

 

Karen Reimer’s exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery is titled  The Domestic Partnership of Heaven and Hell and runs from November 19 – December 31, 2011 (however, please note that the gallery is temporarily closed for repairs).