{"id":1810,"date":"2018-02-10T17:52:24","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T17:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1810"},"modified":"2018-02-10T17:52:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-10T17:52:24","slug":"laura-gascoigne-tangled-web-september-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1810","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: Tangled Web – September 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why is there so much sewing?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d demanded The Art Newspaper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christina Ruiz after visiting Christine Macel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exhibition at this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Venice Biennale. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I get it: domestic work, women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work, is important and undervalued. But is it in itself art? No it is not.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a time when so-called textile arts were prized above all others; when first unveiled in 1519, Raphael\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tapestries for the Sistine Chapel threatened to eclipse the fame of Michelangelo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ceiling. But in the 18th century tapestry began to feel fusty as audiences warmed to the immediacy of paint. A work\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s value no longer resided in the price of the wool, the skill of the weavers, the total hours spent in production and associated cost, but in the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s touch, the signature of authenticity that connected audiences with the creator of the work, usually male.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1980s, when Rozsika Parker wrote The Subversive Stitch, she pinpointed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a major force in the marginalisation of women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. But on the coattails of conceptualism, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwomen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 has come back from the margins. Since the personal signature of the pen or brush fell under suspicion the needle has returned, not always in the hands of women. While the women are bent over their embroidery frames, the men are stealing the limelight, \u00c3\u00a0 la Raphael, with tapestries woven by others to their designs. Chris Ofili\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Weaving Magic has just been the focus of an exhibition at the National Gallery, and there are more tapestries than pots in Grayson Perry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! at the Serpentine Gallery (until September 10th).<\/span><\/p>\n

If Hockney wants to keep his place as top national treasure, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d better put down his iPad and pick up a needle. Tapestry, embroidery, knitting, crocheting are all back in the frame and proving highly popular with a public tired of the self-conscious cack-handedness of so much contemporary art. This is art like granny used to make, sweet as apple pie and absolved of the obligation to be serious. From Vidya Gastaldon & Jean-Michel Wicker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s knitted octopus, titled Sex Is Good (1999), shown in Tate St Ives 2013 exhibition Aquatopia to Shauna Richardson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s three 9m lions, crocheted from 36 miles of Swaledale wool and displayed in a glass cage at Twycross Zoo in 2012 as part of the Cultural Olympiad, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all a bit of folksy fun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally, education departments love it. Imagine the jollity at The Exchange in Newlyn in 2010 when artist Jonty Lees donned a Montgolfier flying helmet and goggles to lead a sewing circle and basket-weaving group in the construction of a full-size hot air balloon. The following year the Science Museum went one better and got participants in its Stitched Science weekend to create an entire Solar System Art Installation from \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcvarious fibre arts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. True, the results looked a bit of a mess, but sew what? Fibre arts have therapeutic benefits. According to the organisers of the Crafts Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccinema knit-along events\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in 2012, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153knitting has been proven to enhance cognitive development in children, and well-being in both children and adults.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sew there.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not all child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s play: serious issues can be addressed with needles. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPolitical statement knits\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 by Lisa Anne Auerbach were a highlight of Wasteland, an exhibition of young Los Angelino artists at the Mona Bismarck American Centre in Paris last year. More ambitiously, at the Minories Gallery, Colchester in 2015 Clare Sams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s installation Knitting Fever recreated the devastation caused by the 2009 floods when a wool shop of that name in Cockermouth spilled its guts through the Cumbrian town. The gallery complimented the artist on using a process \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stereotypically viewed as a feminine past-time [sic]\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to represent \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cataclysmic forces not normally associated with the practice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Sams\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctotal knitted environment\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 looked a little twee for a cataclysm \u00e2\u20ac\u201c acts of God produce more dramatic results than needlework \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to let that stop her, having already knitted her way through the Hackney Riots and Guantanamo Bay. No knit-wit she.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other artist-knitters are not so outward-looking or gender-neutral in their choice of subjects. Given the vogue for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbedroom painting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, bedroom knitting was almost bound to follow and, sure enough, in 2012 the Polish-born New Yorker Agata Olek transformed Tony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Gallery in Brick Lane into a crocheted replica of her boudoir, with walls and floor emblazoned with explicit texts from former lovers. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It is not just another apartment installation,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she assured Metro, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it is the reflection of life, love, trust and lust in current time.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Its tear-jerking title I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone was a quote from, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve guessed it, the queen of the misery stitchers, Tracey Emin. But no artist has taken intimate needlework quite so far as Casey Jenkins in her 2013 performance Casting Off My Womb, in which she knitted a menstrual cycle-length scarf from skeins of wool secreted in her fanny. The work, she told The Guardian, was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153primarily about casting off the need for validation from external sources\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153forging a path of self-determination in the face of society\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expectations\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maria Balshaw would say aye to that. Unlike Christina Ruiz, she congratulated Venice Biennale curator Christine Macel in The Art Newspaper on doing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a really good job in challenging some of the gender stereotypes around textiles,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d singling out male artist David Medalla for praise for his participatory work A Stitch in Time, first shown in 1968. Medalla\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s early lead in removing the sexual stigma from stitching may have laid the ground for the Crafts Council\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 2004 exhibition Boys Who Sew, at which Fernando Penteado established the butch credentials of needlework with a display of samplers embroidered by tattooed inmates of Wandsworth Prison. Since then the social enterprise Fine Cell Work has climbed on the prison wagon and trained 300 prisoners in 20 gaols to spend their lock-up time productively embroidering cushion covers. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s precious little bunce in it for the lags, but more job satisfaction than stitching mailbags.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no discovery that men are nimble-fingered (not a lot of people know this, but the young Malevich upset his father with his unhealthy aptitude for Ukrainian cross-stitch). The danger for women of challenging gender stereotypes around textiles is that male artists will seize the initiative. Not content with getting tapestries woven to their designs, brothers are doing it for themselves. In Art Now at Tate Britain in 2010 Andy Holden showed The Pyramid Piece, a 10ft-high knitted replica of a chip off the Great Pyramid of Cheops that he had illegally smuggled home from a family holiday to Egypt at the age of 12. Along with its benefits for cognitive development, knitting is obviously a good way of assuaging guilt.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main drawback of needlework, for unreconstructed individualists, is its inflexibility as a means of expression, which is why most attempts to employ it as one, Tracey Emin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s included, have been sew-so. The notable exception is Mr and Mrs Pope, Knitted, Shrunk and Hung (2012), a truly heart-wringing piece of work that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c sorry girls! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c was created by a male sculptor, Nicholas Pope, with his own fair hands.<\/span><\/p>\n

Laura Gascoigne<\/strong>
\nThe Jackdaw\u00c2\u00a0Sept\/Oct 2017<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why is there so much sewing?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d demanded The Art Newspaper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Christina Ruiz after visiting Christine Macel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exhibition at this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Venice Biennale. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I get it: domestic work, women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work, is important and undervalued. But is it in itself art? No it is not.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There was a time when so-called textile arts were prized above all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[696,697,73,685,686,695,227,163,690,693,694,422,62,687,688,222,691,692,79,228,689],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-agata-olek","tag-casey-jenkins","tag-chris-ofili","tag-christina-ruiz","tag-christine-macel","tag-clare-sams","tag-grayson-perry","tag-hockney","tag-jean-michel-wicker","tag-jonty-lees","tag-lisa-anne-auerbach","tag-michelangelo","tag-national-gallery","tag-raphael","tag-rozsika-parker","tag-serpentine-gallery","tag-shauna-richardson","tag-the-exchange-in-newlyn","tag-tracey-emin","tag-venice-biennale","tag-vidya-gastaldon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}