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Crafting the Social

A New Translation

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Foreword

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On the necessity of translation

As I write this text in 2014, the term “socially engaged art” has

only come into our institutional consciousness for perhaps fifteen

years. Crafting has been around much longer, ever since the first pot

was thrown or the first basket was woven. And yet as I craft my way

through a Public Practice MFA program (really, you know you’ve been

institutionalized when they offer degrees on the subject), I keep on

feeling this disconnect between the institutional understanding of

social practice, and the common understanding of craft.

I’m not really sure why, because craft is imbued with the same social

values that social practice champions. Collective making, check. Appeals

to those marginalized from high art, check. An anti-capitalist ethic of

generosity and artisanal making, check, check, check.

Is it the erasure of craft from contemporary social practice discourse

an old rehashing of the contest between the old and the new?1 A contest

between the immanence of femininity and the rupture of masculinity

(hello, Futurists)? What does it mean that craft has been sanctified

in high art only when practiced in an individualistic manner by

male artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Mike Kelley? That Alighiero

Boetti is named in art history books, and not the Afghan weavers who

created his pieces? The definition of the “avant-garde” means being at

the forefront, and indeed art history tends to operate in terms of

movements, in terms of seeking out the “next.”

If there is one movement to trouble this thrust of art history, I

hope it can be social practice. Among the many different facets and

definitions of “social practice,” one thing is agreed: it is firmly

rooted in the idea of the social. At its most idealistic, “social

practice” challenges dominant power hierarchies through appeals to

community engagement, grassroots activism, radical pedagogy, and

other methodologies. At its most cynical, social practice explores and

1 Elissa Auther, “Classification and Its Consequences: The Case of ‘Fiber Art,” American Art, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), University of Chicago Press, pp. 2-9.

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manipulates the conflicted aspects of human relationships. Whether as an

end goal or as a target of critique, the social is necessarily embedded

in the methodology and audience of social practice.

One thing that the social implies in social practices is the

identification of publics. And publics don’t speak the language of

MFAs. They speak the languages of barrios, of restaurant workers, of

the environment, and in my particular instance, of crafters. In any

exchange between the artist and the public (if we’re going to construct

that problematic divide - hey, aren’t I also part of the public?), a

moment of exchange and translation occurs between the artist’s training

and the public’s understanding. How then, do we make sure that artists

coming out of MFA programs and institutions are equipped to speak to

the publics they desire to engage?

There have been how-to manuals2 and lexicons3 written on social

practice, but the language of neither, in my humble opinion, does

an adequate job to challenge the Eurocentric, masculine theoretical

language found in contemporary art.4 So instead I turn away from the

texts of contemporary art, to the text found in textile. Pictoral

languages and embroidered family histories preceded written language

and remain a way for diasporic communities to communicate between

language systems. There’s this idea that certain terms fall out of

language with their disuse, and with that, so do certain concepts.

In the interest of recuperating these concepts, I want to examine

alternative languages, in this case textiles, and ask how we can

rehabilitate them and draw out the social structures implied by these

terminologies.5

2 Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art. (New York, New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011).

3 Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership. (Eindhoven, Netherlands: Van Abbemuseum, 2013).

4 Fun story. I once commented to Stephen Wright that his interest in the term “hacking” was troubling because of its associations with white male Silicon Valley culture, and he countered by saying no, he was referring to hacking practices by the Vikings. Because a historical Anglo-Saxon male practice is more acceptable to enshrine.

5 Elizabeth Wayland Barber, “Elements of the Code” in Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years. (New York, NY: Norton & Company, 1994) pp 147-163.

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I think about living a life at the nexus of three languages - my

native Chinese and its accompanying dialects, my adopted English, and

my learned Spanish. Each language has a slightly different grammar

that doesn’t translate perfectly to another language. But it is in this

oscillating back and forth between Cantonese grammar, English terms,

and snippets of Neruda that has opened up new linguistic and conceptual

terrains for my understanding of the world. Sometimes my thoughts are a

pastiche of all three languages, because vincular is the best verb for

the situation but the memory of my grandmother’s voice makes me cry,

and I tell you all this in English.

I take you on this detour through my language history because I’d

like to think about how the institutional language of social practice

can be translated for a public that crafts. Moreover, I’d like to

think about the radical shifts that might occur if we translated the

language of craft for a social practice public. What might social

practice learn from crafting—a methodology much more introverted,

embodied, and durational when compared to the dialogical practices

described in Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces?6 What preexisting

structures, methodologies, and ethics embedded in craft history can

inform our social goals of achieving a more just and equitable form of

coexistence? How do we understand different ways of acquiring knowledge

and how do we share and open up different forms of knowledge? We

translate.7

6 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013). I am inspired by her words: “This founding task of translation does not disappear by fetishizing the native language. Sometimes I read and hear that the subaltern can speak in their native languages. I wish I could be as self-assured as the intellectual, literary critic and historian, who assert this in English. No speech is speech if it is not heard. It is this act of hearing-to-respond that may be called the imperative to translate… We often mistake this for helping people in trouble, or pressing people to pass good laws, even to insist on behalf of the other that the law be implemented. But the founding translation between people is a listening with care and patience, in the normality of the other, enough to notice that the other has already silently made that effort. This reveals the irreducible importance of idiom, which a standard language, however native, cannot annul.” (252-253).

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This essay is focused on translating the language of crafts, but I

hope that one day we will have translated the language of the barrio

and also of the sea.8 This is a blueprint and a point of departure

for future translations. Perhaps the endgame of translation is to

unpack how the phenomenology of lived experience can be related to an

abstraction, and thus translation presents itself as a sister to praxis.

Click click click.

8 Cheers to our cyborg mother Donna Haraway, who has already provided a translation into cyborg languages in Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181.

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On the particular subject position of the author

I am 26. I am Chinese American. In fairly good physical health except

for an unexplained chronic stomach pain that flares up every month or

two. I’m currently finishing up my M.F.A. in Public Practice at Otis

College Art of Design. I am many things, but this is a thesis, not an

online dating profile.

However, my personal politics, which are informed by my personal

history as a first-generation immigrant and my academic leaning as

an intersectional feminist interested in comparative urbanism and

inequality, demand that you know who I am.9 I am not a disembodied

voice, I’m not an authority. You will not finish reading this text

knowing the final truth, but perhaps a truth, that you situate within

a constellation of truths that hang in the sky of your existence like

stars.

So perhaps you should know a little about the context of my truth and

why I speak it. I self-identify as an artist because I believe that the

frame of artmaking provides the creativity and compassion necessary

for deep, human-centered social change. I have spent the past three

years of my life organizing a fiber-based public art collective called

Yarn Bombing Los Angeles. I’m slightly dyslexic with numbers and a

kinesthetic learner—I learn by doing. And I have learned so much while

organizing Yarn Bombing Los Angeles—including the history of fiber art,

how to knit with one’s arms, fire codes in Los Angeles, and how to be

good to others. All these experiences pass into my body and out of my

hands in the form of soft, fuzzy public art.

9 In a nutshell, intersectional feminism asks us to consider the specificity of a subject’s position including not only gender, but also race, class, sexual orientation, and ability, when articulating an individual’s unique position of privilege/oppression in their relationship to others. Where I am situated, a Chinese first-generation able bodied bisexual cis woman living in Los Angeles with an Ivy League degree and a soon to be MFA, therefore, affects the content of my speech (this document) and my ability to speak it. Jawune Uwajaren and Jamie Utt. “Why Our Feminism Must Be Intersectional (And 3 Ways to Practice It)”, in Everyday Feminism, published January 11, 2015. Accessed February 10, 2015 at http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/why-our-feminism-must-be-intersectional/

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Thus, I think of myself less as an authority, and rather as a witness.

A witness to this moment and this collective form of making. Someone

who stands squarely inside a maelstrom of creative production, because

for me there is no outside. Can I ever step outside my practice and

evaluate it with a disinterested, expert eye? No. But my politics say

that there are no experts, but paradoxically we are all experts of our

own experiences. That instead of one voice narrating others, we begin

to celebrate multiple voices narrating themselves and the edges where

multiple narrations begin to intersect and rub up against one another.

Perhaps it’s my work with collectivity, and specifically feminist

collectivity, that impels me to take up this ontological challenge to a

stable subject position.

This thesis is part field note, part abstraction; part subjective

knowledge, part research; part academic parody, part homage; all

testimony.

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Terms (Alphabetical)

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Caretaking

Many of the women I work with are caretakers to some degree. Is this

a function of womanhood? Or is it a function of age? I have worked

among a husband caretaking for his cancer-stricken wife. A daughter

caretaking for her mother trapped by grief. A mother caretaking for

her disabled son. A volunteer caretaking for patients waiting for a

heart transplant. What is it about craft, that invites a level of

caretakers?

According to Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book, Women’s Work: The First

20,000 years, crafting was an art that could be easily practiced while

balancing all the other caretaking tasks of the home.10 While I’m highly

skeptical of any evolutionary psychology point of view that reasons

“because cavemen did X, therefore modern society does Y,” it is true

that knitting projects can be interrupted rather easily in order to

attend to a screaming child. But moreover, I’d like to think of crafting

itself as a form of caretaking, not just one that accommodates a

separate act of care.

The AIDS Quilt is perhaps the most stunning example of relating craft

to care of the body. Comprised of a growing number of quilts that

represent a loved one dying from AIDS, the AIDS Quilt relates the work

of the hands to the care of the body. The warmth of textiles to the

cold of hospital rooms. The tenderness and fragility of hope, fear,

precarity provides a soft contrast to the staid stone of national,

public monuments. In the same way that the activist response to the

AIDS crisis was about making an invisible illness visible, the AIDS

quilt leaves a very public trace of bodies that are no longer present.11

The idea of caretaking is inevitably bound up with generosity. Many

of our caretakers also regularly make pieces to give away—positioning

10 Elizabeth Wayland Barber, “Courtyard Sisterhood”. in Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years. (New York, NY: Norton & Company, 1994) pp 71-100.

11 Rebecca J. Rosen. “A Map of Loss: The AIDS Quilt Goes Online,” The Atlantic, June 24, 2012. Accessed February 10, 2015 at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/a-map-of-loss-the-aids-quilt-goes-online/260188/

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craft as an art in which the process is more important to the maker

than possessing the end product. So many initiatives out there, such

as Millie’s Hats for Hope, or the West Hollywood Stitch ‘n Bitch,

craft donations of sweaters, scarves, blankets, and hats for those on

the streets, those in the cold, those losing their hair. Why these

practices don’t trickle up to the consciousness of institutionalized

social practice, is beyond me. Are they too sincere? Do they not refer

enough to art history? Are they too commonplace, and art can never be

commonplace?

Caretaking is constant and repetitive, like many stitches on a

crocheted piece.

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Casting on

There’s a saying among knitting instructors, to never begin with casting

on the first stitch. The alchemy of making the loops appear on the needle

is endlessly frustrating, and most often ends in a big mess of tear-

stained fiber. Better to hand a beginner a half-begun piece, and guide

them through knitting the next row. Casting on will come later.

I’ve been thinking about this adage in the context of the art collective

that, in a sense, I’ve inherited. I was not among the group of people who

began the collective. I started in the middle. I’ve continued to start

in the middle for a lot of our projects. By that I mean, we’ve partnered

with institutions with existing programs and knowledge that could assist

us in what we do, instead of starting from the beginning and trying to

figure out our own version of those programs.

But our collective did not start from ashes either. It began as a

fortuitous meeting of the existing fiber arts community in Los Angeles,

with the incipient phenomenon called Yarn Bombing that was sweeping

the globe. The official “mother” of yarn bombing, Knitta Please, resides

in Austin, Texas.12 But I would even venture to say that she was not

beginning from nothing, but rather had her own ancestry of fiber artists.

I have a sneaking suspicion that in my life, perhaps I’ll always be

starting in the middle, inheriting from the social practices that my

foremothers have built. And I’m ok with that, as a way to honor the

groundwork so many others have laid underneath my feet so that I may

walk, and to provide maintenance and continuity for their ideas and

dreams. And in doing so, I share in their dream and the dream becomes

something collective, a dream sustained by people who come after me, and

pick up the needles.

One day we will learn to cast on. But it’s not necessary, because our

forebears have already cast on for us.

12 Jaime Derringer. “She’s Crafty: Yarn Bombing Pioneer Magda Sayeg,” Published in design-milk.com, June 18, 2013. Accessed February 10, 2015 at http://design-milk.com/shes-crafty-yarn-bombing-pioneer-magda-sayeg-knitta/.

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Casting off

Is there an ethical way of casting off from an art collective? What

happens when you come to the end of the knitting pattern, and are ready

to finish your piece by casting the yarn off from your needles? What

happens when someone is ready to cast off before you?

There’s not an easy answer to this and every time I’ve experienced

someone “casting off” it has been a rupturing and difficult experience.

I myself find it hard to bring projects and partnerships to a close.

My psychiatrist used to describe the inevitable shock that sets in

after the completion of a project as “post-partum depression.” Does this

trivialize motherhood? I’m not sure. But projects, especially projects

involving people, can feel like a child—delicate, growing, beautiful,

curious, possessing a mind and will of its own that ought to be tended

but not controlled. And all children grow up and begin to live on their

own. So perhaps one day the water will break or you will break and

you’ll know that it’s time to cast off. Just make sure that you have

been working on clothes for your child that entire time, and hold on to

the threads that keep you close.

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Charkha

During the Indian Independence Movement, the Charkha, or table-top

spinning wheel, became an important symbol adopted by Mohandas K.

Gandhi for the movement. In addition to advocating for a return to

cottage industry in opposition to the mill system imposed by British

Imperialism, Gandhi also invoked the spiritual dimensions of the wheel

to exemplify generosity, service, and class unity.13

I think about the image of the Charkha a lot in terms of the

relationship of textiles to political action. The textile industry

itself is the site of global inequalities that impoverish the non-

West for the consumer pleasures of the West.14 What inspires me most,

however, is how the metaphor of textiles becomes an accessible metaphor

to galvanize a popular movement. Spinning on the Charkha is in itself a

significant political action while at the same time embodying a larger

metaphor for social ethics.

13 Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Gospel of the Charkha, Accessed March 26, 2015 at http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap86.htm, “I … claim for the Charkha the honour of being able to solve the problem of economic distress in a most natural, simple, inexpensive and business like manner….. It is the symbol of the nation’s prosperity and, therefore, freedom. It is a symbol not of commercial war but of commercial peace. (Young India, 8-12-1921, p. 406)”“The message of the spinning-wheel is much wider than its circumference. Its message is one of simplicity, service of mankind, living so as not to hurt others, creating an indissoluble bond between the rich and the poor, capital and labour, the prince and the peasant. That larger message is naturally for all.” (Young India, 17-9-1925, p. 321)”“It is my claim that the universalization of hand-spinning with a full knowledge of all that it stands for alone can bring that [conquest of inertia] in a sub-continent so vast and varied as India. I have compared spinning to the central sun and the other village crafts to the various constellations in the solar system. The former gives light and warmth to the latter and sustains them. Without it they would not be able to exist.” (Harijan, 31-3-1946, p. 58)“The Charkha is not like either the small or large machines of the West. There cores of watches are produced in a few special places. They are sold all over the world. The same tale applies to the sewing machine. These things are symbols of one civilization. The Charkha represents the opposite.We do not to universalize the Charkha through mass production in one place. Our ideal is to make the Charkha and all its accessories in the locality where the spinners live. Therein lies the value of the spinning-wheel. Anything that goes wrong with it should be put right on the spot and the spinners should be taught how to do so.” (Harijan, 20-10-1946, pp. 363-4)

14 Susan S. Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence”. in The Textile Reader, ed Jessica Hemmings. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) pp. 234-246.

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The image of the Charkha also reinforces my personal understanding of

craft and craft-based knowledge

as knowledge that originates from

a non-Western perspective, and

thus heals my migrant soul. Art

history is for the most part a

Western tradition that elevates a

realm of high art separate from

the craft of the everyday. I see my

own cultural heritage, which finds

art in calligraphy, embroidery,

and pottery, classified as “craft”

and not high art in the canons of

Western art history because of the

functional everyday use of aesthetic

objects. Within a Western context, to reclaim craft as art is to

reclaim my right to an alternative cultural heritage.15

15 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). “Whether urbane or harsh, cultural invasion is thus always an act of violence against the persons of the invaded culture, who lose their originality or face the threat of losing it. In cultural invasion (as in all the modalities of anti-dialogical action) the invaders are the authors of, and actors in, the process; those they invade are the objects. [...] Cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded; they begin to respond to the values, the standards, and the goals of the invaders,” (152-153).

The iconic image of Gandhi and his charkha, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White for LIFE Magazine.

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Disability

I am 26 years old and the face of an art collective comprised of

predominantly women, predominantly over 50 years old. I am fairly self

conscious of the fact that some of these women see me as young enough

to be their child, and somehow they respect what I say anyway. I am

fairly conscious that it is much sexier for mainstream media to latch

onto me as a figurehead for this movement, then it is to latch onto a 70

year-old woman in a wheelchair, who nevertheless may be the architect

of an impending revolution.

Someone once left a comment on one of our Youtube videos, stating to

the effect “Whatever. It’s not street art. It’s not like these people

are taking risks.” Which is true in the sense that we will never be

targeted for being a young man of color in the United States.16 It’s also

untrue in the sense that just because these women aren’t hanging off

of billboards in the middle of the night, doesn’t mean that they take

equivalent physical risks in order to yarnbomb.

Have you ever experienced heatstroke in Los Angeles in your 60s? That’s

what these women risk when they commit to a yarnbombing installation

for 3 hours. Do your hands occasionally freeze up while crocheting

because you have arthritis from years and years of clerical work? What

about chronic back pain that shoots up on the most inconvenient of

days, such as when you have to get on a ladder to yarnbomb something

high? Among our group, I am the designated person who gets up on

ladders, because I am 26 and insured.

Crafting naturally lends itself to the purview of the disabled, the

ailing, the elderly. We receive countless letters from people saying

that they either knitted their contributions for us when they were in

the hospital, or while they were waiting for someone in the hospital.

I remember sewing together granny squares in the hospital, as I

watched someone I loved pass away from cancer. It was the first time

that someone had ever passed away in my life, but it was not the first

16 See image at: http://blackgirlflymag.tumblr.com/post/103522481567/blacklivesmatter-at-www-blackgirlflymag-com

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time for many of my older peers and collaborators. Crafters experience

and pass through a lot of illness. It gets woven into the click of our

needles, the fabric that we touch and spin.

The haptic nature of crafting also opens up new avenues of possibility

for the disabled. We frequently collaborate with visually impaired

crocheters from the Braille Institute. Some are completely blind,

others only partially visually impaired. Either way, they lack the

ability to distinguish precisely the play of light, dark, and color

in a visual artwork such as Monet’s Waterlilies. However, through the

sense of touch, they are able to experience our works and contribute

brilliant works in return. For our project Yarn-o-Polis, one of the

visually impaired crocheters crocheted a braille message into her work

for the project, through the use of a crocheted popcorn stitch. It was

brilliant, and moving, and one of my favorite pieces.

Our relationship with the Braille

Institute is not one of artists

swooping in to empower the helpless,

because they are pretty fucking

empowered. One of our visually

impaired collaborators has lived alone

in Hollywood with her service dog for

years. She doesn’t need us to “save”

her. I think what our relationship with

the Braille Institute does is open up

a new terrain for human connection,

exchange, and understanding. We gain a

deeper understanding of each other as

artists, makers, and human beings, that enriches our own experience and

our interactions with others.

It’s not just physical disability, either. Knitting and crochet are known

to assist concentration in children with ADHD. As Kathryn Vercillo,

one of our frequent contributors writes in Crochet Saved My Life, it

A submission from Esther Finney, visually impaired crochet instructor at the Braille Institute for the Visually Impaired.

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has helped her and countless people cope with depression.17 I too cope

with mental disability, a depression that leaves me confined to my bed

for days, and post traumatic stress disorder that leaves me gasping

and dizzy after a chance encounter on the subway. Crocheting for a

few hours is how I escape my thoughts, and feel like I am still doing

something productive, in control of my own hands even as my mind is

spiraling into a black elsewhere.

I think this relationship between craft and disability has something

to do with centering an experience within the body in an age when more

and more voices are beginning to critique the mind-body split model

inherited from the Western Enlightenment.18 That as your body, or your

mind, becomes something strange and bedridden, it can be incredibly

empowering to pick up a pair of needles and know that you can still

express yourself through making. That touch, on a very basic and primal

level, is healing.

For me, it’s important to rewrite the idea of art-making to include

the experience of disability and disabled artists. I am often awed at

how much being an artist, and being a member of society in general,

is contingent on one being able-bodied. You know, the Jackson Pollock

model of displaying your virility through pouring paint over an

excessively large canvas. But what if we suddenly become bedridden

for months, even years, with illness? What if we need to take time

off every day in order to care for ourselves,19 and can’t possibly keep

up with the 2-day-jobs-and-all-night-painting-in-the-studio schedule

17 Kathryn Vercillo. Crochet Saved My Life. (CreateSpace: 2012).

18 Rene Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. (Simon & Brown, 2001)

19 Christine Miserandino,. “The Spoon Theory”. Accessed Nov 28, 2014 at http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ “Its hard, the hardest thing I ever had to learn is to slow down, and not do everything. I fight this to this day. I hate feeling left out, having to choose to stay home, or to not get things done that I want to. I wanted her to feel that frustration. I wanted her to understand, that everything everyone else does comes so easy, but for me it is one hundred little jobs in one. I need to think about the weather, my temperature that day, and the whole day’s plans before I can attack any one given thing. When other people can simply do things, I have to attack it and make a plan like I am strategizing a war. It is in that lifestyle, the difference between being sick and healthy. It is the beautiful ability to not think and just do. I miss that freedom. I miss never having to count ‘spoons’.”

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demanded of the professional artist?20 I want to live in a world in

which these able-bodied barriers to making are first acknowledged, and

then structurally overcome. Artists should live with disability and art-

making should not be the purview of the able-bodied.

20 Sunny Taylor. “The Right Not to Work”, Monthly Review, Vol 5:10 (2004). Accessed Nov 28, 2014 at http://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/the-right-not-to-work-power-and-disability/

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DYE-archy

We started as a democratic enterprise. We had a dream of horizontality.

And then somewhere along the way, horizontality went awry.

In a statement that will no doubt make John Locke and a thousand

suffragettes turn over in their graves, I no longer believe so much

in democracy, as I do now in DYE-archy. Diarchy, as poet Sonia Sanchez

would define to us, is:

[...] the whole idea of patriarchy and matriarchy portends

something called ‘power.’ We might have had these women-

centered homes, but it didn’t mean power. [...] I came up

with a term called diarchy. I said Black families were

diarchal, most of them, in that you might have had a

woman there, a mother there, but you had a grandmother,

you had an uncle, you had some cousins in there. Diarchy

happens when a family is under duress, under stress from a

society.21

Democracy has functioned in YBLA in terms of thinking about decision-

making and worth, but not really about roles. Perhaps the problem

with horizontality is that it presumes an equivalence of power with an

equivalence in individual subjectivities. This is simply not true. A

collaborative relationship with an introverted, diffident collaborator

is so much different from a relationship with an outspoken, headstrong

one. In these situations, a perfect theory of social organization cannot

be uniformly applied.

Instead of democracy, I’ve been thinking about social structures that

are, in fact, tailored to the individual voices and needs of the

participants. So I like to refer to this idea of the DYE-archy, because

we do act like a family, and we all have roles that relate to our

gender, life experiences, and age. I think that people can hold equal

21 Sonia Sanchez, “A Course on the Black Woman”, Youtube, 8:41, posted by thevisionaryproject, March 22, 2010. Accessed Nov 28, 2014 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISn0x008eFI.

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amounts of power, but still play different roles. And I would even

venture to say that this is a more fair and kind model than democracy,

because it acutely recognizes and is centered around people’s strengths

and needs.

In a conversation with another artist collective,22 one of the members

once referred to this as the “rock band” model of collectivity. You

don’t want everyone to be the lead singer - too much hairspray and ego

would get in the way. Instead, you recognize the validity of the bass

player and the drummer.

As we are much less of an enterprise based on rock and roll (though you

never know), I like to describe what we have as simply, family.

22 Ed Giardina from Finishing School, to be exact. Thanks, Ed. http://finishing-school-art.net.

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Entanglement

There’s this man in our collective who loves to disentangle balls of

yarn. He will sit there for hours, calmly unknotting yarn and passing

one skein under the other until finally, a perfect ball of yarn has been

created.

Yarn inevitably falls into some form of entanglement, given long enough.

Shuttled from bag to bag, hand to hand, the ends start to disappear

into one large, interconnected mass. If you keep at collective practice

long enough, you’ll also find yourself in some form of entanglement.

Perhaps your finances all of a sudden become part of the group’s finances

because you don’t want to go through a fiscal sponsor. Perhaps you

start finding the collective’s art supplies all over your garage turned

studio apartment. Perhaps you keep on losing a pair of scissors every

single time to the communal stash. Maybe you start talking about the

collective whenever someone starts asking about you. Perhaps you become

emotionally and personally invested in well being of your collaborators’

families. Perhaps your collaborators become personally invested in your

lack of a car.

Entanglement is natural as is the desire to disentangle into some sort

of autonomous, workable entity that will inevitably become entangled

again. When you become entangled, you have two choices. You can cut off

the entangled portion and throw it away, which is a shame and a waste

of yarn, or you can slowly re-trace your steps, and figure out how you

became entangled into the first place.

23

Gauge

Gauge determines how large a piece of fabric a type of yarn will

create. The size of a piece of fabric depends on the thickness of the

yarn, the size of the knitting needles, and the particular habits of

the knitter. Some people always knit at a smaller gauge, yarn tightly

wound around their needles at all times. I, on the other hand, tend to

make big gaping looping holes.

Knitters really like to know their gauge. Without it, that sweater

for your child might balloon into a sweater for yourself. Inevitably

when we put out a call for entries, the first question is, “what is the

gauge”? And then when we inevitably reply, “It’s up to you! The sky is

the limit! Use your imagination!” a panicked look flickers behind the

questioners’ eyes.

This is because knitters live with a lot of rules and precision in

order to create a crafted, loving object. And even within the guise of

conducting an “artistic venture,” some rules are required for comfort

and for sanity. “Just do anything,” is more terrifying and frustrating

than, “We need blue pieces in a certain size.” The key is to balance

the stipulation of rules with enough freedom to stimulate creativity

and encourage people to confront their own fear of knitting outside the

gauge.

For people who have been meticulously measuring their gauge their

entire life, breaking the rules can seem like an absolute rearranging

of their reality. Which can result in incredibly fulfilling and

unexpected results, and is perhaps one of the main functions of art and

the artist in society.

Gauge the situation.

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Group Quilt

A group quilt occurs when a group of people decide upon a certain

square, pattern, and size for their part of the quilt. Each quilter

then goes home and makes nine, or however many versions of the square

that was decided upon. The quilters then reunite, and exchange their

squares so that each person’s quilt contains squares made by the other

quilters.

Group quilts exemplify the crossroads between individuality and loss

of authorship. Certainly each square made by an individual quilter has

its own signature flair. Sometimes it might even be too ugly for the

recipient of said square. When all the squares are pieced together,

however, the quilt loses any individual authorship over the making of

the quilt. The quilt reflects the group that made it, as well as the

material history of the chosen quilt pattern and methodology.

Group quilts are not the only group processes, but I do wish we had

more language to parse out the difference between individuality and

authorship, and to not care so much about the latter.23

23 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method. (Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 1999). Words that I have been thinking about lately, regarding the relationship between individual and collective subjectivity:“In the 1960s many people came to realize that in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless or anonymous crowd or “mass” but, rather, a new level of being… in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualisms of all kinds.”

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Head Poncho

Somehow, within this mesh of personalities and voices, I have become

the gatekeeper. And it is an uncomfortable position for someone who

dearly believes in collectivity. I am uncomfortable at this amount of

power centered in my being. But I also know that, in ceding me this

power, others have placed in me the power that they are hesitant to

wield in themselves, or to be wielded by another.

So I deemed myself the “Head Poncho.” Head because you should know

that I’m in charge. Poncho because puns comparing myself to a piece

of outerwear help undercut any sense of dictatorial authority. Not to

mention that most “honchos” are men. And I try to practice a balance

of being in charge and being extraordinarily humble at the same time.

Being in charge paradoxically means that you are the most beholden to

the wishes and needs of the group. At least, if you’re trying to be

ethical about it.

It can be extraordinarily humbling when something goes wrong with an

outside partner and I take responsibility on behalf of the group. Or to

come up with what you consider a brilliant idea only to discover that

the group doesn’t buy into it. Buy-in is incredibly important because

it makes the difference between feeling like you are dragging along a

group of people for several months, instead of collaborating in unison.

I lead, but I don’t do anything alone.

Perhaps we need to rewrite our understanding of leadership to not mean

“being in charge,” but rather, “at your service.” In that case, we can

all be leaders. And we can all be in service to one another.

I also have been thinking about Paulo Freire’s adages on leadership.

Which is that revolutions require an organized body and a leader. But a

true revolutionary leader always listens and leads with the people, not

apart from them.24

24 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons - not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It

26

Instruction

Every person I have talked to about how they learned to knit have

replied with some form of, “my mother taught me.” Strangely, no one

has ever learned to knit from an art school or a four year university.

My mother taught me how to knit and crochet at a young age. All the

women on my mom’s side of the family knit. I still remember my aunt

coming up to me when I was five, and asking me to pick out a yarn for

a sweater she was making me. To this day, people recoil when I tell

them my grandmother knit me a pair

of pants (It was cold. They were

warm.). Learning how to knit, sew,

and crochet seemed as natural as the

hum of my mother’s sewing machine,

churning out dresses because we

couldn’t afford to purchase them from

stores.

Crafting is among the traditions

that are self taught or passed down

through generations, and that is

radical to me. What else are they

not teaching in schools? Each craft

object made thus carries with them that instructional moment of one-on-

one encounter, one hand touching the other while seated at the kitchen

table, in a library, in the living room—somewhere outside of a school.

The movements become a dance that your grandmother danced, a material

is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). (55).“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. In this way, the presence of the oppressed in the struggle for their liberation will be what it should be: not pseudo-participation, but committed involvement.” (69)

Cora, an aspiring fashion designer, teaches one of her peers how to finger-knit during a public event at UCLA Fowler Museum.

27

memory passed down through touch. Craft knowledge is an intimate

knowledge at the same time that it is a shared one.

It is incredibly inspiring when we come up with an idea for an art

project, and members of our community take ownership of the project

enough that they start instructing casual participants on how to do

the project. Even better when two people who don’t know each other and

who aren’t actively involved in the collective, attend the same workshop

session and find themselves teaching each other their own particular

milieu of craft knowledge.

Ideas travel faster when you empower others to teach that idea.

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Looping

All knitting and crochet begins with a loop. A slipknot of one piece

of yarn crossed in front of the other and then pushed through the

opening that creates. All knitting and crochet consists of just loops,

reconfigured. Multiple loops that you cast onto a needle. A single loop

that you pull through another loop. Two loops if your preference is to

double crochet. Three loops that you move onto a third needle so you

can knit the three loops behind it (this is what we call cabling).

Activities don’t have to be difficult, and most of the time, should not

be difficult. Break it down. Talk about loops.

29

Manifesto for Maintenance Work, 201425

C. Maintenance [of social practices] is a drag; it takes all the fucking

time (lit.)

The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.

The [institutionalized social practice] culture confers lousy status on

maintenance jobs [required to sustain social practice projects once the

‘artist’ leaves] =

minimum wages, housewives [and volunteer performers] = no pay.

Clean your desk, [clean your studio], [look up people to add to the

mailing list], finish the report, [send the newsletter], [upload pictures

to facebook], correct the typos, pay your bills, [track down your

invoices], [start a twitter], [decide if you want to become an LLC or

501c3], save string, go to the store, [sort through donations], [sort

supplies into ikea bags for workshops], [take those ikea bags on the

bus because you don’t have a car], [give instruction], say it again - he

doesn’t understand, [smile and nod], [wonder if you’re being ethical],

[send out meeting notes and agendas], [sit through meetings with city

officials], [contact the engineer], call him again

D. Art. Everything I say is Art is Art [even sending emails].

Everything I do is

Art is Art [even making spreadsheets]. “We have no art, we try to do

everything

well.” (Balinese saying).

Avant-garde [social practice] art, which claims utter development, is

infected

by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and

maintenance materials.

Conceptual and Process Art, especially, claim pure development

and change, yet employ [unacknowledged volunteer labor and] purely

almost maintenance processes [that ought to be economically sustained

beyond the budget of a 3 month exhibition].

25 A rewriting of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969!

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Motherhood

Many of the people within our collective are mothers (and one father).

Organizing a group of mothers is radically different from organizing a

group of single, attractive people in their early thirties, which tends

to be the demographic of activists that invite me to social justice

happy hours in bars. In the interest of becoming a mother one day, and

of being included in social life, here are a couple of observations

about mothers.

Mothers don’t live 9-to-5 schedules.

It’s a miracle that mothers can take any time off at all from being a

mother to participate in a public art project. Mothers sometimes have

time to themselves between the hours when they drop their kids off and

pick their kids up from school - so approximately 10am to 3pm. In the

evenings, they’re helping their children with homework. On the weekends,

they’re dropping their kids off at guitar lessons and picking their

kids up from soccer practice. Summers for mothers are not too good,

unless they can send their kids to summer camp.

So how do you reach out into this temporality of mothers? The easiest

way is to just ask them. Barring that, mothers can most likely get away

during daylight and on the weekends. Mothers are also skilled at taking

phone calls while cleaning dishes, so perhaps you want to check in with

them over the phone or email instead of physically. But never expect a

mother to attend each and every one of your meetings—birthday parties

simply will get in the way. Instead, practice understanding and working

on finding mothers a way to stay updated and contribute from the comfort

of their own home—in between soccer practices, of course.

Mothers take their children places.

The easiest place to have a mother attend your gathering is to welcome

their children. But of course, this requires some tweaking of the

gathering format.

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Location is an obvious concern. Bars are perhaps not good settings

for these interactions. Instead, places that provide distractions for

children are key. Places with happy meals, places with playscapes,

places with things for children to explore and look at. In the absence

of that, bring your own distractions. I hear kids are easily soothed

with iPads these days.

Kids can only watch the Disney channel on their iPads for so long,

however. I’ve noticed that kids start complaining at the two hour mark,

which is when the distractions usually run out. Something to consider

when planning the timespan of a collective gathering.

In general, serious meetings with a lot of pontification don’t go over

well with children. To be quite honest, serious meetings with a lot of

pontification don’t go over well with many adults, either. There is a

time and place for those, but I hope you keep those to a minimum—and/or

post a heavy disclaimer before inviting me.

I once had a conversation with one of my artist friends who felt that

she couldn’t participate in a collective fully because the meetings

took place for three hours in the evening. Her child, who she would

take to these meetings, often grew disruptive and cranky. I asked her

what she imagined as a solution, and she suggested a system of rotating

childcare, kind of like setting up an adjacent daycare to the meeting

space. I thought this was a great idea and I’ve tried to initiate it

at gatherings, but I have never been able to get it to work. Inevitably

despite everyone’s best intentions, the mother is the one who ends up

running after her child. Something to ponder and think about, because I

still think it’s a brilliant idea that I would like to see realized.

This entire treatise may make it seem like children are little terrors,

but they are little joys as well, or at the very least a truth of

community-oriented life. And actually, taking one’s children places

becomes an incredible advantage once mothers have children that are

in college or in their late twenties. Then the children become extra

helping hands—read: unpaid labor—in fabrication and installation.

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Mothers are highly educated, accomplished, skilled and cool.

Mothers seem to become synonymous with their children and/or their

duties once they reach motherhood. Which obscures this very important

fact - mothers are actually much cooler than their children! Mothers

have advanced degrees in obscure fields. Mothers have worked a variety

of jobs before settling into motherhood. Mothers have hobbies. Mothers

tell really, really shocking jokes about penises. So yes, the person

you’re organizing is a mother. But she is also so much more than that.

In a nutshell, mothers are very valuable people with very specific

circumstances and needs. For Christ’s fucking sake, organize your next

social practice project to include mothers.

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Patterning

Patterning is all over the internet. Across multiple robust networks,

knitters and crocheters share, create, exchange, and purchase patterns

for their work. In search for a new shawl? Baby slippers? Christmas

tree ornaments for your coworkers who you don’t actually like that much?

There’s a pattern for that.

Only big corporations such as Lion Brand yarn make you pay for patterns.

But a crafty crafter knows how to get her patterns on the sly.26 She

knows how to xerox patterns out of her circle’s books. The forums in

which she can ask others for patterns. How to look at a certain pattern

for purchase, find a similar free pattern on the internet, and then

modify it so that it’s almost similar.

That’s the thing, is that all patterns become modified and undergo a

mutation of some sort once it’s in the hands of the crafter. I mean,

you’re not really going to have a stash of XYZ yarn from XYZ company in

XYZ dyelot lying around to make that

one sweater for a person of XYZ height

and girth, are you? Crafters take

existing patterns, split them apart,

add a drop stitch here, an intarsia

piece there, change the prevailing

texture from stockinette to seed

stitch, and all of a sudden the pattern

becomes something new and unique. And

perhaps once that crafter shares her

new pattern with her friend, it mutates

from there.

Patterning is the dissemination of free and open knowledge. Patterning

is the new open source.27 Fuck it, open source is the new patterning.

26 Ravelry.com is a popular resource for free patterns.

27 Ele Carpenter, “Open Source Embroidery: Curatorial Facilitation of Material Networks”. in The Textile Reader, ed Jessica Hemmings. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) p. 336-346.

Three contributors from Missouri artfully demonstrate variations on the granny square pattern.

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Piecework

Garment industry workers are sometimes paid per piece. They come, pick

up their supplies from the central factory, and complete the work at

home. Hats, garments, you name it are created in this manner, and this

type of economy often enables undocumented and illegal laborers to be

paid similar undocumented and illegal wages.

Piecework is a potential model for economic exploitation, and a

potential model for collective working. I know, sometimes social

practice looks like fascism. However, piecework functions in our

collective in terms of bridging the gap between collective gatherings

and individual contributions.

As much as we would all like to gather together and collectively work

on a piece from start to finish, our jobs and families don’t permit

collectivity to such an extent. The second best alternative is to break

the project down into small pieces for people to take home, assemble,

and bring back to the next gathering.

The piecework methodology has worked tremendously for us and allowed

us to be more inclusive of people who are often limited by time

and geography. We would like to think that instead of economically

exploiting the situation, piecework allows for each collective member to

structure their life so that it can accommodate economic needs and art-

making.

Much like economic piecework, however, someone needs to organize

the distribution of pieces. Piecework functions best when everyone

has a clear idea of the overall goal and how their particular piece

contributes to that goal. Even the most complex goals and ideas benefit

from being broken down into smaller, simpler parts, one piece at a

time.

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Repurposing

I have a theory that, when the world goes to shit, the poor are the

ones who will survive. They’ll survive because they have had to survive

their entire life.

These days I occasionally raise an eyebrow at the latest urban garden

or reusable shopping bag campaign, because those were not en vogue when

my immigrant parents smuggled seeds to the United States and planted

gardens because we could not afford food for a family of four, not

because we were inspired by a book by Alice Waters.28 Urban gardening,

in my personal history, has always belonged to the poor.

Repurposing, I think, also belongs to the poor, and to crafters. So

many crafters I know are resourceful in so many ways. They collect

bottle caps, soda-pop tabs, buttons, newspapers, clothing labels,

and find ways to remake them into something absolutely stunning and

functional. They make their own bags out of t-shirts, and their own

yarn out of bags.29

An ethos of resourcefulness and repurposing is woven into the history

of craft. The humble granny square began as a way for crocheters to use

up their leftover yarn. Building on the modular element of a simple,

small square, the granny square allowed crocheters to create afghans,

shawls, bags, and what-have-you from the scraps at the bottom of their

yarn stash. Improvisational quilts created by former African-American

slave families also consist of fabric scraps painstakingly reconfigured

into beautiful, functional works of art.30

So don’t get it twisted. This practice of re-contextualizing objects from

everyday life did not begin with Duchamp or Warhol. It began with crafters.

28 Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. (New York, NY: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1999).

29 Rebecca Earley, “Upcycling Textiles: Adding Value Through Design”. in The Textile Reader, ed Jessica Hemmings. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) pp. 376-386

30 Lisa Hix. “The Beautiful Chaos of Improvisational Quilts.” in Collectors Weekly, July 13, 2011. Accessed February 2015 at http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/quilting-jazz-with-a-needle-and-thread/

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Riot Grrrl

Riot Grrrl is an early social practice movement that is just now

currently being institutionalized into the hallowed texts of art

history, via the current exhibition Alien She.31

Riot Grrrl embodies a lot of the ideals of contemporary social

practice. Kathleen Hanna’s Riot Grrrl Manifesto discusses anti-

capitalism, the creation of communities without hierarchies, and the

grassroots production of culture via do-it-yourself posters, fanzines,

and mix tapes.32 Riot Grrrl traveled fast and furious through word of

31 Earlier appearances of Riot Grrrl in the museum include programs in the Walker Art Center during the 1990s, I am told by a source close to me who used to work at the Walker.

32 Kathleen Hanna, “Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” Bikini Kill Zine, 1991.BECAUSE us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways.BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other’s work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other.BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings. BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.BECAUSE we want and need to encourage and be encouraged in the face of all our own insecurities, in the face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can’t play our instruments, in the face of “authorities” who say our bands/zines/etc are the worst in the US andBECAUSE we don’t wanna assimilate to someone else’s (boy) standards of what is or isn’t.BECAUSE we are unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary “reverse sexists” AND NOT THE TRUEPUNKROCKSOULCRUSADERS THAT WE KNOW we really are.BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock “you can do anything” idea is crucial to the coming angry grrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives.BECAUSE we see fostering and supporting girl scenes and girl artists of all kinds as integral to this process.BECAUSE we hate capitalism in all its forms and see our main goal as sharing information and staying alive, instead of making profits of being cool according to traditional standards.BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Sad, Girl = Weak.

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mouth, records and mail, spreading like a virus through person to

person contact. Words and images become photocopied, recombined until

there was no individual voice, only a raucous roar shouting revolution.

Riot Grrrl gathered in conventions and protests. Riot Grrrl captured an

audience that was marginalized from the traditional art world, and from

traditional male-dominated punk venues.

Riot Grrrl also exhibits the same problematics that prevent it from

being canonized in art history. There is no one singular author of Riot

Grrrl. Riot Grrrl never tried to be a part of the art museum culture,

despite the many visual ephemera and performative actions produced. And

the voices shouting their truths are the voices of teenage girls and

young women, voices that still strive to be heard today in their full

authenticity.

Riot Grrrl became a movement because while there was certainly a

center, i.e. Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill, it was an idea that could

take many forms and be easily adopted by others. In this sense, Riot

Grrrl lost its center, ceased to become organized activity, and instead

became a dangerous transmission of ideas.

If movements are headless, how do we attribute them?

BECAUSE we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and/or turned against us via the internalization of sexism as witnessed in girl/girl jealousism and self defeating girltype behaviors.BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.

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Social enterprise

I first learned about social enterprise from partnering with the

Downtown Women’s Center, a permanent supportive housing facility for

homeless women in Skid Row. Downtown Women’s Center has been engaging

in social enterprise for two years now. They provide professional

development and hands on skill training for homeless women to craft

jewelry, pouches, soaps, and various other items to sell through the

Downtown Women’s Center and its partners.33 The Downtown Women’s Center

then pays the women per piece that they create.

As artists, we were brought in as partners to design products for the

women to create. After several testing sessions, we then conducted

4-week workshops in which we taught

women how to knit and incorporate those

skills into the final product.

Partnering through the Downtown Women’s

Center was a phenomenal learning

experience to understand how artists

working in socially engaged manners

can partner with larger social service

organizations. There’s a certain

learning exchange that occurs between

both groups, from us learning how

a social services agency operates, to the Downtown Women’s Center

learning about how we use public art to make a public statement.

As an artist, I ask a lot about how much of my integrity or criticality

I give up when I partner with a social institution. Are artists only

mouthpieces for the ideals of the social institution? I think about the

proposition to design a poster illustrating some nonprofit’s slogan, and

I cringe. Where is the art in that?

33 Dena Younkin, “Engaging Community Through Social Enterprise”. Posted in Social Enterprise Alliance Los Angeles Chapter, June 23, 2014. Accessed November 28, 2014 at http://www.sealosangeles.org/engaging_community_through_social_enterprise

Knit house ornaments created in collaboration with homeless and formerly homeless women at the Downtown Women’s Center.

39

I think partnerships between artists and social institutions work best

when art-making is acknowledged as a complementary and integral part

of the social institution’s mission. In the Downtown Women’s Center’s

case, knitting was not just an act designed to broadcast their message.

Instead, knitting became part of their operations, a way to provide

a therapeutic activity to homeless women and encourage them to earn

income.

It has been incredibly fulfilling as an artist to be able to consult

with policy makers, social workers, and researchers on unique social

issues, the complexity of which I would not be able to grasp through

just my own research alone. At its height, artists and social

institutions mutually benefit from exchanging with each other and finding

a way to complement each other’s work. Social enterprise provides one

model for potential collaboration between artists and social service

organizations.

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Spin-tern

What is an internship in today’s society? What does it empower one to do?

What kind of a world are we offering our college graduates as they set

out into the world, eyes bright and minds filled with recondite Foucault

theories?34

Pedagogically speaking, all experiences are learning experiences. But

some learning experiences are better than others. Through our spin-tern

program, I have attempted to rethink what it means to offer mentorship and

receive free labor in a post-industrial economy.

My parents, who grew up in an era where a college education promised full

time employment and retirement benefits, don’t quite understand what I do.

And I doubt I will fully understand the hybridized jobs that my spin-terns

will continue onto in their lives, even though we’re only a few years

apart in age. My spin-terns talk about starting fashion cooperatives in

Africa, combining digital information technology with art history, and

grassroots consumer-oriented marketing. They are the social entrepreneurs

and content curators of tomorrow, whatever those phrases may mean.

The question always, in the back of my head, is how to tailor an

internship experience for a professional world that is yet undefined, while

at the same time of course convincing someone to share in the drudgery of

making phone calls and researching mailing lists.

This is what I think I can and have offered my spin-terns:

Art World 101

I graduated with my BFA knowing nothing about how the art world operated.

To be honest, sometimes I’m still mystified. The art world is not something

that comes knocking on your door as you sit inside your studio and

generate works of genius. The art world does not run on meritocracy.

Granted, neither does most of the world, but at least the art world has

34 My personal favorite Foucault text is Friendship as a Way of Life. http://commoningtimes.org/texts/mf_friendship_as_a_way_of_life.pdf

41

the good taste to not pretend. There are many art worlds out there,

and the secret is knowing which art world to court and which to avoid.

Artists need to be good at mundane things like keeping budgets and

filing one’s taxes. Artists spend a large part of their professional time

writing emails. Throughout my life I have found artistic labor to be

misrepresented and because of that, derogated and undercompensated. My

first task with my spin-terns is to unveil the practical mechanics behind

the romantic notion of being an artist. In doing so, hopefully they can

learn how to manipulate those mechanics into a life they feel is worth

living.

Create Your Own Learning Experience

All of my spin-terns, perhaps because they are wiser than me, don’t

wish to pursue a career as a strict fine artist. The great part about a

public art collective is that it offers a wealth of experiences ranging

from social entrepreneurship, to marketing, to art historical research.

I always try to sit down with my spin-terns and find out about their

interests and their career goals, and then think through how those can

be addressed through their work with our organization. They are often

so passionate and have so many great ideas about ways in which we could

improve on our projects. Sometimes they know exactly what they need to

see their idea through, other times their great idea needs guidance to

become a reality. Either way, even if their idea doesn’t become a reality

within the organization, I try to guide them through the process of

growing an idea from seed to reality.

A slight shift in learning also happens during these interactions. I find

that I am often the one learning most from my spin-tern about all the

newfangled topics that they’re studying in schools these days. They are

the marketing degree I never had, the constant reminder to be kind, the

passion that rekindles the flame in my heart when it grows low. Through

empowering my spin-terns to craft their own internship experience, I

hope I can inspire them to take charge of their education in other ways

as well. Perhaps they’ll realize they already have all the knowledge

inside of them, in order to take on this swiftly tilting planet.

42

Stitch ‘N Bitch

A stitch ‘n bitch is a routine gathering of crafters in which they work

on their various projects and discuss their lives. People meet other

crafters working on similar projects, become inspired by each other’s

works, and engage in interpersonal exchange.

Stitch circles like this are common and have happened across time and

geographies. But within the general there is a specific. Each stitch

‘n bitch brings together a certain configuration of personalities and

skills that might be better suited to one person than the other. I

remember one of the ladies in our group, Susie, telling us about how

she had been to several stitch groups all across the city, but because

of reasons of proficiency and/or personality, felt most welcome in ours.

Stitch ‘n bitches are also

one of those forms of

convivial gatherings, like

dinners, in which there

is no greater purpose in

bringing people together

than just to be. What

are the politics in this,

compared to the politics

of a gathering such as a

march or a parade with an

express political purpose?

I think this relates to

the temporality of craft

and durational community-

based work, which asks for engagement beyond the timeframe of a

single 5 hour march. Certainly political demonstrations are explosive,

communicative, and effective.35 However, stitching and bitching engages

35 Alex Ihnen, “The Powerful Symbolism of Shutting Down an Interstate.” Posted in nextSTL.com, November 25, 2014.. Accessed February 10, 2015 at http://nextstl.com/2014/11/powerful-symbolism-shutting-interstate/. If you must know, I’ve been soul searching a lot over the recent resurgence in anti-police brutality activism, to the point that I find it imperative that my forms of

All stitches, no bitches at a typical stitch ‘n bitch.

43

in the durational politics of staying with someone over time, and

transforming them through dedicated, consistent support. Stitching and

bitching says that all parts of your life that plague you, like your

back pain or your husband’s behavior, are important and deserving of

support, not just the part of your life that shows up on the news. That

survival, maintenance, and care of the individual and social body are

in itself, political acts that need no further explicit politics.36

living, including my art practice, must change. Thank goodness I wrote this thesis first, as a document of my craft practice. I still believe that craft saves, just perhaps not from police brutality.

36 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays. (Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 1988) “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that in itself is an act of political warfare.”

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Street hooker

One day I woke up and realized I was a street hooker.

Not to demean or diminish the work of actual sex workers. I certainly

don’t experience the specter of sexual violence and financial precarity—

well, not to that degree in my chosen profession, anyway. But the same

systemic form of oppression that governs the lives of street hookers

also governs well, my particular form of street hooking.

Street hookers are ladies who dare to step outside the home. Ladies

who practice our craft in public. We take up street corners with our

bodies and our economies, practicing unsanctioned acts that spark the

imagination. Our profession requires us to be limber and physically

daring. We always come prepared with supplies. Our very existence

troubles a landscape built upon the premises of sanitized, controlled

public spaces. And the legal system has no idea what to do with us.

Walking down the street and

riding public transportation

in Los Angeles, I receive

at least one look or ‘hey

girl’ per day implying that

the price for appearing

in public is a constant

reminder of my subjugation

in private. This message

is repeated through

images in street art that

glorify the romance of the

guerilla tagger through

unimaginative, half naked,

sexually available cisgender

female bodies with their

heads blown off. There is nowhere to retreat, not even the spaces of

supposed “guerilla subversion.” Remember that time I got catcalled by

In the spring of 2014 I guerilla distributed over 70 anti-sexual harassment signs in the overhead adspace of Metro buses all across Los Angeles. Did this lessen the level of harassment I received daily? Nah. But after changing their annual survey language to include sexual harassment, Metro will launch a spring 2015 collaboration with Peace Over Violence against sexual harassment. Interventionist art: it works.

45

the “artist tent” at Occupy LA? A woman in public is always subject to

the rhetoric of sexual control.

What’s a girl to do? No, not hide in our homes once the sun goes down,

because that’s what you want us to do. We’re going to seize the means of

production37 and occupy public space on our own pink, fuzzy, lascivious,

money-making terms. STREET HOOKERS UNITE.

37 Once again, Kathleen Hanna’s “Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” ladies, gentlemen, and gender-nonconforming folks:“BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings.”

46

Swatching

Swatching is the practice of knitting/crocheting small pieces of fabric

in order to test out yarn thickness and needle size before officially

embarking on a project. Also to see how certain fibers, especially

variegated ones, look when developed into a larger piece.

It’s helpful to test out many iterations of an idea before launching it

officially or getting other people involved. Because many of our projects

are based in collective making and crowdsourcing, often we make many

prototypes, or “swatches” of a project idea before releasing a call for

entry. Also, sometimes people like instructions. This might be weird

for you to understand as a freewheeling artist. Just roll with it.

47

Tension

Maintaining the right amount of tension is key to knitting and crochet.

Too loose, and you will not be able to pick up the yarn with your

hook. Too tight, and you will not be able to get the yarn off of your

needle. In the terms of crochet, tension requires pulling in multiple

directions in order to get the loop just right. Depending on your mood,

the tension in your work can vary from day to day. Similar issues occur

when sewing different fabrics, which require testing different thread

tensions. Jersey? Good luck with that.

Tension is a present, and even

necessary ingredient of social

relations. One cannot enter into

a network of social relationships

and not expect it to contain some

tension. People inevitably bring

their own baggage and biases—and

guess what, you do too! Despite

everyone’s best intentions,

tension results from conflicts in

understanding and experience.

The real trick is not to avoid the tension, but rather to identify it,

understand it, and calibrate the right amount for your project.

Successful crocheting [and social organizing] requires being pulled in two directions.

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Time

Crafting time is unlike consumer time. Crafting time is unlike driving

time. Crafting time is unlike capitalist time.

Crafting is slow and repetitive. Crafting has no deadlines, because at

some point your hands just simply cannot knit faster than the speed of

light. Crafting resists instant gratification. Crafting is about watching

something develop before your eyes and underneath your hands, one row

at a time.38

There is one thing that crafting time is like. Crafting time is

like human time. It takes just about the same amount of time to

produce transformative change in an individual, as it does to knit

five sweaters. Or fifty sweaters. Or three sweaters. You know what I

mean. Crafting time is like institutional time, because both you and

I know how sluggish bureaucracies can be. To learn how to work within

individuals, societies, movements, and/or institutions, you need to

learn how to craft.

Crafting time requires patience. It is an ethic of tending and not

of rupture. Of pleasure in process instead of pleasure in result.

Crafting requires a sustained vision of the end result, and the quiet

persistence to see it through.

I was not taught to tell time according to craft in art school. I was

taught to turn in a new piece for critique every week. I was not taught

to craft time in capitalist workplaces that wanted everything faster,

immediately, now. When people want me to make sweaters for them,

tomorrow, I think they must not have learned time according to craft,

either.

But now as I work within people, as I peer within myself over the years

it has taken me to recover from post traumatic stress disorder, I have

38 Mole Leigh, “Chromanual Craft: Time Investment as a Value in Contemporary Western Craft”, in Journal of Design History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2002), pp. 33-45. Oxford University Press.

49

learned what it means to tell time according to the lifespan of craft.

The slow development of this stitching beneath my hands is the same as

the slow mending within my heart. And everyone has to mend, is mended

by transformative community work.

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Warm Fuzzies

Everyone loves yarnbombing because sweaters are literally warm and

fuzzy. But I also like to think there’s a psychological attachment to

the warm and fuzzy.

Warm fuzzies are not popular in conceptual art, I think. I find many

artists dealing with subject matters such as abjection, suffering,

angst, frustrated heroism, and social critique. Fewer artists engaged

on the topic of warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies seem to be reserved for the

realm of Lisa Frank and her empire of technicolor pony illustrations.

Feeling good cannot possibly be a gesture of art.

And yet, both literally and psychologically, warm fuzzies have become

an important part of my art practice. I think I have hugged over 200

people in the name of art. I’ve also injured perhaps 3 of those people

with my aggressive hugging. You can probably identify me in our public

workshops because I’m the one chirping out “hello” with a large smile

on my face. My collaborators refer to me as a constant optimist, a

“Polly-Anna” with way too much faith in humanity (I’m working on that).

And yet these simple acts of greeting, acknowledgement, and optimism

are key to sustaining collaborative relationships and connections.

Certainly there are moments when I am exhausted, distracted, and full

of self doubt. But then I think about the leap of faith a stranger

takes, to come to a participatory art event full of people they don’t

know, and to carve out space within their schedule of work, life, and

childcare. The least you can do to return their generosity is to make

them feel welcome and make them feel like they have come to a place of

value to them.

What no one tells you about warm fuzzy behavior, is that it heals you

as much as it heals others.

51

Warping Space

In the Summer of 2014, we were

invited by Cal State Long

Beach University Art Museum

to activate a sculpture that

a student design course had

created in collaboration with

local architecture group

Materials and Applications. We

collaborated with their fiber

arts department and the Long

Beach Depot for Creative Reuse

to create a collaborative loom

that people could weave into

using recycled materials. We

called it Warping Space, because we are great at puns (the warp is the

vertical strands of fiber on a loom, the weft is the horizontal strands.

The more you know.).

What we had unconsciously tapped into through this project was a

centuries old practice of collective weaving. Collective weaving has

been around for millennia. Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book references

a 560 BC Grecian vase depicting women weaving on a floor weighted

room.39 Looms are such large and complicated endeavors, that its setup

inevitably implies collective action. Social relationships around

crafting, then, was not just invented by me, but rather reach back

centuries, even before this understanding of formalized high art.

Another plate shows a sixth millennium B.C. house set up specifically

for weaving. What is notable is that the architecture of the house -

including the location of the pit in the middle, is set up specifically

to accommodate the action of weaving. In this sense, weaving not only

produces a certain type of fabric, but a certain type of architecture

as well. It would be fallacious to just understand the end product of

39 Elizabeth Wayland Barber, “Courtyard Sisterhood”. in Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994). pp. 71-100

Audience members weaving pieces of recycled fabric into the collaborative loom created by Warping Space.

52

crafting as a finished fiber work. Instead, this historical perspective

points to looking at collective crafting practices as a starting point

for the generation, maintenance, and transformation of physical and

social architectures.40

40 Sadie Plant, “Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture”. in The Textile Reader, ed Jessica Hemmings. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) pp. 324 - 335.

53

Weaving in ends

At the end of a finished knit or crocheted piece, knitters and

crocheters begin the process of weaving in the ends, or gathering the

long strands of yarn and seamlessly hiding them inside the fabric.

But should one always weave in the ends? For our granny squared

project, we asked people to leave ends on their granny squares so that

we could use the yarn to sew the granny squares to one another. What

initially seems like a loose end actually became essential in helping

us join one piece to another.

We still have bins and bins of excess granny squares that were donated

to us, and as I think about the bins of granny squares, I think about

how social practice projects don’t ever truly end. One relationship

created three projects ago might turn up again on a current project.

Thus, I celebrate these loose ends and don’t ever try to tie things up

too quickly and completely. You never know when you can use to yarn to

connect to another piece of the project.

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Yarnbassador

These days I feel more like Princess Diana or Miss America than a crafter.

I find myself not sitting on the couch and calmly knitting away to the

sounds of a serial drama, but rather out and about visiting various

knitting groups and trying to involve them in our projects. It feels like

a lot of hand shaking and smiling and waving my hand the way royals do

when they go by on their motorcade.

After feeling like this for a while, I realize that my world is made up

of yarnbassadors, ambassadors of goodwill without which our ambitious

projects would not be possible. They are the ones with their own

gravitational pull who organize their own groups and represent our project

in our absence. If you want to broadcast your message to a large group of

people, begin by relaying it to the yarnbassadors, who will gladly take

your message and carry it with them wherever they go. If you are running

a large public workshop with more than 40 people

in attendance, consider stationing yarnbassadors

throughout who can instruct and inform people

during the workshop.

What makes a successful yarnbassador? A

yarnbassador believes. That is the most

important part of cultivating yarnbassadors—

to excite them as much as possible about your

message so that they will feel part ownership of

it as well. A yarnbassador who feels ownership

will be able to put their own spin on the

message and bring their unique skills to bear

on the situation. Of course, this assumes a

comfort on your part with sharing ownership,

relinquishing control, and anticipating the

unexpected.

Sharing ownership can be difficult, but that’s why we choose our

yarnbassadors wisely.

Yarnbassador Frances shows off her homemade YBLA pin.

55

Yarn Bombing

Yarn Bombing is the transformation of public space through

knit, crocheted, or otherwise crafted forms of urban

intervention commenting on the juxtaposition between the

feminine and the masculine, the domestic and the public …41

If you want to read a theoretical breakdown of yarnbombing, Google is

available for that. I think right now yarnbombing’s relationship to

feminism and urbanism has been pretty well situated and written about

the world over.42 So I’m not going to repeat that.

Rather, as an active yarnbomber, maybe what I can contribute is what

yarnbombing has meant to me. Yarn bombing has been a way for me to

reconcile the landscape of Los Angeles with the rhythms of my own

personal history. Los Angeles is an odd place. There is so much here

and so much to be connected to, but only if you’re able to withstand

the traffic (I’m convinced the

405 highway comprises the

lost eighth circle of Dante’s

hell.43) The extreme burden

of traffic often creates an

alienating experience, as

traveling to loved ones, art

museums, and galleries suddenly

becomes an onerous burden.

It became so that in the

first year of living in Los

Angeles, I found myself driving

41 Just something I wrote off the top of my head. Attributable to no one and everyone who writes about yarnbombing.

42 Hey, there’s even a book devoted to the subject! Mandy Moore and Leann Prain. Yarnbombing: The Art of Knit and Crochet Graffiti. (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009).

43 Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, translated by Henry F. Cary. Vol. XX. The Harvard Classics. (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001). www.bartleby.com/20/

A selection from our “Urban Letters” project; also, an adage for navigating traffic in Los Angeles.

56

in public more so than going to art museums. And thus, all the art

accessible to me was art on the streets. This inspired me to make art

in public using one of the sculptural means that had been passed down

to me through women in my family—fiber arts. What yarnbombing has meant

to me has been a way to find community and make art within the specific

spatial psychology of Los Angeles. I have been able to make art for

terrains that I frequent every day. I have been able to connect to

others far and near and find community by trading in the alienation of

highways for the connectivity of thread. I have been able to reconcile

my own family history of learning to craft from generations past,

through my interactions with people hailing from multiple generations

and age groups.

Ironically, in a practice that is so visually oriented, it’s actually

the invisible parts of yarnbombing that resonate the most. Kathleen,

a woman who had just joined us 3 months ago, put it best when she

said, looking up at the installation that we had just finished “I didn’t

realize this work was 20% the end product, and 80% the process.”

The process of cutting, stitching, organizing, laughing, healing,

threading, making.

57

Postscript: How to Thread a Sewing Machine

Different nodes of social organizations need to be manipulated in

order to achieve a final social product. I want you to think of these

different social nodes as points in a sewing machine. Which is to say

that each mechanism in a sewing machine is threaded differently, and

you have to pay attention to the differences in the various mechanisms.

So talking to city governments might be more angular and less springy

than organizing a group of elderly. And it’s only when you’ve patiently

mastered the art of threading, that you can begin to stitch.

1. Concept generation2. Field research3. Internal buy-in4. Assembling partnerships5. Getting to know partners6. Community organizing7. Grant writing/fundraising8. Budgeting

9. Logistics overview10. Media campaign11. Fabrication12. Community organizing13. City permitting14. Media campaign15. Installation16. Documentation.

Not all sewing machines are threaded similarly! Some don’t even come with manuals ...