Layers of Meaning
commentary on design, fiber art, & modern embroidery from Serena Fenton
Layers of Meaning is undergoing a software transformation. If you want to watch painfully slow programming in-progress, go to: http://ibiblio.org/quiltart/wp/
I am hopeful that before the weekend is out, LoM will live again! It may be a bit before the new notifications list is up and running. Meanwhile, say a prayer to the computer gods for me. - Serena
For the 75th anniversary of American Gothic, Harvard historian and social critic Steven Biel has written a book, American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. The painting portrays the artist's sister and his elderly dentist (photo taken in 1942).
Biel summarizes the significance of the image:
"During the Depression, it came to represent endurance in hard times through the quintessential American values of thrift, work, and faith. Later, in television, advertising, politics, and popular culture, American Gothic evolved into parody—all the while remaining a lodestar by which one might measure closeness to or distance from the American heartland."
NPR's Melissa Gray offers this audio commentary of American Gothic Gray explores the composition of the work: "The three-pronged pitchfork is one obvious example, but look more closely and you'll see echoes of the design on the face of the man, the bib of his overalls, and the lines on his shirt. In fact, the straightforward Gothic style extends to the directness of the painting itself... In addition to its architectural connotations, "Gothic" can also mean crude or underdeveloped. It's an implication Wood was likely aware of when he titled the painting, though it's unlikely that this was his sole observation about the pair."
In 1942, Gordon Parks provided the first parody American Gothic. It is a parody without humor though:
"American Gothic," considered to be Parks's signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographer's fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. "It's the first professional image I ever made," Parks says, "created on my first day in Washington." Roy Stryker, who led the FSA's very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. "White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldn't even let me in the door, and as the day went on things just went from bad to worse." Stryker told Parks to go talk with some older black people who had lived their entire lives in Washington and see how they had coped. "That's how I met Ella," Parks explains.
Ella Watson was a black charwoman who mopped floors in the FSA building. Parks asked her about her life, which she divulged as having been full of misery, bigotry and despair. Parks's simple question, "Would you let me photograph you?" and Ella's affirmative response, led to the photographer's most recognizable image of all time. "Two days later Stryker saw the image and told me I'd gotten the right idea but was going to get all the FSA photogs fired, that my image of Ella was 'an indictment of America.' I thought the image had been killed but one day there it was, on the front page of The Washington Post ." At the time, Parks couldn't have realized that the image would go on to become the symbol of the pre-civil rights era's treatment of minorities. "
An article in the Boston Globe looks at the image and our identity:
"American Gothic could not work as parody if the original did not have power of its own. Biel is not an art critic, and he hesitated to comment on the painting, apart from the myriad understandings others have had. But when pressed to do so, he gazed up at it over his desk and mused, 'It's haunting -- creepy in a lot of ways. Look at those faces. They're disturbing. Why isn't she looking at us? He is -- why isn't she? What does he want, peering into our souls? He is holding a pitchfork, but there's no dirt on it. Is he posing with it because this is Sunday afternoon and this is one of the tools of his trade? Or is there something -- more sinister?'"
How should art be taught? Ellen Lupton (educator, designer and curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) makes some shocking proposals in her AIGA article, The Re-Skilling of the American Art Student. Her recommendation is that students be taught a set of skills:
"The idea of skill has come to seem woefully outdated in an art world that emphasizes conceptual innovation, and making the right statement at the right time, with the right media. Gone are the days when life drawing was the backbone of any artists’ skill set. The term “skill” carries not only an academic connotation, but a working-class one. The skilled worker is one who knows something about a particular process (which puts him or her a step above the unskilled worker), but is not part of the professional class. Plumbers, auto mechanics and short-order cooks are skilled workers.
I’m arguing for the re-skilling of the American art student across the disciplines of fine and applied art...."
The skills list:
"We help students place their work in a historical and social context. Why do the fields of art and design function the way they do? What issues are artists and designers currently confronting in their work, and what’s the tradition against which contemporary practice takes place? This critical understanding helps students engage the world in a relevant way. The highest level of success for a designer or artist is, in my view, to create work that influences others in the field (or better yet, people in other fields). Such work contributes to the discourse. "
My own math skills tend to be limited to mathematics that have a visible component. Geometry is wonderful. Trigonometry is fun too. Calculus gets a bit dicey and I remain perennially confused about logarithms. I was delighted when I discovered that a crocheter has used her talents to create previously un-creatable mathematical shapes.
"For thousands of years mathematicians believed there were just 2 types of geometry, the plane and the sphere. But another more aberrant structure lurks beneath the surface of Euclid's laws - one that has been illuminated through the art of crochet." Institute for Figuring
" The crinkled edges of a lettuce leaf curve and expand in a shape that has perplexed mathematicians for centuries. Those curves -- an example of a high-level geometry concept called the hyperbolic plane -- were not even defined by geometry theorists until the 19th century. And in the almost 200 years following, mathematicians struggled to find a way to model the complex shape known as the geometric opposite of the sphere. Then mathematician Daina Taimina picked up her crochet needles and some synthetic yarn, and the problem was solved. In 1997, Taimina, of Cornell University, found a way to crochet her way into 'hyperbolic space.' Her woolen creations, which resemble crenulated flowers and hair scrunchies, became the first physical models of the hyperbolic plane." All Things Considered
When asked how she decided to crochet hyperbolic planes, Taimina explains:
"Many students and mathematicians... wanted to have a more direct experience of hyperbolic geometry - an experience similar to handling a physical sphere. In 1868, the Italian mathematician Eugenio Beltrami ... made a version of his model by taping together long skinny triangles - the same principle behind the flared gored skirts some folk dancers wear. In the 1970s the American geometer William Thurston had described a model of hyperbolic space that could be made by taping together a series of paper annuli, or thin circular strips. All these models were time-consuming to make and hard to handle; they are fragile and they tear easily. I realized that Thurston's construction could be made with knitting or crochet - basically all you'd have to do is increase the number of stitches in each row. I grew up in Latvia doing these handicrafts and I decided to try and make one. At first I tried knitting, but after a while you had so many stitches on the needles it became impossible to handle. I realized that crochet was the best method." Cabinet Magazine
Have we all gone too far in copyright insanity? Bouncing around the blogging community is a discussion about street art with a copyright symbol that has appeared in Brooklyn. At the right edge of the image photo (left) you can catch a glimpse of the drawing that is being copyrighted.
Stay Free is of the opinion that the copyright is part of the art experience. Hard to say, but it does make me reflect that the sense of profitable ownership in art may have gone a bit too far.
UPDATE: May 16,2005
A response from the folks at Stay Free: I think you've got our take at Stay Free!'s backwards, Serena.
At the time that I wrote the post I thought the idea of copyrighting chalk street art was laughable and invited him to come after me for posting a photo on the Stay Free blog. On reflection, I think the copyright is INTENDED to make the work stand out so that people talk about it and reproduce it.
-Charles
http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org
Today's links come via two other blogs, In a Minute Ago and Meggiecat. It's the digital image collection at the University of Washington (my alma mater!)
The fashion collection is fun to peruse. You can get an overview of how clothing styles changes throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Equally interesting is how these styles were portrayed. Empire (1806-1813) gowns tended to be shown on models of classical sensibilities, while a century later the Edwardian (1901- 1915) fashion portrait is heavily influenced by art deco and the Japanese print.
The rest of the collection is fascinating as well. I was having fun using the search function to search on various types of animals. Some fascinating results:
A big thanks to Sharron Boggon and Meggiecat!
Inspiration may come readily to some, but others need a jump start - a workshop to get them thinking in new directions and exploring new ideas. The Guide to Art & Craft Workshops hosts a listings of workshops around the world for up to two years in advance. You can search by date, location or art media. There are many, many pages of listings, so don't stop after the first page.
The fibers workshop listings brought several tantalizing opportunities to light:
Knocknara Ireland - image from pdphoto.org
Karen Reimer is a Chicago artist who is exploring concepts of pattern, context and limitation by creating embroidered interpretations of contemporary ephemera and trash.
For the exhibit, Reading Between the Lines, Karen Reimer writes of her work:
"My recent work examines the relationships between beauty, value and meaning by exploiting the tensions between copy and original, object and process and fine art and domestic craft. It demonstrates the out-of-control nature of language and the provisional quality of meaning.
The embroideries are laboriously produced copies of pieces of text taken from sources ranging from great books to candy wrappers ... Of course, in the case of the 'trash' pieces (fragments, product packaging, etc.), the original that is copied has no recognized value to begin with. Only the copy has value. In this way, the trash pieces function differently from the book pages. In the embroidered book pages, the illegibility of the text poses a loss. It is no longer possible to be certain of its meaning. The embroidered text teeters on the edge of legibility, relying heavily on pattern recognition, personal interpretation and guesswork. In attempting to decipher the ambiguous text, the reader projects him/herself into it. The piece functions like a Rorschach blot"
In the series Boundary Troubles, Reimer explores the meaning of boundaries at many levels: physical, visual, spiritual.
"In her new series of pattern-based work, Reimer plays off the implied endlessness of pattern by embroidering the figures of one fabric onto another. Sewing together pieces of fabric whose patterns have differing, sometimes conflicting, cultural associations of class, taste, gender, fashion era, and other domestic or social territories, the competing logic of each pattern dominates, transmutes, blends in or disappears. These mergings can be read as metaphors of infection or invasion, or as attempts to make wholes out of disparate parts. In any case, the results are inevitably incomplete and unresolved rather than neat coherent syntheses, and, as with much of Reimer's work, the amount of labor invested raises the question of whether such attempts are misguided or optimistic.
Reimer continues her investigation of pattern in another series based on notebook pages. Whereas much of her earlier work focused on re-creations of text, now the "text" becomes the sewn lines on the empty page, making the visual structure for the writing into the writing itself. Boundary Troubles is another exercise in order gone amok, order that doesn't know its boundaries, limitations or purpose."