The Constitutive Sofa Cushion – Materialization Analysed From A Cultural Perspective

Sara Hanghøj University of Aarhus, DENMARK

THE CONSTITUTIVE SOFA CUSHION – MATERIALIZATION ANALYSED FROM A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract How can personal values materialize through a hand-made everyday artefact, and how can the artefact constitute action and self-perception? The empirical research and analysis concerns how a former textile crafts teacher’s subjective values and professional identity materialize through a hand-woven sofa cushion, with the sitting room as a cultural and informal environment as its arena in 2006. The local and social network of the informant (born 1919) is traced through a detailed cultural analysis of the creation, usage and existence of the sofa cushion, including even the material interactions occurring between the human body, space and artefact, thereby revealing the materialization process. Based on results of the analysis, ANT (Actor-Network- Theory) is used in order to discuss how The Danish Folk High School’s conception of simplicity as an aesthetic and gendered ideal in the formal education of female handcraft-teachers, was generated and constituted with the sofa cushion as one of many actors.

Keywords: Home-textiles, Aesthetic and Gendered Ideals, Identity, Materiality, ANT (Actor-Network-Theory)

Introduction

The present paper stems from research at Department of Curriculum Research, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I practice my work as an Assistant Professor in Material Culture and Learning. The Department offers a Master of Arts (Education) in Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies (Material Culture).

The research and the education focuses on handcraft processes, materiality, and curriculum related to learning, social, aesthetic and gendered issues in both formal (school and education) and informal (home, workplace and leisure) relations and situations . Of course we take an interest in what we are doing with and to artefacts, but today the interest also concerns what the artefacts are doing to us (Ehn & Löfgren 2004) during creation and during daily use.

In my project (Hanghøj 2007) I distinguish `objectification´ from `materialization´ i.e. `objectification´ is the process by which an individual bring certain values, ideals and understandings to life and create tools and other artefacts from the ideas, (Wenger 2006) while `materialization´ is the process in which meaning is negotiated and in which values, ideals and understandings materialize in front of you during the creative process and through the artefact in its daily use. Artefacts have their demands or commands. They `call´ us and we must “respond rather in a bodily than a cognitive way” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 139; Cerbone 2006: 131)

In a Danish comic strip called NEMI, it is visualised how an artefact can make demands of a person: A female customer wants to buy a wooden bowl in a shop and the shopkeeper informs her, that the bowl will break if she does not oil it sometimes. The

1 customer gets angry – she wants a bowl which can do something for her, not the other way around. “If I buy an artefact which makes demands of me,” she says, “I might as well have a few children instead. I never buy clothes that have to be ironed and I never buy curtains that need to be sewn. I don’t need that bowl; I will have a glass bowl instead.” And the shopkeeper politely informs the customer that the glass bowl cannot be washed in a dishwasher. “Fuck off!” the customer says and leaves the shop. Artefacts must indeed do something to us, call and make demands of us.

To weave a cushion and to use it in a living room is not only a matter of what a person do to the cushion, but also a matter of what the cushion does to the person. But what can a hand-woven cushion actually do to a person? This has been the main question of the project. What can a hand-woven cushion do through its creation, use and daily presence in a living room, and what in particular can it do to the person who made the cushion herself? Can it constitute action and self-perception?

Methodology I limited my empirical choices to one artefact, one informant and one room. I thereby challenged myself and the academic practice to see if these limited and narrow empirical choices could bear and answer the questions of an academic investigation.

The choices were:  A hand-woven cushion made in 1988 by  a Danish textile handcraft teacher, Mrs. Edith Bukh, born in 1919 – who were taught a profession in a Danish Folk High School programme aimed to educate women as handcraft-teachers.  The informant’s living room 2006

Like the Norwegian professor in aesthetics, culture and learning, Else Marie Halvorsen, I regard culture as a process constructing subjective and collective identity (Halvorsen 2004). The cultural and educational context in this project is the textile handcraft culture within the historical organisation “Højskolernes Håndarbejde” (HH) – “Folk High School Handcrafts”. The time frame is 1930 – 2006.

“ Folk High School Handcrafts” (HH) was a Danish organisation that operated from 1932 to 2002, with its heydays from the 1930s to the early 1970s. The women behind the organisation were handcraft-teachers in the Danish Folk High Schools. They educated women, and they created, produced and sold patterns and materials for embroidery and weaving, inspired by `genuine´ and original material, representing the aesthetic ideals of the Danish pre-industrial peasant culture. This production represented a sort of invented tradition (Guldberg 1998: 44; Hobsbawn 1983: 1-14). Together, these women formed a strong social and professional network, they were handcraft `dictators´ and role models, and they educated many women, including the informant of my project, through their firmly held ideals, which became not only aesthetic, but also gendered. Professionalizing textile handcraft and women through education included a construction of gender in a normative emancipation. It was normative because it was based on traditional female work including national-romantic ideals, but it also represented an emancipation of women, because the education provided the female

2 teachers an opportunity to earn their own money and to develop their own professional life. In my method and theory I followed the traces of the artefact, regarding the cushion as documentation and as a non-human actor. Following the actor itself through its traces is one of the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour’s theoretical and methodological ideas (Latour 2005) according to the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). His idea of a flat social network without time- and space limits contains the idea of human and non-human actors interacting in networks via the notion, that objects are acting too i.e. they make a difference and play different roles in the acting of human beings. The hand woven cushion as a non-human actor, its traces: materials, colours, pattern, technique, its creation, use and existence and its aesthetic and gendered ideals (e.g. simplicity), became, in collaboration with the human actor, the informant and her narratives, one of the main entrances to the cultural analysis aimed to find answers about materialization, about what an artefact do to a person and about how close subject and object can be connected. The methodology included:

 Narratives and interviews  Phenomenological descriptions (Merleau-Ponty 1994, Bachelard 1994)  Detailed descriptions of the artefact as an entrance to a  Cultural analysis of the creation, usage and presence of the sofa cushion (Ehn & Löfgren 2004)  The results of the cultural analysis is combined with an ANT analysis (Latour 2005) of simplicity as an aesthetic and gendered ideal in a never ending network of simplicity with the sofa cushion as one of many actors

I define the concept of materiality not only as objects and artefacts but also as acts and actions – and as relations, illustrated in the model of materialization (fig.1). In this project following my choices and my construction the relation between body and artefact focuses on creation, the relation between artefact and space focuses on the use and the relation between space and body focuses on the daily existence or presence of the cushion. These relations lead to materialization of values and understandings illustrated in the centre of the model.

3 Fig. 1: Model of materialization (Hanghøj 2007)

Creation, Use and Existence are the headlines of the main analysis in the investigation. Under the headline “Creation - or how to connect your body with the world through the creation of a cushion”, I examined the processes connected with choices and selections of:

 Thread and materials  Colour  Loom and weaving  Pattern  Finishing the work

The artefact (fig. 2) was chosen, because it represented the aesthetic choices of the informant in general. The choice became obvious, when I listened to the narratives of the informants professional and personal life, when I observed her home and home textiles, and when I related her choices to the context of the Folk High school Handcraft culture, which is highly documented through text books, photos, manuscripts, articles, patterns, materials, textiles and pupils works.

The cushion was based on a pattern from HH, it was made from combed wool from HH, vegetable dyed with chestnut and indigo mixed by the informant. It was woven on a small handloom in a traditional Scandinavian technique, in Danish called “ligesidet røllakken”.

Fig. 2.: “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for”. (Gaston Bachelard 1958 (1994))

4 Results of research

The cushion was made in 1988 by the informant, but it was based on an elder cushion woven in the early 1960s by a woman closely connected to the informant through the social and professional HH-network. This woman died young and the informant and her husband adopted her only son. This fact became important in the analysis, as I regarded the cushion as a transitional object connecting the inner and the exterior world of the informant through textile objects and social relations according to Judy Attfield:

”Thus textiles present a particularly apposite object type to illustrate how things are used to mediate the interior mental world of the individual, the body and the exterior objective world beyond the self through which a sense of identity is constructed and transacted within social relations.” (Attfield 2000: 123)

As a transitional object the hand woven cushion combined the informant with her role models, the other women in the HH-culture, in a social, emotional and professional network and thereby took part in the construction of her identity.

Creation

All choices involve rejecting other possibilities. The informant did not choose artificial materials, hand-spun wool or intense colours. I examined the cultural and aesthetic reasons for this in detail and found that it was important in her handcraft culture to show discipline in choice of material, thread, weaving, pattern and the body. Raw wool was disciplined into a combed thread, which was disciplined into a certain weaving technique including certain weaving rules disciplining the body to control itself during weaving, using the body as a tool and the tool as body (Silvén 2004). Through education, the informant learned identification of certain materials, colours and techniques as a basis for making the `right´ choices according to her textile handcraft culture. Learning practice through her formal education, she then practised her understanding (Søndergaard 2000), not only in her own professional life as a teacher, but also through her informal life in the living-room. Separating the professional from the amateur was part of the professionalizing process. In sewing the cushion together instead of using a zipper, the informant demonstrated to her visitors and the other members of her social acquaintances, that she had the time, the ability and the knowledge to care for, wash and handle the artefact in a professional and correct way in accordance with the ideals of her textile handcraft culture. The constructions of reasons for the right choices, distinguishing right from wrong, genuine from false (materials, colours, femininity, patterns), was in the HH textile handcraft culture derived from the textile history of women and from the functionalism. Both aesthetic and gendered ideals lie buried here.

Use In the analysis of the relation between artefact and space, it is relevant to take a close look at the daily use. Thus, the living room was analysed as:

 a space of structure and order  a poetic space

5  a space of care (care for materiality and care through materiality)  a gendered and social space

When somebody sits on the sofa cushion, it is deformed, and the informant responds to the `call´ of the cushion by bringing it back to its original form and structure, shaking it up and beating it. This is possible because of its fluffy down filling. The living room of the informant is dominated by functionalism and simplicity. When her housekeeper has cleaned and left the house, the informant “brings things back to order in the living room”, (my translation) correcting the placing of cushions and ornaments – it is a bodily feeling, she explains, she cannot help it. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty this can be explained by the idea of a subjective body-scheme (Merleau-Ponty 1994). In this case the classic ideal of composition called “the golden section”, as the informant learned it through her education, has become a part of her personal body-scheme. “The individual elements must be more similar than different” is the informant’s motto. It is her own way to express the principle and the rules of the golden section and of simplicity, and she transfers this rule from the way she chooses and uses her patterns in textile handcraft (eg. the pattern of the handwoven cushion) to the way she keeps her home tidy in a certain gendered way. Thereby the ideal of simplicity becomes both aesthetic and gendered. Taking care of home textiles during creation and use and taking care of the home is here not only seen as gendered action but also as a sensory and tactile action and experience. The French philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard points out how taking care of a furniture means creating.

“ … when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woollen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object. He increases the object’s human dignity.” (Bachelard 1994:67)

In the period from 1956-1959, new textile patterns by HH were presented weekly through articles in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten. This included not only descriptions of the textiles, but also directions and ideals for decorating the home and for the `right´ life for a housewife. The headlines of the articles comprise an extract of meaning showing that the cushion was `humanized´, and that the woman and the cushion in the 1950s were expected to have the same functions in the home. Here are a few examples of headlines:

 The Cushion for Decoration and Usefulness  It Cheers up the Living Room  Cushions must be Quiet  A Cushion has many Tasks

The strategy of rationalizing and formalizing the home, started by functionalism as a social programme in Denmark in the 1930s supported by the Danish Government, architects and Danish Women’s organisations, and it led to a focus on cleanliness and order and made simplicity a duty more than a liberation with the sofa cushion as one of many actors. The textile handcraft culture HH and the The Danish Folk High School played a role in this emerging social network of functionalism and simplicity, by using the home textiles as actors to obey the aesthetic rules and by using the housewife as a gendered and aesthetic actor and main keeper of better homes.

6 Not all women obeyed these directions of simplicity. A comparison of the functionalistic living-room of the informant (fig. 3) and that of another Danish female handcraft-teacher of the same age, but rooted in a different textile handcraft culture (fig. 4), made me imagine the informant visiting the other woman in her living room and reverse. Their body-schemes would most likely both be challenged in different ways by the other woman’s home because of the differences in aesthetic choices and the differences in the numbers of materials, colours, techniques and things. It is simplicity and austerity versus diversity and homeliness.

Fig. 3: Simplicity and austerity

Fig. 4: Diversity and homeliness

7 Conclusions

 Artefact, body and space are united in the sofa cushions’ creation, usage and presence.  In the informant’s mind the social, professional and historic background and environment for the cushion’s creation blends with the social environment for the cushion’s use today. The ideas and understanding of practice deriving from the informant’s educational life (e.g. the golden section) materialize in the informant’s practice of understanding in her every day life and becomes part of her body-scheme.  The sofa cushion represents compressed time, the amateur is separated from the professional, the knowledge and care of the informant materializes through the cushion in the form of the informant’s values in life and the cushion hereby constitutes her professional identity.  Knowledge was seen as power in the education of textile handcraft teachers in the middle of the twentieth century, setting the amateur apart from the professional in a marginalising and excluding way. How is the situation today in the educational handcraft world, do we share knowledge instead?  Simplicity is not only an aesthetic ideal but also a gendered ideal which becomes part of the informant’s body scheme. This led me to an ANT analysis of the local network of the informant placed in a global network:

The Never-ending Network of Simplicity in Time and Space. Human and non human actors :

 Simplicity as an ideal is older than functionalism as ideology and as style  The Danish Folk High School – aesthetic and Scandinavian ideals  The City Hall of Copenhagen (1905) is “the Danish Folk High School marching into the capital in clogs” (my translation)(Abrahamsen 1994: 117)  Martin Nyrop – architect  HH patterns and materials as conveyers of aesthetic ideals through education and through the letter box in private homes as mail order business  The sofa cushion  The informant and her role models  Cleanliness and structure – gendered ideals  Project Housewife and functionalism as a social programme (Schmidt 1986)  Young peoples revolt against simplicity and cleanliness in the 1970s  “Less is more” (Mies van der Rohe - Bauhaus)

If I refer this project to the title of the conference the conception of the new word “Crafticulation” is not only a matter of expressing yourself through craft but also a matter of how crafts constitute action, professional identity and self-perception.

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