The aesthetics of "neither here nor there”
The aesthetics of "neither here nor there”
I have participated in many American craft shows this year in the fall, winter, and spring. Thank you all very much. From July to September is the off-season. I have decided to return to Japan this summer. In Japan, I will create my works. I will get a lot of new inspiration and will let you know how things are progressing along the way!
Often during an American craft show, I think about my work within the context of society. I think about what craft means to me. That's because when I exhibit, I get questions like, Did you paint this by hand? Did you weave this cloth? People seem to be interested in how much my hands are involved in the work. Then they ask how long it took. The effort I put into the piece seems to be an important factor in determining its value.
Art is a creative activity with an aesthetic sense. Within the box of art, there are craft, design, and technology. If it has the function of a scarf, it is craft. Design is practical beauty that is closely related to life and society. Fiber art is the transformation and resonance of materials born from the interrelationship of space and light. The more I try to put it into words, the less it fits, but standing on the vague boundary, I am a textile artist, a dyer and weaver, a wearables artist, a fiber artist and a textile designer. (this is how people are called in Kiryu.* The town of Kiryu is described below.)
Magdalena Abakanowicz, born in Poland, explored the artistic language of weaving, using metal supports to pull her work away from the wall, creating a work that is both weaving and sculpture. Sheila Hicks, born in USA, created colorful, innovative, experimental sculptural textiles with embedded personal narratives. Eva Hesse, born in Germany her work has been described as minimalism, conveying simple shapes, delicate lines, and material transformation through minimal physical manipulation of the material. Olga de Amaral, born in Colombia, she shifts the elements of painting from the wall to space, approaching the problem of the three-dimensionality of painting from the perspective of the materials themselves, rather than with canvas, fabrics and textures, which are the support of the painting. It was these artists and other open-minded and innovative artists who revolutionized fiber art in the 1960s and 70s who led me to this world, but the momentum disappeared in 1980s. I had lived in the vague boundary since.
There is currently a major exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC called "Woven History, Textiles and Contemporary Abstraction." I read very interesting article in the Washington Post about this exhibition but seeing is believing! so I visited the exhibition the other day. Although there was no work by Magdalena Abakanowicz, I was happy to see artworks of the three other artists!
The exhibition also highlights the work of a new generation, Liz Collins, a college classmate. When we began studying, weaving, the Jacquard machines were operated manually. Computerized Jacquard machines came in our senior year, and teachers and students learned how to use them together. Liz was talented and hardworking, always taking the initiative to learn new skills. Her recent work, “Heartbeat”, makes full use of Jacquard techniques. I think it is a powerful work.
Did you know that many fiber artists are women? Bauhaus, founded in 1919, is called an art school, but it was a craft school for learning techniques and drawing. At the time, many art schools in all countries did not allow women to attend, however since the Bauhaus was not an art school, it accepted women. When the school was first established, 50% of the students were women, and even in 1933, when the school closed, 30% of the students were women, so it seems that the desire of women to study art was very high. The textile industry had developed dramatically after the Industrial Revolution and learning techniques on the handlooms in the Bauhaus textile workshops was considered old fashioned, out of date and uninteresting to men. Because weaving was unpopular, educators forced women to study in the textile workshops, \ and men did not want to study with women. When the Bauhaus closed, the women who had studied in the Bauhaus textile workshops- Anni Alberts, Gunta Stolzl. Marile Ehrman left Germany and continued their creative endeavors, in their new locations with textiles at the center. Then came the generational shift and the aforementioned early pioneers such as Magdalena Abakanowicz etc. How much did the fiber art revolution of the 1960s and 70s affect people's minds, including mine? Why was that? I think it was because the freedom that only men were given and the liberation after WWII gave rise to a creative energy that aimed at the destruction of traditional forms and the radical construction of new ones, which shocked us when we saw forms we had never seen before.
My third hometown, Kiryu City in Gunma Prefecture, where I always return to in Japan is called "Modern Weaving-Metropolis.”and my origin as a fiber artist is here in Kiryu. Built in 1997, the Kiryu city performing art center was designed to resemble cocoons used to make silk fabrics. The building looks like a giant cocoon floating high in the sky. In 1994, to symbolize the weaving capital of Japan, the leaders at the time gathered together to accomplish a project of international quality, taking advantage of the talent and technology of Kiryu for the Kiryu city performing art center. During my textile teaching years in Tokyo from 1993 to 2000, I often visited Kiryu to research under the textile planner, Junichi Arai, and I was able to see the integration of all dyeing and weaving techniques and art in this project. I am the person I am today because of the experiences I had here in my 20s to 30s.
The stage curtain, “Flowering Future,”in the performing arts center’s main hall was created by Sheila Hicks together with local textile companies in Kiryu. Also commissioned for the center were “3-Dimensional Macro-gauze” a woven piece of steel yarn and steel rods by British textile artist Peter Collinwood, “Request from the Future” by seventeen female artists, and “Mineral,”eight glass doors made of vacuum-deposited polyester film cloth, by Junichi Arai.
The fact that fiber art is beginning to be reevaluated and exhibitions have been held here and there in recent years is a sign of the times, and there are elements that resonate with us today. For example, people may feel a sense of desolation when they spend too much time touching a small mobile screen in their daily lives, or feel a sense of relief when they feel the warmth of a pet. I think that somewhere in today's increasingly isolated life, tactile art forms call for a sense of enrichment and relief for people.
The reason why the works of the new generation are attracting attention is because they seem to have the artistic means to remove the anxiety that is stirring within them. Representative of the new generation are artists such as Tau Lewis and Igshaan Adams.
Lewis, born in Canada likens up-cycling practices to diaspora and survival techniques, situating her work within the history, present, and oracle-filled future of black culture. Adams born in Cape Town, South Africa, stitches racial, religious, and sexual identities together with pieces of wood, plastic, beads, shells, string, and rope to create works that are deeply connected to the commodity trade and local environments of postcolonial Africa.
A new institutional recognition of fiber art in history is presented through museums and other institutions. I am very interested to see how it is presented from different angles and how people will react to it. But I do not think these artists are necessarily creating for the sake of having their work exhibited. They created because the definition is their own and they wish to find their own way of life in it. It is an aesthetic that is neither here nor there.
I conclude with a quotes from Sheila Hicks and Olga de Amaral
Sheila Hicks:
“Today, the curators walking in the door are different. They aren’t textile or craft experts — they are contemporary art experts. And that ultimately seems to be the peculiar fate of this medium.”
Olga de Amaral:
"I am not familiar with current tendencies in textile design. It seems to me that those who weave artistically base themselves only partially on fiber craft, which in my opinion, makes no sense. I consider that one must base oneself on precision, on mathematics, on color theory. What is woven, does not occur by chance, but totally the opposite - it is very calculated. I can't do that because I am not trained and because I am in the midst of an abstraction. Finally, my work is nothing more than my way of telling how I feel about life, about the soul of things.”
Thank you for reading my newsletter of May and June 2024.
-Yuh Okano
Below is a list of recent and upcoming fiber art exhibitions.
“Magdalena Abakanovic” at The Tate Modern in London
“Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art “ at Metroplitan Museum of Art
“Sheila Hicks : Infinite Potential” at Alison Jacques in London
