Knowledge and who you know...

I know it must seem like I'm always going on about Sharon B, but she does have a wonderful blog and I have to say that she has a great website including a stitch dictionary and a interesting informative blog.

In her latest post 'web truths' where she is responding to the Joshua Porter idea of the fact that the internet isn't authoritative on subjects and compares it to walking down the street, overhearing conversations, that may be biased, but are also informative.

She goes on to talk about the inherent marginalization that occurs throughout the academic and internet world.

There is the basic fact, and a quote I was reminded of constantly growing up was that everything is biased in someway; 'The victors were the ones who wrote the history books' Some of you may not know that I have studied Art History and as part of this, we had to look at what gets left out of Art Books...

You'd be surprised! Gombrich's "The Story of Art" is an art textbook used the world over. It was written in the 1950's and has been a staple book for H.of A. classes since.

Now, if you start with the title He presents it not as A story of art but as _THE_ story of art, the one, the only, the definitive work on the subject. On closer inspection the book concentrates almost entirely on art produced by white men of European origin (He does include American artists in the later sections).African art and that of Oceania are all covered in the first chapter on PRIMITIVE art...That was the first lecture I took at University.

The university I attended teaches the social history of art rather than the "This is an oil painting by such and such and you can tell this by...." type of art history. It covered the who, where, when and why of art.

One of my tutors (and in fact my mentor and personal heroine!) was Griselda Pollock. She is somewhat of a leading light in the world of social art history. She focuses on various subjects but one of them is the role of Gender in the art world.

One of the modules I was taking before my impromptu departure from university was called Old Mistresses. The entire concept of the series of lectures was to get us to look at the basic fact that as long as art had been being talked about the dominant, and for a long time, sole voice on the subject was Male.

This underlying complete bias affecting not just the art world has been perpetuated down through the centuries. As Sharon put it "It is not a deliberate conspiracy, it is simply that dominant themes are told and retold. Within these themes dominant value systems are constantly enforced."

In Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker's book 'Old Mistresses' there is a chapter called 'Crafty women and the hierarchy of the arts'.

It has some really interesting ideas in it such as; the fact that the gender of the artist DOES matter as it affects how the art is seen and interpreted. I wish it didn’t but it does. The fact my university had/has to run a module to identify these issues shows this up particularly.; The fact that due to the fine arts and decorative arts split in the late renaissance, the decorative arts aka crafts became considered a 'lesser' art.

The main focus on this chapter is while it is still a majority of women who practice these 'lesser' arts it should not be considered a solely female area. Just because the fields of embroidery and sewing are seen as 'feminine' doesn't make them any less of an art form.

By the time I reached Art College the 'crafts' had been parceled off to one side; relabeled design crafts and mainly involved ceramics and a small amount of textiles.

Embroidery as a taught subject is also almost non-existent these days. I want to take a C&G in Stitched Textiles but since government legislation about minimum class sizes, I can only do it by mail order at vastly inflated prices.

There was, up until the end of Victorian era and earlier into the last century, a view that embroidery was a pasttime of the middle and upper classes. Sewing is seen as being below embroidery as one is decorative and the other functional. Being skilled at Embroidery soon became seen as the feminine proof of refined gentility.

Sewing and Embroidery are seen as 'domestic', which lumps in into a category with cleaning, washing and cooking!

A good-sized section of the chapter 'Crafty women and the hierarchy of the arts' is given over to the Patchwork Quilt. Although they don't comment on CQ, they do look at the Patchwork quilt in some detail.

Describing an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972 entitled 'Abstract Designs in American Quilts' they point out that there is, even in this short title an underlying formalization of the quilt in that 'emphasizing the formal elements in the quilts as their reason for new found recognition of art...and the exhibition was dedicated to "the anonymous women whose skilled hands and eyes created the American quilt". This separates the makers from the objects, dedicating the exhibition to them suggests they are not present, that they are not represented by the art that they made...morever the women are reduced to skilled hands and eyes as if quilt making bypasses the mind, feeling, thought or intention." (p72)

They highlight that the quilt, in the early days of the US were an important survival tool and the important social value of them. They look at the idea of the Quilting Bee and the very idea of the social interaction that these things involved. They even point out that skills with the needle were and are held so highly that you were more or less socially excluded from these events if you couldn't sew well.

What I am trying to say is, just because the established art world, with its still intensely patriarchal views on the world doesn't fully recognize the beautiful things we make for what they are - Works of Art - it doesn't make them any the less beautiful or less valued by OUR community

I was bought up in an environment where EVERYONE sews. My mother studied fashion and much of my childhood was spent getting under her feet in her work room. My father works backstage in the theatre industry, can thread a sewing machine or overlocker without looking and is the first person who gets called by the costume department if the machine is playing up. He can sew as well as my mother. My sister makes her own clothes when she has the time. My step-grandfather embroidered as part of his schooling and his recovery in a military hospital after being in Burma. I sew and embroider because it keeps me sane. I even used to aid my recovery from various illnesses because it gave me something other than the illness to focus on.