Week 7 & 8 - Thankful for time to read
High praise from the boss
Thanksgiving week was a blur, despite being stuck on the UK side of the pond. I threw a large dinner and the prep and the day job conspired to keep me away from any meaningful work completed on the PhD front. I think I’ve bought myself a little breathing room with previous fervent efforts. I did, however, during the Thanksgiving week manage to sneak up to London to meet with my new friend Dr Stephanie Boonstra of the Egypt Exploration Society! We met a couple months back when both of us happened to take the same Oral History Society course.
We got to chatting since she’s an American, and we tend to gravitate together in social settings, and I found out she is a big wig at the EES. I have been a dues-paying member these last 10 years, ever since I joined when I came to do my Master’s degree since my undergrad education had a very significant Ancient Egyptian component to it. My dear friend Ed is also employed by the EES, so we had a good laugh about the coincidence.
I went up to see their archives and to chat about the best way to preserve things and to organise objects. They have a couple ancient artefacts but most of their archive catalogues the materials generated from their archaeological digs. I learned a TON and took away some great learnings about how to structure an object collection. I think this learning will not only serve the Foundation and its aims in due course, but it will provide me with a structure to put on top of the wealth of materials I have when working on the PhD.
The rest of the week was stolen moments on the train to get some reading done from the absolutely excellent Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art edited by Maria Elena Buszek. I took 8 full pages of handwritten notes about the finer points of studio craft and fine art, and how they can/can’t really be reconciled in the western tradition. It’s a sticky argument I’m not really going to be touching much. This is not a complaint, but I’m glad I did the research into craft theory enough to be able to accurately articulate why Marian’s work isn’t relevant to it.
Fashion and textile art/garments are often lumped into craft and forbidden from entering the echelons of “fine art” as they fail to meet the criteria of “avant-garde” and tend to be less representational and more functional. Craft is the combination of technical ability, design prowess, and artistic aesthetic. A particularly well designed chifforobe that is hand-detailed and planed is an obvious example of excellent craft. Amish quilts are another classic example of the same. Neither of these are representational though. They fill a functional and domestic role.
Marian’s designed pieces, whether for the wall or the body, did not intersect with this concept. Even in the later days, when the definition of fine art is more difficult to come by as commercial garments are made by a business, craftsmanship may have played a part in the ultimate delivery of these garments to the world but in the earlier portions of her career the work was indisputably art.
Some fascinating reading about black women and their wardrobes, and how their black identity is inexorably tied up into the garments they choose to wear in a given setting (as it is with almost every other facet of their expression). Mary Schoeser has suggested Marian was a racial-boundary breaker with her fashion. I’m no longer convinced of this given the general upswell in luxury consumption by people of colour in the 80s (look no further than Dominique Devereaux’s wardrobe in Dynasty) and the difference between black women wearing “white” couture vs clothes by and for black people. I will need an interview or two to clear this up as the oral history begins, with both appropriately expert voices in the academic space, but also people of colour who have worn Clayden pieces.
I’m up to Leeds next week for a mandatory seminar about writing I hope won’t be too tedious, and of course I’ll be meeting my supervisors while there as well as spending time on the way up and back reading heaps. I have plenty of reading I could be doing, but I’ve come to the end of some pretty deep reference dives and I think I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. I hope to have a lovely little update by next Friday to help point in a new direction that will focus further action whether that’s literature or object-based.