The God of Small Details

An essay for the exhibition OverCraft:
Obsession, Decoration and Biting Beauty
The Art Gallery, Haifa University, Israel
November 2003

There are exhibitions that have no need for wordy explanations, viewing them is experiential and un-mediated. OverCraft is such an exhibition. The colorful excess, the toil, the density, and sensual abundance that characterize the works in it magnetize the spectator’s eye with effects of spectacular and multihued beauty. The women artists taking part in the exhibition bring to center stage that which has been pushed to the lowly margins of kitsch and decoration and has belonged exclusively to the world of women. Through empowerment, pleasure, and defiance they elevate what was in the past thought of as an “aesthetic crime” and give it new meaning and content.

In an ironic paraphrase of the American artist Barbara Kruger’s slogan, “We Decorate Your Life,” these artists engage with decoration and ornamentation, obsessive work and handicraft as their principle practice and proudly present seductive, labor intensive beauty without shame or apology, often imbuing it with latent, biting criticism.

In recent years, after a long absence, the concept of “beauty” has returned to the center of the theoretical discourse of contemporary art. In 1999 two central exhibitions on this topic were exhibited in the United States: one at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, and the second, at the Tampa University Museum in South Florida, under the title Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space with Cocktails.(1) The second exhibition was curated by Dave Hickey, one of the prominent theoreticians in the world of American art, whose articles and books paved the way for “beauty” to return to center stage. (2)

OverCraft similarly activates pleasurable sensual experience and renews concepts connected to beauty that had been excluded from the modernist discourse in general and the local Israeli art discourse in particular.(3)The term “decorative” (along with “kitsch” and “illustrative”) was for many years one of the common condemnations in the unwritten rule book of Israeli modernism. Until recently the adjective “beautiful” was a derogatory term in the local ethical code that supported reduction, efficiency, leanness, asceticism, thrift, and austerity. OverCraft renews the discourse on the beautiful, the decorative, and the ornamental, celebrating the joy of liberation from these adjectives’ derogatory labels.

OverCraft’s historical sources are anchored in the feminist wave of the early 1970s, in the radical art of women that dealt with the rehabilitation of traditional women’s craft, motivated by a desire to crystallize its core images and to formulate what would be termed female “essentialism.” Artists such as Harmony Hammond, Faith Wilding, Judy Chicago, and Miriam Schapiro started to express skills that until then had been thought of as lowly, as being “too feminine” in the eyes of the male art world. Judy Chicago’s well known pieceThe Dinner Party (1973) – homage to 39 creative women from history – is a key example of the expression of female essentialism. The grandiose dining table that Chicago created brought together images of nutrition, fertility, and sexuality through the use of handicrafts such as ceramics, tapestry, lace, and embroidery, with an emphasis on soft colors and open, round, and flowing forms. The question of whether there are essentially feminine images, techniques, or materials – is still debated in the field of Feminist Studies. What is clear is that the use of these materials and crafts in the 1970s was a meaningful political act in itself.(4)

With the penetration of feminist theories and their influence on mainstream cultural trends in the 1980s and 1990s, male artists such as Mike Kelly, Lucas Samaras, Oliver Hering, and others also began to knit, sew, and embroider. Women artists such as Ann Hamilton and Annette Messager refined feminine expression and took another step toward labor intensive and detail-filled work, through the use of materials linked exclusively to female territories. The most important artist in the context of OverCraft, however, is the young American Liza Lou, who set a new standard for such work when she created The Kitchen (1991-95), where she covered a standard, life-size American kitchen from top to toe with tiny beads. With the start of the 21st century these trends have been assimilated into the center of the artistic establishment, and at the last Venice Biennial (2003) it was possible to see a record level of decoration and obsession in the works of the British artist Chris Ofili, the Brazilian Beatriz Milhazes, and the Danish Olafur Eliasson.

The women artists participating in OverCraft therefore reflect post-feminist trends dominant in the contemporary international art world: they succeed in refuting disturbing conventions regarding work and gender. They do this in a refreshing manner combining political radicalism, sensual pleasure, and emotional expression. For each and every one of them the laborious, Sisyphean process stands at the center of the artwork, and the final product testifies to the thousands of hours invested in it. The creative process common to all the artists is characterized by monotonous, repetitive, and obstinate acts of cutting, joining, folding, piercing, gluing, covering, and filling in areas in an obsessive manner known in Art History as horror vacui: Yael Yudkovik pierces clay with her fingers; Tal Matzliahfills areas with cross-hatches of color and with mantra-like sentences; Dina Shenhav, Merav Sudaey, andShula Kobo sew and glue sequins and beads; Aya Ben Ron, Meital Katz-Minerbo, and Hilla Ben-Ari cut and glue paper and wallpaper; Tal Amitai, Naomi Siman Tov, and Dina Schupak create the illusion of handwork in painting (embroidery and puzzles); Alice Klingmanand Michal Shamir cover surfaces with various materials (plastic toys and jelly candies); and Miri Chais and Vera Korman perform thousands of virtual acts of “cut & paste” on the computer.

OverCraft reflects the natural way in which craft work has been assimilated within the canonic artistic language after being transformed from folkloric material and functional art, from techniques belonging to “outsider art” or to bourgeois leisure activities, into viable means of expression valued as contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition demonstrates the long way that feminist art has come since the political activism of its early days, which motivated women artists to choose obsessive-decorative techniques as a way to liberate themselves from the hegemony of male, intellectual, and spiritual art up to the renewed engagement with the same practices thirty years later. This time around, however, they are performed with relaxation and humor, with no barricades and banners of war.

In Israel the use of crafts carries additional meanings connected to the Zionist education of the 1950s and 1960s, and to the gender-related division of labor that relegated women to home keeping and excluded them from public life. Elementary school “girl’s crafts” lessons were meant to prepare us for life, armed with the female knowledge necessary in order to be good wives skilled at holding needle and thread and darning socks. Acquiring craft skills was also developed as a kind of hobby that would allow women to keep themselves busy during leisure time as they quietly continued decorating the men’s world. Beyond feminist concerns, however, it must be said that questions of aesthetics and beauty were never at the center of Israeli society. Remains of socialist values are still noticeable in the cultural-ethical code that prefers simplicity, modesty, and visual poverty to any hint of bourgeois luxury. Two artists who lived on kibbutz, Hilla Ben-Ari and Shula Kobo, mentioned the aesthetic deprivation that was part of the ascetic kibbutz society, and confessed their strong desire to compensate themselves through an obsessive preoccupation with beauty and ornamentation. Yet despite the post-modernist blurring of differences between high and low culture, and despite the “high” needing the “low” for over two decades, it is still clear who rules the roost. Contrary to high art dealing with cardinal issues, handicraft still belongs to the “authentic,” “popular,” and “exotic” voice – the world of the domestic, the practical, and the day to day.(5)

Decorative craft is closely linked to the concept of “obsession.” Because of their demanding focus on details and on compulsive repetition, it is commonly said that works of the type shown in this exhibition are “obsessive.” “Obsession” is defined in the dictionary as to “haunt” or “beset” and in clinical psychological terms as a form of neuroses whose main characteristic is the attachment to a troublesome thought, impulse, or image that forces itself on the patient’s mind. It is a closed circle: compulsive obsessive actions are meant to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsession and they express a desperate effort to seemingly control an uncontrollable world.(6)

The clinical definition of “obsession” connects obsessive expressions to the work of “outsider” artists – psychotic artists in a mental state that activates their creative imagination in an unusual manner. In the “Hotel Utopia-Dystopia” – a special edition of Studio Art Magazine (1998:89) edited by Meir Agassi – the “outsiders’” world is defined as “a world experienced and seen as if through autistic glass, a complex universe, dense, intricate and so intensive, that it immediately creates a feeling of discomfort and temporary loss of balance in the viewer who comes in contact with it. Narrative and formal labyrinths direct the eye toward a complex trap of images that flood the paper in a conflicted merging of dream and reality.”(7)

Density, abundance, urgency, compulsion, and discomfort also characterize the works in OverCraft, although, of course, none of the artists here are really “outsiders.” The similarity is only on the visual level and it exists only in the affection for small details. InReading in Detail, the feminist theoretician Naomi Schor writes about society’s negative relationship to small details seen as a form of surplus, as a decadent and annoying expression, in other words as “women’s matters.”(8) Indeed, an essential part of women’s protest turned against the therapeutic language that labeled them as illogical, hysterical, obsessive, and preoccupied with the insignificant. The (male) view was expressed in art as well, where the tendency toward small details was considered the opposite from the ideal, the sublime or classical, threatening to undermine the internal hierarchy of artistic creation and to blur the relations between center and periphery, between the meaningless and the significant, between foreground and background.(9) InOverCraft, therefore, this phenomenon receives a defiant meaning. The artists question which details should be dealt with, and aspire to invert the hierarchy of what is really important. The same details that society bothered to organize, categorize, clean up, and hide as being meaningless, impure, and unworthy acquire here full attention and are treated with critique, love, and humor.

“The uniqueness of obsession is that its compulsive quality could obscure its contents and could become through infinite return the content of itself.”(10) At first glance, the compulsive repetition that characterizes most of the works in this exhibition obscures the contents of the works. Moreover, there is something apparently autistic, disconnected from the world, in this kind of intensive labor. Yet it is precisely here that the strength of the works lies: the rich colorfulness, the harmonious combinations of small details and the actual preoccupation with fragments and shards of imagery and materials are the hook on which the bait is hung – they dizzy the spectator with feelings of pleasure and astonishment and only then surprise with their content. None of the works exhibited here remain on the level of ornamentation: the reaction to reality, discomfort, subversion and sarcasm bubbles under the surface of beauty and is revealed only with a second gaze. Relations of woman-nature, food, sexuality, politics, ecology, psychology, gender roles, body, pornography, and even our political conflict are camouflaged by the rich surfuces. The works’ beauty and their ornamentation veil the spectator’s awareness with a screen of pleasure, neutralizing resistance and then – at the most unexpected moment – they bite.

Notes

1 Viso, O.M., Benezra, N., (eds.), Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 1999); Hickey, D. Ultralounge: The Return of Social Space with Cocktails (Tampa: The University of South Florida, 1999). In this exhibition Hickey exhibited the works on black walls in a darkened space. The ceiling and floor were completely neutralized, and only the works glowed from the walls. The installation of works in OverCraft has been inspired by Hickey’s exhibition.

2 The most important collection of his articles on this subject has been collected under the title: Hickey, D., The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).

3 In this context OverCraft is a direct continuation to previous exhibitions I have curated such as Antipathos at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, (1993) and Metasex at the Ein Harod Museum (1994), which dealt with the non-canonical margins of Israeli art.

4 The current October edition of Artforum (2003) is dedicated to the question of whether today, thirty years after the radicalism of the 1970s, there is still meaning to the term “feminist art.” For an in-depth discussion on the issue of essentiality and the use of crafts see also: Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” in Old Mistress: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).

5 The flagship exhibition that marked and summerized the dialogue between “high” and “low” as expressed in modern art was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1990 (curators: Kirk Varnadoe and Adam Gopnik). See: Varnedoe, K., & Gopnik, A.,High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990) In Israel the Tel Aviv Museum of Art put on the exhibition The Height of the Popular in 2001 (curator: Ellen Ginton). However, the exhibition closest in spirit toOverCraft was A Labor of Love at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1996 (curator: Marcia Tucker). This exhibition focused on contemporary art’s adoption of labor intensive techniques and folkloric crafts. See: Marcia Tucker, A Labor of Love(New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).

6 The first article in which Freud relates to obsessive disorders was written in 1907. See: “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” in Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. & ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) vol. 14., pp. ?? . The definition given here is based on the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (Tel Aviv: Am Oved), p. 4 [Hebrew]. For a clinical definition from the field of psychiatry see also: Harold I. Kaplan & Benjamin J. Sadock, Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences, Clinical Psychiatry (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1998), Chapter 18.5: Anxiety Disorders, pp.326-327.

7 Meir Agassi, “Hotel Utopia-Dystopia,” Studio Art Magazine 89, January 1989, p. 6 [Hebrew].

8 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 4, 15.

9 Marcia Tucker, A Labor of Love (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996) p. 37.

10 Amir Orr, editorial article on obsession, Helikon, Anthological Series of Contemporary and Classical Poetry 22 – Arousings [Hebrew]. See the electronic version at the web site: http://www.snunit.k12.il/sachlav/db/helicon/upload/.num22/content.html