Critical Craft forum session at caa, 2017
NYC
2017 8th Critical Craft Forum: Gender and Jewelry
Co-Chairs: Namita Gupta Wiggers, Critical Craft Forum and Benjamin Lignel, Artist, Curator, Writer
Meredith P. Nelson, Bard Graduate Center
Emily K. Rebmann
Julia Heineccius, The Evergreen State College
Tigger-James Ferguson
renée c. hoogland, Wayne State University
DISCUSSANT: Jenni Sorkin, UC Santa Barbara
Session Abstract:
Despite the connection between jewelry and the body, significant critical analysis of the relationship between gender and adornment – particularly of contemporary art jewelry – is nascent at best. This panel explores connections between this subject and forms of adornment, ornament, and art jewelry. Panelists will each present their research in brief, focused 8 minute talks, to be followed by a respondent and workshop/discussion amongst panelists and attendees.
The goals: to identify and work collaboratively with researchers and artists to explore the relationship between gender and jewelry; to work collectively prior to the panel to build a core group with shared interests via ww.criticalcraftforum; to publicly share individual research investigations; and to use the broader collective group of CAA attendees to further questions, thinking and concerns to expand critical frameworks for further study. Collective project work for this session with panelists and panel attendees will be acknowledged and explored in a forthcoming publication – the first to critically examine gender and art jewelry – currently being researched by Lignel and Wiggers.
Papers, Speaker Info, and Paper Abstracts:
Speaker 1: Meredith P. Nelson, Bard Graduate Center
The gold body chain (catena) is a Roman jewelry form that is represented by a small corpus of pieces, uncovered primarily in excavations of the Vesuvian region, and dating to the 1st century A.D. Representations of catenae in contemporary visual media indicate that the body chain held distinctly erotic connotations, as it appears to have been worn only by women, over their bare torsos. Furthermore, the chains are found primarily in images of Venus and mortal women engaged in explicit sexual acts. Because of these illustrations, it appears the catena functioned in Roman contexts as an assertive, visual sign of female sexuality. The intersection of material remains and visual representation elicit deeper questions about the role of catenae in advertising female sexual autonomy, the status of the women who wore them, and the kinds of social environments in which such demonstrations were considered appropriate.
Speaker 2: Emily K. Rebmann
Historically, men’s jewelry has been subject to regulations that have not been applied to jewelry worn by women. These rules changed over time as well as in relation to event type and time of day, and can best be summarized as an unfaltering emphasis on “correctness” of style. The guidelines functioned as a “dress code” of sorts that established a “uniform” that could allow men to transcend the boundaries of class – if executed correctly. Though it is not possible to ascertain the precise number of men who followed this advice, the sheer magnitude of advertisements and articles that played off men’s social anxieties and the popularity of "correct" jewelry during the period lead to the following question: how, if at all, has nineteenth- and twentieth-century prescriptive literature impacted the jewelry worn by men in contemporary society?
Speaker 3: Julia Heineccius, The Evergreen State College
Jewelry everywhere and nowhere.
• How is jewelry used in the photographic description of bodies?
• When does jewelry no longer describe the body wearing it?
• What is the effect of opting-out of adornment?
In the images made by Annie Leibovitz of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair, jewelry is everywhere and nowhere. On the cover, there is no jewelry: just the hair vamped and flesh bodysuited in satin. In one of the interior article shots, the jewelry is negligible, especially when contrasted with the giant Olympic gold metal left on the table. The placement and scale of jewelry in these portraits authenticate gender (and wealth) and allow the lack of jewelry to be as descriptive as the presence of it.
Speaker 4: James Tigger! Ferguson
I have a sassy story to share about a sissy-gendered teen struggling to breathe in the Midwest who inherited the "Dead Grandma Collection" of garish costume jewelry, and how it helped to open a door he had been kicking against for as long as he could remember. It takes me an hour just to write a postcard. This story takes many, many postcards. My art moves very quickly onstage but takes a lifetime of preparation. New York’s leading boylesque performer since 1997, Actor/Dancer/Stripper/Performance Artist James Tigger! Ferguson has been stripping and grinding since 1988.
Speaker 5: renée c. hoogland, Wayne State University
The thrust of my argument will be that becoming non-heterosexual, both epistemologically and ontologically, is, first of all, a radically historical process, but also an undeniably materially embodied/embedded phenomenon within an ever-emergent system of linkages with material objects and practices. That this, at least theoretically, equally holds true for dominant or straight modulations of becoming does nothing to detract from the fact that it is in its material practices, manifestations, and effects that the latter, heterosexuality, appears, and thus obtains as a form of natural or transcendent being, while the former, queer becoming, primarily consists in activity, in what Alfred North Whitehead calls “actual” or “living occasions,” or what Deleuze and Guattari describe as intensive “events” within complex matrices of materiality.
Discussant : Jenni Sorkin, UC, Santa Barbara