Grenzerfahrung: Embodied Narrative: a critical tool to develop a Sustainable Ethical Practice

Abstract

The paper will examine the extent to which it is possible to use craft, not merely as an idea, but as a skills-based-mode-of-expression, to convey an ethical message, and through the physicality of the work and the relationship to craft traditions, to become a contemporary agent of change. Most significantly the paper will examine the concept of embodied narrative, that has emerged out of reflection on making; it will be illustrated by reference to my own installations, that deal with responses to the Holocaust from a familial perspective within a context of contemporary practice. It is a practice that has become a “methodological map of reflection,” an “engaged practice… with an open-ended, undetermined procedural trajectory.” (Sullivan, 2010 p85). Thus it places itself in opposition to some contemporary readings of craft that perceive it as merely a reactionary, negative in a dialectic of deskilling and reskilling. (Roberts, 2008).

Embodied narrative has its theoretical roots in Phenomenology; Edmund Husserl argued that one must develop a “standpoint”, a baseline that provides a “horizon” (Husserl 1969), a philosophical position from which to understand the world. Martin Heidegger maintains that the “horizon” is set by my Being in the world (Heidegger, 1962). Merleau-Ponty considers the whole, integrated person, as embodied subject; embodied narrative employs the artistic expression, that Plato wished to condemn as a mere distraction, and on the contrary to express through haptic means, what cannot be expressed through text.

Daniel C. Dennett originally proposed embodied narrative as a concept that might explicate the self (Dennett, 1992). Arthur Danto developed a concept, that he called “embodied meaning” to apply to productions in art (Danto, 1964, p580); Bruce Metcalf further refined this theory in the context of the crafts, as “embodied sympathy” (Metcalf, 2002). Metcalf proposes the idea of “sympathetic craft as an extension of its maker’s [hand]. The pot in being touched, extends the potter’s touch to its user…for this process to work , the object must be used” (Metcalf, 2002. p7). I have adapted these models to connote the metaphoric and symbolic content of a work, that develops rationales beyond function, signified via its material, haptic and its visual properties.

Meaning is embodied through actual making – in its performative inception. Some of the imprinted meaning is conscious and is deliberate mark-making imposed on the material; other marks are the unconscious product of accustomed (craft) practices embedded, as Shusterman suggests, through “muscle-memory”(Shusterman, p99), and marking by flame in ceramic firing. The embodied narratives of fire, embedded in the vessels, carry the ethical load; they point towards the fires of the crematoria in the concentration camps. The individually crafted objects nominated from my own production in conjunction with appropriated, discarded materials come to stand for the peoples whose rights and identities were shorn by the Nazis. An analysis of the ethical load, informed by Levinas, will be developed in readings of the embodied narratives in recent work, and demonstrate that craft is sustainable, not necessarily merely “ironic”, “supplementary” nor “nostalgic” (Adamson, 2007, p13).

References:

Adamson, G., Thinking through Craft, Oxford, Berg, 2007

Danto, A., “The Artworld”, Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964

Dennett D.C., The self as a center of narrative gravity. In Frank S. Kessel, P. M.

Heidegger, M., Being and Time, Oxford, Blackwell, 1962

Husserl, E., Ideas, New York, George Allen and Unwin, 1969

Merleau-Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970

Metcalf B., Embodied sympathy,. In Metalsmith magazine. Summer 2002, vol. w2, number 3

Roberts, J., The Intangibility of Form, Skill and Deskilling after the readymade, London, Verso, 2008

Schusterman, R., Thinking through the Body – Essays in Somaesthetics, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012

Sullivan, G., Art Practice as Visual Research, London, Sage Publications, 2010