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Tentoonstelling/Exposition
30.06.00-27.08.00
Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/
Palais des Beaux-Arts
Vereniging voor Tentoonstellingen/
Société des expositions
Koningstraat10 Rue Royale
Brussel 1000 Bruxelles
Van dinsdag to zondag
/du mardi au dimanche
10 -18u/h
docpba@skynet.be

 

..I think a lot of artists, and I am certainly one of them, are steered toward art by a kind of visual omnivorousness they know as children—by their baby appetite for visual experience, and by the pleasure they get from it. When they’re young, that pleasure can be excited by objects of all and every kind, so that I could sit down today and draw the patterns on some of the dresses that hung in my mother’s closet when I was small, or the tiles on the kitchen floor. But if, as you get older, you develop any kind of serious interest in visual form, you will start educating yourself in its history, and education is inevitably a process of selection: this is worth paying attention to, that is not; this is art, put it on your chart, that is decor, please ignore. For better or worse, this education, whether self-directed or institutional, will have a lot to do with the artist you may become.

.. I grew up in New York, a capital of modernism, and I put in my time at The Museum of Modern Art as a girl and as a teenager. Then when I went through art school, the syllabus mainly had to do with the formal principles of modernist painting. The consequence is that the particular history and way of seeing implicit in modernist formalism, and the formalist’s concern with effective picture-making and visual analysis, are second nature to me, permanently embedded in the way I think. At the same time, like many other artists of my generation, I was deeply troubled by the selections implicit in the formalist education, which, as a program of inclusion and exclusion, seemed utterly flawed. I was consistently taught that art’s only true subject was itself; all too obviously, though, there were more subjects to address than that principle allowed.

.. Throughout my career, I have been dealing with ideas about the way art relates to culture, how cultures relate to other cultures, how people relate to people. I have made art in a variety of forms—installations, photo-based production, other kinds of conceptually grounded work—but the materials I’ve used most have been cotton, silk, wool, linen, and the rest of the stuff of embroidery, knitting, and related labors traditionally associated with women. I see a whole gendered subtext in the use of these media in formally and intellectually ambitious ways. But here’s where my education comes back, because an interest in the qualities and implicit meanings of tactile materials is of course completely consistent with formalist training; it’s just that, in choosing those materials with different criteria in mind, a whole new field of thought can open up. In any case, «At Home & in the World» is for me in some ways a return of the repressed: even while it is, among other things, an argument about the limitations of formalist concerns, it proceeds by allowing their reemergence.

.. The subject matter of the new work is black and white. Those colors—or rather those places, at opposite ends of the spectrum, where color vanishes—have long associations in the history of modernism, which is notorious for its interest in purifying the artist’s palette, whether by confining it to the primaries or sometimes by erasing color altogether (almost). That description obviously simplifies a century’s worth of art, which, happily, was far more various than some of its own makers were ready to acknowledge at the time; but this is not the place to recap the revisionism of recent years. Suffice it to say that before that revisionism took place, I studied with Ad Reinhardt, whose near-mystical attempts to produce modernism’s last, ultimate paintings—paintings that were purely retinal, having no other content besides visual experience—won him the nickname «the black monk.» Reinhardt’s last paintings, of course, were (almost) pure black.

.. Needless to say, the importance of colorlessness in modernism—of white, black, and the gray scale between—goes far beyond Reinhardt. I think, for just a couple of examples, of the metals and felts of the Minimalists, who saw color as an offensive decorative skin, and mostly did without it except to the extent that it was fixed in their materials; and I think of the context of modernist art, the gallery as white cube—a space designed to obliterate any sense of history, any sense of the body, and to suggest a timeless aesthetic divorced from life’s dirty realities. The white wall, the blank canvas, the empty white page—all of these haunt modernist thought.
In this fin de siècle art moment—pluralist, magpie, and deeply marked by Pop art, Conceptual art, post-’60s politics, and much else—it seems almost a joke to explore a formal issue as basic as color choice. Yet choices of that kind have deep metaphorical meanings, and are tied to real politics. Free-associating on «white,» an analysand might get: the hospital and the nurse—the sanitary. Housework—whiter than white, cleaner than clean—and the domestic, interior, ahistorical space conventionally associated with women. The exclusion of the decorative, which is associated with women. The exclusion of sexuality, particularly that of women—the idealization of the virginal, the untouched, the unpenetrated, the desexualized, the pure. The lifeless, the dead. Snow and ice: cold as opposed to heat, north as opposed to south, mind as opposed to body. Abstract rationality. The expulsion of color: a language of repression, of erasure. Whitewashing, or hiding a secret (white paint will cover anything). The confession that cleanses guilt. Colonialism, and the sense of racial superiority that made Victorian Britons speak of «the white man’s burden,» the job—the responsibility—of running the world. The blank space on the map, the unknown. The pretense toward neutrality, the pretense toward perfection. Silence, desolation, emptiness, despair.

.. Run «black» through your session and you’ll get just as long a list. So that just as the earlier samplers shown in «At Home & in the World» trace ideas about thread work through a selection of its countless appearances as a theme in writing and visual art, the new embroideries, in dealing with black and white, can deal with all of the things that an artist like Reinhardt, in constantly reducing his palette, thought he was getting rid of: politics, race, sexuality, culture, society.

.. To describe the whole process of making these works would take a long time, and I’m actually not sure I could do it—I hope the works speak for themselves—but I’m always interested to hear artists talk about their process, and the remainder of this essay will describe some of the things I was thinking about in producing these black and white embroideries. I have imagined them installed in a certain order, which passes discursively through literature, into art, into race, back into literature, and back out through race again. It begins with Edith Wharton’s novel about New England in winter, and with a pair of quotations that contrast a scene indoors, where a man and a woman are warmed by their own company, to the cold «white immensities» outside. The passage I quote beds a sexual metaphor in a description of a woman sewing. I gave the work its long narrow form to convey the isolation of the house. Warmth inside, cold outside—at home and in the world.

.. The next work takes quotations from Herman Melville’s story «The Tartarus of Maids» and from Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The Melville story is set in a paper factory, where white women fold white pages; the Hardy is about a fate inscribed on a woman’s very substance. So both have to do with writing or inscription on a blank whiteness that confuses with a woman’s body, an idea that again is implicitly or explicitly sexual. The embroidery pattern is based on a nineteenth-century mourning sampler—a kind of sampler that women used to make during a period of bereavement. For the final literary sampler in this sequence, I had noticed that tragic heroines often wear white—there’s a Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins that actually depends on this habit for its title, The Woman in White—and I picked a few examples: the Lady of Shalott (her name, incidentally, is Elaine), whom I’ve also treated in an earlier work included in this exhibition, and Hamlet’s fiancée Ophelia, as imagined by Rimbaud. The English comic dramatist Richard Sheridan wraps that piece up.

.. Next the show passes into art. Lawrence Weiner’s work epitomizes what has been called the dematerialization of the art object, in the late 1960s and ’70s; in the group of his pieces that I appropriate in the next set of embroideries, instead of exhibiting a concrete object he provides verbal instructions for making one. Essential to these works of Weiner’s, in which words substitute for the activities of artmaking, is the idea and in fact the physical reality of the gallery as white cube, a blank page for Weiner to write on. These embroideries are also for me a kind of joke about formalist picture-making: each one is really just two rectangles, one white, one gray, but in the context you can’t help but read them as wall and floor, particularly since I looked for a linen the color of poured concrete.

.. Sampler (Optic White) is an embroidered copy of Roy Lichtenstein’s White Brushstroke 1 (1965). In painting an image of a brushstroke, Lichtenstein was deconstructing a key signifier for the generation of painters before him: to the Abstract Expressionists and their followers, the spontaneous gesture of hand over canvas was the definitive artmaking move. Lichtenstein turned that idea inside out by rendering a brushstroke in an obviously preplanned, labor-intensive form. My version is more labor-intensive still. Lichtenstein also undercut the idea of spontaneity through references to mass reproduction, painting the benday dots used in the technology of printing; I reproduce those dots in stitching. Actually embroideries share with the printed halftone, and with computer images composed of pixels, this quality of being pictures made up of tiny, carefully controlled fragments. To see that is to start to inquire into picture-making generally, and into the relative values assigned to different ways of constituting an image—a subject that in my art goes back to work I made in the 1980s, when I made reproductions of photographs in woollen knitting.

.. Sampler (White) covers a real span of twentieth-century art. Setting embroidered copies of white works by Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, and Robert Rauschenberg alongside verbal quotations from Theo van Doesberg, Le Corbusier, Kasimir Malevich, and Robert Ryman, the work is a consideration of modernist ideas about whiteness—its purity, its transcendence, its modernity, its neutrality. As a kind of comment on those ideas, I’ve also included a series of traditional patterns from white-on-white samplers dating from well before the modernist period. The final work based on earlier artworks takes off from a well-known piece by Marcel Broodthaers that itself took off from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés. Mallarmé’s poetry is full of reflection, refraction, and transparency, which Broodthaers eliminated by crossing out the words of the poem with black bars, heightening its quality as a visual structure on the white page. I’ve done my own kind of crossing out, reproducing Broodthaers’s black bars in the crosses of cross-stitch. Then I’ve also made a version on black linen, where the bars appear as rows of tiny white pearls. In part this has to do with restoring the light and transparency that Broodthaers removed from Mallarmé’s poem, but it also extends Mallarmé’s ideas about the concretization of language, about making words palpable and physical—ideas that Broodthaers picked up on when he emphasized the poem’s visual form on the page. So the group of works that talk about art begins with Lawrence Weiner dematerializing painting and sculpture by translating them into verbal language, then ends with the opposite movement, making words physical, text textural, as pearls of speech become pearls in three dimensions.

.. Now we go back into literature, and to Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon. In Sampler (It was a very), the language is physicalized in the form, a long horizontal: I wanted you to have to walk along the piece to read the text, so that you are literally following Camus’s narrator in his long trek down the beach to meet the Arab, or walking with him behind Maman’s coffin. And as you walk, you’re carried along by the wave shape of the red lines, which also refer to the beach, at the same time that they’re an image of barbed wire—or rather of the modern, urban equivalent of it called razor wire. Black and white generally stand in sharp, graphic contrast; here, I wanted the white and also the red to have a brightness against the black field, an intense concentration of color, almost to make you squint, as Camus’s narrator squints in the sun. (Because the piece is so big, and because the ground is black, there’s also a glare off the glass in the frame, and a reflection of the viewer—I liked that too.) Both texts come from North Africa, where you can literally go mad in the white light of the noonday sun, and you’re always hiding from it. White here is blinding and dangerous. This sampler is one of the places where race explicitly enters the show—actually for the second time, since in Sampler (Optic White), derived from Lichtenstein’s brushstroke image, the quotation, from the African-American novelist Ralph Ellison, is about a black man who almost drowns in an explosion of white paint—paint that is made to appear whiter by the addition of a measure of black. Ellison’s image, clearly, is a metaphor about the racial mix of the United States.

.. For Emily Dickinson, despair is white. Which is sad, because she was known for always wearing white dresses. I paired her poem about the impossibility of two people coming together with an image of a weeping eye, which is derived from an embroidery pattern several hundred years old but which reminds me of an eye in the art of Magritte—who, like Broodthaers, haunts the Palais, as you can see in an old photograph in the building’s archives. (Both Warhol and Weiner, incidentally, have also exhibited in this space.) In the Dickinson poem you begin to see whiteness as having some peculiar, sinister power in American culture, and this is more clearly spelled out in an embroidery that returns to Melville, who wrote in Moby Dick that «the idea of whiteness strikes panic to the soul.» Here you have an idea of race itself as original sin.

.. From there white reaches to the sublime, the terrifying, in two embroideries about opposite ends of the globe, the hottest and the coldest, just as white and black are at opposite ends of the spectrum. First I quote the young Joseph Conrad’s view of central Africa as a blank space, an emptiness. (Elsewhere, of course, he called it «the heart of darkness.») I pair that remark with an image that I found in the African museum in Tervuren, an image made well before Conrad wrote, showing the many and various peoples who actually filled that populous continent. Then there is a piece about another aspect of white Europe’s outward drive, this time to the poles, zones of icebergs, emptiness, silence.

.. The last piece in my imaginary tour of the new work is based on a late-eighteenth-century Quaker sampler, and tenets of Quaker belief—«Simplicity, Peace, Equality»—are embroidered in the sampler in black. Those words are an expression of the strong strain of puritanism in American culture, a strain you can see coming out again in an artist like Weiner, or for that matter in Minimalism, and also, I think, in the American version of modernist formalism I was taught as a student. (I have nothing against the Quakers, incidentally; they handle their puritanism quite beneficently.) So now I am back where I started, just as Ad Reinhardt wrote of «starting over at the beginning, always the same,» a line I quote in one of the earlier works in the show—just as I also quote Homer’s Penelope on rebeginning her work daily from scratch, and a motto of Mary Queen of Scots, «In my end is my beginning.» This kind of circularity, of course, is built into needlework, the movement of each stitch always repeating the movement of the stitch before, and starting almost in the same place. It is a heartbeat activity. Which brings me to another kind of return, for I hope the viewer of «At Home & in the World,» even while tracing the paths along which its references and quotations lead, will receive from it another kind of pleasure—the absorbing pleasure I got from the dresses in my mother’s closet, and from the patterns in the kitchen tile.