Making Something from Nothing

In 1968 Rubye Mae Griffith and Frank B. Griffith published a “hobby book called How To Make Something from Nothing. On the cover (where it would sell books) his name was listed before hers, while on the title page (where it could do no harm), hers ap- peared before his. It is tempting to think that it was she who wrote the crypto-feminist dedication: “To the nothings—with the courage to turn into somethings.” The book itself is con- cerned with transformation—of tin cans, beef knuckle bones, old razor blades, breadbaskets and bottlecaps in- to more and less useful and decorative items. As “A Word in Parting,” the authors state their modest credo: “This book . . . is simply a collection of ideas intended to encourage your ideas .. We want you to do things your way... Making nothings into somethings is a highly inventive sport but because it is inventive and spontaneous and origina. it releases tensions, unties knots of frustration, gives you a wonderful sense of pleasure and accomplishment. So ex periment, dare, improvise—enjoy every minute—and maybe you’Il discover, as we did, that once you start making something from nothing, you find you can’t stop, and what’s more you don’t want to stop!

Despite the tone and the emphasis on enjoyment—unpopular in serious cir- cles—this “sport” sounds very much like fine or “high” art. Why then are its products not art? “Lack of quality will be the first answer offered, and “derivative” the second, even though both would equally apply to most of the more sophisticated works seen in galler- ies and museums. If art is popularly defined as a unique and provocative object of beauty and imagination, the work of many of the best contemporary “fine” artists must be disqualified along with that of many “craftspeo- ple,” and in the eyes of the broad audience, many of the talented hobbyist’s works would qualify. Yet many of these. in turn, would not even be called “crafts” by the purists in that field. Al- though it is true that all this name call- ing is a red herring, it makes me wonder whether high art by another name might be less intimidating and more appealing. On the other hand would high art by any other name look so impressive, be so respected and so commercially valued? I won’t try to answer these weighted queries here, but simply offer them as other ways of thinking about some of the less obvious aspects of the art of making.

Much has been made of the need to erase false distinctions between art and craft, “fine” art and the “minor” arts. high” art and “low” art—distinctions that particularly affect women’s art. But there are also “high” crafts and “low” ones, and although women wield more power in the crafts world than in the fine art world, the same problems plague both. The crafts need only on more step up the aesthetic and financi respectability ladder and they will headed for the craft museums rathe than for people’s homes.

Perhaps until the character of the museums changes, anything ending up in one will remain a display of upper class taste in expensive and doubtfully “useful” objects. For most of this cen- tury, the prevailing relationship be tween art and “the masses” has been one of paternalistic noblesse oblige along the lines of “we who are educated to know what’s correct must pass our knowledge and good taste down to those who haven’t the taste, the time, or the money to know what is Good. Artists and craftspeople, from William Morris to de Stijl and the Russian Con- structivists, have dreamed of socialist Utopias where everyone’s life is im proved by cheap and beautiful objects and environments. Yet the path of the Museum of Modern Art’s design de- partment, also paved with good inten- tions, indicates the destination of such dreams in a capitalist consumer society. A pioneer in bringing to the public the best available in commercial design the Museum’s admirable display of such ready-mades as a handsome and durable 39c paring knife or a 69c coffee mug has mostly given way to installa tions more typical of Bonnier’s, DR, or some chic Italian furniture showroom.

It is, as it so often is, a question of audience, as well as a question of cate- gorization. (One always follows the other.) Who sees these objects at MOMA? Mostly people who buy 83.00 paring knives and 88.00 coffee muge which are often merely “elevated” ex- amples of the cheaper versions, with unnecessary refinements or simplifica tions. Good Taste is once again an eco- nomic captive of the classes who rule the culture and govern its institutions. Bad Taste is preferred by those ingrates

who are uneducated enough to ignore or independent enough to reject the im- positions from above. Their lack of enthusiasm provides an excuse for the aesthetic philanthropists, their hands bitten, to stop feeding the masses. Class-determined good/bad taste pat- terns revert to type.

Such is the process by which both design objects and the “high crafts have become precisely the consumer commodity that the rare socially con- scious “fine artist is struggling to avoid. Historically, craftspeople, whose work still exists on a less exalted equi- librium between function and com- merce, have been most aware of the contradictions inherent in the distinc- tion between art and crafts. The dis- tinction between design and “high crafts is a modern one. Both have their origins in the “low crafts of earlier periods, sometimes elevated to the level of “folk art” because of their usefulness as sources for “fine art. A “designer is simply the craftsperson of the techno- logical age, no longer forced to do her- his own making. The Bauhaus became the cradle of industrial design, but the tapestries, furniture, textiles and tea sets made there were still primarily works of art. Today, the most popular housewares all through the taste gamut of the American lower-middle to upper- middle class owe as much stylistically to the “primitive or “low crafts— Mexican, Asian, American Colonial— as to the streamlining of the interna- tional style. In fact, popular design tends to combine the two, which meet at a point of (often spurious) simplic- ity, and to become “kitsch —diluted examples of the Good Taste that is hid- den away in museums, expensive stores, and the homes of the wealthy, mnaccessible to everyone else.

The hobby books reflect the manner in which Good Taste is still unarguably set forth by the class system. Different books are clearly aimed at different tastes, aspirations, educational levels. For instance, Dot Aldrich’s Creating with Cattails, Cones and Pods is not aimed at the inner city working-class housewife or welfare mother (who couldn’t afford the time or the mater ials) or at the farmer’s wife (who sees enough weeds in her daily work) but at the suburban upper middle-class wom- an who thinks in terms of “creating, has time on her hands and access to the materials. Aldrich is described on the dust jacket as a garden club member, a naturalist, and an artist; the book is il- lustrated by her daughter. She very thoroughly details the construction of dollhouse furniture, corsages and arrangements” from dried plants and an occasional orange peel. Her taste is firmly placed as good” within her class, although it might be seen as gauche “homemade art” by the upper class and ugly and undecorative by the working class.

Hazel Pearson Williams Feather Flowers and Arrangements, on the other hand, has the sleazy look of a mail-order catalogue; it is one of a craft course series and its fans, birdcages, butterflies and candles are all made from garishly colored, rather than na- tural materials. The book is clearly aimed at a totally different audience, one that is presumed to respond to such colors and to have no aesthetic appreci- ation of the “intrinsic superiority of natural materials over artificial ones not to mention an inability to afford them.

The objects illustrated in books like the Griffiths are neither high art nor high craft nor design. Yet such books are myriad, and they are clearly aimed at women—the natural bricoleurs, as Deena Metzger has pointed out. The books are usually written by a woman. and if a man is co-author he always seems to be a husband, which adds a certain familial coziness and gives him an excuse for being involved in such blatantly female fripperies (as well as dignifying the frippery by his participa- tion). Necessity is the mother, not the father of invention. The home maker’s sense of care and touch focuses on sew- ing, cooking, interior decoration as often through conditioning as through necessity, providing a certain bond be- tween middle-class and working-class housewives and career women. (I am talking about the making of the home, not just the keeping of it; “good housekeeping” is not a prerogative for creativity in the home. It might even be the opposite, since the “houseproud’ woman is often prouder of her house, her container, than she is of herself.) Even these days women still tend to be brought up with an exaggerated sense of detail and a need to be “busy, often engendered by isolation within a par- ticular space, and by the emphasis on cleaning and service. A visually sen- sitive woman who spends day after day in the same rooms develops a compul- sion to change, adorn, expand them, an impetus encouraged by the “hobby books.

The overdecoration of the home and the fondness for bric-a-brac often attributed to female fussiness or plain Bad Taste can just as well be attributed to creative restlessness. Since most homemade hobby objects are geared to- ward home improvement, they inspire less fear in their makers of being self- ish or self-indulgent, there is no confusion about pretentions to Art, and the woman is freed to make anything she can imagine. (At the same time it is true that the imagination is often stimu- lated by exposure to other such work, just as real” artists are similarly de- pendent on the art world and the works of their colleagues.) Making conversa- tion pieces” like deer antler salad tongs or a madonna in an abalone shell grot- to, or a mailbox from an old breadbox, or vice versa, can be a prelude to break ing with the “functional” excuse and the making of wholly “useless objects.

Now that the homebound woman has a little more leisure, thanks to so- called labor-saving devices, her pas- times are more likely to be cultural in character. The less privileged she is, the more likely she is to keep her inter- ests inside the home with the focus of her art remaining the same as that of her work. The better off and better educated she is, the more likely she is to go outside of the home for influence or stimulus, to spend her time reading, go- ing to concerts, theatre, dance, staying well informed. If she is upwardly mobile, venturing from her own con- firmed tastes into foreign realms where she must be cautious about opinions and actions, her insecurity is likely to lead to the classic docility of the mid- dle-class audience, so receptive to what experts” tell them to think about the arts. The term culture vulture is un- derstood to apply mainly to upwardly mobile women. And culture, in the evangelical spirit of the work ethic, is often also inseparable from good works.

Middle- and upper-class women, al- ways stronger in their support of “cul- ture than any other group, seem to need aesthetic experience in the broad- est sense more than men—perhaps be- cause the vital business of running the world, for which educated women, at least to some extent, have been pre- pared, has been denied them, and because they have the time and the background to think—but not the means to act. Despite the fact that mid- dle-class women have frequently been strong (and anonymous) forces for social justice, the earnestness and amateur status of such activities have been consistently ridiculed, from the Marx Brothers’ films to the cartoons of Helen Hokinson.

Nevertheless, the League of Women Voters, the volunteer work for under- funded cultural organizations, the garden clubs, literary circles and discussion groups of the comfortable classes have been valid and sometimes courageous attempts to move out into the world while remaining sufficiently on the fringes of the system so as not to challenge its male core. The working- class counterparts are, for obvious reasons, aimed less at improving the lot of others than at improving one’s own, and, like hobby art, are more locally and domestically focused in unions, day care, paid rather than volunteer social work, Tupperware parties—and the PTA, where all classes meet. In any case, the housewife learns to take deri- sion in her stride whether she intends to be socially effective or merely wants to escape from the home now and then (families are jealous of time spent else- where).

Women’s liberation has at least be- gun to erode the notion that woman’s role is that of the applauding spectator for men s creativity. Yet as makers of (rather than housekeepers for) art, they still trespass on male ground. No won- der, then, that all over the world, wom- en privileged and/or desperate and/or daring enough to consider creation out- side traditional limits are finding an outlet for these drives in an art that is not considered “art, an art that there is some excuse for making, an art that costs little or nothing and performs an ostensibly useful function in the bar- gain—the art of making something out of nothing.

If ones only known outlets are follow-the-number painting or the ready-made “kit art offered by the supermarket magazines, books like the Griffiths open up new territory. Sug- gestions in “ladies and handiwork magazines should not be undervalued either. After all, quilt patterns were published and passed along in the 19th century (just as fashionable art styles are in today s art world). The innova- tive quilt maker or group of makers would come up with a new idea that broke or enriched the rules, just as the Navajo rug maker might vary brilliant- ly within set patterns (and modern ab- stractionists innovate by sticking to the rules of innovation).

The shared or published pattern forms the same kind of armature for painstak- ing handwork and for freedom of ex- pression within a framework as the underlying grid does in contemporary painting. Most modern women lack the skills, the motive and the discipline to do the kind of handwork their foremothers did by necessity, but the stitch- like mark” Harmony Hammond has noted in so much recent abstract art by women often emerges from a feminist adoption of the positive aspects of women’s history. It relates to the ancient, sensuously repetitive, Penelo- pean rhythms of seeding, hoeing, gath- ering, weaving, spinning, as well as to modern domestic routines.

In addition, crocheting, needlework, embroidery, rug-hooking and quilting are coming back into middle- and upper-class fashion on the apron strings of feminism and fad. Ironically, these arts are now practiced by the well-off out of boredom and social presure as often as out of emotional necessity to make connections with women in the past. What was once work has now be- come art or “high craft—museum- worthy as well as commercially valid. In fact, when Navajo rugs and old quilts were first exhibited in New York fine arts museums in the early 1970s, they were eulogized as neutral, ungen dered sources for big bold geometri abstractions by male artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Had they been presented as exhibitions of wom. en’s art, they would have been seen quite differently and probably would not have been seen at all in a fine an context at that time.

When feminists pointed out tha these much-admired and strong works were in fact women’s crafts, one might have expected traditional women’s art to be taken more seriously, yet such borrowings from “below must still be validated from above. William C. Seitz’s Assemblage show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 had acknowledged the generative role of popular objects for Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, and predicted Pop Art, but he never considered women s work as the classic bricolage. It took a man, Claes Oldenburg, to make fabric sculp- ture acceptable, though his wife, Patty did the actual sewing. Sometimes men even dabble in women’s spheres in the lowest of low arts—hobby art made from throwaways by amateurs at home. But when a man makes, say, a maca- roni figure or a hand-tooled Last Sup- per, it tends to raise the sphere rather than lower the man, and he is likely to be written up in the local newspaper. Women dabbling in men’s spheres, on the other hand, are still either inferior or just freakishly amazing.

It is supposed to be men who are handy around the house, men who fix things while women make the home. This is a myth, of course, and a popular one. There are certainly as many women who do domestic repair. as men, but perhaps the myth was de- vised by women to force men to invest some energy, to touch and to care about some aspect of the home. The fact re- mains that when a woman comes to make something, it more often than not has a particular character—whether this originates from role-playing, the division of labor, or some deeper con- sciousness. The difference can often be defined as a kind of positive frag- mentation or as the collage aesthet- ic—the mixing and matching of frag- ments to provide a new whole. Thus the bootcleaner made of bottlecaps sug gested by one hobby book might also be a Surrealist object.

But it is not. And this is not entirely a disadvantage. Not only does the ama- teur status of hobby art dispel the need for costly art lessons, but it subverts the intimidation process that takes place when the male domain of “high” art is approached. As it stands, women—and

especially women—can make hobby art in a relaxed manner, isolated from the real” world of commerce and the pres- sures of professional aestheticism. Dur- ing the actual creative process, this is an advantage, but when the creative ego s attendant need for an audience emerges, the next step is not the galler- ies, but to become a cottage indus- try. The gifte shoppe, the county or crafts fair and outdoor art show circuit is open to women where the high art world is not, or was not until it was pried open to some extent by the femin- ist art movement. For this reason, many professional women artists in the past made both public art” (canvases and sculptures acceptable to galleries and museums, conforming to a combin- ation of the two current art world tastes) and private or closet art (made for personal reasons or “just for myself”—as if most art were not). With the advent of the new feminism, the private has either replaced or merged with the public in much wom- en’s art and the delicate, the intimate, the obsessive, even the cute and the fussy in certain guises have become more acceptable, especially in feminist art circles. A striking amount of the newly discovered closet art by ama- teur and professional women artists re- sembles the chotchkas so universally scorned as women’s playthings and especially despised in recent decades during the heyday of neo-Bauhaus functionalism. The objects illustrated in Feather Flowers and Arrangements bear marked resemblance to what is now called Women’s Art, including a certainly unconscious bias toward the forms that have been called female imagery.

Today we are resurrecting our moth- ers', aunts and grandmothers activi- ties—not only in the well-publicized areas of quilts and textiles, but also in the more random and freer area of transformational rehabilitation. On an emotional as well as on a practical level, rehabilitation has always been women’s work. Patching, turning col- lars and cuffs, remaking old clothes, changing buttons, refinishing or re- covering old furniture are all the traditional private resorts of the eco- nomically deprived woman to give her family public dignity. This continues today, even though in affluent Western societies cheap clothes fall apart before they can be rehabilitated and inventive patching is more acceptable (to the point where expensive new clothes are made to look rehabilitated and thrift shops are combed by the well-off). Thus “making something from nothing” is a brilliant title for a hobby book, appealing as it does both to housewifely thrift and to the American spirit of free enterprise—a potential means of mak- ing a fast buck.

Finally, certain questions arise in re gard to women’s recent “traditionally oriented” fine art. Are the sources direct—from quilts and county fair handiwork displays—or indirect—via Dada, Surrealism, West Coast funk, or from feminist art itself? Is the resem- blance of women’s art-world art to hob- by art a result of coincidence? Of influ- ence, conditioning, or some inherent female sensibility? Or is it simply another instance of camp, or fashion- able downward mobility? The problem extends from source to audience.

Feminist artists have become far more conscious of women’s traditional arts than most artists, and feminist artists are also politically aware of the need to broaden their audience, or of the need to broaden the kind of social experience fine art reflects. Yet the means by which to fill these needs have barely been ex- plored. The greatest lack in the femin- ist art movement may be for contact and dialogue with those amateurs whose work sometimes appears to be imitated by the professionals. Judy Chicago and her co-workers on The Dinner Party and their collaboration with china painters and needleworkers, Miriam Schapiro’s handkerchief ex- changes and the credit given the women who embroider for her, the “Mother Art” group in Los Angeles which per- forms in laundromats and similar pub- lic/domestic situations, the British “Postal Art Event, and a few other ex- amples are exceptions rather than the rule. It seems all too likely that only in a feminist art world will there be a chance for the “fine arts, the minor arts, crafts, and hobby circuits to meet and to develop an art of making with a new and revitalized communica- tive function. It won’t happen if the feminist art world continues to be ab- sorbed by the patriarchal art world.

And if it does happen, the next ques- tion will be to what extent can this work be reconciled with all the varying cri- teria that determine aesthetic quality in the different spheres, groups, and cultures? Visual consciousness raising, concerned as it is now with female im- agery and, increasingly, with female process, still has a long way to go before our visions are sufficiently cleared to see all the arts of making as equal pro- ducts of a creative impulse which is as socially determined as it is personally necessary; before the idea is no longer to make nothings into somethings, but to transform and give meaning to all things. In this utopian realm, Good Taste will not be standardized in museums, but will vary from place to place, from home to home.

References: The Griffiths’ book was published by Castle Books, NYC; the Aldrich book by Hearthside Press, Great Neck, N.Y.; the Williams book by Craft Course publishers, Temple City, California. I found all of them in the tiny local library in a Maine town with a population of circa three hundred.

The Hammond article appeared in Heresies No. 1; her “Class Notes” in No. 3 are also relevant. The Metzger appeared in Heresies No. 2 and is an important con- tribution to the feminist dialogue on “high and “low art. The British Postal Event, or “Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife, is a visual conversation” between amateur and professional women artists isolated in dif- ferent cities. They send each other art ob- jects derived from “non-prestigious folk traditions, art that is “cooked and eaten, washed and worn” in an attempt to sew a cloth of identity that other women may recognize. It is documented in MAMA!, a booklet published by a Birmingham collec- tive and available from PDC, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC 1.

I have also been indebted in this series of articles (which includes “The Pink Glass Swan” in Heresies No. 1) to Don Celender’s fascinating Opinions of Working People Concerning the Arts, 1975, available from Printed Matter, 7-9 Lispenard St., NYC 10013.

Lucy R. Lippard writes feminist criticism and fiction She has temporarily and regretfully escaped from the HERESIES Collective to live on an isolated English farm with her son and her third novel.