Page 107 - Constructing Craft
P. 107

He added:

                        Characteristics of such subcultures tend to also include strong
                        group  identification,  an  adherence  to  traditional  values,  a
                        certain  defensiveness  about  their  discipline,  an  inability  to
                        distinguish between effort and excellence, and an unwillingness
                        to  acknowledge  the  distinction  between  hobbyist  and  the
                                          40
                        committed artist.





               The Debate and Women


               Women encountered more than one difficulty when confronted with the debate

               about whether craft could be art or indeed whether specific forms of craft might be

               excluded because the majority of practitioners were women. Bourdieu contended
               that women, along with other groups in society, had been subjected to hierarchies

               of limitations that he called ‘symbolic violence’. ‘Symbolic violence’ is a term used to
               describe how unconscious force is used by one group in society to convince

               another group that they are in some way inferior or that their values are less
               important. Women were often unaware this was happening but the gender

               imbalance in some crafts such as weaving and the large number of women involved

               with craft in comparison to the number of well-known women artists, provide some
               evidence that, in the early days of the movement at least, this argument could be

               made. In addition, feminist writers claimed that the number of ‘famous’ women

               artists was small because they had been excluded from history by male writers and,
               furthermore, they argued that the inferior position of craft was a gender-based form

               of segregation.


               Male writers also used the dominance of women in some crafts to suggest that
               symbolic violence encouraged women to engage in some forms of craft rather than

               others. In a New Zealand Listener article in 1988, commenting on an exhibition

               called ‘In Stitches’, Peter Gibbs, the New Zealand Listener’s arts writer, noted that
               although more than 4000 people (presumably mostly women) were members of the

               fifty guilds that made up the Association of New Zealand Embroiderers’ Guilds, the
               craft was not considered a mainstream art form. He claimed that, ‘In spite of the

               vast support it enjoys from women, it is not taught in the white male institutions, nor

                                                                          Constructing Craft
   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112