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Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces The Journal of Modern Craft Queerly Made: Volume 2—Issue 1 Harmony Hammond’s March 2009 pp. 59–80 Floorpieces DOI 10.2752/174967809X416279 Julia Bryan-Wilson Reprints available directly from the publishers Photocopying permitted by Julia Bryan-Wilson is Assistant Professor of Contemporary licence only Art in the Department of Art History and Director of the © Berg 2009 Ph.D. program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also a curator and critic, and her writing has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, and Oxford Art Journal. Her book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era will be published in 2009 by the University of California Press. This article draws upon her recent research in feminist and queer craft since 1970. Abstract In 1973, the artist Harmony Hammond made a series of artworks entitled Floorpieces. Based on traditional rag-rug techniques, these braided fabric pieces were selectively painted and then placed, like rugs, directly on the ground. The making of the Floorpieces coincided with Hammond coming out, and their spiraling, braided form is suggestive of both lesbian erotics and traditions of women’s handicraft. Hammond’s work challenges many of the binary oppositions that continue to structure conversations of craft—high/low, masculine/feminine, functional/decorative. This article argues that Hammond’s destruction of binaries activates a queer space, and that her handmade abstractions open up possible directions for a productive queering of the category of craft that is attentive to sexuality and class. Keywords: Harmony Hammond, craft, queer theory, feminism, class, lesbian art. Crafting the Floorpieces In 1973, US artist Harmony Hammond came out as a lesbian. That same year, she created a series of six watershed artworks—her Floorpiece sculptures (Figure 1). Made using The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 59–80 60 Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces Julia Bryan-Wilson Fig 1 Harmony Hammond, Floorpiece V, 1973. Cloth and acrylic, 59 in. (149 cm) diameter. Courtesy Dwight Hackett projects, Sante Fe, New Mexico. © Harmony Hammond. Licensed by VAGA, New York. traditional braided rug techniques, the also bringing craft up. In a statement for her circular, spiraling Floorpieces were comprised solo show in 1973 at A.I.R., the women-only of recycled knit cloth found during alternative cooperative gallery of which Hammond’s rag-picking excursions in New she was a cofounder, Hammond wrote of York City’s garment district. These industrial her “desire to break down the distinctions cast-offs were braided together, tightly coiled, between painting and sculpture, between art stitched to a heavy cloth backing, and then and women’s work, and between art in craft selectively painted with acrylic. Hammond and craft in art.”3 Many other craft-based fi ne has called the Floorpieces “her most radical arts, such as tablecloths or quilts, rely upon works.”1 The term “radical” invokes its a spatial shift from horizontal to vertical as Latin origins—a rooting in, or return to, they are institutionally framed and legitimized foundations—while it also suggests a strident as art—such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed politics. This article considers the Floorpieces’ (1955) or Faith Ringgold’s story quilts.4 This radicalism anew within two related contexts: move to the wall cancels out the work’s Hammond’s craft-based process, and the utility; such use-value, of course, is one concurrent emergence of her queer identity. standard dividing line between craft and art. However, one need not have recourse to Hammond’s Floorpieces, however, stubbornly the biographical to make claims about craft’s resist that change in orientation. They are perhaps inherent queerness. laid on the ground as rugs—insistently To understand the Floorpieces as queer low, although any functionality they have craft is to write a feminist art history that is in that capacity is partial, and intentionally defi antly lesbian as well as sensitive to class.2 compromised. Few artists in 1973 were as dedicated as Hammond’s work is positioned within Hammond was to bringing art down, while several overlapping art historical movements. The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 59–80 Julia Bryan-Wilson Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces 61 The Floorpieces have been exhibited Yet within art history, the Floorpieces alongside other gendered, handmade art are most often retrospectively understood (“Division of Labor: ‘Women’s Work’ in as in dialogue with other 1960s and 1970s Contemporary Art,” curated by Lydia Yee fl oor-based artworks, such as Lynda Benglis’s at the Bronx Museum of Art, 1995), as poured paintings and the metal sculptures well as seen as expanding the defi nition of of Carl Andre (Figure 2). Much has been painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s made of the differences between Hammond (“High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting and Andre in particular, in language that is 1967–1975,” curated by Katy Siegel, 2006). stereotypically, even hyperbolically gendered: While these are relevant critical contexts, circular versus square; soft, warm fabric Hammond’s work also exceeds them, versus hard, cold metal; saturated, applied bringing together feminist politics, avant- color versus neutral, inherent tones; and garde abstraction, queer sensuality, and handcrafted domestic surfaces versus found “middlebrow” hobbyist crafting. industrial material. Hammond’s integration As Elissa Auther has argued in a previous and braiding together of her cloth strands issue of this journal, fi ber crafts and fi ne arts, to create a unifi ed, spiral rug is at odds while sharing common ground aesthetically, with Andre’s placement of individual units were often segregated in this era and subject that remain separate even when subsumed to hierarchical divisions.5 Some of this within his precise grids. However, such separation was challenged by feminism, and easy dichotomies disregard the fact that the Floorpieces reference a range of 1970s both artists shared an interest in fl atness, feminist concerns: namely, the elevation baselessness, and the phenomenological of the domestic arts, the dismantling of activation of the viewer’s space. What is gendered hierarchies of art and craft, and the more, Hammond’s materials—strips from dignifying of historically feminized labor.6 They the end-cuts of large bolts of machine-knit also key into other social and political issues fabric—are just as industrial as Andre’s of that decade. Hammond’s use of remnants metals. from garbage dumpsters had an ecological Ironically, perhaps the most important component, for instance, and relates to the difference between Andre’s work and nascent environmental and do-it-yourself Hammond’s Floorpieces, which she views anti-capitalist movement. And the braided as “lateral paintings,” is that the latter are pieces are embedded in a kind of femo- not meant to be walked on. Andre’s primitivism that attempted to link women’s metal pieces—stepped onto and trod art cross-culturally and trans-historically with upon—are in clear dialogue with utilitarian indigenous and traditional craft practices. fl oor coverings, but the artist himself was The Floorpieces’ spiraled forms relate to strongly opposed to this reading, as it pushed Native American pottery and basket-making, his sculptures dangerously close to the which are based on similar coiling, and long-dismissed realm of craft. Phil Leider Hammond has long been concerned with referred to Andre’s fl oor works as “rugs” the ritualistic stitching of much women’s in his 1968 review of Andre’s solo show at work. Dwan Gallery in New York, a terminology The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 59–80 62 Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces Julia Bryan-Wilson Fig 2 Carl Andre, Steel-Magnesium Plain, 1969. Steel and magnesium, thirty-six-unit square, eighteen 3 3 plates of each metal alternating, each plate /8 × 12 × 12 in. (1 × 30 × 30 cm); overall: /8 × 72 × 72 in. (1 × 182 × 182 cm). © Carl Andre. Licensed by VAGA, New York. that had wide circulation despite Andre’s a time when he was a vocal member of objections.7 As the artist wrote in a letter to the Art Workers’ Coalition and signaled the editor in Artforum in 1973—the same his identity as an “art worker” by sporting year that Hammond made her fl oor-based a daily uniform of worker’s overalls.9 What sculptures—“My work derives from the Andre’s letter does not mention is that rugs, working-class crafts of bricklaying, tile-setting, too, are in dialogue with labor; Hammond’s and stone-masonry. I have pointed this out Floorpieces are feminist, class-conscious over and over again and yet my works are comments on work—fl oors are, after all, described as ‘rugs.’”8 loaded sites of women’s housekeeping. Andre’s insistence that his art derives If Andre is one “father” of fl oor-based from (masculine) artisanal labor ignores the art, Lynda Benglis might be considered fact that a rug might as easily be considered a “mother.” Starting in the late 1960s, a “working-class craft.” “Rug” becomes a Benglis poured pigmented latex directly pejorative term, and Andre distances himself on the ground in large colorful swaths. from its low, feminine origins. Andre’s Benglis also used industrial materials such masculine, classed identity was especially as polyurethane foam to create droopy, at issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, bulbous forms on the fl oor. With their The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 2—Issue 1—March 2009, pp. 59–80 Julia Bryan-Wilson Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces 63 almost fl uorescent, intentionally vulgar colors surfaces rely on subtle textural contrasts not and debased materials, Benglis’s “fallen” clearly visible in photographs—especially paintings were, like Hammond’s work, since the paint has often soaked into the feminist challenges to fi ne art hierarchies.10 fabric.
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