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Ever since I fell in love with a textile artist I was smitten. The unfurling of that first wall hanging was my undoing. Promoting textile art has become a way of life and a labour of love.
I trained as a concert pianist and give several classical piano recitals a year. But while I was studying as a postgraduate in Budapest, I developed a wrist injury which forced me to take a couple of years off - my guard was down, in slipped textiles. In a strange reversal of gender, I felt like a midwife for an international movement of textile artists. The one thing I heard over and over again was despair about the lack of recognition of the medium.
It didn't take me long to realise that textile art does not enjoy a level playing field in the world of art. In many countries, it suffers from an astonishing prejudice in the eyes of the fine art world. I felt very strongly that I would like to do something, an act of protest, an act of calculated stealth on the fine art world. To paraphrase Matthew Collings in 'What is Modern Art': Picasso is Gauloises, Pollock is Marlboro, Warhol is the creation and marketing of a brand without any product, and textile artists are too busy working in the studio to stop for a smoke. (note 1).
But work has become a dirty word in the art world. Nowadays the idea is the thing. Modern artists just have the ideas, that urinal idea, that Merda d'Artista idea (note 2) (respectively the number one and number two bright ideas from the art world). But they're too busy to become very engrossed in the mere manufacture of the object, beyond a quick grunt and a couple of press conferences. Another outmoded concept is beauty. Aesthetics, deeply felt communication from the artist to the viewer? - all that stuff went out with the death of Matisse and Chagall. So where does that leave fibre art? Out in the cold.
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It is interesting to compare the fate of photography with that of fibre art. Photography a century ago was too common a currency to have high value. Everyone was familiar with matter-of-fact photographs, there was no art cachet to them. 'The history of photography evolved independently and parallel to the history of painting. Fear of contact between the two was great, disputes sometimes harsh, a reconciliation seemed hopeless. Fortunately, a dialogue did eventually evolve and this is undoubtedly one of the most exciting chapters of the visual culture of our century. It was not just a matter of recognising photography as art, but definitively eliminating the borders between photography and the creative arts. In time, photography succeeded in gaining public acceptance'. (note 3)
Meanwhile, for now, galleries won't promote the medium of textiles and, as any good capitalist knows, if no one is selling or buying, you're cold turkey. If no one is buying, and no one is showing, and the media aren't picking it up, and the textile artists are demoralised, what are we all doing about it? Is it time to hang up those hanks of yarn and go and join those bad boys behind the bike sheds? Maybe. Who are textile artists: living saints, or wall-flowers with a death-wish? Last survivors of an ancient view of art as embodying integrity, sensitivity and skill; or confused, delusional nobodies experiencing a protracted death in no man's land?
But what is art anyway? Art involves transcendent skill and design, a persuasive aesthetic, and it often involves communication from the heart. The dictionary knows this; the history of art and culture knows this; the vast majority of art lovers know this. It is only a small minority who believe that the naked emperor of modern art is actually clothed. His time must surely soon be up. (note 4)
So we're allowed to be skilful and still be considered artists? YES! Art has always been skilful. Leonardo's notebooks ('My works are born of simple and pure experience, the true mistress . . . enabling men to strive toward what is possible, with discrimination') or Bach's B-minor Mass ('If anyone works as hard as I have, they could achieve what I have achieved') or Liszt's Etudes d'exécution transcendante ('Homer, the Bible, Plato, Byron, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart ... are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this I practise four to five hours of exercises: thirds, sixths, octaves, tremelos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc. Ah! Provided I don't go mad you will find in me an artist!...') or Cézanne's studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire ('I work obstinately, I glimpse the Promised Land ...') or Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex ('I am by nature prone to persist in overcoming difficulties') - great artists have always been passionately skilful! This is part and parcel of their art. They set themselves huge technical difficulties which they transcended. Their work has stood the test of time. It expresses universal human emotions or values. The richer their feeling, the more complex their layering of structural and technical procedures. (note 5)
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Who knows how - in terms of journalism - this notion of a divorce between an artist's ideas and their skill has come about - it is a C-minus idea. It is of course true that artists such as Raphael would run a busy atelier with the assistance of apprentices. But this was only after acquiring mastery, and a reputation to match. (The idea that the likes of Raphael would condone unskilled art is absurd.) It is also true that a sculptor such as Louise Bourgeois may, being physically ill-equipped for the task of a gigantic sculpture, quite legitimately make a maquette and get others to make it for her. But this does not prove for one second that skill per se is inferior. This is an insidious misunderstanding which is to misrepresent the masterpieces of art, music and literature for centuries. (note 6)
What has happened is that the fine art world entered a sad cul-de-sac with Duchamp. Increasingly desperate, over-reliant on shock, a junkie's dependency on the quick fix of the latest technological buzz-word, morally bankrupt, technically deficient, an inability to relate positively to the roots of art history to a degree which would have any good therapist worried. The current art scene is all sex and no love; orphaned bastards lying around naked, bleating for attention. The public has bought into a kind of mass-delusion about the nature of art, a bit like a stock-market ramp or bubble. The latest name, the latest puff is hyped by a gallery with clout and good media connections; predictions of enhanced economic value of the work become self-fulfilling prophecies; economic values are seen as equal to real value. The artist is famous, therefore the art is good, therefore the price is high, and so it continues...
Gallery owners meanwhile, in England at least, appear to represent a last bastion of male chauvinism. We've had a drive for equal opportunities for the disabled, for women, for blacks - how about for textile artists? In Australia there is a very successful community of aboriginal women artists called Utopia. A small landscape painting on canvas by Emily Kngwarre auctions for around US$23,000, while a similar landscape on batik, which would have taken six times as long to make, sells for around US$11,500. Why? Because for gallery owners, canvas means art, silk means textiles. Textiles is women's work. It is merely a hobby. We don't sell textiles here, madam, good day. (note 7)
The gallery world may throw up two flawed arguments in defence of their exclusion of textile art: first that there is little market for this work. There are buyers and sellers for anything, if marketed and promoted effectively. There are many who have done very well out of buying work by certain textile artists early in their careers and seen their investments rise ten-fold. Out of those whose studios I have had the pleasure of visiting, it would seem a very safe bet that good work by the following will command substantially higher prices in ten years' time: installations by Yuko Takada Keller, now in Denmark; installations by Masakazu and Naomi Kobayashi in collaboration, and weavings by Chiyoko Tanaka, from Japan; silk hangings by Sally Greaves-Lord and installations by Yinka Shonibare in England; the early printed and painted work of Nicola Henley from Ireland; silk hangings by Utopia in Australia and mixed-media work by Marian Bijlenga in the Netherlands. (I am not rash enough to single out any artist from the States, but anyone who invested in Amazon.com at $100 may be ruing the day they neglected to buy some decent fibre art for their walls from any of the artists in this book - now that would have been a shrewd investment!)
The second argument put forward by the gallery world is that textiles are fragile and therefore a physically poor investment. Again this does not stand up to investigation. Like all art, textile art should be kept out of direct sunlight. The artist will leave simple, clear and competent instructions on maintenance, if necessary, for the gallery/owner. Woven tapestries, for example, many of which have already survived several centuries, may be lightly and carefully vacuumed. There is no mystique to this, nor cause for concern. After all, it is not as if the collection of paintings on canvas is trouble free. Think of the hugely expensive and sometimes damaging restoration of canvases that takes place all the time. Any investment carries with it risks and responsibilities and pleasures. But since many established artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Magdelena Abakanowicz use cloth, and since the value of their work rises, it can be seen that this explanation is merely another lame excuse for exclusion.
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So not only are textile artists representing outlawed concepts of beauty, aesthetics and skill; as if that wasn't enough they are (mostly) the wrong gender in one of the few areas of western professional life where sexist discrimination and chauvinism reign totally unchallenged.
For the situation to improve, the first thing to go must be the word Craft. It hovers like an albatross in our wake. Craft, with its connotations of sandals, garage sales of cufflinks and pots, cost per square foot, hemp-dyeing workshops, sends out a confusing message to the public. Yes, textile artists have awe inspiring skills often with long traditions in the applied arts world, but let them be skills that dare not speak their name. The artistry is sometimes in concealing the difficulties. (note 8)
The presentation of art textiles, whether in print or on exhibition, has to regain an emphasis on art, on professionalism, with the ambition to move into a larger public sphere. I vote for 'art textiles' rather than 'textile art' as a name, as a kind of symbol. Exposure in the media, exposure in galleries, will need to be fought for and won with skill and determination. It is possible to retain artistic integrity and simultaneously to fight for recognition. As in music, photography and cinema, trends come and go. The public will one day become disenchanted with the current superficial scene (fast food, internet, techno-art) and start searching again for more meaning, warmth, lyricism, tactility, tradition.
My own personal contribution toward improving the public perception of textiles is my commitment to publishing one volume a year in the series 'Art Textiles of the World'. This is NOT intended to be an 'official top ten'. Instead, this is a personal selection of a variety of excellent artists from a country with hundreds of excellent artists. My criteria are as follows: I want to offer a wide variety of work across the spectrum of contemporary textile practice, be it tapestry, installations, printed and painted, mixed-media, weave, and so on. I try to include a fair balance of emerging, mid-career and established artists. (It might be tempting to stick to the safe big names, but where an artist already has a monograph of their work published, I feel that the public is already well served and it is somebody else's turn in the sun.) I have an unashamed bias toward work that is photogenic, since I consider that in the past a grave disservice has been done to the art textiles movement by the publication of so many 'how to do it' books full of out-of-focus, black and white photos. Three-dimensional textile art is notoriously difficult to photograph effectively. On the whole this means a slight bias against installations (hard to get in focus) and against work which is predominantly white (disappears on the page) or which is monochrome (again this can look dull on paper over a whole chapter). On occasions and with great regret artists have had to be excluded due to the poor quality of photographic transparencies available. If the artist has sold much of their work overseas, or lost the address of the buyers, etc. then alas there is little to be done. I hope that readers may find their conception of contemporary textile practice challenged and enlarged; that their appetite may be whetted to find out more about these artists' peers; that the personal slant of some of the artists' statements prove alluring to the general arts reader who, in the past, has often felt alienated by a preoccupation with matters technical. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I dream that these books may serve as seeds for exhibitions of textile art - catalogues in search of an exhibition?!
I have a very simple ten year plan to dramatically improve the status of textile art. Here it is in a nutshell. I propose ten books in this series, one a year, each accompanying an exhibition of work by the ten artists. The exhibition to tour to ten cities around the world, with appropriate and sympathetic curators committing to this annual project. If you like this idea, you will need to wield your mouse!
Now to flesh it out a little: imagine a show in a city near you called Art Textiles of the World: Japan in the winter of 2003. Together with leading curator Keiko Kawashima of Gallery Gallery, Kyoto, Japan, I will be editing a book of the same title for publication in October 2003. If ten appropriate curators agreed to collaborate with Ms Kawashima (cherry-picking their favourite artists if necessary), not only would they have a fabulous exhibition in its own right, but also their galleries would be sure to enjoy a surge of visitors for the show, given the universal popularity of Japanese textiles (just ask MOMA, New York's Museum of Modern Art). Interested galleries would almost certainly attract public funding and sponsorship. If the show toured to just one major city in each of the following countries: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Canada and to two cities in the USA ... If the show became a prized annual event in the cultural life of that city ... A gradually expanding audience would come to see art textiles through fresh eyes. Media interest would surely follow. This will be the turning point of a vicious circle into a virtuous circle. Work of beauty, of aesthetic appeal, executed with integrity, speaking to the heart. Gaining new status in the eyes of the public through quality publications, educational events and deftly promoted international exhibitions. A new professionalism entering the textile world; an end to the ghetto mentality, no more defensiveness, increased self-confidence and awareness of what is happening from one country to another. Do you share our dream?
If so, the ball is in your court, dear reader. On Valentine's Day (14 February) 2001 and annually thereafter, you are invited/incited to send an attractive mailing, either electronically or by snail mail, to the curators whom I will list on my web site (www.arttextiles.com in the 'feature' section) each January. If these curators hear from enough of you saying 'I am asking you please to show an exhibition of Japanese art textiles in your Gallery', then surely they may act. Popular pressure can bring about real change in real life. 500 messages may not be enough. But 1,000, or 2,000, or 5,000 - that they surely could not ignore. To those who say 'It's no use, Gallery prejudice will never change', I say 'well, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness'. Move your mouse in February, and please tell your colleagues. We've got a battle to win. The time has come. (note 9)
In the wonderful novel entitled 'The Bear Comes Home', the bear says 'That's New York for you. If they think it's art they clap their hands, and if they think it might be real they turn pale and hope it goes away'. (note 10) Textile art is for real and it's here to stay. Real art, with just as many ideas as fine art but better executed, finer art. I call it art textiles, or art for short.
This is not a book. It is an act of war.
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Editor Matthew Koumis was born in London in 1964. At the age of 17 he won an Open Scholarship in Modern Languages from Pembroke College, Oxford University; he subsequently gained a First in classical piano at the Royal College of Music, London, together with an Honours degree in Music from London University. He continued his studies of languages and music at Athens University with a scholarship from the Greek government, and at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. He founded Telos Art Publishing in 1995 to bring contemporary textile art to a wider international audience, and is now equally engaged in his two careers as musician and publisher. He is married to the textile artist Alice Kettle and they live in Winchester, England with their three daughters.
This article is from The World of Embroidery, Volume 51 No.6, © Matthew Koumis.