Con-Textilizing Critical Language

Surfacing - Con-Textilizing Critical LanguageMy essay, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, appears in the winter 2006 issue of Surfacing Journal, a publication of the Textile Artists & Designers Association.

In this essay I suggest that less time be spent worrying about what does or does not pass for criticism, and much more time be spent on thinking about what to say, where and how to say it, and to whom. I contend that the critical decisions made by fibre artists in their work that more than qualifies them as critical voices:

High art, low art, craft or trade – the artist’s ontological position is established through the active generation of “material” language. The choices made – between riotously sexy velvet, florid fuchsia fun fur or deliberately domestic damask – speak volumes. If the vernacular is not official, or correct, or refined, or even immediately recognizably critical – so much the better, I say. Content is more critical than criticism. If the story is a good one, it will get read. So let’s focus on deciding what story to tell and how best to tell it – in fluid script discharged from printed fabric, in re-programmable circuits woven into cloth, in loaded statements laboriously crocheted from continuous thread – and forget for a while about what is or is not said about the story after the fact. Fibre Art, adept as it already is at working in the margins, has its very elusiveness at its disposal in its quest for critical language… the language of Fibre Arts can choose to include the fragmentary, the inconclusive and the digressive. It can be interlaced with texts. It can be something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the tip of a needle. It can also be as cerebral as the head of a needle. Head and point and eye, looking for just the right place to push the point… out, and out loud.

J. R. Carpenter, Con-Textilizing Critical Language, Surfacing Journal, Toronto, WInter 2006.

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Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment

Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment, an illustrated essay, appears in the Fall 2005 issue of ARS MEDICA, A Journal of Medicine, Health and the Humanities, a new quarterly literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and medicine, and examines what makes medicine an art.

Writing and healing have always been intrinsically linked. ARS MEDICA seeks to provide the reader with vivid examples. Content includes narratives from patients and health care workers, medical history, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, illustrations and photography.” http://ars-medica.ca/

Ars Medica - Notions of the Archival in Memory and DeportmentI began writing Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment as a response to the discourse of disembodiment that was prevalent in early days of the Internet. I never believed that the physical gendered body would be subsumed in an idealized information age. Even in our attempts to externalize and expand upon the processes of the brain through the computational and storage capacities of the computer, the precariousness of the biological body persists. It seems to me that somewhere along the way cultural theory veered away from body politics. In Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment I have tried to examine, from the inside, not just ‘the’ body, but also ‘my’ body in particular. I have focused on the storage and retention of bodily memory in order to explore the relationship and/or disconnect between body and mind that has preoccupied philosophers for generations. In Ethics, Part II: Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind, Spinoza writes: “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and … is cable of receiving a great number of impressions… If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing… Memory is simply a certain association of ideas involving the nature of things outside the human body, which association arises in the mind according to the order and association of the modifications of the human body… The human mind has no knowledge of the body, and does not know it to exist, save through the ideas of the modifications whereby the body is affected.”

An earlier version of Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment is available for viewing online at: http://Luckysoap.com/notions/

Thank you to: Alison and Ian at Ars Media, for their attention to detail; Elise Moser, for telling me about the journal; OBORO, for supporting the production of the online version; Dave Liss, for including an installation version of the “Nails and Hair” portion in “L’Entrespace II” at the Saidye Bronfman Center; and to Barbara Layne, who instigated the project way back when I was …

“suddenly far from my brain and naked without it”
Notions of the Archival in Memory and Deportment
J. R. Carpenter, http://Luckysoap.com/notions/


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Hennessey’s High Pasture

The New Quarterly has accepted my short story Hennessey’s High Pasture for publication. It will appear in Issue #97 (due out January 2006).

“Most nights the dogs and I walk up to Hennessey’s high pasture. You can see the whole King’s County from up there. Even when it’s dark you feel it, the earth curving away from you. But I’m not ready yet. I smoke a cigarette. No matter which way I hold it, the smoke blows toward Earl.” J. R. Carpenter, Hennessey’s High Pasture


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Broken Things on Drunken Boat

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome has been named a finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards – Web Art Section. The final results of the competition will be announced later this fall. Broken Things will appear in the next issue regardless. DrunkenBoat.com is an international online journal for the arts featuring poetry, prose, photography, video, web art, and sound.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was created between 2002 and 2005 in Rome and Montréal with the generous financial support of the Oboro New Media Lab artist in residency programme and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Milli gazie again to Barbara Catalini in Rome and Stéphane Vermette in Montréal.
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