The Domestic Soundscape

Last night at The Oxford Bluestocking Stitch’n'Bitch weekly knit, I found myself ranting quite a lot on the subject of Yarnstorm’s book and realising that my post about it is therefore probably somewhat overdue.

The Oxford Bluestockings meetings are a good place for this post to start because when I think of this inspiring group of incredible women, the last adjective that pops into my head is ‘gentle.’ When I first turned up at a meeting with a bag of cheap acrylic and an ebay pattern for crochet cakes, I was awestruck by the velocity of the needles click-clacking everywhere and the advanced technicality of many of the projects in development at the time. Around the table sat women with good jobs or enrolled on exciting study programmes. Smart women, qualified women, ambitious women, brilliant women. I benefit from the energy and creativity of my knitting friends, from the support we provide each other with and from the healthy competition that emerges when a bunch of skilled people come together to share and show projects. I know my knitting is better because I go to a group and am motivated to improve by the amazing stuff that other people are making. I learn constantly from reading my friends. We take photos, we knit, we write, we get better at what we are doing.

Yarnstorm in many ways is the epitome of a competitive, creative, brilliant sort of woman who blogs, makes, beautifies and documents an entire realm of home-based creativity. She works with high-profile crafters like Kaffe Fassett; she meets with the editor of Knitty.com for afternoon coffee. She prolifically produces beautiful items and, as she frequently reminds us in her book, is highly qualified and widely read.

Now I myself believe in the importance of a good education and have never been shy about approaching famous or high-profile people for information, tips or simply help with my work. Like Jane Brocket I am interested in meeting with the experts in my field and in learning from them, and all power to her for making such astute and confident choices viz textile courses, acquaintances and social allies. I say good for her that she has famous people from the online world of craft reading her blog and commenting on what she makes, but it’s not gentility that has won her these things so much as ambition and smarts. After about 10 iterations of ‘gentle arts’ I began to resent the disingenuous quality of this phrase and to wish that the book would be more honest about the ambition, industry, creativity and drive inhabiting it. I’m certain Liz Hunt’s article in the Telegraph was sparked in part by a similar irritation; since the book itself continually insists on its gentle and inoffensive, choice-based message, it falls to the reader to identify the driven, busy, organised, self-determining impulse sequestered inside its opining chapters. Why should professional writers like Liz Hunt live with vicious labels like ‘hard-bitten careerist’ while Ms. Brocket gets to enjoy the safety of her carefully defended role as a ‘domestic artist?’ I found it baffling when Jane said in her talk at I Knit London that she ‘couldn’t believe that a few fairy buns and a bit of knitting had caused such a fuss’ because if the book is indeed just that, then why is it so enormously long, so painstakingly and beautifully designed, and so full of commentary?

The book itself is a difficult read; posing as a kind of social exploration of ‘the domestic arts’ it is in fact 287 pages of Jane Brocket’s opinion on the way of things. We learn what she likes to do when she goes travelling, what she likes to buy, where she gets her inspiration from, where the ideas for various quilts have come from, which pieces of artwork are personally interesting to her and how she believes home life ought to be. This style of writing is indicative at least to my mind of the problem of shoe-horning a blog into a book. I love to read the personal insights other people have posted about a painting they have seen, a certain view they enjoyed which inspired a knitting project or an opinion about a quilt. But once such things are committed to print and bound in a book form, they take on a gravitas and social meaning that personal opinion and anecdote are not, I would suggest, worthy of. As soon as you place a painting on a page with a paragraph beneath it, your book takes on the references of Art Criticism and as such, needs to say something more enlightening than ‘I like this because…’

…which leads me to my greatest problem with the book, which is its insidious conservatism and its inability to distinguish between the value of a thing for and of itself, and the value of a thing to Jane Brocket. To quote lengthily from Jeanette Winterson;

Admire me is the sub-text of so much of our looking; the demand put on art that it should reflect the reality of the viewer.

‘Do I like this?’ is the question anyone should ask themselves at the moment of confrontation with the picture. But if ‘yes’ why ‘yes’? and if ‘no’, why ‘no’?. The obvious direct emotional response is never simple, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ has nothing at all to do with the picture in its own right.
‘I don’t understand this poem’
‘I never listen to classical music’
‘I don’t like this picture’
are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because the ignorant, the lazy or the plain confused are not likely to want to admit themselves as such. We hear alot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work…of course they can absorb in a few moments, and without any effort, the sum of the artist and the art.
If the obvious direct emotional response is to have any meaning, the question ‘Do I like this?’ will have to be the opening question and not the final judgement. An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination of the piece of work.

When Yarnstorm writes on pg 18 of her book about this painting, she dismisses the cleverness of her MA writings on the subject in favour of taking the simplistic view that her ‘true response [to the painting] was to see that this mother was doing something incredibly valuable and enjoyable.’ It is as though this personal liking of the painting, the simplistic enjoyment of it that she conveys here, carries more verity than any considered, intellectual engagement with the work ever may have done. This is only one example of many instances throughout the book where Ms. Brocket blithely eschews the difficult politics of art in order to apply her own highly subjective and narcissistic readings to various paintings. On a blog her witticisms about the stripy sock and the multi-tasking daughter in this painting could concievably be funny, anecdotal and entertaining; but committed to print these words read as an appallingly conceited and conservative view of art. Paintings like this are nothing to do with woman’s active and empowered agency. A Life Well Spent is an interesting title when one wonders how else the woman in this painting may have spent her time considering that in the era when it was painted she would not yet have had voting power, equal pay, access to contraception, sexual health advice or a local Stitch’n'Bitch group to bolster her confidence or advance her knitting technique. I have no problem with Jane Brocket liking the painting and enjoying her version of what it represents. But the inference that her simplistic reading of it is somehow more real or earnest than any critical engagement with it narrows the amazing scope that exists for us to engage with art and reduces any potential debate to a simple question of personal taste. Professional artists and writers who have dug deep in order to form meaningful positions on such work are completely sidelined by this bewildering obliviousness and we are left with a very thin and subjective reading of the painting that effectively closes off any meaningful contemplation of it as something that may conceivably be considered domestic art. Which leads me to my final and biggest problem with the book which is its continual use of the phrase domestic artist.

Far from being liberating and opening our minds, I find The Gentle Art of Domesticity an extremely limiting book in terms of the potential it offers for creative engagement with the domestic environment. While it is full of suggestions relating to how we may consider colour and home decor, how we may enjoy our holiday times, how we may collect fabrics to make quilts, how we may make lovely cakes and how we may best enjoy the fruits of these labours, it offers very little in the way of enriching the way we experience our lives beyond that. Lots of craft books full of quilt patterns, knitting ideas and baking projects have avoided generating the kind of ire and irritation that The Gentle Art of Domesticity has inspired, simply because they have not sought to position themselves ambitiously as social commentary in the way that Jane Brocket’s book has.

I appreciate the creativity and beauty of what Jane Brocket does and aspire to fill my own home with such things for my own pleasure and enjoyment. But I do recognise the distinction between these personally fulfilling activities and the creation of art. When Christian Marclay tied an electric guitar on the back of a lorry, wired it up to an amplifier and drove around the deep south amplifying the excruciating sound of the guitar being destroyed on the road, it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t as pleasing or as beautiful as an iced bun or a Kaffe Fassett quilt. But it was an effective statement about the death of a young black man who’d recently fared a similar fate to the guitar in a violent, racist murder. When Bobby Baker created action paintings out of the foods she craved during her pregnancy – guiness, marmite, beer, tomato sauce etc. – the resultant sheets with their resemblance to both action paintings and bodily-stained sheets or blankets were not beautiful either. But they did constitute a powerful and brave exploration into the territory of what is allowed to be shown in a gallery and what is not. The tortured genius of Jackson Pollock with his alcoholism and depression is evidenced all over the world with his globally acclaimed drip-paintings; how many post-natally depressed tortured genius women get the same level of exposure? These are difficult questions and are not easily answered. But the difference between Bobby Baker’s accounts of domestic reality and Jane Brocket’s, for instance, are massively striking. In terms of scope for imagining the world differently, critically engaging with the entire cultural construct of domesticity or considering any of the feminist questions that inevitably go with the territory, I find The Gentle Art of Domesticity gob-smackingly oblivious to the wider issues surrounding some of the ideas it contains.

Yarnstorm’s main defence of her book is that people have taken it far too seriously and that many of the references that people have found difficult ‘were meant ironically.’ But if you publish a book which bandies around art terminology and then fails to deliver any critical thinking of quality, I think it is bound to spark debate. I’m glad for all the healthy thinking and consideration that this yarnstorm in a teacup has generated, because the territory is now richly problematised and therefore resplendent with new possibilities.

In summary I wish that the book had dealt more transparently with the ambitious, busyness of its author instead of confusingly painting creative activity as ‘gentility’ and masking the active life of Ms. Brocket behind a garish and sentimental backdrop of coveted domestic perfection. As an extension of this I also wish the book had either explored in a meaningful way what ‘domestic artist’ means or dropped the use of that term altogether. To be an artist requires a level of critical engagement that simply isn’t evidenced in this book. I wanted to like the book, I defended the book, I have thought long and hard about the book but, in the words of Needled in her fantastic post, The Domestic in Drag, I think Jane Brocket should have considered more carefully the implications of ‘domestic artist’ more carefully before elevating her activities to that status. In failing to engage critically dialogues like feminism, class, gender-politics, art/craft debates and so on, she actually avoids the political and experiential aspects of Domesticity that potentially make it an interesting focus for study.

What we are left with is a very beautiful book filled with subjective opinion and masquerading beneath a title that assumes a level of social commentary exhibited nowhere within the book. I wish this book could have done more to establish a solid social and economic argument for the importance of craft, but sadly, it leaves me thinking that perhaps I have misunderstood and indeed all Ms. Brocket was trying to do was ‘make a few fairy buns and do a bit of knitting,’ in which case any of us attempting to meaningfully engage with domesticity as a true creative focus can sideline the book as being of little interest or relevance.

Tags: Critical Engagement, Domestic in Drag, Expensive, Gaudy, Germaine Greer, Jane Brocket, Labels: Classist, Needled, Rant, The Gentle Art of Domesticity, Yarnstorm

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Art projects, Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.