Homework #1: Collaborative Crochet for a Purpose
This project is intended to provide a space for you to investigate:
the crochet process / how an artwork might exist well in multiple contexts (”white cube” AND _______) / explore how art functions and meaning communicates in art / explore how fiber might contribute or add to this function in meaningful ways / explore ideas of site specificity, performance and participation
You will be investigating this thorugh the creation of a homework project as a collaborative team of 2-3 artists.
1.) Use crochet* (can also incorporate other materials, and processes as the artwork dictates).
2.) Design, construct and present an object with a specific purpose or function, for a specific audience. The object can be functional in a variety of ways, not simply the obvious ones. (Look at the artist project examples posted above to help you think through your ideas….)
3.) Consider the multiple contexts of your project. The work is presented at the critique, but likely also exists in another context (for a particular person, place, thing, event….) beyond the critique (assuming that your classmates are not the intended audience of the work). How can you insure this meaningfulness of your project is an included part of what we see and discuss in our critique? This is one of the challenges of this project.
4.) Documentation and presentation matter and contribute to how viewers understand the work in the critical space of a gallery context. Both of these components of the work should be considered as thoughtfully as the art object/s.
Completed projects will be due and critiqued during class on Thursday February 29th.
a student last Spring created this crocheted project for a particular individual, knowing it would also be on view for an art audience in our critique conversation. Because the artist's sister ate a banana everyday in her car on the way to work, the artist used this project as an excuse to invent a device that would hold a banana for safe transport in a vehicle. Her fiber banana carrying case was BOTH displayed as an artwork on the wall, but also included a short video showing the work in its original home context.
We benefit from another earlier iteration of this project in our fiber studio everyday: the snack stool. This is a great example of students using the concept of function and the crochet process to completely transform an object for a particular purpose. The yarn bombed stool serves the fiber class community by providing a zone for snacking in the otherwise food free studio! A yarn bombing project is one great option to think about for this collaborative project.
The next 3 images articulate different facets of an artist project called “Congratulations and Celebrations”. This was an interactive project by artist Ellen Lesperance which invited participants to engage with a sweater designed and knit by the artist and also exhibited regularly in the gallery context. The sweater is emblazoned with a battle axe and it is to be worn by any member of the public who wishes to engage in a solo performance which promotes personal agency.
Here is a link to a 2016 exhibition featuring the sweater in LA. Here is a link to the archive of past participants on an instagram page.
The final 2 images are an artwork project called “The Boarders” by French artist Annette Messager in 1972. They show two different views of the project.
This project involves 72 small taxidermized sparrows, each wrapped in custom made sweaters created by the artist and displayed in tidy organized rows. Her work of mourning is not fast, easy or quickly forgotten. The labor of making each individual sweater is a conscious, slow, deliberate kind of mourning for a creature ordinarily missed or passed by.
The artist talked about this project as important to her development of an artist when she said:
“I found my voice as an artist when I stepped on a dead sparrow on a street in Paris in 1971. I didn’t know why, but I was sure this sparrow was important because it was something very fragile that was near me and my life. Like the people I love, these small birds were always around me, yet they remained strange and mysterious. So I picked up the sparrow, took it home and knit a wool wrap for it. Why? I can’t say. You want to do something and don’t know why – all you know is that you have no choice, that it’s a necessity.”
