Page 252 - Constructing Craft

hundred craft organisations in Australia. Hersey’s comments, linking the

administration of craft with the position of craft in society, recognised the
significance of the struggle by craftswomen in New Zealand to have their position in

the craft world validated and ‘their’ crafts acknowledged as equal in importance to
all other crafts – and to art.

The standing of ‘women’s’ craft was boosted by the emergence of the second-wave

of feminism in the 1970s. For example, crafts associated with fibre, such as

weaving and quilts, improved in status after they became subjects of academic
study and aesthetic appreciation by scholars and other interested writers. This was

a result of craftswomen and feminist writers linking craft to political issues, such as

the use of quilts as protest banners – although in New Zealand this was less
common than in the United States. Quilting was identified as a ‘women’s’ craft

linked to the domestic oppression of women and therefore its use in this way was
considered to be a particularly ironic form of protest. It also encapsulated the

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counterculture slogan: “[T]he personal is the political”.

Attacking Modernism

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s feminist critics were part of a broader postmodern
assault on earlier Modernist ideas about the relationship between art and society.

They criticized the Modernist idea that artists were not a part of conventional social

structures and were therefore free to express universal ideas without the restrictions
that others faced. They claimed that the ‘universal vision’ that Modernists talked
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about was, in fact, a white, middle-class, male perception. The ‘universal vision’
was based on the notion that there existed a ‘Great Tradition’ – a body of work of

superior quality that new work could be added to so long as it conformed to the
same standard – a standard that often excluded women and craft. This was not a

male-only perception. Many women also thought that art was located on a higher

level above everyday life. Therefore, craft, a field where women were more
numerous, was excluded.

Constructing Craft