EMERGING VOICES: TENSE PRESENT

EXCERPT:

“Words drive craft. Its evolving terminologies and lexicons reflect the field’s priorities and how it defines itself at particular moments in time – its etymology catalyzes expansion and contraction in scope. The titles of craft’s institutions, exhibitions, artists, and works themselves are constantly contested and in flux. The title of this catalogue and exhibition, “Tense Present,” embodies the wordplay that has become characteristic of the field. It is not only the namesake of David Foster Wallace’s famous essay about words, their creators, and the grammarians who fanatically assess them (whom he calls “SNOOTS”), but it also references the American Craft Council’s conference title, “Present Tense,” and the tense social and political landscape in which it is presently being staged. Craft historians are the original SNOOTS.

Fifty years ago, what once was being designated as “handcraft” was rebranded as “object.” The term rose up defiantly. Between 1965 and 1976, there was a surge of exhibitions and catalogues mounted by institutions using the
word “object” to frame inquiry and understanding of craft: “Collector: Object/ Environment” (1965), “The Object in the Open Air” (1966), “Objects for Preparing Food” (1973), “The Object as Poet” (1976). The case for “object” as an alternative designation to “handcraft” was most overtly postulated by the seminal exhibitions “Objects are...?” in 1968, organized by Museum of Contemporary Crafts curator Paul J. Smith, and “OBJECTS: USA” in 1969, curated by New York gallerist Lee Nordness with consultation from Paul J. Smith.

The “Objects are...?” press release describes the pieces on view as “defy[ing] precise classification” and assigned the works hybrid terms like chair-table-stools, sculpture-furniture, vase-statues, and sculpture-weavings. To enter the exhibition on opening night, visitors were required to bring an object as their admission ticket, which was incorporated into a durational collage on site. The didactics in the exhibition continued a line of inquiry about objects as reported by George W. S. Trow for The New Yorker: “Paul Smith led us to various displays that asked what he called ‘visual questions’ about objects. One display, which featured a free-standing structure of yarn in a strong shade of orange, asked the question ‘Is Weaving Architecture?’ After inquiring about a piece by Wendell Castle, Smith replied, ‘Now, you see, it is impossible to decide whether this object is a chair-table-stool or a piece of sculpture, and it is not necessary to decide,’ Mr. Smith said. ‘This show is an attack on the terminology we’ve been burdened with. Objects are statements in themselves; released from the maker, they take on their own identities’” (Trow 18).

The elusiveness of the term “object” was useful to describe the work emerging from the nascent studio craft movement in the 1960s – which was unlike anything the field had seen before. “Object” signified an expanding definition of craft. New materials and conceptual practices were being brought into the fold. This inclusive scope was demonstrated by the expansive material sections represented in the OBJECTS: USA catalogue, which included a dedicated section for the new material of plastics, for instance. In the same years, minimalist artist Donald Judd was experiencing a similar quandary of terminology. His work, like Castle’s chair-table-stool, was intersectional, encompassing site-specific intervention sculpture, painting, raw material, and fabrication. The term that he ultimately adopted for his work in 1965 was “specific-object” (Judd 4).

Renowned fiber artist Ed Rossbach, whose wire-frame basket and twine and plastic wall hangings were featured in “OBJECTS: USA” (as well as in the foundational fiber art exhibition “Wall Hangings” at the Museum of Modern Art just a few years earlier), reviewed “OBJECTS: USA” for Craft Horizons magazine in 1972. He criticized both the nebulousness of the term “object” as well as questioned if it was an appropriate word to describe the work.”