When artworks started self-consciously commenting on their own status as commodities there simultaneously rearose the interest in escaping commodification. The argument was put forth that the artwork could function analogously to the gift, as an object outside of the system of exchange. This is what initially led to my interest in homemade craft items, these being the objects already existing in popular usage that are constructed solely to be given away. Not to say that I believe that craft gifts themselves harbor utopian sentiments; all things have a price. The hidden burden of the gift is that it calls for pay-back, but the price is unspecified, repressed. The uncanny aura of the craft item is linked to time. Crafts are the literal embodiment of the Puritan work ethic. They seem to announce that work is its own reward. This is spoken through the long, labor-intensive hours it takes to construct them by hand. They speak the language of the wage earner in which there is a direct one-to-one relationship between time spent and worth. The equation is not between time and money, it is a more obscure relationship drawn between time and commitment, one that results in a kind of emotional usury. The gift operates within an economy of guilt; an endless feeling of still-owing attends it because of its mysterious worth. And the incredibly loaded nature of these objects is intensified by their material nature, by the seeming contradiction that their emotional weight far exceeds the worth of the cheap and lowly materials from which they are constructed. However, it isn't proper to speak of the "junk" status of the craft item: it is in bad taste to comment on the monetary worth of a gift. The fine art junk sculpture could be said, like the icon, to have value beyond its material.

In the process of acquiring large numbers of craft items, primarily dolls and stuffed toy animals, I started to become aware of them for the first time as discrete objects. That beyond simply being carriers of "love hours" (or "guilt hours") they also had specific forms, and that there must be some connection between these forms and the objects' use. But at the same time that I became conscious of the fact that these were discrete objects I also saw that they were extremely limited formally. There are only a few craft types commonly made. They can easily be categorized by material and construction techniques. My shift of interest to the individual craft item led me away from my earlier accumulation works into the Arenas series consisting of stuffed animals in

arrangements on blankets laid on the floor. In these works I played the inclination to project into the figures, to construct an inner narrative around them, against the viewer's awareness of his or her own physical
presence. This self-consciousness was produced by using extremely worn and soiled craft materials. The viewer's immediate tendency to be sucked into a narrativizing situation is repelled when he or she gets close enough to sense the unpleasant tactile qualities of the craft materials. Fear of becoming soiled counters the urge to idealize.

Stuffed toys, dolls especially, lend themselves to invisibility. When you look at at doll you don't notice its particularities. Rather, you see them as "human" in a general way. If there are enough suitable cues -head, body, legs, etc.- you project humanness into them. And you tend to ignore specifics such as facial features, hands, and feet. The figure can be stripped down almost to a simple bag shape and still be accepted as portraying a human being. All other qualities are filled in by the viewer, and it is this projection that allow us to empathize with the doll. If you were to see the doll as an exact model of a figure, as a portrait statue, you would be unable to empathize with it. It would be seen as a monstrosity.

In my next series, the Empathy Displacement series (1991), I concentrated on this process of identification. The works consist of human-scale depictions of a doll, presented along with its model concealed in a black box that lies on the floor in front of it. Empathy is problematized in this situation. The shift in scale makes it difficult to empathize with the painting of the doll; the viewer is led to empathize with the original doll he or she must assume is enclosed in the box. Projection is made complete because the object of empathy is no longer to be seen.

In my newest work, which is the one to be presented at the Carnegie International and also, I believe, the last of my "stuffed animal" works, I want to remove all vestiges of empathy -to deal with the pure "material nature" of the crafts. Three representational systems will be simultaneously used to present the crafts, categorized by construction, technique, and shape. One system is the crafts themselves arranged by category on simple folding tables. The second system consists of a photograph of each item with a ruler to show its true size, and the third is a drawing done by an archeological illustrator of one category of craft item. In this way all the psychological baggage usually attending these objects will be denied. And, of course, by repressing this aspect, these qualities become even more pervasive.

M.K.

(From Carnegie International 1991,
vol, 1, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,
Rizzoli, New York)