CRAFT: Craft and the Making of "Global" Contemporary Art

11 CRAFT: Craft and the Making of “Global” Contemporary Art Pamela N. Corey The terms craft, decorative arts, and folk art designate constructs that were once (and arguably, in some instances, continue to be) downplayed in descriptions of artistic practices due to the perception that such references could undermine the critical and market reception of a modernist or contemporary artist’s work. The discursive cleaving of “art” and “craft” that supported the ideological formation of artistic modernism is notoriously associated with, for example, the history of abstract expressionism and the writings of critic Clement Greenberg. His argument for modernist art’s philosophical interiority, transcendentalism, and medium specificity relied on a purging of all associations with “low” culture, be it mass, popular, or vernacular (Greenberg 1982, 1986). In this formulation, craft’s association with the low rather than the high (a peculiar hierarchical distinction for many, if not the majority, of the world’s cultures) thus distanced it from art’s forward evolution. These developments are well-known within prevailing histories of modern art, which has long situated Western Europe and North America as the theater of modernism, and the accomplishments of white male artists as universally exemplary. But I will outline what is necessarily a longer and broader span of history that brings craft into the discourse of contemporary art’s desire for globalism, while examining specificities of practice that are brought into focus through localized contexts and formal scrutiny. An abbreviated historical sketch will situate craft within transnational and transcultural histories, emphasizing the ways in which the art versus craft dichotomy has been constructed not only within the narrative of industrial modernization but, more crucially, as part of the taxonomies and circulations that supported the project of empire, ideologically, and materially. This background will provide context for considering craft as the hinge of an artwork but also as a risk for artists from regions like Southeast Asia, whose works become instrumental in the making of a “global” contemporary art. A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, First Edition. Edited by Jane Chin Davidson and Amelia Jones. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. c11.indd 119 05-09-2023 16:43:32 120 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y Historical Economies of Craft By now there is a substantial discourse around craft that theorizes the subject as more than highly skilled technical knowledge, or a material process defined by the handmade, or a taxonomy of objects designated by function. The current literature certainly takes us far beyond the art/craft dichotomy, even if developed from and generative of ongoing thinking about the ontological relations therein. Over the last twenty years, art historians, artists, practitioners, and cultural theorists have probed and expanded craft’s histories to make arguments about the complexities of how craft operates and is articulated within diverse but often mutually constitutive economies of production. From a contemporary artistic viewpoint, craft should be recognized as having an identity of its own. However, folding craft into the conceptual frames of tradition, material, or process provides a shorthand and limited means of grasping what Louise Mazanti argues are the multiple cultural positions that craft inhabits. For Mazanti, it is far more productive to think critically about craft as a process of doing, rather than making; in other words, we must move away from a definition of craft that is predicated upon material- or technique-specificity to think more profoundly about “the role that it performs in the world of objects” (Mazanti 2011, 60). Anna Fariello concurs, suggesting that “[a] workable definition of craft depends very little on technique or medium at all. … craft, as a discipline, is not so much about materials as it is about an approach to materials” (Fariello 2019, 40). For Glenn Adamson, it is craft as an avowedly cultural practice and a conceptual limit that has rendered its fraught position within and in relation to the modern conception of art, as embedded in the problem of autonomy (Adamson 2016). For Adamson, we may get to the ontology of craft through this entanglement; as it operates across or on either side of the familiar binary, we begin to understand craft as methodological and as something that has historically been defined as supplementary (following Derrida) to the paradigmatic progress of “Art” and within “Art” itself (Adamson 2016, 14).1 Today, as numerous writers have noted, the relationship between craft and contemporary art seems considerably less fraught. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has described: [w]ithin the twentieth century, art has constantly tested and refined itself against a series of ostensible opposites, such as “work,” “life,” or “craft”; the history of recent art is in part the narration of what happens when those divisions collapse or bleed into each other (Bryan-Wilson 2021, 13). We now occupy a time when, according to Maria Elena Buszek, “[e]merging artists in today’s art world enjoy a tremendous amount of freedom in exploring such craft media—so much so, in fact, that one might argue that art students today often take this freedom for granted as they develop their studio practice” (Buszek 2011, 6). This freedom, implied by Buszek, was hard won, given the trajectory of craft’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following a familiar narrative of its gradual transformation and instrumentalization as a category and lever of sociocultural and economic reform. The account is rooted in the context of Western industrialization, with an emphasis on Great Britain and the United States. In sum, in the mid-nineteenth century, new technologies of mass production transformed structures of labor and ways of making in the name of efficiency and progress. This situation catalyzed responses to what was perceived as a decline in standards of quality, aesthetics, and public taste. The British Arts and Crafts Movement provided leading voices in calls for reform, championing the revitalization and elevation of traditional craft industries and processes to drive spiritual and moral regeneration. This was an ideology infused by the pastoral ideal and a utopian imagination, but as a movement influenced by socialism, it also sought to restore agency to artisans in the realms of design and production to redress factory divisions of labor and product alienation (Morris 2010). As such, it c11.indd 120 05-09-2023 16:43:32 CRAFT ◼◼◼ 121 was in the context of its perceived decline and even disappearance in the face of industrialization that craft became articulated as a modern field of discourse and a discourse about modernity itself. This summary does not do justice to the complexities, fault lines, and contradictions within the debates and approaches to craft in the mid- to late nineteenth century. However, this is the narrative that has long served as conventional knowledge and that supports observations of the liberation that contemporary artists may feel today in terms of treating the art and craft divide as a spectral artifact of history. However, historical writings on craft have since multiplied and complicated this narrative over the last three decades as postcolonial approaches have teased out the interconnectedness of developments in the West with those of the colonies and brought to the forefront the ways in which industrialization cannot be disambiguated from empire as the engine of changes associated with modernization. The field of craft production in the colonial context bore similarities with the discourses of disappearance and restoration led by the voices of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain; but in the colonies, these discourses indexed intersectional categories of race, class, and gender and were explicitly shaped through paradigms of civilizational development and what John M. MacKenzie (1995, 122) has described as romantic primitivism. Using methodologies informed by art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, case studies from South Asia have brought this scholarship into prominence as they have emphasized how the discursive, institutional, and racialized disambiguation of art and craft was interwoven with the emergence of museums (in the colonies and the metropole) and economies of exhibition and display (see e.g. Guha-Thakurta 2004; Dutta 2007; Mathur 2007). As Saloni Mathur and others have argued, the field of these experiments in policy and production was constituted by concerns and developments that were occurring in Great Britain as well as in the South Asian colonies. Even if the Indian craftsperson was seen to occupy an anterior position in developmental time, bound to cultural-geographical space, they could nonetheless provide an idealized symbolic figure informing the pastoral return and spiritual reform of British arts and crafts. And, as Mathur argues, this symbolism bore a legacy for the project of South Asian decolonization and nationhood: For the emergence of a popular European interest in the Indian craftsman by the 1880s and the subsequent claiming of this figure by Indian nationalism—a dialectic I refer to as the “cult of the craftsman”—was a distinctive phenomenon signaling the crises related to industrialization in the colony and the modernizing processes of the period more generally. Supported by the multiple discourses of anthropology, ethnology, “good” design, art reform, and art education in both Britain and its Indian colony, the disputes about the labor and worth of the Indian craftsman map a range of economic and political anxieties in the popular arena regarding the passage into modernity from a preindustrial past (Mathur 2007, 29–30). And if the Arts and Crafts Movement spokespersons advocated for the transformation of labor conditions and relations to endow British artisans with agency, it was typically the reverse situation in the colonies, where the discourse of preserving artistic heritage often served to undermine and appropriate the agency of the colonized subject (see Dutta 2007). European colonial policies for the arts played out differently across the realms of empire. In French colonialism, and its architectural programs, for example, theories of assimilation (imposing models of the colonizer’s culture to perform civilizational hegemony and superiority) and association (integrating aspects of Indigenous cultural forms to demonstrate cooperative, allied governance) informed shifting directives in the French administration’s relationship to Indigenous arts and culture (see Wright 1991; Morton 2000). These shifts were nonetheless enacted to varying degrees across their colonies and protectorates from c11.indd 121 05-09-2023 16:43:32 122 AQ1 c11.indd 122 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y North Africa to Southeast Asia. Regardless, what James Clifford has termed the salvage paradigm, “reflecting a desire to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of destructive historical changes,” resurfaces across these contexts as well, particularly in institutions and systems of pedagogy established by the French to “restore” and “protect” forms of artisanal production that they saw as exemplary achievements of the colonized race, imperiled by the European presence and the tides of industrial modernization (Clifford 1989). The language of disappearance and preservation thus echoed the discourse of craft reform in Great Britain, but in the colonial context, it provided a rationale for European paternalist intervention. However, responses to this perceived threat varied depending on the individuals charged with instituting new systems of artistic pedagogy. In Algeria and Vietnam, certain colonial administrators who saw natural artistic aptitude in their native students led more liberal, at times controversial, pedagogical reforms—in the case of Algiers, for example—to “liberate the natural talent of Indigenous artists from the tendency to ‘perpetually retrace traditional models’ as well as the ‘templates’ [poncifs] that guide the hand and dispense with all mental initiative” (Benjamin 2003, 195).2 According to Roger Benjamin, these seemingly altruistic campaigns to revive the Islamic decorative arts nonetheless justified the rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), in addition to fueling inspiration for French modern artists while generating economic value from artistic commodity production in the North African territories (Benjamin 2003, 191–219). At the School of Cambodian Arts in Phnom Penh, a more rigid artistic education focused on such methods of retracing traditional models as the operative work of restoring tradition and cultural heritage (as well as fueling transnational sales circuits for Cambodian craft commodities). Exposure to contemporaneous European artistic models and movements was deemed unsuitable for Cambodian students, who were tasked with preserving their craft traditions (what School Director George Groslier believed was predicated on Indigenous purity and racial genius) through the guidance of the French (Muan 2005; also see Abbe 2014). In contrast to this ideological and institutional ossification of the divide between modern art (deemed Western) and artisanry/decorative arts/craft (deemed Cambodian), during the founding years of the École des beaux arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi, the French director of the school (Victor Tardieu) collaborated with Vietnamese artist Nam Sơn (born Nguyễn Vạn Thọ) to create a curriculum that saw potential for innovation and evolution from within artisanal traditions, such as lacquer work; in their view, craft and the decorative arts would serve as a site and stage for the development of a specifically Vietnamese modern art (see Taylor 1997; Herbelin 2010–2011). Postcolonial scholarship has emphasized the role that colonial exhibitions and world fairs (and their newer iterations as cultural festivals) have played in promoting Indigenous craft traditions and, in some cases, introducing what was presented as emergent local modernisms as another example of European intervention and innovation. The focus was typically on the former as crafts were displayed to promote their economic potential and to participate in the spectacle of authenticity; native artisans were often brought to the exhibitions to perform their craft and to authenticate the experience of alterity. But, as mentioned earlier, the display of craft commodities also served the purpose of inspiring craft and decorative arts reform in the metropole. In the case of the great exhibitions that took place in London between 1851 and 1886, MacKenzie (1995, 119) argues that crafts and design products from the colonies were seen as a means of enhancing Western design traditions and improving the values and techniques of British artists and craftspeople. Roger Benjamin has also argued that the historiography of art deco has neglected the role that colonial exhibitions played in terms of informing modern European design, citing the colonial pavilions that exhibited arts and crafts from Algiers and Morocco such as those displayed at the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (Benjamin 2003, 210–213). And, in terms of introducing French publics to Vietnamese modern art, Phoebe 05-09-2023 16:43:32 CRAFT ◼◼◼ 123 Scott has emphasized the significance of the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition as being the first major exhibition to distinguish a new social group of colonized subjects vis-à-vis the art and craft divide: In the grounds of the Tonkin pavilion, Vietnamese artisans were part of a live exhibition, occupying a simulated village street, complete with stalls selling silk, lace, ivory and inlaid objects, jewellery, and sculpted and lacquered furniture. That the students of the EBAI [École de Beaux Arts de l’Indochine] were not positioned in such a way attests to their status (Scott 2019, 194). Contemporary Interventions Proliferating studies of modernism as a global matrix of interconnected and transnational developments attend to the significance of pedagogical institutions and sites of formation in the colonial context, which may have focused on artisanal training but also provided the grounds for nationalist and modernist formations. But it has also been noted that what might be considered more contemporary versions of these earlier world fairs and exhibitions have borne an impact on the development of contemporary artistic practices, particularly those of diasporic artists. On the influence of the Festival of India in the mid-1980s, Mathur (2007, 28) describes how “[m]ore recently, a new generation of South Asian artists in the diaspora have acknowledged the role of the Festival of India in introducing them to the aesthetic traditions of the subcontinent and, indirectly at least, influencing their work.” I have provided this historical background as an important context for thinking about the ways in which craft serves, but also at times may undermine, the reception of the works of contemporary artists from these formerly colonized regions, especially when they draw on craft forms and methods as a personal means of connecting to and engaging with cultural traditions. I will develop this point in more depth shortly, but this observation stems from an essay I published in 2016, which examined works by established artists Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968, Vietnam) and Sopheap Pich (b. 1971, Cambodia), in which I argue that the recognition of elements and methods associated with vernacular, “local” craft traditions played an important part in their conceptual efficacy, and undoubtedly, global artworld appeal (Corey 2016). This is not a unique phenomenon, given the critical success of contemporary artists who employ craft within their practice. As Kirsty Robertson and Lisa Vinebaum observe: What’s more, today, artists not always associated with craft or textiles such as Ghada Amer, Tracy Emin, Polly Apfelbaum, and Liza Lou, and including those enjoying a great deal of critical acclaim such as Tuttle, Michelle Grabner, Grayson Perry, Jim Drain, Theaster Gates, and William J. O’Brien, are using tapestry, embroidery, knitting, beading, ceramics, wood work and other forms of craft to make work celebrated at the heights of the art world. While we applaud this shift, we surmise that the embrace of craft and fiber stems at least in part from their increasing use by male artists, and we remain cognizant that many important women artists who have spent decades working with fiber materials remain under-recognized (Robertson and Vinebaum 2016, 4). In recent scholarship focusing primarily on developments in North America and Europe, this historiographical gap has begun to be addressed, with emphasis given to the ways in which women artists and feminist art historians forged critical interventions in artistic and art historical practice, often turning to the spheres of domesticity, labor, and handicraft as crucial sites of resignification and challenges to the social order, even if the racial politics of institutional recognition remains an ongoing issue (Bryan-Wilson, 2021, 14–17).3 c11.indd 123 05-09-2023 16:43:32 124 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y Perhaps seemingly adjacent to but nonetheless connected to these contexts is the question of craft in the development of contemporary art practices and discourses in the parts of the world that we conveniently identify as the global south. My own work has primarily been in Southeast Asia and its diasporas, a focus that nonetheless affords comparable contexts and responses to broader global developments (e.g. decolonization, globalization, neoliberal autocratic regimes) and the local specificities of their structural enactments and sociocultural formations. The tides of decolonization in the mid- to late twentieth century informed the inauguration of the contemporary as an undoubtedly political project in many parts of the world. If ideas of modernist autonomy, individualism, and internationalism were seen as yoked to colonial legacies of artistic formation or nationalist strategy, the contemporary was heralded in some instances as an alternative paradigm that could restore Indigenous and vernacular forms of collectivity and aesthetic production as a means of aesthetic and agentic innovation. In this, craft as an index of locality was a hinge of such discourses, resonating with Li Edelkoort’s observation that craft is “an activity that expresses something about its own origins by utilising local resources” (Edelkoort 2003). In 1995, Indonesian artist, curator, and scholar Jim Supangkat cited Philippine artist Charlie Co’s observation (made at a conference on Asian modernism held in Tokyo, Japan) that the use of locally sourced materials signified the departure from modernism and entry into the contemporary: “The modern era, in my view, was when I was still using Western materials. In this contemporary era, I use local materials.”4 Beyond the use of locally sourced materials, however, was the formation of artistic discourses around the shared aesthetic ingenuity of craft practices, vernacular cultural forms, and contemporary art mediums, the interrelationships between which could provide the grounds for a decolonial and contemporary artistic identity. I want to explain here that what may appear to be my glossing of “craft” and “vernacular forms” is a choice; I am cognizant of both their differentiation but also their overlap as specific crafts are practiced with meticulous care to fulfill cultural, often ritual, functions. One can think of numerous instances in which the two come together, such as Balinese ceremonial offerings in the form of intricately handmade sculptural arrangements made from flowers or food products. Within the site of artistic discourse, the sourcing of such forms could index place, identity, and heritage in a specifically decolonial gesture of autonomy, in conversation with rather than in total rejection of Western paradigms. This would serve as a project of artistic and intellectual decolonization, as can be inferred by Raymundo R. Albano’s 1981 review of an exhibition titled Installations held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Albano sought a definition of installation that accounted for the cultural specificity of its source in Philippine festival culture, as a counterpart to the “borrowed” legacy of painting as medium and discourse: There is no other criteria in judging a painting than those for American or European art, simply because we have no native practice that is equivalent to this art. Purist scholars who love to dig into the indigenous will find no logical precedent for painting, unlike sculpture. It may be that our innate sense of space is not a static perception of flatness but an experience of mobility, performance, body-participation, physical relation at its most cohesive form. Thus installation is akin to fiestas and folk rituals, from all our ethnic groups (Albano 1981, 3). The enunciation of craft and the vernacular as source and support for the empowerment of a post- or decolonial artistic discourse naturally served projects of nation building and identity formation for newly decolonized states. Such was the development of batik painting in Malaysia and lacquer painting in Vietnam, where in both instances the narrative of a local craft turned exemplary national and modern art form was privileged over the specific histories of such conversions under colonial pedagogy and/or patronage (e.g. Soon 2016). What may appear to recur here is the story of craft in the service of form, or a perceived c11.indd 124 05-09-2023 16:43:32 CRAFT ◼◼◼ 125 dissolution or porosity of the boundaries between art and craft that nonetheless affirms the binary as long as one appears to elevate the other. The relation of craft to and within modernism resurfaces here as one of supplementarity, as Adamson (2016, 9–37) argues: bringing into ontological definition that which it appears to frame or support. A return to thinking about craft less as a category and more as a matrix of co-constitutive cultural positions, as Mazanti (2011, 59–82) suggests, offers productive avenues for examining contemporary projects that offer multiple ways of thinking about aesthetics, creativity, representation, and collaboration. As one such example, the work of Heri Dono (b. 1960, Indonesia) enables an understanding not only of craft’s role in driving aesthetic and developmental economies in the contemporary globalized world but also of craft as an attitude toward collaborative making and democratized representation. Based in Yogyakarta, Dono is one of Indonesia’s most established artists, from a generation of artists who came of age under Suharto’s new Order Regime (1966–1998). Dono dropped out of art school (where he focused on painting) to study wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) under the master puppeteer (dalang) Pak Sigit Sukasman (Rath 2003, 44). As a medium of storytelling and as one of the most revered artistic forms of Indonesia (even if relegated to craft or the popular arts outside of the traditional academic art historical paradigms), wayang provided Dono with a means of staging multiple critical interventions into ideas of tradition as defined through national identity, notions of high and low culture, and the classical repertoire of wayang iconography and methods of production (for an extended version of this discussion, see Corey forthcoming). In describing the collective process behind Dono’s conceptual development and production of puppets, Supangkat describes the artist’s stance toward making and representation: To Dono, recycling junk is an innovative practice because it is a cultural matter. “The facts show the efforts of poor people using tradition to survive in a difficult modern situation. The creations show how tradition continuously makes breakthroughs, not only for the sake of artistic means but more for survival,” he believes. … Heri Dono asked people to collaborate with him in making works of art, and those who were craftsmen graciously accepted the invitation. During the process of collaboration, these people did not just help Dono; they also gave him advice and ideas. Together they created works that not only show Dono’s convictions. The art also reveals the surprising dreams, hopes, fantasies, and beliefs of the urban poor in facing today’s harsh realities. And these, in turn, have enriched Dono’s representation of the world (Supangkat 2003). The interventions mentioned earlier were extended through Wayang Legenda (1988), referring to a set of some sixty hand-crafted puppets as well as the performance, scripted and performed by Dono as the dalang. As Amanda Rath emphasizes, part of Wayang Legenda’s significance lay in its introduction of non-Javanese cultural sources, even “unrepresentable” sectors of society, in addition to upsetting aesthetic conventions associated with the iconographic and aesthetic differentiation of moral types, problematizing “traditional social hierarchies mapped onto the wayang that have been inscribed into the psyche of most Indonesians as to what is appropriate to represent in certain cultural practices” (Rath 2003, 44; Romain 2016, 188). In addition, the use of languages other than Javanese, which is traditionally used in wayang performance and was the dialect instrumentalized for Suharto’s cultural program of “Javanization” (itself a legacy of colonial cultural hierarchization), enabled Dono to assert the potential of wayang to pluralize Indonesian identity and decenter hegemonic concepts of culture: To me, wayang is only a medium for expressing a story. And folk-tales, legends, and various types of folklore are widespread throughout Indonesia. Why do we only perform stories from the Mahbharata, Ramayana, and Panji epics? As an Indonesian, I feel the c11.indd 125 05-09-2023 16:43:32 126 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y responsibility to make a contribution in the field of art. Say that each of the twenty-seven provinces in Indonesia has five folk-tales. How many folk-tales could then be made into wayang performances? Wouldn’t wayang then truly become the property of the Indonesian people? (Wright 1994, 234). Dono’s artistic philosophy can be understood as an intervention into the high and low, specific to the context of Indonesian cultural paradigms, more so than a disruption of the art versus craft binary. These works were carried out in the 1980s, prior to the art world’s increasing appetite for collective and relational practices that began to gain currency in the 1990s. This turn toward community-based and participatory practices in contemporary art has of course fostered conditions in which collective craft production serves as a medium of social relations, further facilitating the embrace of craft in contemporary art projects. Nonetheless, the division continues to be revealed in the kinds of institutional and market spaces that frame these works. Craft in the service of form tends to be curated for modern and contemporary art museums and art fairs, while craft as form, more legible as garments or ceramics, for instance, may continue to be situated within institutional exhibition spaces designated for arts and design. One example of the former is an elegiac 2014 installation by Jakkai Siributr (b. 1969, Thailand) titled 78 (Figure 11.1), which was shown at Art Basel Hong Kong.5 Siributr pursued the textile arts in his undergraduate and graduate studies, and continues to work with sewing, embroidery, and textiles to enact introspective and often participatory projects in response to local and regional political developments in Thailand and Southeast Asia. A black shrouded structure referencing the Kaaba, 78 served as a memorial for the victims of the 2004 Tak Bai incident in which the Thai military arrested over 1,000 Muslim protesters in conflict-ridden southern Thailand and stacked them, like logs, in trucks to transport them to holding facilities. Seventy-eight prisoners were crushed or suffocated en route. A significant part of the power of Siributr’s installation hinges upon the use of syncretic text that addresses and represents Muslim communities in Southeast Asia.6 On the exterior, the names of the seventy-eight identified victims are depicted in Thai characters stylized to resemble Arabic script, framed by gold tubing referencing tubular amulets (takrut). Inside, multitier bamboo bunk beds each hold a single white tunic, with sleeves embroidered in the Figure 11.1 Jakkai Siributr, 78, 2014, mobile room installation: steel, scaffolding, bamboo, textiles, kurta, threads, and brass-coil embroidery (350 × 350 × 350 centimeters, including wheels). Collection of MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum. Photographer credit Smit Na Nakornpanom. c11.indd 126 05-09-2023 16:43:32 CRAFT ◼◼◼ 127 Arabic-Malay Jawi script. The merging of Thai sign and Arabic script on the exterior obstructs the legibility of deliberately pictorialized text, adding to the pivotal force of the artwork as a spectral call to remember. More recently, some of Siributr’s more explicitly garment-based works were included in a 2022 exhibition titled Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, curated by Alexandra Schwartz.7 The Blind Faith series (Figure 11.2) extends Siributr’s observations of the lives of those affected by the conflicts and violence occurring in Thailand’s south. The works consist of Thai military uniforms that the artist heavily embellished with Buddhist amulets and talismanic objects such as a Yantra (a protective cloth) as well as brass bullet casings. The ornamentation becomes an encompassing surface and armor-like layer, relegating the military uniform to something stripped of its authority. It becomes a hollowed gesture of national service as it is transformed into nothing more than a material support for an excess of symbolic objects that have traditionally served as more potent protective wards for warriors and for military conscripts today. The work was fueled by Siributr’s observations of these young men, typically from rural backgrounds and limited socioeconomic circumstances, who purchased the talismans upon the realization that their service in the military would place them in actual sites of real violence and risk, comparable to what they perceived as war zones since the sectarian conflicts between Buddhists and Muslims in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Figure 11.2 Jakkai Siributr, Blind Faith, 2019, military uniforms, amulets, glass beads, crochet. Courtesy of the artist. Photographer credit Chanupat Boonwong. c11.indd 127 05-09-2023 16:43:32 128 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y Iftikhar Dadi has described the affordances of craft as a crucial material, method, and language for contemporary artists working across the world today: With the loosening of the formal language of Modernism, many fine artists now draw upon crafts practices to explore social and aesthetic dilemmas, by creating works which refer simultaneously to the specificity of artisanal practices and objects, while making works that address global issues (Dadi 2003, 4). This is of course something to celebrate because of the conceptual and aesthetic richness of such works as those described earlier. But the ways in which such works harness ideological and market value, in ways that could benefit from diachronic thinking about past discourses and formations, particularly as shaped by colonialism, offer perspectives on the construction of ideological and market value in the global art world today. In a special journal issue that I co-edited with Cambodian studies scholar and art historian Ashley Thompson in 2014, we noted in our editorial introduction that, in a set of reproduced essays on such objects as palm leaf screens and a rice threshing apparatus, the “types of materials and practices [the essays] document are crucial to ‘modern and contemporary Cambodian art’ even as, and even because, they sit outside of the global networks in which the said ‘art’ evolves” (Thompson and Corey 2014, 4). The use of such elements as craft to index the “local,” insofar as those elements remain recognized and maintained as such, support and facilitate an academic and art world discourse that articulates, even fetishizes, the “global” of contemporary art. And while artists may be celebrated within these circuits for their drawing of inspiration from and reworking of such sources, they may—at the same time—need to be defended from accusations of strategic self-Orientalism, as Kevin Chua (2021) claims in the case of Dinh Q. Lê and Sopheap Pich.8 A Catch-22 situation presents itself here, where such artists’ biographies and perceived modes of alterity are seen as indexes for their practices; the cultural referents are embraced, even over-determined, and also invoked as a challenge necessitating excessive justification of their works’ merit beyond cultural performance. Here craft may be an asset but also a burden, a problem that continues to stem from culturalist readings that overemphasize racial, gendered, and ethnic difference, particularly for those artists identified as inheritors of postcolonial legacies. Notes 1 Derrida theorizes this concept of supplementarity through the parergon, which means something subordinate or accessory to the larger work or its principal subject (ergon). Derrida (1987, 9, 37–82) theorized it more specifically as a frame (or framing apparatus) that “gives rise” to the work, essentially constituting and elevating it as such. 2 Benjamin cites here from Alexandre (1907, 10). In the case of Algiers, the École supérieure des beaux-arts d’Alger was established in 1843, but diverse documentation and pedagogical initiatives were coordinated through the local activities of the Office of Indigenous Arts (est. 1908), and led by such figures as Prosper Ricard, who was influential in the careers of the celebrated artists Mohammed Racim and Azouaou Mammeri. In Vietnam, the École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine was established in 1925 under the directorship of French painter Victor Tardieu, but the vision for the school’s pedagogical program was developed in consultation with the Vietnamese artist Nam Sơn. 3 Bryan-Wilson notes, for example, that Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79) “has received necessary criticism for its deeply troubling racial politics, yet it is still granted institutional attention (it now occupies an entire specially built wing of the Brooklyn Museum of Art) disproportionate to that given to women artists of color such as [Faith] Ringgold, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Senga Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell, all of whom made work c11.indd 128 05-09-2023 16:43:33 CRAFT 4 5 6 7 8 ◼◼◼ 129 with textiles from needlework to pantyhose to banners to stuffed canvases in the 1970s” (Bryan-Wilson 2021, 17). Comment made at the discussion “Asian Modernism,” Asia Center, Tokyo, Japan, held in conjunction with the exhibition Asian Modernism, October 1995. Cited in Supangkat (1997, 24). Siributr realized 78 in collaboration with the Bangkok-based architecture and design firm Design Qua. In Thailand, Muslims are a minority community, and the insurgencies in southern, peninsular Thailand should be understood as a legacy of the remapping of borders that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as negotiations with European powers were made by Thai monarchs to secure the sovereignty of what was then called Siam. In contrast, Islam is the dominant religion in Malaysia and Indonesia, and the official religion of Brunei. “The first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art, Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art examines work by thirty-five international contemporary artists, from established names to emerging voices, several of whom will be exhibiting for the first time in the United States. By making or altering clothing for expressive purposes, these artists create garments, sculpture, installation, and performance art that transform dress into a critical tool. Adopted globally as an artistic strategy, garmenting uses the language of fashion to challenge traditional divisions of form and function, cast a critical eye on the construction of gender, advance political activism, and address cultural difference.” Available at: https://madmuseum.org/exhibition/garmenting-costume-contemporary-art, accessed April 1, 2022. Kevin Chua (2021, 32 n13) suggests that Southeast Asian artists risk (or may even strategically employ) “(self)-Orientalism” by sourcing craft traditions in their work: “But the use of media other than painting may perpetuate modern, colonialist framings of the art/craft dichotomy set out in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Craft becomes—perhaps has always been—the false repository of cultural authenticity.” References Abbe, Gabrielle. 2014. “Le développement des arts au Cambodge à l’époque coloniale: George Groslier et l’École des Arts cambodgiens (1917–1945),” Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies no. 12: 7–39. Adamson, Glenn. 2016. Thinking through Craft, vol. 2. London: Bloomsbury. Albano, Raymundo R. 1981. “Installations: A Case for Hangings,” Philippine Art Supplement 2, no. 1: 3. Alexandre, Arsène. 1907. Réflexions sur les arts et les industries d’art en Algérie. 1905. Algiers: L’Akhbar. Benjamin, Roger. 2003. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 18801930. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2021. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buszek, Maria Elena (ed.). 2011. Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Chua, Kevin. 2021. “Lacquer’s Ecology, or the Swirl.” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 2 Summer: 32 n13. Clifford, James. 1989. “The Others: Beyond the Salvage Paradigm,” Third Text 6: 73–78. Corey, Pamela N. Forthcoming. “Of Myth and Message: Some Reflections on ‘Hindu’ Forms in Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia.” In Hindu Arts of Southeast Asia, edited by Wannasorn Noonsuk. Fresno: California State University Press. Corey, Pamela N. 2016. “Beyond yet toward Representation: Diasporic Artists and Craft as Conceptualism in Contemporary Southeast Asia,” Journal of Modern Craft 9, no. 2: 161–181. Dadi, Iftikhar. (ed.). 2003. “The Future Is Handmade: The Survival and Innovation of Crafts,” Prince Claus Journal no. 10a. c11.indd 129 05-09-2023 16:43:33 130 ◼◼◼ I N ST IT U T I O N S / O N TO LO G Y Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dutta, Arindam. 2007. The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility. New York and Oxford: Routledge. Edelkoort, Li. 2003. “CRAFTS: On Scale, Pace and Sustainability,” Prince Claus Journal, no. 10a. Fariello, M. Anna. 2019. “Making and Naming: The Lexicon of Studio Craft” In Extra/ Ordinary, edited by Maria Elena Buszek. Durham: Duke University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1982. “Modernist Painting (1961).” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison, and Deirdre Paul, 5–10. New York: Harper & Row. Greenberg, Clement. 1986. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, edited by John O’Brian, 5–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New York: Columbia University Press. Herbelin, Caroline. 2010–2011. “Deux conceptions de l’art en situation coloniale: George Groslier (1887–1945) et Victor Tardieu (1870–1937),” Siksacakr: The Journal of Cambodia Research 12–13: 206–218. MacKenzie, John M. 1995. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mathur, Saloni. 2007. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mazanti, Louise. 2011. “Super-Objects: Craft as an Aesthetic Position.” In Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, edited by Maria Elena Buszek. Durha: Duke University Press. Morris, William. 2010. “The Revival of Handicraft.” In The Craft Reader, edited by Glenn Adamson, 146–155. New York: Berg. Morton, Patricia. 2000. Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge: MIT Press. Muan, Ingrid. 2005. “Haunted Scenes: Painting and History in Phnom Penh,” Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies 6: 17–20. Rath, Amanda. 2003. “Shadow Stories: Wayang in the Work of Heri Dono · Indonesia.” The Future is Handmade. Iftikhar Dadi. Robertson, Kirsty, and Lisa Vinebaum. 2016. “Editorial: Crafting Community,” TEXTILE 14, no. 1: 4. Romain, Julie. 2016. “‘All Art is Part of the Same Constellation’: A Conversation on Craft and Artistic Practice with Heri Dono,” Journal of Modern Craft 9, no. 2 (July): 183–191. Scott, Phoebe. 2019. “Colonial or Cosmopolitan? Vietnamese Art in Paris in the 1930s–40s,” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3, no. 2 (October): 187–240. Soon, Simon. 2016. “Batik and the Grand Design for Modern Art.” In Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond, edited by Simon Soon and Rahel Joseph, 6–12. Kuala Lumpur: ILHAM. Supangkat, Jim. 1997. “Contemporary Art of the South.” In Balai Pustaka (Persero) PT and Proyek Pengembangan Media Kebudayaan (Indonesia). 1997. Contemporary Art of the NonAligned Countries: Unity in Diversity in International Art: Post-Event Catalogue. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka: Project for Development of Cultural Media Directorate General for Culture Dept. of Education and Culture. Supangkat, Jim. 2003. “Upside-down Mind: The Art of Heri Dono,” special issue of Prince Claus Journal. In The Future Is Handmade: The Survival and Innovation of Crafts, vol. 10a, edited by Iftikhar Dadi, 38. c11.indd 130 05-09-2023 16:43:33 CRAFT ◼◼◼ 131 Taylor, Nora. 1997. “Orientalism/Occidentalism: The Founding of the ‘Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine’ and The Politics of Painting in Colonial Vietnam 1925–1945,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2: 1–33. Thompson, Ashley, and Pamela N. Corey. 2014. “From the Editors.” In On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics, special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies, 12, no. 4. Wright, Astri. 1994. Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Kuala Lumpur and New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Gwendolyn. 1991. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. c11.indd 131 AQ2 05-09-2023 16:43:33