Extreme Craft

Work It!

Hooray again for Rob Walker's "Consumed" column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  This week's article concerned Savannah College of Art and Design's "Working Class Studio".  The studio, which was founded two years ago by SCAD alums Andrea Messina and Sari Gunderson, takes a handful of students from different disciplines every quarter and transforms them into "interns".  The classes take a pragmatic approach to designing desirable design goods that can be mass-produced.

The success of the studio has been stunning.  I know that I recognize their melamine plates, shown above, from online stores like Elsewares.  They also get their work into retailers like Anthropologie.  Working Class gives students in media besides design a chance to learn that there are a great many ways to succeed as an artist.  This pragmatic exposure to the marketplace has created work that wouldn't normally emerge from an art school. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about the position of craft in America--the energy, creativity, and social power, and I've decided that although craft is ascendant in Europe, design is their equivalent.  For every punk rock knitter in the United States, there's a rogue product designer who has learned how to mass-produce their work and take it to the streets.  As manufacturing processes evolve, so does design.  I'm curious to see craft bleed into design, and vice-versa.  Working Class products can be found at SCAD's online shop, as well as a "stuff store" near you.

Give Terrorism the Finger

Dammit!  Kids today sure do have life by the balls.  I often think about this when I see cool toys, like the Terrorism Finger Puppets shown above.  Then, I realize that for the most part, children's toys are neutered and overly safe...when I was a kid, we had science kits that could blow your head off, lawn darts, and any number of metal toys with sharp edges and tiny parts that were fun to feed to a younger sibling.  STILL!  These finger puppets, which were created by Golfini Della Nonna for online hipster design store MOSS, rock pretty hard.  Remember the episode of Family Ties where Alex P. Keaton loses his virginity to a girl who shared his love of economist Milton Friedman?  Your kids will be getting PLENTY when they master the finer arts of diplomacy, subterfuge, and terrorism on the playground.  Come to think of it, that's kind of what the playground is like without the finger puppets.

LINK via BoingBoing

The Pitfalls of Craft

Philadelphia Artist Christine Domanic's work has been bouncing around the internet for a while now, but I never took the time too dig beyond her (admittedly kick-ass) soft sculptures of ataris and old-skool televisions playing Pitfall. She's got a flagship line of craft for sale on Etsy.com, under the name JackRabbit.  You can improve your life with all sorts of crafty gear, including crocheted garden gnome beer bottle covers, venus flytrap shirts, and...um...this "wiener bench" created entirely from "upcycled" materials including an ikea table and some abandoned sweaters.

She has a great Flickr site as well, which shows more of her artwork, including an intriguing project consisting of mug cozies documenting the sex offenders that live in (presumably) her zip code.  Usually, Etsy has some great work for sale, but is noticeably short on interesting work by artists.  I think that Christine's work covers the entire craft-art spectrum, from fun and functional to museum-worthy.  Supposedly, she is open to custom projects as well--according to a post on FLICKR, she will create a piece based on any Atari game you choose.  I'm really starting to think about getting her to document Atari's Doomed E.T. game...  Hmmm.

LINK thanks, Spencer!

Writer's Block

Sometimes I just don't have anything to say about craft. This, however, has been gnawing at me since the diapered astronaut love triangle story hit. ODB+Amanda Peet=Lisa Nowak?

Agrifolk Documentary

Last year, Extreme Craft brought you a behind the scenes look at Agrifolk, a shockingly new great art movement that emerged from Georgia.  Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats (lately of John Cage ringtone fame) and author Andrew Dietz (The Last Folk Hero) collaborated to give an artistic voice to 50 young trees on a farm.  The art that emerged is dazzling...yet surprisingly subtle.  The pair didn't let their good deeds go undocumented, however.  Their Agrifolkumentary has been completed, and now resides on YouTube.  Explore the wild and wooly frontier of Agrifolk with the artists.  Keats plays the gentleman farmer, philosopher, and protector of the artists, while Dietz alerts you to the cold, hard realities of the art market.  Agrifolk may be a burgeoning movement, but that doesn't make it immune to the forces of the larger art world. 

You can also check out an article on Agrifolk in the most recent issue of Outside magazine.  The magazine has a podcast, which you can find here.  Just select the story with headline, “March 2007 Out of Bounds: The School of Sap (17:25) Eric Hansen gets up close and sappy with the next performance artist: the Leyland Cypress tree.”

LINK

8-Bit Sampler

Flickr user (and apparent craft goddess) CrystalPowell posted this amazing cross stitch sampler of classic Nintendo games.  Thank you very much--I had only just gotten past the trauma of the smirking dog in DuckHunt.  I'm writing this from a fetal position under my desk.  Mottthhhher!

LINK via CRAFT

Margaritaville

Craft.  It's always tough to look at a handmade object and get a sense of the maker.  Does the object come from a stay-at-home hipster mom in Williamsburg, or was it created by a sweatshop slave who was forced to amputate her hands and replace them with prosthetic glue guns.  When I started checking out Margarita Cabrera's work online, I kept running into the same words over and over (so they were culled from her press release by lazy writers).  Chief among these was "labor-intensive".  Cabrera creates oversized soft-sculptured objects out of vinyl.  Of course we've seen this before--Cabrera admits her debt to Claes Oldenberg, but she has staked out a territory where the objects make sense as a part of her worldview.

Cabrera was born in Mexico, but attended school in the United States.  She currently lives in El Paso, Texas, and her work is intimately tangled with border politics.  Her most recent show, at Sarah Meltzer Gallery in New York, featured a landscape  dotted with cacti made out of khaki uniforms from border guards, a beatdown vinyl Volkswagen, and a life-sized soft-sculpture Humvee that sports a real Humvee grille.  Ancillary objects included a pyramid created from smaller humvee sculptures, and most intriguingly, a set of backpacks made of vinyl.  These packs contained other sculptural vinyl objects that made them appropriate for each member of a border-crossing family.  Objects like garlic (to ward off rattlesnakes) and pocketknives were displayed with the appropriate bags.

All of Cabrera's objects are painstakingly (second-most common word besides labor-intensive) crafted in a way that amplifies their handmade qualities.  Stitches and seams have threads hanging from them, revealing their ingenious construction and individual attention.  The Humvee in particular, exhibits a grandiosity of scale which only makes the flaccidity of the vinyl starker.  Cabrera obviously feels an affinity for workers South-of-the Border, and her objects serve to remind us that every act of making is in some way, political.  If you're in the Dallas area, she has a two-person show at the University of Texas at Arlington Gallery.

LINK

A Swede Deal

I work just down the street from an IKEA.  I'm not so keen on particle board, but the idea of cheap modern furniture is a good one, even thought I'm more likely to get sucked in by their cinnamon roles (or caviar in a tube).  A few years ago, Extreme Craft blogged about a D.I.Y. coffin made from IKEA parts.  Now, you can combine your IKEA and hacking lusts with IKEA Hacker!  There are craft projects, simple projects, and major undertakings like the one above, turning a kitchen counter into an office.  There's a whole world of people hot-rodding their particle board out there--but it might all be an excuse to visit IKEA and drink lingonberry soda.

LINK via Consumerist

The Most Feared Phrase

Is any phrase in the English language more feared than "Starring Eddie Murphy...Eddie Murphy....and EDDIE MURPHY"?

One is the Craftiest Number

I've always wondered what a mash-up of Crying While Eating and Stitch-n-Bitch would be like.  Now we can ALL find out!

via Subversive Cross Stitch