Common Threads: Weaving Stories Across Time

El Anatsui, Many Come Back, detail.

In January a friend and I explored an exhibit at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, around the corner from the Museum of Fine Arts but a world away in history and mission.  When Mrs. Gardner's only child died at age three, in 1865, this independently wealthy woman was understandably devastated; travel, she was told, would help. So travel she did, buying her way through Europe. Not content with the usual Grand Tour-style objects, Mrs. Gardner acquired bits of antique buildings and collaged them into a building she called the palace. 

Her acquisitions included tapestries and other luxury textiles and the exhibit Common Threads: Weaving Stories Across Time, on view from October 4, 2018 through January 13, 2019, responds to textiles in the collection. Using headphones, museum-goers listened to true pearl: an opera, in five tapestries, created by David Lang and Sibyl Kempson, in the tapestry room, hung with 16th-century Flemish textile masterworks illustrating the life of Queen Tomyris, valiant warrior queen who defeated Persian King Cyrus.  I can't connect you to the music but you may see the tapestries here, and learn more about how tapestries were made here.

The focus of this post, however, is the seven works in the Hostetter Gallery, part of the new wing of the museum.  The work with perhaps the most literal connection to anything in the Gardner's Tapestry Room is the large 21st-century textile, below, created by Elaine Reichek and based on a painting by Titian.

Elaine Reichek, Paint me a Cavernous Waste Shore, 2009-10.

The textile is captioned by an excerpt from T. S. Eliot's 1919 poem, Sweeney Erect:

Paint me the bold anfractuous rock
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Aeolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne's hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.

Ariadne, of course, gave Theseus a spool of red thread with which to mark his path through the labyrinth of the Minotaur, sort of like Hansel and Gretel with the bread crumbs.  Theseus did slay the Minotaur and used the thread to find his back out of the maze, aided, not by sword or spear, but by a woman's cleverness and an item from her workbasket. And was Theseus grateful? - Nah, he abandoned Ariadne on the island of Naxos, and sailed away without a backward glance. However,  Bacchus finds her and falls in love with her.

By translating Titian's painting into fiber, Reichek reinforces the thread of the story (pun intended). I've encountered Ms. Reichek's work before, at the Drawing Center in Manhattan. In a way, her work recalls a time when monumental tapestries were more valuable than paintings, and great deeds were celebrated with needle and thread - see the Bayeux Tapestry, for example, which is not actually a woven tapestry but an embroidery.

Paint me a Cavernous Waste Shore, detail.

Another modern tapestry on display was designed by South African artist William Kentridge, as part of his Porter Series.  In the image below, a figure carrying a bed  moves in front of a backdrop of a map from an old atlas.  The rough silhouette of the figure, designed using torn paper, is a muddy brown, with indecipherable markings, mainly in coral and white, placed near the location of anatomical joints - ankles, knees, etc. - but also on the bed.

At any rate the tapestry itself, made in the South African studio of Marguerite Stephens, is a tour-de-force of weaving and embroidery, exhibiting the fine detail work achievable in warp and woof.

William Kentridge, Porter Series: Russie d'Europe (Man with Bed on Back), 2007

Man with Bed on Back, detail.

Modern ideas and traditional techniques also merge in the hand-woven wool carpet, below, designed by the New Delhi -based Raqs (pronounced rux) Media Collective and woven by Rodopski Kilim, a studio in Asenovgrad, Bulgaria.

Now, when I first looked at this artwork, before reading the wall text, I thought I was looking at rug, made with a knotting technique originated in ancient Persia, with imagery reflecting the conflict in the modern Middle East.  There is a precedent - Afghan rug weavers incorporated armaments and weaponry into their work during the conflict with Russia; these textiles are called "war rugs".
 
In the wool pile, I saw fighter jets - the black lines - and their contrails (aircraft exhaust) - the white lines. The blue stripes represented sky, and of course red is the color of conflict (blood). Well, was I ever wrong.

Raqs Media Collective, The Great Bare Mat, 2012.

According to the wall text, this rug responds to two small items in the Gardner: ancient Chinese bronze mat-weights, in the shape of bears. Evidently these weights anchored rugs on which scholars would sit, argue or play board games.  The black lines and dots in the rug are supposed to represent the constellations of the Big Bear and the Little Bear, and the white lines reflect digital conversation pathways.

Chinese mat weights, Western Han dynasty, circa 200 BCE to 9th cen. AD.

The Great Bare mat, detail.

Speaking of "war rugs," Nevet Yitzhak's video installation, WarCraft, unambiguously references and conflates two traditions - the entrenched conflicts in the Middle East, and the entrenched tradition of rug-making.  Ms. Yitzhak's digitally "woven" rugs, projected in a gallery and accompanied by a battleground soundtrack, surround the viewer visually and aurally, and it's like walking into a video game.  Animated helicopters move across the screen in an endless loop.

Nevet Yitzhak, WarCraft, 2014.

WarCraft, detail. Blurred image is animated helicopter.

It was something of a relief to view a project about repairing the world, one mending stitch at a time.  Viewers were invited to bring a textile in need of mending to Lee Mingwei's installation, The Mending Project. Uncut threads trace arcs from the mended items, displayed on a table,  to wall-mounted spools of thread, forming a web of connection. The artist's statement is wonderfully clear and concise:

The gesture of mending for me has different levels of meaning.  The most obvious is that a piece of clothing is broken and needs repair.  It could also be in (a) completely different conversation about how the world is today.  There are so many things that are broken in the world now, with politics, the climate, relationships between people, between countries.
Can we do something about it?  I know I am just an artist and all I can do at this moment is something close to me.
So let me start with our second skin: the clothes that we are wearing.
-Lee Mingwei

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009 - present.

Table of mended items, The Mending Project, detail.

Owners can retrieve mended items at the close of the exhibit.

While the mending project conveys its message in an accessible and immediate, if somewhat literal way, concepts of reuse and recycling are not so immediately obvious in the work of El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist now living and working in Nigeria. At first glance, the shimmery Many Came Back (below and at the top of this post) appears to be made of precious materials. However, it is in fact created from flattened aluminum liquor bottle tops which are linked, like chain mail, by wire loops.  Although not made of traditional tapestry materials-  wool, linen and silk - this work nevertheless drapes like a textile.

Finally, a communally created work, Standard Incomparable, organized by Helen Mirra.  Here's another work perhaps too dependent on wall text for explanation. Without the text, the viewer might think these were a single artist's variations on a theme, or a series of studio explorations. In actuality, each weaving was produced by an individual artist at the invitation of Ms. Mirra.

In 2015, Helen Mirra invited people of all ages and experience levels to weave with the following parameters: to use undyed wool from the weaver's locale to make a weaving the length of the weaver's arm, with seven stripes the width of the weaver's hand.  Each participant made two pieces for this collection, the other to be exchanged as a gift with another participant.  Standard Incomparable includes weavings from sixteen countries, made by people born between the years 1946 and 2009.

Helen Mirra, organizer, Standard Incomparable (partial), 2016-17.

Stripes, of course, are one of the most basic variations on plain weaving - the artist simply introduces another weft (horizontal thread) color.  Contrast is provided by color, although some of the weavings feature contrasting texture also.

Standard Incomparable, detail.

Stripes are now well-established in fine art, fashion and interior design, but are not without a checkered history (another pun, I know, I know...) as recorded in The Devil's Cloth, A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, by scholar Michel Pastoureau. You may remember the character of Robert Langdon, the "symbologist" in The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown? Well, Pastoureau is the real deal - an expert in the language, lore and history of heraldry and sigilla, those devices which announce status, lineage, and allegiance. According to Pastoureau, in the middle ages stripes were embued with negative qualities and associated with criminality and betrayal; the pre-modern mind preferred cloth either plain or with a clear figure-ground relationship.

Today, stripes are not as symbolically loaded although, before orange was the new black, prison uniforms often featured stripes, the anti-camouflage. This visual trope is still popular in cinema: for example,  an image below, from the delightful family film Paddington 2.

https://rogersmovienation.com/2018/01/07/movie-review-paddington-2/

While I understand that credit goes to Ms. Mirra for the creative impetus behind this project, I still would have liked to know more about each individual piece, with maker, material and location details.  But perhaps such knowledge would undercut the emphasis on the communal, as opposed to individual, effort and impact.

These beautiful objects, made of humble materials and unified through pattern, gain status not due to any intrinsic value of the materials - no silver or gold - or historic provenance but in communion with their neighbors, as part of a woven confederacy.  This measured, structured process of collection building contrasts nicely with Mrs. Gardner's eclectic approach to the acquisition of precious objects and the sometimes inexplicable juxtapositions of those objects.  In some ways, the entire Gardner museum is a folly, an edifice and collection looking for a purpose beyond documenting the whims and idiosyncracies of one wealthy woman during the Gilded Age.

It is worth noting that although the Gardner was open to the public beginning in 1903, early access was very limited: two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall, with an admission price of $1, a large sum for the time. The new wing, although questioned by some critics, allows the museum to serve as a truly public space.

Standard Incomparable (partial) details of weavings.