Layers of Meaning
commentary on design, fiber art, & modern embroidery from Serena Fenton
"With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think."
The paragraph above is from the 10x10 Project, an experiment in understanding the news and world events. It is automatically updated hourly, with images drawn from internet news sources. There are 100 images each hour, placed in a 10 by 10 grid, "ranked in order of importance, reading left to right, top to bottom. Along the right edge of the screen are listed the corresponding top 100 words, one for each image. Moving your mouse across the images enlarges the corresponding word. Clicking on a photo brings up the related headlines, which are links to the articles.
Since 10x10 is completely generated by a computer, it is possible to endless debate the linkages and associations. In relation to art and the fiber art world, this brings up comparisons to other photo montages, such those by Robert Silvers and David Hockney.
Glow-in-the-dark yarn seems to have made a big impression on the fly fishing and the Emergency Rescue communities, and is slowly creeping into use by the arts community.
There appear to be at least two main varieties of light reactive yarn. Retroglo is a reflective yarn. "Retroglo® has 50,000 minute glass beads to the square inch, reflecting light back to a light source, such as a car's headlights. The driver sitting behind the headlights, immediately sees the reflected light and is alerted to the wearer ahead."
Uni-Glo is a phosphorescent yarn. Exposure to a bright light for 10 minutes causes the phosphorescent yarn to glow for hours. The yarn creates a work that changes with exposure to light, to the current lighting conditions and over time, as the light-emitting charge in the yarn slowly discharges. The possibilities for expression and exploration using this medium seem quite broad and not fully explored by fiber artists (needle-felters take note!). Antoinette Carrier and Christine Keller are two artists who created works using the light emitting yarn.
From a 1999 review by Jennifer Dudley of Antoinette Carrier's contemporary tapestry works: "Like ghosts, the works exhibited are semi-transparent, having a luminosity and glow achieved by the weaving materials used - shiny polypropylene twine, clear cling-wrap, silk, shredded silver-gelatine on paper, phosphorescent yarn, light - everything which encourages our perceptions of the insubstantial, of a shifting reflexivity, the ever elusive quality of memory, of things which are, and then are not. Where we stand determines what we see. Notations appear as text panels for a story-cloth, suspended slightly in front of the woven cloth surface, whose structure is also its dominant texture and contains in its weave the marks of its images."
For a presentation at Australia's 2004 Space Between conference, Christine Keller writes: "...these pieces respond to light in unexpected and unknown ways. The viewer will experience a space where images appear and disappear on the structures through illuminations of various kinds. Due to the properties of Retroglo yarns two layers of visual appearance are integrated in one fabric, alternately visible.
The phosphorescent pigment will store the projection in a ‘magic’ way and let go of it slowly. Layering of images is possible. This constructed textile surface has the potential to memorize the traces of light it is exposed to. A fabric is created which can carry various motifs. New high tech materials are being placed in the realm of contemporary art. The potential exists to expand these applications to performance, theatre and dance etc."
Image above by Christine Keller. Keller will be teaching a workshop at the 2005 Surface Design Conference, Uncovering the Surface.
Jean Hicks is a Seattle artist who works in three dimensional felt. For the practical, she makes felt hats. For the visionary, Hicks creates felt renditions of ordinary household objects: phones, chairs, and irons.
At Penland, Hicks began a hat project that melded political philosophy and sculpture into a felted hat. "... The impulse came from her desire to utilize the gesture that wearing a hat entails. "Just putting on a hat signals some intention. The red hats I made at this time are deliberately extreme shapes, because I wanted to give them a spirit of real animation. I wanted them to be about speaking up and speaking out. 
"The project," she says, "came out of my emotions about the politics of that moment. In the face of warmongering, hatred and the curtailing of rights, people simply were not speaking up as much as they should."
Invited to participate in a fashion show at the Seattle Arts Festival, Bumbershoot, artists were required to complete the sentence, "Fashion is". Hicks' statement read: "Fashion is Facism: Style is Self-Defense". "...the hats were modeled by women who performed kajukenbo - an eclectic style of kung-fu that blends five distinct traditions."
For the production of Far Away, a play by Caryl Churchill, Hicks created all of the hats and coached the actors on the art of hat making. Image from the play above.
Hicks' work can be seen in person at some of the American Craft Council shows.
update: Friday Feb 25, 2005
Even more Gates humor: The Crackers. "Gift to the City — is it Art or for the Birds?"
Credit is shared with The Snack Project: Austin Quality Cheese Crackers & Creamy Peanut Butter, which also defines the color as "safety cone orange", not saffron.
It's here!! Christo - Gates humor!!
"Often Hargo's The Somerville Gates has been compared with Christo's "The Gates", Central Park, New York City. These comparisons have been unfair; sometimes the media has exaggerated -- even lied -- about the similarities. Differences abound ... The gates are not for sale. Neither is the cat.
And don't let anybody sell you tickets to these gates: it is free!"
The oooos and ahhs have subsided a bit - now we are getting to the critical (and even the catty) on Christo's gates in Central Park - and down to the money: who has the right to sell postcards of the Gates?
From the Washington Post: " There's not much tension between nature and man-made in this project, since Central Park is about as unnatural a bit of landscape as you could ever come across. The artists' gates just add an extra bit of decorative artifice to spaces that are pretty artificial, and decorative, anyway ...
...The gates are often said to be a classic "saffron" color, but to my eyes that's a much warmer, more flamboyant hue than what's now hanging in Central Park -- "saffron" ought to be the color of paella at midnight in Valencia or of the robes on an Eastern divine. Central Park's PVC archways, it seems to me, are an almost perfect, very modern, slightly pinkish "hazard orange."
Who owns the Gates images on postcards, posters and photographs?
Image rights may emerge as the one of the most interesting aspects of this installation. In January 2002, "Artist Christo has won the rights to images of Germany's Reichstag building, which he and his wife shrink-wrapped as an art project. The couple covered the parliament building in metallic silver fabric in 1995. Christo took legal action against a photographic agency which wanted to sell postcards with the image on. But Germany's Constitutional Court, the country's highest, has ruled the pictures can only be sold with the permission of Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude."
Robert Lederman, a New York arts activist, has reportedly been circulating an email claiming that a similar action is taking place in New York: "Christo's publisher claims a vast new degree of copyright and trademark protection. They claim they will prosecute anyone who sells their own original photos of The Gates; who makes and sells a drawing of The Gates or who even uses the words, The Gates, without their permission. They claim to have copyrighted the words, The Gates. They also claim to have an agreement with the media that media sources may only use news photos of the gates for the period the installation is up. That after that the media will only be allowed to use "official" photos of The Gates." An interesting discussion of copyright of public art on the blog Stay Free.
Photo above is by Nathan Blaney.
I have always been of two minds about Christo:
1- that the artwork is really cool
2- there is an inordinate amount of hype and self-promotion in this 'artwork'
I got curious about his funding and financial gains from doing these huge scale projects. I found a couple of article that I would like to share. It does much to dispell thought #2 regarding boundless self-promotion.
"The fact that Christo and Jeanne-Claude pay for their projects with their own money is also an aesthetic decision, they want to work in total freedom, and is why they accept no sponsors, so that they can do: what they want, how they want, where they want, but of course, not always WHEN they want because it took them 24 years to get the permit for the Wrapped Reichstag, and ten years for The Pont Neuf Wrapped.
... There can be no money back on the expenses because they do not charge admission and they do not accept any commercial offers. The Christos have never received a cent for posters, postcards, books, films, etc. Most Artists receive grants, foundation money and produce commissioned works of art for an art patron -- the Christos do not accept those. They have never accepted sponsorship of any kind, and they never will, because they value their freedom most of all. Also they never accept to create a work in collaboration with other artists, nor the ideas of others for the choice of a site for their work. The search for freedom is the reason why Christo escaped from his native country Bulgaria, at age 21, while it was under Communist rule. Christo and Jeanne-Claude will never allow any kind of "strings attached." They refuse all commercial involvement -- at any price. They refused a ONE Million dollar fee for a 60 second commercial on Japanese television, in 1988. The Christos have lived at the same address since 1964 when they emigrated to the USA -- Christo's studio is on the 5th floor -- there is no elevator. This is their one and only home. Christo has never had an assistant. He works alone in his studio. He even does his own framing. Because the Christos work with so many hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people at the sites of projects, Christo's studio is the only place where he can be by himself, so that he can create the drawings which show their ideas of what a temporary work of art will look like. " from the Presidential Lecture Series at Stanford University
CNN's comments on the financial gains for the city of New York from the Gates project:
"The city's estimate of 90,000 additional visitors is based on attendance at other recent cultural events...But those numbers include New Yorkers -- not just tourists -- and officials don't know what portion were from out of town, so the figures are difficult to compare.
More tourists, along with the money spent on the project itself, could generate $2.4 million in additional tax revenue for the city, according to the city's economic development agency. "
How 'bout that? This is simply a wonderful gesture (and piece of art) to a city and to every person who partakes via photos or any other way. I can now lay aside my concerns and just enjoy it. It really is pretty cool - check out the NY Times slide show:
(click to "SKIP THIS AD" skip the ad)
There are many more images and in-depth information on the project at the site of Wolfgang Volz, their official photographer.
Image by Christo, courtesy of Wolfgang Volz
Joyce Kozloff is a painter commonly associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s. The movement was an effort to challenge the stigma that modern art had put on ornamentation. The artists of this movement drew inspiration form arts and cultures outside the mainstream of modern art: Islamic, Celtic, and Arts and Crafts. In an interview in 2000, Kozloff says of this cultural melding: "I would not enjoy a world in which cultures became homogeneous and lost their singularity. All my work is appropriated from outside sources; I create a hybrid, a fusion of diverse materials, but I don't disguise their uniqueness or stylize them beyond recognition. We are flooded with imagery from everywhere: in our museums, our libraries, our media. For years, I've been trying to put it together for myself."
Kozloff explains her new work in a recent interview in Raleigh's News & Observer "Decorative is associated with functional, and things that are functional, at least in the West, are not often viewed as high art. And also the decorative arts are associated with women and people of color, non-Western people. Mainstream art history is a series of white male geniuses who paint or sculpt."
Kozloff's most recent work, Crossed Purposes, explores map making and the human elements that are hidden within these maps. The press release reads: "Her recent works retain an overall decorative scheme, but now they are inscribed with "quotes" from books, recipes, images of movies, and popular art. These fragments are, in turn, layered into map mutations that explore the effects of empire, namely British, French, Spanish, and American, upon the conquered. Each of her pieces is complex, witty, packed with thoughtful allusions, and highly visually engaging."
More images:
Shrunken (felted) old wool sweaters plus some stitching on an old Singer sewing machine = cozy blankets. Crispina Ffrench has taken this concept and made it into a business. Her web site describes the process: "Our Basic Blankets are made from softened recycled wool sweaters. We cut 7" squares from carefully brushed and felted garments and incorporate fresh details in each finished piece. Basic Blankets are edged with colorful decorative scalloping."
The blog Treehugger, shows the power of this kind of recycling, "Over 150,000 lbs (68,000kg) of discarded clothing has been salvaged to make Crispina blankets. Using mostly wool products, they wash garments and sort them into particular themes before combing the elements into a new whole. Quirky elements of the original apparel are retained to fashion unique goods."
Katie at Jejune's blog d.i. your own damn self gives directions as well as insight as to her experience of making a blanket from scraps of old, felted woolen sweaters. Lots of tips on what to look for and little glitches to dodge. Great photos of satin stitching the seams and all those other details that most magazine articles gloss over.
The blanket on the left is by Crispina. Katie at Jejune created the blanket on the right. And luck is with me! Our local thrift shop is having a 'bag day' sale starting in 20 minutes!
Additional links on the process:
For those of you who are also magazine-packrats, the Dec 2002-Jan 2003 Threads Magazine featured an article on making felted slippers (with any leftover felt!)
Michael Brennand-Wood is a textile artist working in the U.K., whose work focuses on patterns and the exploration of "meta-patterns, patterns that connect, reveal much in anthropological terms, about our spiritual, cultural and sociological history." His works all incorporate fabric, in some manner, but never in the traditional way. For one exhibition, Brennand-Wood's made 'lace' out of wood and fabric, blowing up the details to a giant scale and bringing a new meaning to the delicate, intricate work: "The pattern is inspired by pieces of Italian sixteenth-century lace, but Brennand-Wood diverts this from its original and expected use. Traditionally women made lace on a small and delicate scale. "It is an obvious symbol of femininity...As a man who works in textiles what I was really trying to do was to reclaim lace fabric for men...change people's appreciation of something they normally see as very small fragments." In order to change the connotation of the lace pattern, Brennand-Wood blows it up. It is a big work, 3.5m wide by 1.2m high. An interior and essentially domesticated construct thus becomes an architectural piece whose shape is reminiscent of stained glass."
Brennand-Wood's connection to fabric is the stuff of childhood: "'When I went to Art school, I thought 'I'm going to be a painter or a sculptor' and I got interested in using cloth as well, but in an expressive way,' explains Brennand-Wood.1 He finally hit what was, for him, the right track: "I didn't want to make dresses or to make furnishings...I would hopefully make art out of cloth. "It was an old family story. 'My grand-mother on my mother's side was a weaver in a cotton mill...North of England used to be a big weaving-cotton area...when I was a little boy I used to play a lot with fabric.'"
Drumcroon Gallery offers this description of Brennand-Wood's art and of the artistic process, in particular: "He was born and raised in Bury, Lancashire, (once a centre for the spinning and weaving of cotton) into a family who had worked in the mills. He remembers visiting the mill as a child and being fascinated by 'its amazing machinery with threads speeding backwards and forwards'. Fabric was a familiar childhood toy. His grandmother taught him to knit and sew, and he played with sheets of calico, cotton and bed linens which he inherited when she died. 'Field of Centres' uses fabric from this source. He also watched his grandfather at work with wood in the shed, and so the two materials with which Michael has formed his own visual language - textiles and wood - have grown out of a deep-rooted personal significance.
Paul Klee compared the artist to a tree, the roots are symbolic of what the artist gathers in, the trunk is the artist through which ideas eventually blossom. I feel that at the core of who I am today are the interests and influences of who I was as a child. Successive ideas drawn from experience build up in layers around the core, layers of references,each one accessible if you cut through to the next.'"
Some of Brennard-Wood's recent works are investigations into the floral patterns of textiles, but as a twist, Brennand-Wood creates patterns using live flowers and beads arranged on a fabric background. The final art piece is the photograph is the event. He has also created this same fascination with floral pattern using elaborate overlays of fabrics flowers, embroidery and stitch.