Bryan-Wilson 2017

Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art + Textile Politics. University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Introduction

What does it mean to imagine the sewing needle as a dangerous tool and to envision female collective textile making as a process that might upend conventions, threaten state structures, or wreak political havoc?

An article on the Republican Party national field director Maxene Fernstrom from 1981 recounts that “she turns heads when she bursts into a room wearing a mink coat over a sweatshirt that says, ‘Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society.’ ” 7With its evo…

The T-shirt itself embodies a tension within textiles: they occupy a central place in traditionalist histories while they also erupt as potential sites of resistance to that very traditionalism, claimed by compet- ing factions at once as hegemonic and counterhegemonic.

Throughout, I use fray in several senses: the material wearing out of textiles, the undoing of threads, the pulling apart of fibers through strain and repeated use. Edges— or borders—are more prone to fraying, as they are subject to more friction.

While it is said that one should “rise above the fray,” this book choses to dwell in its sometimes un- comfortable place of forceful confrontation, for I take as my central subject fractious disputes about what and how textiles mean, where they should live institutionally, and where they belong politically.

In Fray I discuss select instances in which textiles from the 1970s to the 1990s—in art as well as nonart contexts—have been marshaled for their spe- cially tensile properties, that is, their capacity to be pulled, stressed, and withstand tension, sometimes to their breaking point.

Rather than adopt a binary scheme in which amateurism is defined, oppositionally, against professionalism, I understand these as ever-mobile terms in a broader, flex- ible matrix that admits a range of individual and collective production by all kinds of self-proclaimed textile makers. This book structurally asserts how, in the case of textiles, fine art and amateur practices are mutually cocon- stitutive, constantly informing each other and viewed radically differently depending on context.

Amateur textile craft in the main falls outside the scope of contemporary art, which is increasingly comfortable with assessing the exceptionalism of self-trained or “outsider artists” such as Judith Scott (evermore folded into the apparatus of auction houses and art magazines) but is less able to critically account for the tremendous amount of making generated by those termed, in a telling phrase that equates amateurism with nonremunerative

leisure time, “Sunday makers.” In recent decades, textiles have provided a unique challenge to these divisions as more self-trained crafters are absorbed into the art market; the traveling exhibits and coffee table books featuring the African American quil…

With the phrase textile politics I mean not only to suggest how textiles have been used to advance political agendas but also to indicate a procedure of making politics material: textile as a transitive verb.

I claim that to textile politics is to give texture to politics, to refuse easy binaries, to ac- knowledge complications: textured as in uneven, but also, as I will show, as in tangibly worked and retaining some of the grain of that labor, whether smooth or snagged.

Truth might have so carefully deployed knitting because it could be seen several ways, as a nonthreaten- ing demonstration of her aptitude for domestic work, a reassuring sign of her femininity, and as an assertion of her strident activism and creative self- production.

Given that textile handicraft has played a significant role both in the consolidation of national identities, especially in moments of turmoil or upheaval, and in agitational actions and anti-authoritarian protest cultures, it can be difficult to reconcile frequently diametrically opposed uses or incompatible interpretations. Fray, with its focused case studies, attempts to give specific texture to particular moments that have been too often generalized.

…ch as Alois Riegl have looked to textiles for, among other things, theories of pattern and style, within the arena of contemporary art history, I must emphasize, it was the activism of feminists that brought textiles more prominently into the conversation.

Textiles have been central to—indeed have a tendency to dominate— conversations about handmaking; yet the term textiles is not equivalent to craft, or vice versa.

Fray deliberately focuses on this frequent elision by examin- ing the fertile territory where textiles overlap with handicraft, though I do not treat them as completely coterminous. Within contemporary art history, craft has occupied a very specific place, as it is often defined in relation to utility and crafted objects are understood to have functions or use values. This is one of the distinctions that, arguably, separates it from “art.” Within the twentieth century, art has constantly tested and refined itself against a series of ostensible opposites, such as “work,” “life,” or “craft”; the history of recent art is in part the narration of what happens when those divisions collapse or bleed into each other…

…es stained by “bad taste.” While it is necessary to interrogate the studio craft-versus-art divide, it is also imperative to dismantle the false binary between highly trained skilled professional craft and amateur efforts from across the twentieth century.

The pervasive idea that craft might be utilized for strategic or polemical purposes (whether as a vehicle for the Right or for the Left) has been shad- owed by an even more prevalent story within the twentieth century regarding textile techniques such as sewing, knitting, or quilting, which is that they are fundamentally trivial. In fact, “hobbyist” methods of textile handmaking have long been castigated as inconsequential, particularly because they have traditionally been gendered female.

As this demonstrates, the “buy handmade” pledge overlooked one signifi- cant fact: mass-manufactured goods (especially those with textile elements) are also often in large part made by hand.

Rather, I think about the instability of textiles’ relationality, which in some instances might be felt to be queer—that is, how they propose different sorts of bodily orientations and create volatile inter- faces between public and private selves.

…nomy.” 80Many of these transformations took hold first within the sphere of textiles; indeed, from the Industrial Revolution until today, textile making has been the bleeding edge of manufacturing, modeling new modes of fac- tory efficiency and production.

And neoliberal hallmarks such as entrepreneurial- ism and self-branding are especially pronounced in the case of much textile production.

For Marx and Engels, textile manufacturing was a precipitating event in the history of capitalism; since their time, crafts like knitting and sewing have been posited as a resolution to the crisis of commodity manufactur- ing and the crisis of alienated labor. Handmade textiles have been heralded as materials that could resist the mass standardization of everyday life by visibly and affectively reinscribing the intimate and personal procedures of their making.

These legions of hobby quilters, sewers, and weavers are in some measure responsible for the current academic and art-world interest in textiles, but despite their keen eyes, enthusiastic blogs, and museum admission dollars, their actual work is often considered too mundane, uninteresting, generic— that is to say, too amateur—to itself cross the threshold of institutional vis- ibility.

But it also bears repeating that cloth has the ability to traverse the line between public and private as it travels with us on our bodies as we shift from the domestic realm to the street.

Textiles as dense and multivalent sites of inscription help define our rela- tionship to interiors and exteriors; they shape how we move through space, and they alert others to our sense of self and signal our attempts to collec- tively belong. In many respects they map the coordinates of social status, in- cluding our allegiances and disidentifications with categories of gender, race, class, sex, age, ethnicity, subcultural stylistic affiliation, and much more.

Chapter 1

Throughout the book, I aim to suggest that low–high divisions within textile handicraft are insufficient and faulty, as it frays these neat binaries. By juxtaposing two registers of making, I suggest that these spheres are cru- cially coconstitutive, feeding each other in a multitude of ways, as the per- petually intersecting realms of the amateur and the fine arts motor a greater visibility for textiles more generally. I do not mean to imply causality, or even mutual awareness, between my two case studies—rather, I hope to illuminate how different makers were working through questions of queerness through textiles at around the same time.

…queer drag and textile craft could be considered closely aligned, parallel practices—historically, non-gender- conforming folks like drag queens, drag kings, butch lesbians, and femmy fags (as well as transgen- dered folks who aim to pass “seamlessly,” to invoke a sewing metaphor) have had to make their own clothes, significantly tailor garments, and invent body-altering modifications like breast binders and packing cocks…

…—a kind of psychological puzzle to help her put herself back together.” 66In other words, crafting drag was not about dissembling (or falsity) but about assembling an earnest, if pro- visional, self by which she could engage in a conversation with herself.

In the 1970s, strict divisions between handmade and store-bought within the craft scene were dissolving.

This is one lesson of the queer textile handmade ae exists where grit and glitter meet, ostensibly right on the surface of things, yet also profound.

Few artists in 1973 were as dedicated as Hammond was to bringing art down while also bring- ing textile craft up.

Hammond’s insistence on fusing art and textile craft and her repositioning of painting at ground level are strident, not modest, gestures—assertively feminist and complexly queer. She contests the primacy of verticality by in- sisting on horizontality as active rather than…

The Floorpieces are polyvalent utterances, as all artworks are, and one thing they might propose is a coded “talking back” to a straight feminist aversion to emerging lesbian sensibilities. Lesbian handiwork explodes one persistent assumption about craft as rooted in the primarily straight, domestic sphere and made in relation to “men’s” work.

My queering is less a forensic hunt for hidden codes that might magically unlock the “real” meaning of the art, as if such things are ever totally know- able, stable, or unified, than an intentionally open-ended engagement with the work, with its potential to mean in many different registers through time as they are continually resignified for new audiences—queer and not. This does not involve the “unmasking” of hidden symbols but instead posits that some readings attach themselves, belatedly, to art in ways that their maker might not have foreseen.

Chapter 2

in Vicuña’s work, craft as a formerly discrete set of skilled practices has broadened from its traditional significations of handmade functionality to include raw materials in their incipient stages, not yet fully transformed into usable or aesthetic things…

In 1966 Cecilia Vicuña, originally from northern Chile and then not yet twen- ty years old, created one of her first art pieces, titled A Quipu That Remembers Nothing. I reproduce no object because none was created, and I describe no photograph because none was taken. The piece consisted of her act of think- ing about a quipu—the knotted-cord method of communication used by An- dean peoples beginning around 3000 bce.

The work exists as a feat of ideation and nothing else: an act of thinking, naming, and dating. In this sense it exists just as much in your own mind, as you read these words, as it did in Vicuña’s: it is as pure a work of conceptual art as one could conjure.

Vicuña’s art exists at the inter- section of word, thread, and gesture as she plunges into the fray of politics. Her practice not only speaks to traditional craft techniques but also opens into a metaphoric realm of signification regarding line, communication, and the body using ever-evolving forms and means.

…the quipu for Vicuña is a powerful visual manifestation of the ways that fiber-based creations hold and organize information, as well as a tactile, spa- tial way to transmit memory. Her title suggests that indigenous knowledge systems might be fragile threads that have been severed by colonial regimes and cannot easily remember their own histories…

Impermanence, dissolution, and change have been at the heart of her work since its inception; these are not quali- ties prized by the art market or museum, and her witchy, womanly slant has meant that her precarios have sometimes been dismissed as strange charms rather than serious sculptures. So while one of the art-historical and archival “problems of thread” is its delicacy, this preservation problem of thread lies alongside the theoretical problem it poses, by which I mean that her work of- fers a proposition about fiber that might have a variety of possible solutions and multiple matrices of engagement.

For her, Native textiles were not only part of writing and cosmology, as with the quipu, but also existed within larger networks of communication and adornment, conjoining social life, memory making, and signifying practices that might be legible within a locality and illegible outside of it.

Quipu in the Gutter, a street installation, returns to the form of the quipu, but rather than serve as a system of account- ing or information, strands of yarn unfurl down from the rough gray pave- ment into a murky puddle of water in the road— debased, fallen, abandoned, perhaps, but also embroidering and thereby enlivening public space with its vibrant red, pink, and orange strands…

Deliberately unfinished, or even, in the case of Quipu in the Gutter, drawing attention to procedures of unraveling and unweaving, they refuse to be fully transformed into polished commodities. They ignite thought about what is to come, asking what sorts of factories and what sorts of working conditions might be put to use in the service of their reanimation, suggesting the nascent, the about to happen, the almost, the gearing up.

There were thousands of arpilleras created during the dictatorship, and though far fewer are now made, their production continues. At the height of their export during the 1980s, it is estimated that between eight hundred and two thousand arpilleristas were at work sewing at the rate of about one com- pleted textile a week. It is an overwhelming archive.

…the style of appliqué found in the arpillera is not unique, as examples can be found in other Latin American countries like Colombia and Peru, but using this textile format to explicitly criticize a political regime was specifi- cally developed in the 1970s workshops in Santiago…

There are so many contested stories, so many wavering memories and disputed facts, so many partial names and missing dates, that in some crucial sense the only thing we know for sure about the arpilleras is what they look like. They do not belong only to the realms of artistic making and folk prac- tices. Though they may be handmade, as I argue throughout this book, textile handicraft is never just itself, for it always defines itself in opposition to some other category—the realm of industry, say, or work.

The arpilleras are in many respects structured by the frictions between mak- ing and selling, oscillating between cheerful decorative souvenir and grue- some testimonial.

Chapter 3

Texture thus invites two distinct temporal imaginings, as the viewer both considers the object’s origin (looking back to its process of conception and the whole sweep of its physical existence) and projects forward to a future moment of speculative touch, fondling, and interaction.

I move beyond questions of failure or success to consider how textile textures make evident contested notions of memorialization in uniquely material ways. I examine the Quilt to assert that it is not only a text, as the quote above states, but a textile and that one must take into account questions of cloth and craft to do justice to its complex visual field and to account for what have been seen not only as its insufficiencies but also as its plenitudes.

Far from an accepted iteration of activist craft that was indebted to female labor, the Quilt was viewed by some feminists as erasing previous efforts by women in order to eclipse—yet again—histories of female making. By con- trast, some women came to the Quilt because of its connection with women’s work.

But the very specificity of its materials, the object-heavy quality of the Quilt—the tangibility that makes it so personal—is more complicated than an embrace of its “vibrancy” can suggest. Crucially, the thingness of the Quilt—that is to say, its textured textile-ness as well as its glut of personal- ized items such as stuffed animals—has also weighed it down, tying it, in- exorably, to the realm of the regressive, the romanticized, and the ineffectual. Far from vibrant, its thingness, for some audiences, threatens to suture it to the past, an infantilizing or nostalgic backward-looking and fetishizing of personal detail, rather than enlivening other futures and envisioning new collectivities.

As I have suggested, it might be more useful to understand the Quilt not as a registry or encyclopedia of names that aims to be a complete record of the losses from AIDS, but rather as what Ann Cvetkovich has described as “an archive of feelings,” undergirded and made possible by an affectively rich set of community relations and shared histories, a repository of intimacies, love, trauma, loss, and tending…

Despite the public attention directed its way, in some vital respects the Quilt has barely been seen in its totality. It does not function as a memorial that, affixed to one constant site, serves to remind changing generations in perpetuity. Rather, it is always only a temporary textile gathering place, a substitute, ephemeral graveyard where people come to remember only every so often.

Chapter 4

Women’s work now registers both as the purview of the female homemaker in the private domestic sphere and also, pressingly, as a factory workforce, where racial, structural, and material oppressions are ever present. This shift means that some earlier feminist art uses of craft—as an institutional critique of gendered hierarchies of formalist quality in art, or as a recuperation of the decorative, for example—are less pertinent today than are considerations of the economics of textile production.

What was partly at stake in the reclamation of textiles in the early 2000s was a declaration of the contemporary relevance of craft—that is to say, its currency. 12Rather than seen as retrograde, outmoded throwbacks to a previ- ous era, the craftivist movement insisted on knitting, sewing, and crochet- ing as current, up to date, or even future-looking, with sophisticated digital interfaces for how-to websites and networked tools that link online hackers to textile makers across the globe.

… is intentionally nonsensical, to be sure, but perhaps craft time has a peculiar relationship with what has been theorized as queer time, for queer temporalities are also nonlinear, looping back be- tween past and present and veering into imagined futures.

…there are multiple meanings embedded within my question about “currency”: in one sense, textiles are in the now, contemporary, alive in the present moment. Yet textiles also carry a current—they can convey a charge, an almost electrical ability to act as a temporal conduit as they move us from

the past into realms of affective simultaneous coexistence. Textiles also func- tion as literal economic currency, that is, as money or other forms of capital to be exchanged.

…one facet of craft’s “currency” that speaks directly to contem- porary economic conditions, namely the ubiquity of outsourcing and mass fabrication, by discussing projects by female artists that engage with the histories and present conditions of textile manufacturing…

Artists who have provocatively explored multinational manufacturing and its effects on workers’ bodies and minds include Margarita Cabrera, who was born in Mexico and currently lives in El Paso, Texas.

Like Cabrera, Stephanie Syjuco has explored the unsettling triangu- lation of work, gender, and textiles, recruiting hobbyist makers online to stimulate discussions about issues like global outsourcing and its labor conventions.

In her Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy) (2006–8), Syjuco invited the contributions of hobby crafters to intervene in the branding and fabrication of desire.

…ne between the handmade and the mass-produced textile is Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, whose Shopdropping series entailed her purchasing garments from Walmart, meticulously duplicating them, and then returning them to the rack to be bought for their original price.

Their acts of remaking ask us to think about how process, remuneration, and physical effort in textile production are wildly variable and remind us that fabrics and fibers have complex stories to tell. Other female artists use the durational performance of handmaking to ask questions about the gendered and raced production of contemporary tex- tiles in an era marked by globalized manufacturing.

In 2013 artist Beili Liu sat in an Austin art gallery under a cloud of suspended Chinese-made scissors, hand-sewing scraps of white cloth together with black thread (fig.

…mess of wriggling worms.” 36As Liu threaded her needle and made small stitches for this performance-based installation, titled The Mending Project, the cloth swatches, sutured with their visible dark seams, accumulated like a widening moat around her feet.

Why perform such effortful labors in public? What do these attempts at transparency and demystification offer us in an age of anxiety about what textile work looks like and where it is located?

The idea of craft as performance is signaled by art historians such as Jenni Sorkin, who elaborates on the “simultaneity of the craft-based perfor- mance and its produced object.” 39The phrase “craft as performance” is also discussed within anthropology an…

In recent projects that highlight performance and process, the “preachy” aspect of craft is complicated and nuanced; these artists do not shy away from ambivalence. Handmaking has been heralded as a path to personal and social “salvation,” as Craig’s soap- box speech declared. However, the political and economic realities of textile handicraft in the early twenty-first century mean that any alternative it offers to late capitalism also coexists with its predictably neoliberal encourage- ments of individual branding—that is, craft does not undercut market ex- changes but impels and relies upon their flexible expansion. Here the notion of “craft futures” does not signify utopian promise but keys in to commod- ity futures trading and speculation—gambling on the uncertainties of the economy to yield large profits. The relentless marketing of the handmade as a way to purchase “unique” objects, coupled with the sometimes high physical costs enacted on the bodies of some makers, means that textiles must always be seen as a mixed terrain, one marked by cares and also exploitations.