0 FOB Final.Indd 1 05/01/2017 19:24 Published by Turner Contemporary on the Occasion of the Exhibition Entangled: Threads and Making 28 January – 7 May 2017

0_FOB_Final.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:24 Published by Turner Contemporary on the occasion of the exhibition Entangled: Threads and Making 28 January – 7 May 2017

Turner Contemporary Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, CT9 1HG, UK T: 00 44 (0)1843 233000 www.turnercontemporary.org

ISBN 0-9552363-9-8

Editor: Karen Wright Assistant Editor: Kathryn Lloyd Subeditor: Louisa Wright Art Director: Fiona Hayes

For Turner Contemporary: Sarah Martin, Kate Boys-Layton, Victoria Evans

Printed by Graphius, The Netherlands

© Turner Contemporary, 2017. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form by electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Texts by Ann Coxon; Stina Högkvist; Siri Hustvedt; Kathryn Lloyd; Sarah Martin; Rosa Martínez; Marit Paasche; Victoria Pomery; Anna Ray; Karen Wright.

Cover: Phyllida Barlow, untitled: brokenshelf2015, 2015, timber, plywood, steel, fabric, PVA, cement, tape, plaster, 120 x 300 x 110cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

0_FOB_Final.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:24 4 Preface

7 Introduction: Excellence has no Sex

10 The Art of a Woman? Siri Hustvedt

20 We are all Penelope: In conversation with Frances Morris Karen Wright

30 Making Something from Something: Toward a Re-definition of Women’s Textile Art Ann Coxon

44 Philomela’s Tongue Marit Paasche

60 Debate/Share/Make Aware/Enjoy Rosa Martínez

66 Sidsel Paaske: On the Verge Stina Högkvist

80 Material Girls: From Garage to Factory Karen Wright

102 Things are Inexplicable: In conversation with Kiki Smith Karen Wright

116 Made in Margate Anna Ray

122 A Way of Waiting Peacefully: Some Works in Entangled Sarah Martin

128 Women and Hair: Materialising the Abject Kathryn Lloyd

138 Susan Hiller: Analysis and Ecstasy Karen Wright

144 Exhibiting Artists

150 Credits and Acknowledgments

0_FOB_Final.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:24 Preface

Victoria Pomery

omen have played a pivotal role in the production of art- Wworks for centuries and yet, so often, their work has been regarded as of less importance than that of men. The histories of art have often made them invisible. The reasons for this are well documented, some of which are pursued in several essays in this publication. However, when we began discussions for this exhibition with critic, curator and writer Karen Wright, we hadn’t envis- aged an exhibition of work solely by women artists. The intention was to focus on a specific strand of current practice related to the use of materials, in particular textiles and threads. This area of art making relates to a much longer history, encompassing both art and craft, and through our conversations and selection of works it became apparent quite early on that women are very actively engaged in the experimentation and production of diverse works using such materials. Hence, as the list of artists emerged as an all-women line up, we felt that there was something intrinsically important in the current climate about making an exhibition solely by female artists. This exhibition brings together an extraordinarily diverse group of works from the 20th century alongside works made this century — a number of which are specially commissioned for the show. Some of the artists may be less well known than others, but the works create a fascinating narrative, spanning, as they do, an incredibly rich period in history. Indeed the exhibition as a whole poses a raft of questions about categories, hierarchies and contemporary practice, a frequent feature of our programme here at Turner Contemporary. Curiosity has informed the selection of so much of the work, and whilst this is not seeking to be a comprehensive survey, it demonstrates that there is a strand of practice that is difficult to categorise, somehow falling between art and craft. Hannah Ryggen’s 6. oktober 1942, 1943, is a hugely important social and political document and its inclusion in Entangled:

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:24 Threads & Making will be the first time that the tapestry has been seen in the UK. Ryggen took real personal risks to produce the work and this theme is one that recurs in many of the pieces brought together here. Ryggen is a contemporary of Anni Albers whose career began at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany before she and her husband, Josef, left for the United States as political refugees in 1933. Both Albers’ taught at the Bauhaus where Anni had been a student, and were to become hugely influential as artists and teachers. Anni believed that ‘…a free way of approaching a material seems worth keeping in mind as far as the work of beginners is concerned. Courage is an important factor in any creative effort. It can be most active when knowledge in too early a stage does not narrow the vision.’ Her work, which has been included in a number of recent group exhibitions, is ripe for re-evaluation and will soon be the subject of a large Tate Modern exhibition. Her ability to create geometric woven works from the traditional hand-weaving process was radical for its time and still captures an intense energy and quest to understand the essentials of abstraction. More recently, artists such as Phyllida Barlow, Sheila Hicks, Maria Roosen and Tatiana Trouvé are pushing their experimentation to create works that are bold, playful, intensely visual and thought-provoking. This fascination with materials and their possibilities is explored in a multitude of different ways throughout the exhibition, with artists such as Christiane Löhr and Ursula von Rydingsvard using materials that aren’t always associated with traditional categorisa- tions of the word ‘fabric’. I am extremely grateful to Karen Wright for approaching us with the outline concept for this exhibition. It is Karen’s first foray into curating in a public gallery. Her huge knowledge of artists, collectors and contemporary practice has been absolutely essential to the development of Entangled: Threads & Making. Karen has worked closely with my colleagues and I to shape and develop this exhibition and we’ve had much fun in exploring and discussing our ideas together and with many of the artists. Karen has dedicated many hours of time as well as energy and commitment to the curatorial process and the development of this publication. She has been hugely supportive of the work of Turner Contemporary and in this instance she has been able to shape our work, for which I am enormously grateful.

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:24 I am also very grateful to all of the artists for their participation in the exhibition. It has been a delight to meet so many of them on recent visits and I am particularly grateful to those who have made new works for this exhibition. The generosity of spirit the artists have shown has been inspiring and is hugely appreciated. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have lent their cherished and wonderful works to the gallery. Central to any exhibition is the quality of the loans and we have been incredibly fortunate in securing works from public and private collections both in the UK and overseas. My thanks must also go the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The exhibition has been made possible with the assistance of the Government Indemnity Scheme, which is provided by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, administered by Arts Council England. Additional funding has been required in order to realise such an ambitious exhibition and publication and I am grateful to our long-standing core funders Kent County Council and Arts Council England as well as The Baring Foundation, The Art Fund, OCA, Norway, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Embassies of Iceland, Norway and Germany. In an era when institutions are producing fewer and fewer publications, we felt that it was important to create a document to accompany this exhibition. My thanks go to all our writers for providing a bold and thoughtful group of essays that explore many different themes and areas of research. The essays have been edited by Karen Wright, ably assisted by Kathryn Lloyd, and the book has been beautifully designed by Fiona Hayes. Finally I would like to thank all my colleagues who have contributed so much to the development and realisation of this exhibition and publication. My special thanks go to Sarah Martin, our Head of Exhibitions, Andrew Shedden, our Gallery and Technical Manager, Clare Warren, our Programme Co-ordinator and to Victoria Evans our Programme Assistant. The team has worked extremely closely with Karen and the artists, writers and lenders. This collaborative approach ensures that we are able to develop bold and ambitious exhibitions that are thoughtful and reflective, inclusive and creative. n

Victoria Pomery OBE has been Director of Turner Contemporary since 2002.

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:24 Excellence has no Sex

Karen Wright

orking on any project over an extended period of time Wcould lead to a feeling of ennui. This is not true of Entangled: Threads & Making. The list of artists, long and distinguished as it is, could have been lengthier. There are discoveries that could simply not fit within the space and others whom I discovered too late in the process to include. I was concerned that women, and in particular younger women, would object to being in an exhibition dedicated to female artists but this proved not to be the case. I am grateful that every invited artist chose to participate with zeal and passion. Recent events have made this exhibition even more timely. I awoke in Boston in June and turned on the television in the hotel room to see Boris Johnson followed by Donald Trump arriv- ing in Scotland. Decades ago, I moved to England from America, initially to study, and then stayed as I fell in love with Europe — the diversity and excitement of language, architecture and art- istry. But in 2016, I woke up to find myself retreating backwards. Trump, exultant, proclaimed that when the pound goes down more people will be drawn to playing on his Scottish golf course. When a journalist pointed out the UK is a country not a golf- course, he replied by citing their similarity: ‘You’ll be amazed how similar it is. It’s a place that has to be fixed.’ I thought things could not get worse but on 9 November 2016, we woke to the news that America had elected Trump as president: a man who packs no punches about his feelings towards women as objects of desire and distrust, not to mention his feelings about race and religion. Coincidentally, on that day I went to my younger daughter’s PhD ceremony at Birkbeck College. At the beginning we were asked to acknowledge the graduates, but this was then followed closely by applauding their families and friends. Many of the graduates were also working — often holding down more than one job, and we were reminded of the sacrifices also made by spouses and children when their partner or parent is studying.

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:24 This was in my mind when Stina Högkvist filed her piece on Sidsel Paaske. Paaske is an artist I hope you will discover through both the exhibition of Entangled: Threads & Making and this accompanying book. Paaske was well known in her native Norway early in her career. But she was written out of history for reasons Högkvist discusses in her text. When I first visited Norway in January 2016, I met Högkvist in what she describes as her ‘she- shed’, where she was deciphering the life of Paaske. She was bent over tables of various ‘stuff’: a mixture of letters, jewellery and posters. I was instantly drawn to the work and asked if I could include it in the exhibition. When I returned to Oslo recently, the resulting survey exhibition, born out of Högkvist’s work was almost open, an affirma- tion of her discoveries. She says that when she walked Paaske’s son Carl Størmer around the show, he was surprised that most of the contents had come from his basement. What Högkvist does not mention in her essay is why it was relegated to the cellar. When Carl was only a few months old Paaske, a single mother at the time, placed him in an orphanage, in order to pursue her dreams. This happened several times during his younger years. When she returned from a holiday or her studies she took him back home. Paaske, as many women artists of that time, was pragmatic in her approach. She also monetised her work, often swapping artworks for services such as her son’s drumming lessons, which eventually led him to study in the US. Størmer was in America studying music when his mother died. Paaske had been complaining of symptoms and was diagnosed with stress and prescribed Valium by her doctors shortly before she died of a brain tumour. Størmer often recalls coming from his bedroom to the kitchen, through his mother’s studio, to find her painting. He would say, ‘that is too red’, to which she would say ‘OK’, and splat, she would pour on some blue. ‘Art was teaching her rather than the other way round’ is how he put it. In asking Högkvist how she found the work of Paaske, her response was that Paaske found her. A better pair would be hard to find. Hannah Ryggen’s husband was a painter but gave up his career in order to support her and their disabled daughter. Ryggen’s work, often deeply political, as shown in6. oktober 1942, was influential on artists both of her time and now. As Marit Paasche says in her essay on Ryggen, ‘it was not decorative patterns that she set

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:24 in the warp, but the challenging national and international political issues of the day.’ Recently, when I mentioned that Ryggen was in the show to Ingar Dragset of Elmgreen & Dragset, he said ‘she is the reason I am an artist’. The idea of limitingEntangled: Threads & Making to women evolved over time. However, after all my research, I am convinced it was the right decision. When I look at the recent tapestries of certain male artists, there is no doubt that the transferal into different materials makes the work immediately different — in its materiality and scale. I wanted to focus on the experimental hand and the process of making. ‘Excellence has no Sex’ is an often-quoted statement by Eva Hesse. She would thwart interviewers enquiring about her gender by re-focusing artistic quality as not related to gender. This is absolutely true of all the artists I have selected for Entangled: Threads & Making. During her tragically short life Hesse continued to experiment and touch her materials; she never stopping experimenting. The works in Entangled clearly show the impression of the hand. Regardless of the gender of the artists, their works are united in their excellence. Recently I saw an exhibition of the tapestries of William Kentridge and for the first time felt a twinge of regret that I had set myself a mantra, and so could not include him in the exhibition. I was, however, relieved to be told by his affable gallerist that Kentridge made the work in collaboration with a woman. Clearly, her hand is visible in these works. This book could not have happened without the zest and zeal of its makers. I am endlessly grateful to my wonderful designer Fiona Hayes who worked indefatigably, always calmly and with humour, to my right-hand woman Kathryn Lloyd who worked tirelessly, and my daughter Louisa who took in endless corrections and did the captions, the most thankless work of all. And thanks to the team at Turner Contemporary, in particular Victoria Pomery, Sarah Martin and Andrew Shedden, who allowed me to make the exhibition I wanted to make, and that will be free for all. n

Karen Wright is an art critic, curator and writer. She was co-founder and Editor of Modern Painters from 1987 until 2002. She writes regularly for The Independent. She is the curator of Entangled: Threads & Making with Turner Contemporary.

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2_ESSAY_Intro_VP_KW - FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:24 The Art of a Woman?

Siri Hustvedt

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:24 am writing this at a political moment when open misogyny has I found a loud voice in American politics, when fantasies about the feminine Other have a renewed, contagious power, and a popu- list rhetoric of fury and fear have come to fascinate millions with a glamorous, if bitter, attraction. What we can be certain of is that Simone de Beauvoir’s claim in The Second Sex that ‘a man is in his right by virtue of being man; it is woman who is in the wrong’ continues to haunt us. Woman still plays a defective Other to man and this fact touches everything she makes — whether it is a for- mula in mathematics or a sculpture. It is important to realise, too, that the idea of femininity is often bound up with other Others, with those who must be stopped at the border or pushed out or beaten or purged as pollutants in societies that are inebriated with ideas of purity. The Greeks demeaned their archenemies, the Persians, by referring to the great empire as ‘womanish.’ In anti-Semitic tracts, Jewish men were often feminised as weak, inferior, and prone to a host of psychiatric and hereditary ailments. In the United States, black men were stereotyped as effeminate and infantile, but also more corporeal and bestial than white men. The big lies of National Socialism were directed at Jews and a host of others, including blacks, Slavs, and homosexuals. After the increasing free- doms women gained during the Weimar Republic, the Nazis pushed ‘racially pure’ women back home to serve the Reich as Aryan birthing machines. We often forget that ‘progress’ is an Enlightenment fantasy to which many people cling, sometimes for dear life. What is there to say then about artists, especially artists who are women, working in their spacious well-lit studios or in back rooms or at desks in cramped apartments, armed only with the tools of their practice? What is a woman artist? What is woman’s art? Is it different from man’s art? How are we to think about this question? And can we think about this question at a time when it seems to lack urgency and meaning, when the so-called art world — indul- gent, effete, often silly — is the very image of froufrou, fluffy elit- ism, a perfect target for rage because, among other things, it figures in the popular imagination as feminine? The ‘art world’ cannot be siphoned off from the culture as a whole, and during moments of reaction and backlash, it may be

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:24 more rather than less important to understand why and how the hatred of women manifests, not only in authoritarian thinking but in longstanding notions of art as an elevated domain of mental creativity, which, despite shifting perceptions, has consistently given the advantage to men. In her introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir writes that there is ‘an absolute human type that is masculine. Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world... whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.’ A woman’s body is a problem. A man’s body isn’t. When a woman lifts a brush to canvas or chips away at stone, builds or weaves an object or installation or dreams up a conceptual work, the resulting thing is not seen as an expression of the human condition but rather of woman’s second place in the culture as more physical than mental. Of course, men and women are equally natural. We are all born and we all die. We are all vulnerable to sickness and multiple forms of injury, and both sexes are needed for reproduction, but a foetus gestates inside a woman and is born from her body, and this incontrovertible fact has iden- tified woman with nature, not culture, with the body, not the mind. Despite the fact that many believe the division between the mental and the physical is false, the mind remains an elusive concept, so elusive that there is no agreement about its contours or meaning. Any theory that advocates or hides within it an immate- rial psyche hovering above a brute material body is philosophically riddled. Nevertheless, the notion of a divide between psyche and soma continually informs contemporary life in the West. The mental as superior to the physical, as wholly beyond or above human biological reality is vital to contemporary concep- tions of artistic activity. Man artist equals artist, unless he is black or brown or homosexual or missing arms or legs, all of which will instantly cast him into the category of Other, of less-than, a condition that in one way or another connotes the feminine because it signifies a fall from the rarefied terrain of intellect, spirit, and soul to the sullied regions of the corporeal, which is where we all began — inside a woman’s body. The vigorous suppression and denial of human beginnings has a lot to do with why all work by women

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:24 remains undervalued. Human beings are strikingly immature at birth, but this truth has rarely been given a significant role in the philosophy of art or Western philosophy in general. Human beings are neotenous. Neotony is the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. Our extremely slow bodily development when compared to other mammals means that we are creatures dependent on other people for a long time. Inter-uterine life is followed by a period of living outside the womb in a state of extreme helplessness. Without constant care as infants and young children, none of us could survive. Further, those of us who do survive neglect of one kind or another carry the scars into adulthood. The interactions we have with our caretakers are crucially implicated in how we develop. The retarded growth of human beings is in part responsible for the fact that we are deeply social beings bound to other people all our lives and thrive only in organised, cooperative communities. When it comes to people, independence and autonomy are highly relative terms. We cannot escape our social nature. All of our perceptions are shaped by it, and those perceptions vary according to our societal arrangements. Research has shown that an image in a museum will be viewed differently from one on the street, that a famous artist’s canvas may appear larger than one by an obscure artist, even if they are exactly the same size. Most of this visual processing takes place unconsciously and automatically in the brain because past experience shapes present vision. This is how cultural conventions become the material realities of our bodies. Men and women are limited by corporeal reality, but we are also imaginative and symbolic beings who can run ahead of ourselves by imagining a joyous or tragic future. We can dream up benevolent and cruel gods. We can invent impossible animals, such as the unicorn. We can play for hours with mud, sand, threads, stones, and scraps of wood and turn these materials into strange new entities. And this creative capacity is old. When I visited the University of Tübingen in November of 2016, I looked into a glass case in the museum at a tiny, 40,000-year-old carved hedgehog, as beautiful and detailed as any ‘realist’ sculpture from the 18th century. No hard assumptions can be made about what this beautiful little animal meant to this lost people. We do not know whether hedgehog carving was a job for women or men or both. What we do know is that the urge to creative representation predates

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:24 any notion of art as art. At some point in our evolution, we became image-makers, possessed of a desire for symbolic representation. The hedgehog also reminds us that a word such as ‘primitive’ is misplaced if we want to describe this extraordinary little object. What does the word mean? It describes a European condescension to and fascination with pre-industrial cultures, and, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out in her essay ‘Going Native’, her examination of the myths that surround Paul Gauguin, even in contemporary art historical writing on the painter, the primitive is linked and often conflated with the feminine. The great male artist turns on a fantasy of autonomy, independence, and separation that is frankly delusional, but it seems we all like to worship art deities. Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ remains a deft examination of the problem. She writes, ‘Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great Artist — subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person a mysterious essence... called Genius or Talent.’ In harmony with de Beauvoir’s phenomenological description of a human being as a ‘situation,’ Nochlin understands context and culture as crucial to the production of art. Although many like to think that ‘progress’ has launched women into a new era of freedom, artists who happen to be women are still restrained by the perceptual expectations of their viewers. All of us human beings move in space and take in the world through our senses, but our gestures and sensual experiences are modified and directed by learning that has become unconscious habit. Culturally specific metaphors are also habits. A single example: in English speakers, the pitch of a sound is visualised as high or low; in Farsi speakers, it is seen as thick or thin. All of these people hear the sounds, but their perception of them is affected by convention. A 2015 paper in Psychological Science by Devon Proudfoot, Aaron Kay and Christy Koval is typical and confirms the duality we continue to live inside. The authors found that because creative thought is associated with stereotypically masculine traits ‘independence and self-direction’ as opposed to stereotypically female ones, ‘cooperativeness and supportiveness’, participants in their study granted more creativity to men than to women for exactly the same work. They also found that ‘stereotypically masculine

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:24 behaviour’ enhanced the perception of a man’s creativity, whereas acting in just the same way did nothing for a woman. There are countless empirical studies that demonstrate what I have called ‘the masculine enhancement effect’, a perceptual lift that is part of our physiological, sensual experience. It is also crucial to note that women are often just as likely as men to assign more intellectual and artistic ‘creativity’ to men. Nochlin did not take on the long-standing mind/body split or fully spin out the fantasy underlying our use of the word ‘genius’ (which was highly developed in the 19th century from different perspectives, including genius as a pathological state). A genius in our world is not only a person who soars beyond the constrictions of his upbringing or particular culture. He has been anointed precisely because his radical ‘independence’ seems to undo the all- too-human reality of mutual interdependence, one most radically present in our pre- and neo-natal lives when a mother or mother substitute is a figure of omnipotence. One can argue that the fantasy of the male art genius is rather like a dream of running away from home. Our artistic gods must fly as far away as possible from the murk and muck of a woman’s body, in which every person was literally housed and bound by umbilical cord and placenta until birth. Widespread misogyny may well be the result of a violent denial of origin. Because art continues to carry inside it, perhaps more in popular culture than in art subcultures, the Romantic legacy of artistic practice as a feminine activity, one best left to softies and prisses, the need to assert manly qualities in art may become more urgent. The terror of emasculation should not be underestimated. Women participate in it, too. Big is mannish. Small is girly. Massive strokes are bold and masculine; the delicate and hesitant are feminine. Buying work by a woman, showing work by a woman, writing and heralding work by women remain risky. Women’s work is always cheaper, too, and, even when we know better, cheaper signifies worse. Money is never just money. The collector is often in the business of self-padding, of purchasing names rather than works, and a man’s name on a work of art will sparkle with the superiority of the creative intellect, of the pure, clean mind over the sullied, mortal, needy, dependent body. As many feminist scholars have pointed out, contempt for traditionally feminine arts, for weaving, knitting, sewing, quilting,

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:24 crocheting, and embroidering has meant that they were lumped together in the inferior category of ‘craft’ (rope-making and the elaborate art of knots seem to have avoided the taint because they are not specifically feminine, although they are part of the same human activity). Weaving figures is a trope in myths all over the world, myths that have no geographical or historical relation. Weaving was the business of women and as far as I can tell, the reiterated statement that there are no gods of weaving, only god- desses, is true. Ix Chel, the Mayan goddess of weaving, the Navaho grandmother spider of rug weaving, the spinning Nordic goddess Frigg, and the Greek story of Arachne and Athena are just a few of hundreds of examples. Although the mythical stories are ‘spun’ in many different ways, the shared metaphor is one of connectivity — binding, cycling, bringing together, and bridging. In a number of cultures weaving was an explicit metaphor for sexual reproduction, and midwives were depicted with spinning and weaving tools, the powerful female equivalents of male weapons. In her essay on Tlazolteotl-Ixuna, a goddess of the Post- Classic period in Mexico, Thelma Sullivan writes, ‘Spinning goes through stages of growth and decline, similar to those of child- bearing woman. The spindle set in the spindle whorl is symbolic of coitus, and the thread as it winds around spindle symbolizes the growing fetus.’ Spinning and weaving represented the ongoing cycle of life, of gestation, birth, growing up and growing old, and dying, a rhythmic cycle, which is then repeated in the next generation and the next. But weaving was and is a trope for human creativity in general, for the urge to represent the rhythms of our lives in a thing that can be given or shown to others. Art and the myriad objects that came before ‘art’ are always for and about collective human life. They exist in the space between self and other. Whether the objects we make are wanted or not, these productions are always signs of a person’s reaching out for another and a bid for his or her recognition. Textiles are consummate examples of things, which in their frozen, repetitive patterns illustrate what I have come to call ‘the metrics of being’, the quickening and slowing beats of aliveness. The power of the weaving metaphor and the motions of loom and spindle cannot be divorced from the rhythmic character of human animal bodies, to heartbeat and breathing, to walking and running, to the pulse of lived reality.

3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:24 Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 2003, stainless steel and tapestry, 59.7 x 71.1 x 63.5cm

3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:24 In Patterns in Comparative Religion Mircea Eliade writes, ‘For to weave is not merely to predestine (anthropologically) and to join together differing realities (cosmologically) but also to create, to make something of one’s own substance as the spider does in spinning its web.’ The spider web is a rich metaphor with a long and ongoing life. Louise Bourgeois used the spider to great advantage as an image of the maternal, either frightening or comforting or both, depending on the perspective of the viewer. The spider metaphor is now most obviously used in the World Wide Web, but webs and nets are recurring. The theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra refers to the Hindu myth of Indra’s net in his book The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism as ‘the first bootstrap model, created by Eastern sages some 2,500 years before the beginning of particle physics.’ Images of interconnectivity also remain crucial to both systems and chaos theories. If human language and symbolic representations of all kinds are, as John Dewey argued in Art as Experience, continuations of our embodiment and not the product of an isolated realm of ‘mental’ activity, then our understanding of art as a product of the unique masculine individual has to be reconfigured. Dewey writes, ‘An experience is a product... of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world. There is no other foundation upon which esthetic theory and criticism can be built.’ And if our use of metaphor (as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson maintained and many neuroscientific studies have borne out) is intimately linked to our motor-sensory corporeal experiences in space, to the multiple meanings of above and below, forward and backward, light and heavy, as well as binding, spinning, and cutting, then our bodily situations cannot be removed from thinking itself. And if at the same time, metaphors multiply and change among us in our particular worlds and therefore also enter and become us, then there is a fundamental reciprocity at work between self and other that marks a community as a whole. There is a further metaphor that derives from an anatomical fact about human existence, which is often curiously overlooked in discussions of binding and severing tropes. In all placental mammals, an offspring is literally connected to its mother by the umbilical cord or navel string, a string which is then cut and tied after birth. Among the Masai, ‘the umbilical cord’ is used to describe a

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:24 close friendship. In English we talk about ‘close ties’ and also about ‘no strings’ relationships. I found a somewhat comic and explicit use of the umbilicus on an Internet site called The Confident Man Project titled: How to Cut the Emotional Umbilical Cord with Your Mother. The anxiety expressed in this sentence needs no analysis. Linking and separating are continually at work in dynamic organic life, in the motions of approach and retreat, of turning to and turning away from. In human life they are found in desire and rejection, in the need for others and in the fear of the power others have over us. We see this played out on the political stage continuously. The emotions involved range from the ecstatic to the excruciating to the vengeful. We are always spinning explanations for why things are the way they are, and our metaphors often go unexamined. They may be deadening or liberating, and they are kept alive in language and gesture and infect and alter our perceptions of the world. Yes, women are the ones who become pregnant and give birth and this fact has shaped our shared metaphorical understandings of women and men and the different meanings that have attached themselves to ‘women’ and ‘men’ over time, but the idea that one sex is more ‘natural’ than the other is an absurd distortion of biological truth made even more curious in the idea that women are somehow incapable or handicapped when it comes to the profoundly human need to make objects, to play, to think symbolically, to bind and cut concepts, and to represent life in its myriad forms; in other words, to be artists. This idea is founded on a dangerous and corro- sive delusion about what we are — on a fantasy of purity and pol- lution, form and matter, mind and body that have divided along the line of sexual difference. The human imagination at once rises from and transcends the bodily self in collective symbolic behaviour. Imaginative works may be sexed or unsexed or both sexes at once. But whatever the created thing is — a sacred talisman or hedgehog or a canvas hanging on a wall in the Louvre — it is always a product of human intercourse, of our relations with and dependence on others. n

Siri Hustvedt is a novelist, poet and essayist. Her 2012 novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. Her latest collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind was published by Sceptre in December 2016.

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3_ESSAY_Siri_Hustvedt_ FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:24 We are all Penelope: In conversation with Frances Morris

Karen Wright

Frances Morris, Director, Tate Modern in front of Susumu Koshimizu, From Surface to Surface, 1971

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:32 hen Frances Morris greeted the throngs of journalists in the WStarr Auditorium before the opening of the extension at Tate Modern, Nicholas Serota introduced her for the first time as its newly- appointed Director. She stood up, flashing what has since become known as her signature silver shoes, and was promptly swallowed up by the podium. We have a history together, of which I remind her when I sit down to chat with her months later, in her now bigger office at Tate Modern.

KAREN WRIGHT: The last time we had a proper conversation was a long time ago. We were thinking of doing a show together of female artists at Tate. I am not sure when it was; I think it is when you started working with Louise Bourgeois.

FRANCES MORRIS: That is a very long time ago.

KW: It probably was a long time ago. I remember I had this venn dia- gram with circles with all the artists. I showed it to an artist friend and he asked me why Phyllida Barlow wasn’t on it. He had studied with her at the Slade. And now, look at Phyllida. Why and when did you became such an advocate for acquiring and presenting exhibitions by women?

FM: That is an interesting question. I think it was something I became personally aware of when we did our opening display at Tate Modern in 2000, because it was the first opportunity to really look at the collection in public view. We were so squeezed into just a cluster of galleries at the old Tate Gallery. And although we were not specifically looking at gender, or even trying to achieve a balance, it was evident we were trying to show new perspectives in the history of art — even though that was Western European and North American narratives — and therefore we were looking at work that we had overlooked. I remember we ‘discovered’ — we should have known about it — a fantastic triptych by Jo Baer, which we had in the collection for a number of years. I had never shown it before. I think it had been shown as a new acquisition in the 1980s, but it had been, to all intents and purposes, invisible. And so we brought it into the hang of Minimalism and it did two things: one, for me, it showed how despite the reluctance of artists such as Judd to engage with painting in Minimalism, there was of course a story around painting. And two, it

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:32 was a story configured by a strong female voice. So, the conjunction of women and the margins, and what was missing from the mainstream, I think, I clocked around that time. And then of course this was brought into striking relief thinking about Louise Bourgeois’ history, because she found her distinctive and individual pathway on the margins of the canonical history. She was associated with Surrealism, associated with Abstract Expressionism, but she was never a member of the club. She was never clubbable because she was digging around at the point where mainstream met what could never at that time have been conceived of as art. We are now discovering that this is a fruitful place to look at creativity and innovation. It’s interesting, I was reading a report in the paper about the Nobel Prize and Bob Dylan. We have a prize for literature for a pop singer. But, of course, his lyrics are beginning to redefine what we mean as literature. And in the same way, Bourgeois’ work with materials that were at that time disregarded from an artistic view has redefined what we think of as art. As indeed has her content. She was one of the first people in the cultural sector to use the term child abuse. Her content also pushed art into a whole new dimen- sion. We could not think of gender and identity politics in art now without thinking of Bourgeois’ example.

KW: In a recent interview with Susan Hiller, she said, in response to a question about Bourgeois’ influence on her work, ‘who knew she was in the MoMA?’ And so people such as Hiller, who you associate with Bourgeois, took artists such as Georgia O’Keefe as their role models.

FM: Yes, but I do think with Bourgeois, while much of her work was invisible to a wider community, she was at the epicentre of a community of women artists in New York, who took her as their senior figure. So, that generation of women around the 1960s and 70s, the WAC [Women’s Action Coalition] generation. Artists such as [Yayoi] Kusama, for example. When Kusama was in New York, Louise Bourgeois was, in effect, invisible, but Kusama knew her and completely revered her and still does to this day. And of course people like Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse, they all knew her. I think she was also very influential on a number of men — artists such as Robert Gober. Within an inner circle in the New

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:32 Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2005, fabric, 40.6 x 53.3cm

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:32 Geta Brătescu, Hypostasis of Medea VIII, 1980, coloured sewing on textile, 85 x 60cm

Geta Brătescu, Carpati, 1985, collage (burned cigarette papers) on paper, 129 x 111cm

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:32 York scene, people knew her. So then those people began to influence other people, and the context of writing and thinking around art opened up. It is like ripples. Ripples and ripples.

KW: This is where you come in with the [Bourgeois] spider.

FM: The thing about the spider is, we had evolved a project with Unilever to commission an artist on an annual basis to make a work for the Turbine Hall. The initial concept was that it would be a competition and we would invite two or three artists to come up with proposals, and we would choose the strongest one. So we had a short- list of artists, and when we looked at the list, which included eminent artists who then went on to make projects with us, we just thought we cannot put these people in a race or a competition. Particularly Louise Bourgeois, who was our outstanding candidate for year one. We thought she was too old and too distinguished to be asked to com- pete with anybody else. One of the reasons it felt right to ask Bourgeois was because, in a way, she symbolised so much of what we wanted Tate Modern to be. She was the oldest of young artists, the youngest of old. She was making superbly fresh work even in her 90s. Her work spanned the century. Many of the great avant-garde paradigms were reflected in her work, so in a way it was a story of art history, or an engagement with art history, and at the same time it was a personal history that defied art history. She redefined every engagement with the canon. She was a perfect symbol, a metaphor for what we wanted at Tate Modern: to celebrate and shine new lights on the great careers of people who were overlooked; to build new audiences and explore new territory. Every single material that we were ever going to show in Tate Modern, apart from video, was represented in her work. If you list the materials she worked with: painting, sculpture, drawing, print making, works on paper, found objects, fabric, bronze, steel, wood, glass, every technique in the world; the whole of history was there. She was the Pandora’s box of Tate Modern. So, we invited her to do the project, and she came up with the tower. I loved the tower because it related so much to He Disappeared into Complete Silence, her print portfolio of 1947, which is then realised three-dimensionally 60 years later in the tower. And she made a tower, another tower and another tower, so we had three towers which represented the triangle of the family for her. We thought they

4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:32 might be a bit invisible from the west entrance, so Nick [Serota] pro- posed that we might borrow a group of spiders and bring them down the ramp. I have to say I wasn’t convinced; I thought it was a slightly naff idea, but I was indulging my Director. She came back with an emphatic no, but why didn’t she make a really big spider to go on the bridge. It was out of the blue, and it was like a gift from God. It was great. When we opened, I got a sense of the huge appetite among women artists for role models to follow, celebrate, explore, to engage with women practitioners and audiences.

KW: Well, we don’t really have a great history of women artists in the UK. We have Bridget Riley, but I wonder why she seems so outside.

FM: Do you think the work of pure abstraction is so much less acces- sible to people’s personal identification? I do not know. I think it is the storytelling in Louise Bourgeois that is so compelling. I think it is now, just in this moment in time, this decade, this era, that storytelling really matters to people.

KW: That is why I am so excited about the Hannah Ryggen tapestry in Entangled: Threads & Making.

FM: That is fascinating isn’t it? The idea of coming across unknown or unrecognised artists is so empowering, because it makes you think that history is not a fixed thing, or made in stone. It makes you think that we can all engage with re-thinking history, we can all make history bigger and we can all have a history that relates to us and for those of us women who have been left out of history and religion and historical politics. Sometimes I sit in St Paul's Cathedral, which I adore, and think, I am in a man’s world: God, Jesus and the Church... So, I do think it is incredibly important.

KW: You have put on such amazing shows in Tate to rebalance this. Agnes Martin for me was a wonderful exhibition. I went with a painter, Chantal Joffe, and she kept saying, ‘it’s such a beautiful show but it’s so terrible because you feel her pain’.

FM: You do. It made me weep. I found it really difficult not to be emotionally engaged in the work.

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4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:32 KW: It was not universally well received by the critics.

FM: They were not looking. Lots of male critics loved that show. I do not think it was entirely a woman’s show. As Martin herself said, if you are the kind of person who likes sitting in front of a flat sea and looking at that sea without stopping, if you’re compelled to sit and look at the sea then you will love my painting. That’s what it is; it’s that kind of ‘find the world in a grain of sand’ experience. It is very meditative.

KW: I remember seeing some Agnes Martin paintings in artist Richard Tuttle’s house in Abiquiú in New Mexico, and how they reflected the horizon line.

FM: Richard Tuttle is interesting because, just thinking about that quote about that sea, when I spoke to him he talked of time in relation to Martin's work, and I’d never really thought about that. But of course it relates to the sea: the duration, that endless line, the length of time to think and watch. It is very beautiful.

KW: Taking it back to women, it’s this idea that a lot of the women in our exhibition have talked about, this repetitive nature...

FM: It is Penelope. We are all Penelope. Men are all Sisyphus and we are all Penelope. I never thought of that one before; it’s a rather good thought isn’t it!

KW: We have a young Norwegian weaver, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, responding to the Ryggen tapestry. She is working away on a big piece for Entangled. But, she works alone and it is very solitary. I think this is another thing that women do.

FM: Yes, you think of Bourgeois’ studio and she was very solitary for many, many years.

KW: Again, do you think that is a female thing?

FM: Well, I am very worried about gender stereotypes. I do not know if it is a female thing, but I think it is interesting that in today’s world there are fewer female artists who run these big studios with big production houses as a matter of appetite.

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4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:32 KW: Rosa Martínez has written a piece about Joana Vasconcelos, who does have a huge studio. But it is very different from a Koons studio, for example; she approaches it very holistically.

FM: But, one wonders, because we see with gendered eyes, clearly. I think there are behavioural patterns that are taught. I think it’s probably about the way we’re brought up. If you look across the whole of society, from industry through academia to politics and the cultural sector, women tend not to pursue leadership positions so early in their careers. Is this because we are encouraged to be team players and play mummies and daddies and skip together? Maybe there is a reason that it took me until I was in my 50s to really think I could be a director, whereas I have colleagues in their 20s or 30s — chaps — who think they can be directors. They have a stronger self belief, and so it may be to do with that and I do not personally know if this is a thing we want to encourage in artists. I think one symptom, or feature, of the contemporary art world is a lot of formulaic work churned out by artists who do run factory-like productions. It has become a kind of a trope, and it is fuelling the market place. It is one of the things that accounts for the price differential I think. You need to have a certain volume of production in order to develop a market. You need a bit of competition. 10 works at £10 million each.

KW: What about Eva Hesse? Do you think that Hesse is important?

FM: I think Hesse is incredibly important. When I think of how short her life was, how fearsome, innovative and daring she was, I think it is astonishing. What is interesting is that she has become a legendary figure, and there are very few woman artists who have done this. Of course, there is O’Keefe in that way, but Hesse was more innovative than O’Keefe as an artist in her practice. In a way, she’s the pivot that art of the 20th century turns on — her embrace of the organic. What one would like to tease out is something about Hesse and Bourgeois. Her legacy has been, in some ways, well served by her death. There is a sufficiently large body of her work to become iconic and loved, and yet what would have happened to her work if she had lived longer? You will never know. Bourgeois is somebody who had to fight the good fight for decades. She had to reinvent herself on a number of occasions, and she did it well.

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4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:32 KW: A lot of this show came about from studio visits. Are they important for you?

FM: I have made a lot of my discoveries by going to artists’ studios. Again it is often in the margins that you make discoveries. It’s a little like Bourgeois’ insomnia drawings, which were the drawings she discarded and were only picked up in the morning by her studio assistant Jerry Gorovoy. When we were doing the Art Now room [at Tate Britain], I used to say to the artists: what is in those plan chests? Do you have projects never realised? What would you like to have done most of all? The studio visit is incredibly useful. I find the way people make art is almost more interesting than the outcome.

KW: How did you discover the amazing Romanian artist Ana Lupas?

FM: We discovered her just through visiting Romania, and talking to artists and dealers on the ground. She is well known by the artistic community — younger artists and Romanian collectors.

KW: We have the wonderful Romanian artist Geta Br˘atescu in the exhibition, who, like Louise Bourgeois, is still making amazing work in her 90s. Do you know her work?

FM: Of course. Tate is one of the first public collections to have acquired her work. Say, for example, you come to the UK and you are Chris Dercon, my Belgian predecessor, and you discover early works by British artist Phillip King in the Duveen Gallery of Tate Britain, but he has no role or history outside the UK. You just meet these artists by going to places; they are not hidden in their localities. One thing I always do is ask a young artist who their greatest teacher was and then you ask the great teacher who their best student is. That is how you get to the great artists such as Phyllida Barlow really quickly. n

Frances Morris studied History of Art at both Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She joined Tate as a Curator in 1987 and became the Head of Displays at Tate Modern when it opened in 2000. Her appointment as first female Director of Tate Modern was announced in January 2016.

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4_ESSAY_FrancesMorris_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:32 Making Something from Something: Toward a Re-definition of Women’s Textile Art

Ann Coxon

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:36 n the winter of 1978 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard pub- Ilished an essay in the feminist journal Heresies, in which she raised questions about the nature and status of women’s art, craft and ‘hobby art’ that remain both controversial and somewhat unan- swered nearly four decades later. Lippard is better known for the ground-breaking exhibitions of highly cerebral conceptual art and formless, process-based art she curated during the 1960s. Yet, in the late 1970s, several years prior to the publication of Rozsika Parker’s breakthrough book The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Lippard’s surprisingly passionate and provocative feminist essay ‘Making Something from Nothing (Toward a Definition of Women’s ‘Hobby Art’)’ dares to question the assumed qualitative differences between ‘fine’ or ‘high’ art, professional craft and amateur, ‘hobby’ art, reframing the latter as both a valid outlet for creative expression and a reflection of the true extent of gender and class inequalities. Beginning with a description of a hobby book titled How to Make Something from Nothing, in which the reader is encouraged to make decorative items from ‘tin cans, beef knuckle bones, old razor blades, bread- baskets and bottlecaps’, Lippard observes that, ‘this “sport” sounds very much like fine or “high” art’. She continues:

Women’s liberation has at least begun to erode the notion that woman’s role is that of the applauding spectator for 1. Lippard, Lucy R., men’s creativity. Yet as makers of (rather than housekeeper ‘Making Something for) art, they still trespass on male ground. No wonder, From Nothing then, that all over the world, women privileged and/ (Toward a Definition or desperate and/or daring enough to consider creation of Women’s “Hobby outside traditional limits are finding an outlet for these Art”)’, Lippard, Lucy drives in an art that is not considered “art”, an art that R., 1995, The Pink there is some excuse for making, an art that costs little or Glass Swan: Selected nothing and performs an ostensibly useful function in the Feminist Essays on bargain — the art of making something out of nothing.1 Art, The New Press, New York, p.134. While Lippard’s essay primarily focuses on the place and sta-� (First published tus of women’s hobby art and what it might look like when in Heresies, No. viewed through the lens of high art, she flips the question on its 4, Winter Edition, head towards the end of her text, asking, ‘…Is the resemblance 1978.) of women’s art-world art to hobby art a result of coincidence? Of

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 2 06/01/2017 16:57 influence, conditioning, or some inherent female sensibility?’2 Taking Lippard’s question as my own starting point, I would like to explore some ways in which women’s ‘art-world art’ has taken up or continued certain aspects of craft practice and/or hobby art. Why does so much 20th and 21st century art by women adopt processes, techniques and motifs more widely associated with ‘hobby art’ and/or craft? In particular, why do so many female artists — even those who may not define themselves as feminist — continue to work with textile-related practices such as weaving, stitching or knitting, or with other techniques more commonly associated with the domestic realm? Though she refers to an ‘inherent female sensibility’ in several of her texts from the late 1970s, like many of her feminist peers, Lucy Lippard later rejected the essentialist idea that there are common characteristics of all art made by women simply by virtue of the sex of the maker. Yet, it remains true that the sex of the maker is important, not least because of the way the resulting work is received and interpreted.3 With their professional credibility and acceptance in the art world at stake, many important female artists throughout the 20th- century have attempted to distance themselves from essentialist and/or feminist interpretations of their work. Louise Bourgeois 2. Ibid., p.138. and Eva Hesse, both of whom contributed to Lippard’s Eccentric 3. It is interesting Abstraction exhibition in 1968, made it clear to interviewers that to note that it they were not in the business of making women’s art. As with took a transvestite most things, Bourgeois was ambivalent on the subject of feminism potter — a man and stated, ‘I don’t think there is a feminist aesthetic. Loads of the who literally dons 4 emotions I express in my work are pre-gender.’ And Hesse, in an the masquerade of interview for Women’s Art Journal in 1970, famously stated (to the femininity — to gain frustration of her feminist interviewer), ‘Excellence has no sex.’ art world recognition Yet despite such comments, the work of both artists has pro- for an ‘amateur’ vided fruitful ground for interpretation by feminist critics, art histo- craft practice when rians, and those who have sought to explore the ‘feminine’ in 20th Grayson Perry won century art. Works by Bourgeois and Hesse were both included, the Turner Prize in for example, in Catherine de Zegher’s major touring exhibition 2003. Inside the Visible, 1996, a show that brought together works by 37 4. Morris, Frances significant women artists in an attempt to highlight what is most (Ed.), 2007, Louise clearly described in the exhibition’s subtitle: ‘an elliptical traverse Bourgeois, Tate, of 20th-century art in, of and from the feminine.’ More recently, London, p.131.

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:36 the exhibition Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016 at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles included works by Hesse and Bourgeois amongst those by 34 women artists of different generations, exploring what is described by Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin in the catalogue foreword as, ‘…the undeniable presence and emotional impact of sculpture made from a woman’s point of view.’ They continue:

…women sculptors of this period persevered, creating unique forms from uncommon and found materials, often loosely based on or evocative of the body and its processes. They followed the direction of the knot, let the rope lead, stretched fabric, pierced the surface that the wire slips through, closely observed the angle at which a form looped or curved back on itself. They created works that are rooted in handwork: process-based, non-narrative, profoundly tactile, and fundamentally experimental.5

Whether or not it makes sense to speak of a female sensibility, it is undoubtedly true that such exhibitions galvanise the existing links between women artists of different generations, drawing out the lines of influence between them and making visible the common threads. As Schimmel and Sorkin suggest in the passage above, the techniques and processes of making employed by women artists throughout the 20th century may be seen to return time and again to what they term ‘handwork’ — a word suggestive of a tactile, haptic sense of making and experiencing art that no longer privileges the visual or cerebral.

WEAVING Though much has been written about women’s art practice in 5. Schimmel, relation to the structures, techniques and cultural significance of Paul and Sorkin, weaving, any consideration of the relationship between craft-based Jenni (Eds.), 2016, techniques and women’s professional ‘fine’ art practice would do Revolution In The well to acknowledge the significance of the textile art produced by Making: Abstract the mostly female weaving workshop at the Bauhaus throughout Sculpture by Women the 1920s. Founded on the vision of Director Walter Gropius who 1947-2016, Skira wished to establish ‘art-craft unity’, the Bauhaus set the agenda for Editore, Milan, p.12. modern design in the 20th century. At the Bauhaus, craftsmanship

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:36 and design went hand in hand, both essential for modern living, both anything but amateur pursuits. As a student in the weaving workshop and later a teacher at Black Mountain College, Anni Albers had very clear views on craftsmanship, design and art, which she set out in two highly influential texts,On Designing, 1943 and On Weaving, 1965. Though she entered the weaving workshop by default, Albers soon became fascinated by both the limitations and possibilities of the medium. Making what she termed ‘pictorial weavings’, she produced works that were simply ‘objects to be looked at’ or contemplated, elevating weaving to the status of art. Albers’ use of thread is no feminist critique of domestic arts or women’s place in the history of art. On the contrary, she, with her peers at the Bauhaus, went a long way in elevating the place of textiles, making weaving once again a valid medium for art that can and should be taken as seriously as painting or sculpture. For Albers, the structure of woven cloth introduced a way of thinking and speaking materially. She defines weaving very clearly as both a process and a structure in her book On Weaving:

The structure of a fabric or its weave – that is, the fastening of its elements of threads to each other – is as much a determining factor in its function as is the choice of the raw material. In fact, the interrelation between the two, the subtle play between them in supporting, impeding, or modifying each other’s characteristics, is the essence of weaving.6

Albers’ book does not set out to defend her practice. Rather, it acts as a kind of textbook, instruction manual and theoretical treatise for subsequent generations of artists and weavers (or artist- weavers). Albers dedicates a chapter to the history of the loom, covering enormous ground in considering the various forms of loom technology from ancient Peru to Medieval Europe to indus- 6. Albers, Anni, trialisation with the Jacquard loom. Her book is dedicated to the ‘The Fundamental ‘great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru’. The plates section Constructions’, includes images of the Mexican, Coptic and Peruvian textiles that Albers, Anni, 1965, inspired Albers through both their structure and technique and On Weaving, for the fact that they acted as a form of language or communica- Wesleyan University tion. Taking a practical approach to her subject, Albers does not Press, Connecticut, explore the rich mythical or metaphorical associations of weaving p.38.

5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:36 Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Wall Hanging, Germany, designed in 1926, made in 1967, woven silk, 207.6 x 121.4cm

5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:36 in the Western world, though such stories and myths have fed many more recent theoretical texts on weaving.7 As a 20th-century modernist, it is perhaps not surprising that Albers instead analyses the history and essence of her medium. Successful contemporary designer/weaver Margo Selby has described the sense of satisfac- tion she feels in making a cloth ‘from scratch’, as if weaving were the art of making something from nothing.8 Albers, on the other hand, seems to be saying that weaving is in fact the art of making something from something: that the choice of raw material and what you do with it is what makes weaving what it is. At the back of her book On Weaving, Albers also included illus- trations of works by contemporary artists at the time of writing who were working with tapestry or open weave. Lenore Tawney’s Dark River, 1962, is illustrated as an example of her monumen- tally-scaled, open-weave hanging pieces. Tawney was associated with the Fiber Art movement that gathered pace in the US in the late 1960s. Another figure at the forefront of the ‘new tapestry’ or Fiber Art movements was Sheila Hicks, who was a student of Anni Albers’ husband Josef at Yale University, completing an MFA there in 1959. Interest in Tawney and Hicks has grown consider- ably in recent years, with monographic exhibitions of Hicks’ work taking place at Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2006, Addison Gallery of American Art, Massachusetts, 2011, and The Hayward Gallery, London, 2015. 7. See, for example, Tawney, Hicks and others such as Polish artist Magdalena Danto, Athur Abakanowicz trained as fine artists and began to explore fabric C., ‘Weaving as construction and weaving as a form of serious sculptural practice. metaphor and model However, the relatively late recognition of their art historical sig- for Political Thought’, nificance may be, in part, due to their choice of medium and the Stritzler-Levine, Nina categorisation of their practice as Fiber Art. (Ed.), 2006, Sheila Curators Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen attempted Hicks: Weaving as to establish Fiber Art as an important development in contem- Metaphor, Yale porary sculptural practice in the US in the late 1960s when they University Press, New put together an exhibition titled Wall Hangings at the Museum Haven and London. of Modern Art, New York. However, various factors conspired 8. Selby, Margo, against their success. Around this time, hand-weaving saw a pop- 2013, Interviewed ular revival amongst hobbyists, and other craft methods such as on BBC programme macramé were becoming fashionable. To be taken seriously, Fiber Mastercrafts: On Art had to fight against associations with both domestic craft and Weaving.

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 7 09/01/2017 14:52 the hippies’ return to the natural and handmade. The association with wider cultural trends in the Western world was one factor that undermined the success of exhibitions such as Wall Hangings, which failed (at the time) to fully establish the place of Fiber Art within the history of ‘fine’ art practice. There was also the fact that the majority (though by no means all) of the fiber artists exhibited by Constantine and Larsen at MoMA in 1969 were female. The questions Lucy Lippard raised about female hobby craft in 1978 are set against the background of a decade of seeming progress for artists incorporating fibre or textiles into their practice. Yet within the same decade it also became apparent that beliefs about what constitutes ‘high’ art and what is merely ‘women’s work’ were deeply entrenched.

STITCHING While the weavers of the Bauhaus workshop set out to explore the essence of their medium, to make ‘pictorial weavings’ that could be considered of equal importance to the paintings of their male counterparts, and the fiber artists of the 1960s and 70s set out to create monumental sculptures from textile materials, a wave of feminist practitioners in the 1970s attempted to dispense with the accepted fine art mediums altogether. These artists turned, instead, to domestic crafts such as quilting, crochet and embroidery, a craft the art historian Rozsika Parker described as having ‘a heritage in women’s hands, and thus…more appropriate than male- associated paint for making feminist statements’. Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist work The Dinner Party, 1974-9, is perhaps the most well-known piece from the period to incorporate embroidery. Chicago worked with a large number of volunteers to create the 39 place-settings commemorating important historic female figures, employing crafts such as embroidery, weaving, sewing and china painting. Another artist who began to work with stitching and embroidery in the 1970s is Elaine Reichek. Influenced by her studies with the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Reichek set out to ‘add a different material to the language of abstract painting’. A stitched sampler titled Sampler (Starting Over) made by the artist in 1996 juxtaposes the words of Ad Reinhardt with those of Penelope, the weaver from Homer’s The Odyssey who unravels her works each night. Neatly stitched in black embroidery thread,

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:36 Louise Bourgeois, HAND, 2001, red fabric, wood, glass and steel

5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:36 5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:36 Reichek’s sampler seems to suggest that Penelope could have written the following words, that this is how women have made art all along:

Starting over at the beginning, always the same Perfection of beginnings, eternal return Creation, destruction, creation, eternal repetition Made — unmade — remade.9

In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, then Co-Directors of the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), initiated a radical collective exhibition with their students that sought to ‘build their artmaking out of their experiences as women’. Taking over a derelict house, the group produced Womanhouse, an exhibition that unflinchingly addressed the 9. See Rose, subject of domesticity, questioning assumptions about ‘women’s Barbara (Ed.), 1975, place’ and shedding light on women’s predicament. As the cata- Art As Art: The logue essay states: Selected Writing of Ad Reinhardt, Each of the women, working singly or together, had made The Documents of rooms or environments: bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, Twentieth-Century hallways, gardens. The age-old female activity of homemaking Art, Viking Press, was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the New York. repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, 10. Chicago, Judy 10 bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away. and Schapiro, Miriam, 1972, Arguably the most evocative work included in the show was Womanhouse, Faith Wilding’s Womb Room, 1972. Wilding took the domestic art published on www. of crochet and created an installation that filled one of the rooms in womanhouse.net. the house entirely with a kind of crocheted net or web that draped 11. See Albers, Anni, from the walls and ceiling, having the effect of enveloping or trap- 1957, ‘The Pliable ping the viewer. In this way, she combined the traditionally femi- Plane: Textiles nine activity of stitching with the masculine domain of architec- in Architecture’, ture, echoing Anni Albers’ ambition to re-invent the Pliable Plane Danilowitz, Brenda 11 of textile-based architectural structures. (Ed.), 2000, Anni As a collective, feminist exhibition Womanhouse was able to draw Albers: Selected attention to both the domestic demands placed upon women in Writings on Design, general, and the conflicting or conflicted demands of women who Wesleyan University have artistic ambitions. In building their artmaking out of their Press, Connecticut.

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 11 05/01/2017 19:36 experiences as women, the students of the Feminist Art Program were in fact drawing attention to the many ways in which women artists already combine their artmaking with their domestic lives. Women throughout history have been in a position of having to combine their artistic aspirations with their duties as wives, moth- ers and home-makers, setting up work-spaces in their homes and balancing conflicting demands upon their time. From this point of view, is it any wonder that women have used domestic labour, crafts or hobbies as source material for their art? In an essay from 1977, the poet Adrienne Rich stresses the importance of acknowl- edging the differences and inequalities between male and female labour. She describes women’s tasks in the following passage:

world-protection, world-preservation, world-repair, the million tiny stitches, the friction of the scrubbing brush, the scouring cloth, the iron across the shirt, the rubbing of cloth against itself to exorcise the stain, the renewal of the scorched pot, the rusted knife-blade, the invisible weaving of a frayed and threadbare family life.12

The above passage could almost precisely be describing the subject matter of the artist Louise Bourgeois, who created a large body of work using salvaged fabrics and thread. In a career spanning seven decades, Bourgeois repeatedly explored the domestic. As a young artist and mother during the 1940s, she worked within the home, producing her Femme Maison series of paintings that show a woman with her head literally trapped within the four walls of the house. Bourgeois saw herself first and foremost as a sculptor, though her work encompasses a range of media and materials. Interestingly, it was not until the 1990s — at a time when she set up her studio in a large former garment factory in Brooklyn — that Bourgeois felt able to incorporate textiles and stitching into 12. Rich, her sculptural practice, though the references had been there for Adrienne,1977, years. In her later years, she worked on the table in her back par- ‘Conditions for Work: lour, drawing and making while she also employed a seamstress to The Common World assist in the fabrication of her textile sculptures. Bourgeois explored of Women’, Heresies the psychological and therapeutic aspects of stitching and making No. 3, Fall 1977 in considerable depth. The stitching in Bourgeois’ fabric works Edition, p52-56. is sometimes badly crafted with aggressive-looking sutures, and

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 12 05/01/2017 19:36 sometimes exquisitely neat and well formed, yet always power- fully evocative. She was inspired by the work of Melanie Klein and motivated by a desire to record her memories and to explore the personal significance of concepts such as reparation (her mother was a tapestry restorer). For this artist — perhaps the most significant female artist of the 20th century — who had declared that she was ‘not in the business of making women’s art’ — women’s work was undoubtedly an artistic resource from which to salvage techniques and materials, to make and re-make, to mend and repair and, ultimately, to shape a highly successful career.

KNITTING Towards the end of her essay ‘Making Something From Nothing’, Lippard makes some provocative statements about the treatment of craft and hobby art within the feminist art movement of the 1970s:

The greatest lack in the feminist art movement may be of contact and dialogue with those “amateurs” whose work sometimes appears to be imitated by the professionals… It seems all too likely that only in a feminist art world will there be a chance for the “fine” arts, the “minor” arts, “crafts” and hobby circuits to meet and to develop an art of making with a new and revitalized communicative function. It won’t happen if the feminist art world continues to be absorbed by the patriarchal art world.13

Lippard’s essay may have ended differently if she had written it in the 21st century following the recent resurgence of interest in the political potential of craft, known as Craftivism. Championing a return to handcraft in an age of mass-production, Craftivist artists such as Lisa Anne Auerbach, Allison Smith, Cat Mazza, Betsy Greer and Sabrina Gschwandtner have explored the potential of knitting, in particular, creating practices that are socially and politically engaged, participatory and community-orientated. Unlike artists such as Rosemarie Trockel (who employed knitting as a medium within a very securely established fine art practice, creating objects clearly made to be looked at) this generation of makers is not so concerned about whether their work is classed as art or 13. Lippard, Lucy R., craft, whether it ends up in a gallery, or on the street. They make, op cit.

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 13 05/01/2017 19:36 curate, participate, blog, write and publish on their own terms. In a passage that reflects her lack of concern for formal boundaries, Gschwandtner has written:

I’d knit or crochet something, leave it, come back, rip it up, fix it, wear it, add some other material, hang it up, leave it, project film onto it, record that, edit it, show it, give it away and start over. Even when I’m not working with knitting as my actual medium or technique I’m still working with it as a single thread out of which emerges a surface, a fabric, a narrative, an outfit, a pattern, a text, a recording and even, despite my seemingly erratic way of working, a form that encompasses all of these things.13

Craftivism has not been an exclusively female or feminist endeavour, though feminist political issues are addressed, alongside other issues. Like the earlier generation of feminist artists, the Craftivists are drawn to craft because of its status as a form of making that lies outside of accepted art-world categories. However, they are not so concerned about raising the status of craft per se, but about using craft to bring people together, to find new audiences and to make changes in the wider-world. The phenomenon of ‘yarn-bombing’ or ‘yarn-tagging’ is testament to this desire to take the activity out onto the streets and to disrupt the status quo. When women artists today pick up a needle and thread or needles and yarn, or turn to the loom, they are re-working one of the most resonant and culturally complex materials available to them. Anni Albers, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago and many other women who made art with fibre or employed craft practices within their art have given later generations of women artists permission to work with textile mediums without having to justify their choices. No longer making something from nothing, these artists are able to draw upon the rich tapestry of 20th-century art and cultural history, looking to the resourcefulness of women 14. Gschwandtner, before them to make, unravel and re-make, and proving the age- Sabrina, ‘Knitting old adage that many hands make light work. n is…’, Journal of Modern Craft 1 No. Ann Coxon is the Curator of Displays and International Art 2, 2008, pp. 271-278. at Tate Modern, London.

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5_AnnCoxon_FINAL.indd 14 05/01/2017 19:36 Philomela’s Tongue

Marit Paasche

Hannah Ryggen

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:40 1 ‘Histos’ can also mean cloth, material, The Greek geographer Pausanias gave us a vivid chronicle of the fabric. citizens of Pisa and Elis who were drained and demoralised by 2. Plato, conflict. They longed to move beyond the blood-soaked legacy of ‘Statsmannen’ (‘The their former ruler Damophon, and so they designated two women Statesman’), Kolstad, from each of their eight clans to resolve the conflicts and estab- Hans (Ed.), 2004, lish peace. Every four years these women retreated to a specially Platon, Samlede designed dwelling near Elis’ agora, not far from Mount Olympus, verker, Bind VI and wove a cloak in honour of the goddess Hera. (Plato, Collected The Greek word for weaving is ‘histos’1, the etymological root Works, Volume of the word ‘history’. Weaving ‘gathers up threads’, and the ritual IV), Vidarforlaget, from Elis is, according to John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, a para- Oslo, pp. 366–409. digmatic act in which weaving symbolises peaceful co-existence. Scheid and Svenbro They trace features of this act in other important literature from claim there is much antiquity, such as Homer’s lliad and Odyssey, Plato’s The Statesman evidence that and not least Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, which expounds on Pausanias’ Plato derived the representation of the political connotations of weaving, its ability metaphor relating 2 to rally and subdue the incompatible elements of a society. weaving and politics The play opens with Lysistrata bemoaning the interminable from Pausanias Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which has taken husbands from and Aristophanes; their families for years on end, drained the treasury and left a wake see Scheid & of dead sons. What Lysistrata yearns for most of all is peace, as do Svenbro (Eds.), the majority of the women whose lives have been touched by the 2001, The Craft war. Echoing the events at Elis, women from various regions con- of Zeus. Myths of gregate and become Lysistrata’s ‘council of wise women’. Weaving and Fabric, Together they devise a common plan. When the magis- Harvard University trate asks what their strategy is, Lysistrata answers, ‘We women, Press, Cambridge, we weave. And to put an end to this war, we have woven a plan. Massachusetts, p. 15. 3 Yes, the image of a plan; a plan in the form of a tapestry.’ The 3. Translated from a magistrate dismisses her words as mere ‘women’s talk’, to which Norwegian version Lysistrata replies: of Lysistrata: ‘Jo. Vi kvinner vever. For å If, when yarn we are winding, it chances to tangle, then, få en slutt på krigen as perchance you may know, through the skein så har vi vevet til en This way and that still the spool we keep plan som er et bilde, passing till it is finally clear all again: ja, som en billedvev.’

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:40 So to untangle the War and its errors, ambassadors out on all sides we will send This way and that, here, there and round about – soon you will find that the War has an end.4

The magistrate has difficulty comprehending this ‘image’, and so Lysistrata elucidates the process further:

Well, first as we wash dirty wool so’s to cleanse it, so with a pitiless zeal we will scrub Through the whole city for all greasy fellows; burrs too, the parasites, off we will rub. That verminous plague of insensate place-seekers soon between thumb and forefinger we’ll crack. All who inside Athens’ walls have their dwelling into one great common basket we’ll pack. Disenfranchised or citizens, allies or aliens, pell- mell the lot of them in we will squeeze. Till they discover humanity’s meaning.... 4. Aristophanes, As for disjointed and far colonies, translated into Eng- Them you must never from this time imagine as lish by Jack Lindsay, scattered about just like lost hanks of wool. 1925, Lysistrata, Each portion we’ll take and wind in to this available online: centre, inward to Athens each loyalty pull, www.gutenberg.org/ Till from the vast heap where all’s piled ebooks. Accessed 8 together at last can be woven 5 November 2016. a strong Cloak of State. 5. Ibid., accessed 8 November 2016. Weaving is thus used as a central metaphor for good political 6. Plato, handicraft. To govern effectively, one has to be able to tease out ‘Statsmannen’ ‘slubs’ and combine fibres from various sources. The philosopher (‘The Statesman’), Plato employed a similar metaphor in The Statesman. According in Kolstad, Hans to Scheid and Svenbro, Plato also made an interesting analogy (Ed.), 2004, Platon, between statesmanship, syntax and weaving. The art lies not in iso- Saml, Bind VI lating each individual letter, but in the ability to interpret the pat- (Plato, Collected tern. This is the essential talent of a statesman. The statesman must Works, Volume IV), also be capable of weaving together such opposites as ‘caution’ and Vidarforlaget, Oslo, ‘boldness’, for it is only by joining seemingly incongruous qualities 6 p. 408. that one obtains a dense, durable and flexible weave.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:40 PHILOMELA 7. The verb ‘texere’, When Plato uses the analogy between weaving and language — to weave, used in the understood as a pattern of letters — he also indirectly alludes to sense of ‘composing another etymological connection. The Latin word for the verb a piece of writing’ 7 ‘to weave’ is ‘texere’, while ‘textus’ means ‘text’. In Ovid’s can be found as early Metamorphoses the connection between text and textiles is explained as in Cicero (106-43 8 by the story of Philomela’s destiny. Philomela was the daughter BC). See Scheid & of Zeuxippe and Pandion, King of Athens. Her sister Procne was Svenbro, (Eds.), The married to Tereus, King of Thrace, and together they had a son, Craft of Zeus. Myths Itylos. Tereus had agreed to travel to Athens to escort Philomela of Weaving and by ship to Thrace so that she could visit her sister. During the jour- Fabric, p. 106. ney, however, Tereus lusts after Philomela, and as they approach 8. See Due, Otto Thrace, he forces her below deck and rapes her. After the assault Steen, 2005, Ovid’s Philomela’s sense of disgrace is so profound that she declares she Metamorphoses, will therefore make known to everyone what he has done. Fearing Saxo, Copenhagen, vilification, Tereus cuts out her tongue and disposes of her in a for- Sixth song, lines est. To overcome her muteness, Philomela weaves a tapestry that 420–675. illustrates what has happened. The weaving is delivered to her sis- 9. She avenges her ter Procne, who then carries out a gruesome act of revenge on her sister by killing her 9 husband. own son and serving Philomela thus employs the act of weaving to tell a story, quite his flesh as meal to accurately expressing the widespread Roman analogy between Tereus, who eats the weaving and text. When Philomela ‘writes’ what happened into boy unwittingly. her tapestry, she gives herself an audible voice too, insomuch as 10. ‘When you read, reading was synonymous with reading aloud for the ancient Greeks I am speaking, for and Romans. Giving voice to a text was thus a precondition of the your voice is mine’, 10 text becoming ‘material’. The story of Philomela also intimates ‘Anthologia Latina, that the visual relates to action on several levels: not only does her no. 721’, as cited in tapestry depict an act that has occurred, it instigates another. Scheid & Svenbro, This conception of the act of weaving as both a vehicle for (Eds.), The Craft recounting history and as a political act has since been manifested of Zeus. Myths of in myriad ways throughout the world, and notably in the work of Weaving and Fabric, Hannah Ryggen and Ann Cathrin November Høibo. p.151.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:40 WE ARE ALL JUST FLESH AND BLOOD Hannah Ryggen was born in Malmö in 1894. She grew up in a working-class household and initially trained to be a primary school teacher. Teaching ultimately, however, did not agree with her. Much suggests that the major Baltic Exhibition in Malmö in 1913 inspired her to explore art. This exhibition featured vanguard Russian, Swedish and German paintings; visitors could experience such works as Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition no. 6 from 1913 and many examples of German Expressionism from the Die Brücke artists, as well as a large selection of applied-arts works and Swedish handicrafts. Three years later, in 1916, Hannah Ryggen began studying with Fredrik Krebs, a Danish portrait painter living in Lund. Employed at the time as a teacher, every day after work she took the train from Malmö to Lund to study freehand drawing, mixing pigments, composition and perspective along with other students. She also received an introduction to art history and cultural history. In 1922 Krebs recommended that Ryggen travel to Dresden to study the old masters and further develop her technical skills as a painter. During this tour she also met her husband-to-be, the Norwegian painter Hans Ryggen. They married in the autumn of 1923, and she moved — in late pregnancy — to Ørlandet, a flat and windswept coastal region in the middle of Norway, in February of the following year. While Ryggen was no sheltered aristocrat, life in Ørlandet was 11. Housed at the a far cry from city life in Malmö. ‘Rønnan’, as they lovingly chris- Gunnerus Library, tened the little house that Hans had built, had no running water, an archive of diverse and no electricity before 1944. The property was large; they culti- items (manuscripts, vated grain and grew vegetables and kept livestock. It was in these letters, photographs, spartan conditions that Ryggen gave birth to daughter Mona in etc.) of Norwegian May 1924. What little free time they had while running a small cultural and farmstead they used to pursue their art. In an undated note Ryggen historical value writes, ‘We poured all our energy into paying down debt, and pro- and part of the curing food and clothing, and what we believe we were meant for special collections in this world... Life was brilliant even though we wore ourselves of the NTNU out, especially Hans, who bore the heaviest burdens. Life was rich, 11 University Library in filled with work and with beauty.’ Trondheim. From letters Hans and Hannah exchanged we know that

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:40 Ryggen decided as early as 1923 to give up painting and begin weaving instead, and in so doing she ensured her place in the art historical record. Ryggen brought all of her painter’s knowledge and political fervour to bear in her weaving. It took her a decade to master the medium: composition (often with respect to an out- sized scale), carding, spinning, weaving techniques and, not least, making vegetable dyes. Extracting colours from the natural terrain that surrounded her and controlling the sophisticated chem- ical processes that rendered the colours stable over time was the result of laborious experimentation. But once she had this knowledge at her fingertips, she felt ‘free’ to express herself. And it was not decorative patterns that she set in the warp, but the challenging national and international political issues of the day. The first truly successful, monumental tapestry Hannah Ryggen created was Fiske ved gjeldens hav (Fishing in the Sea of Debt) from 1933, the subject of which is the harsh social conditions and con- sequences of the devastating economic crisis that struck Norway in 1930. In the worst year, 1933, over one-third of the organised workforce was unemployed. Many were ruined by overwhelming debt, and fishermen, a large number of them in Ørlandet, were among the hardest hit. Ryggen found the injustice of the situation — that banks prospered from people’s insolvency — intolerable. She believed that everyone ought to be able to support themselves 12. Letter from and their own: Hannah Ryggen to Andreas … every man and woman, whether rich or poor, Schjoldager, ought to be raised capable of two things: producing 26 March 1942, their own food and supporting themselves. It is an Nordenfjeldske indignity that some serve others. Everyone should Kunstindustri- work, no one should be above another. Equality for all museum, 12 mankind. We are all flesh and blood, just the same. Trondheim, Norway.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:40 WORLD WAR TWO AND THE IMPORTANCE OF ART AS PUBLIC STATEMENT When she first came to Ørlandet, Ryggen made and sold craft items as a source of income, but she stopped doing so around 1933. Meanwhile, the large-scale weavings were extremely time- consuming and labour-intensive, and art was for a long time an economic drain on the family. Documents show that during the 14 years from 1926 to 1940 Ryggen earned a total of 3,000 Norwegian crowns from her tapestries. And yet despite extremely difficult means, Ryggen never compromised: she gave up making and selling crafts, but still she was unwilling to sell her monumental weavings to private buyers.13 She intended her works as public statements, and for that reason felt that they should be publicly owned and hang where all citizens had access to them. This intention is clearly demonstrated in the exceptionally powerful series of anti-Nazi and anti-fascist tapestries that Ryggen produced in Ørlandet from 1935 to 1945. These works are devoted to international political conflicts and circumstances in Norway under the German occupation. Etiopia (Ethiopia), 1935, is about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and the League of Nation’s shameful and anaemic response. In this weaving Ryggen depicts Mussolini’s head skewered on a black man’s spear, leaving no ambiguity as to her standpoint. When Ethiopia was shown in conjunction with the Paris Exposition in 1937, the organisers feared the subject mat- 13. Only three of ter would offend the Italian authorities and censored the work by Ryggen’s large folding over the portion that showed Mussolini’s head. Ryggen’s woven works are in Ethiopia was shown at the same venue as Picasso’s now famous private collections Guernica (which was not censored). In Drømmedød (Dream Dead), today: Fiske ved 1936, we find Ryggen’s defence of Carl von Ossietzky and her gjeldens hav (Fishing protest against Hitler, Goebbels and Göring. Liselotte Herrmann in the Sea of Debt), halshuggen (Liselotte Herrmann Beheaded), 1938, is about the female 1933, Livet glir forbi communist, Herrmann, who was charged with treason and decapi- (Life Moves On), tated by German authorities in 1938. 1939, and Schweden In 1939 the Nazis occupied Norway, and their presence was (Sweden), 1946. keenly felt by those living in Ørlandet in Trøndelag. As a hub in The sale of these the middle of Norway, the region was of great strategic impor- works was due tance for the Nazis. In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Albert to extraordinary Speer wrote that Hitler had ambitious plans: the central city of circumstances. Trondheim would become home to the third largest naval base

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:40 of the Third Reich, and an airport was to be built at Ørlandet. The airport was constructed in 1941-1944, primarily with Russian and Serbian prisoner-of-war labour. The destruction was on a vast scale. Much farmland was transformed into a cement tarmac for the airport, and wartime acts of aggression played out with frightening clarity in front of Hans and Hannah Ryggen’s eyes. They witnessed torture, and long processions of emaciated prisoners passed their house en route to forced labour. Several episodes from wartime Norway would make their way into Ryggen’s weaving in the years before peace. One of these episodes occurred in the autumn of 1942 when the Nazis tightened their grip on Trøndelag. A new declaration of martial law was announced on 6 October. Reich’s commissioner Josef Terboven had received a list of 15 persons, from which ten were to be selected and executed as a symbolic demonstration of the futil- ity of resistance against the occupation. Terboven had ensured that men of a certain stature were chosen. The selection was reviewed by gauleiter for the Nasjonal Samling (the Norwegian fascist party) in Sør-Trøndelag, Henrik Rogstad, along with Gerhard Flesch and Heinrich Christens, who were respectively the German chief of police and chief administrator in Trondheim. On the evening of 6 October, Hannah Ryggen went to the Trøndelag theatre and saw a dress rehearsal of Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden (The Wild Duck). The role of Doctor Relling was played by the theatre’s director, Henry Gleditsch. He must have had an ulterior motive in choosing to stage a play where such concepts as reality and truth are truly put to the test. The Wild Duck was meant to premier on 7 October, but just before the dress rehearsal, Gleditsch was taken into custody by the Nazis. His name was on the list; he was one of the ten that was to be executed. On the morning of 7 October 1942, the death sentence was served extra- judicially upon the ten political prisoners in the forest near Falstad, outside Trondheim, and they were shot.14 The Wild Duck’s postponed premiere was held on 20 October. Colleagues took over the roles that Henry Gleditsch and his wife 14. Store Norske Synnøve had played. The entire run of The Wild Duck was sold Leksikon, online: out, but after every performance that autumn something quite https://snl.no/ unique occurred: the audience did not applaud. Instead everyone sonofrene_i_ rose and collectively observed a minute of silence before leaving Trøndelag. Accessed the theatre. 8 September 2015.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:40 6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:40 Hannah Ryggen, 6. oktober 1942, 1943, tapestry, 182.88 x 426.72cm

6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:40 15. Hannah Ryggen wrote to Helge Thiis on 16 November, shortly after he had published his review Hannah Ryggen incorporates Gleditsch’s murder and the in Adresseavisen in fate of the sacrificed scapegoats in her large work entitled 6. okto- 1937, NFKIM. ber 1942 (6 October 1942), 1943. The imagery is a fusion of news 16. A few small photos, visual impressions and imaginings. She utilised elements sketches exist, but from diverse sources, ascribed them new colours and placed them they are extremely together in such a way that the imagery resonated and remained simplified, not in her mind’s eye. She had developed this unique compositional suitable as a basis method over some time; as early as 1937 she wrote in a letter to for weaving. That her friend the architect Helge Thiis: ‘What is dream and what is 15 Ryggen also had reality, for me, it all becomes enhanced their mixing.’ That the difficulty with mix is unique, is undeniable. Her diary entries reveal that the commissions that colours also played an important role; they often fostered the com- required planning position. Once the entire image ‘sat’ well enough, she could begin and that she to weave. The composition had to be visually arresting, given that tended not to enter she relied solely on what she had in her mind and did not resort to 16 competitions that sketches or patterns. New elements occasionally emerged while required design she worked, but there was no hierarchy of meaning or rules that prototypes speaks governed the surface composition. What Ryggen followed is the also to her reluctance weaving’s own logic and limitations, how weft meets warp, respect to use scale drawings for the surface, and development of form with the help of triangles, or sketches. a method one also finds in Coptic weaving. Concise patterns The scene to the right in 6. oktober 1942 depicts a journey or for craft items were exodus that has certain similarities to another of Ryggen’s tapes- something else tries from this same period, Petter Dass, 1940, which portrays the entirely; they were 17th-century poet and pastor Petter Dass and his wild ride from necessary, but she Northern Norway to the king in Copenhagen on the Devil’s back. found them tedious In 6. oktober 1942 we see the Ryggen family at sea. The boat they and gave up using are in is black, like death, but they are surrounded by red roses, them as well. symbols of hope and beauty. Mona holds binoculars, Hans sits in

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 11 05/01/2017 19:40 the middle holding a rolled-up canvas or tapestry while Hannah grasps the horn of a cow, a suggestion perhaps of reluctance to let go of Ørlandet.17 Three heads float above them, crimson and menacing. The face in the middle bears a strong likeness to Terboven’s, and the one to the right resembles Jonas Lie, who was the chief of police under Terboven, responsible for the police tri- bunal and the one who authorised death sentences against Nor- wegians during the war. The face to the left could be that of Gerhard Flesch, who was among those responsible for the death sentence against Gleditsch. The trio echoes that of Hitler, Göring 17. Hannah Ryggen and Goebbels in Dream Dead, 1936. herself said that The tapestry’s mid-section was woven separately and subse- it ‘was just a pale quently attached to the left and right sections, as is noticeable from dream about the a purely compositional perspective. Ryggen herself has indicated cow back home’ that the left and right portions were woven first; however, they in an interview, did not function well enough as a whole together. In terms of the Ny sensasjonell colouration, she felt that a measure of red was called for to balance kunstutstilling (New the two parts, and thus wove the middle section where Winston sensational art Churchill stands guard over his country in an orange-red fortress exhibition) signed 18 tower, holding a map of England in his hand. He stands like a qui, that appeared bulwark. in the newspaper To the left the tragedy takes place, as if on a stage. The mor- Morgenposten, 26 tally wounded actor and theatre director, Henry Gleditsch, in cos- April 1946. tume as Doctor Relling from The Wild Duck, lies in his wife’s arms. 18. Hannah Ryggen Synnøve Gleditsch, also in costume, is kneeling by her husband’s confirmed that side. Their positions are evocative of a pietà, and the reference is it is a map in the intensified by the presence of a naked man bound to a post behind article published in them. The figure is not, however, a Christ figure, but rather a Morgenposten, 26 Serbian prisoner of war whom Ryggen personally witnessed being April 1946. tortured and executed at the Austrått concentration camp. She 19. Krohn-Hansen, described the event: ‘The Serbs were tortured and tied to posts for Thorvald (Ed.),1968, having stolen bread, and left there, naked, overnight — and in the Hannah Ryggen, 19 morning, the Germans broke their necks.’ Trondheim, p. 31.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 12 05/01/2017 19:40 Above them, Hitler with his pistols floats like an omnipresent devil. The shots fired strike Gleditsch. Ryggen ridicules Hitler, depicting him with oak leaves coming out of his anus. Oak leaves were a well-known symbol used by the Nazis on their military decorations; variations of oak leaves were also commonly used 20. The neatly on their uniform shirts to indicate rank. Ryggen also derides the compact, three-word famous Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and the traitor Vidkun phrase translates Quisling; they are portrayed as pitiful black birds flying around directly as ‘them Hitler. Hamsun expressed early on his sympathy for the Nazi’s about that’ and idea of a third ‘Reich’. He was also an unequivocal Anglophobe connotes derision and opposed to the broad campaign in Norway and Europe for or dismissiveness of the release of Carl von Ossietzky (which is also the subject of the other’s convictions: anti-Nazi tapestry Dream Dead). In 6. oktober 1942, Ryggen wove 20 yes, well, they’re in Hamsun’s condescending remark ‘Dem om det’ , which was stupid for thinking probably taken from a sarcastic feature Hamsun wrote for the Nazi- that, get what they friendly Norwegian newspaper Fritt Folk (A Free People) about 13 21 deserve, etc. condemned Norwegians and their support for England. 21. Hamsun, Knut, 6. oktober 1942 demonstrates Hannah Ryggen’s ability to com- 1943, ’Nu igjen’ bine personal experiences with a passionate political zeal, as well as (‘Now again’), Fritt her extreme fearlessness. She never hesitated in displaying her alle- Folk, 13 February giances through visual statements. 22. Other artists included Claude HINTERLAND Cahun, Pablo One of the people who encouraged me to engage in a years- Picasso, Travis long research project about Hannah Ryggen was Ann Cathrin Meinolf, Gerd Arntz November Høibo. In 2009, November Høibo was a student at the among others. The Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where I was teaching, and we following year, both began to take great interest in the distinctive legacy of the in 2012, Hannah Swedish-Norwegian artist. This interest culminated in the exhi- Ryggen was chosen bition The Human Pattern at Kunsthall Oslo in 2011, which Will for inclusion at Bradley and I co-curated, and which featured works by Ryggen 22 dOCUMENTA 13 and November Høibo. In the exhibition Entangled: Threads in Kassel, which & Making their works will be displayed together once again: featured six of her November Høibo will present two new works in response to works. Hannah Ryggen’s 6. oktober 1942, one with a light-coloured warp

6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 13 05/01/2017 19:40 Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Untitled, 2014, handwoven wool, nylon and jersey, 209.5 x 182 x 16cm

6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 14 05/01/2017 19:40 and a darker one with a grey warp made of wool from spælsau sheep, a Norwegian short-tailed breed.23 The two woven pieces are to be 2 x 1.5 meters each; placed together, they will span three meters. Like Ryggen, November Høibo’s working method is one which allows the tapestry to evolve of its own accord. November Høibo is also as equally concerned with the warp, the lengthwise thread that is the anchor of a weaving, as she is with the weft, the crosswise threads.24 She acquires materials to use as weft on her travels, materials that range from silk, jersey, cotton, and linen, to tulle. November Høibo also weaves on the back side of the piece, and therefore has only a vague idea of what the result will be before 23. These works the tapestry is cut off the loom and the front is revealed. are in progress at November Høibo’s work is characterised by her deftness with the time of writing. materiality, colour and composition. She has an innate sense of Hannah Ryggen also what materials can signify, what information, stories and effects had a preference they possess, and what they mean in combination with each for spælsau wool, other. Unlike Ryggen, who usually constructed her tapestries which is known for around symbols, events or persons that in turn created narratives, its durability and November Høibo makes use of diverse materials from our collec- was used for sails tive reservoir, our material ‘hinterland’. The juxtaposition of these during the Viking materials also tells stories, but they are bound to something beyond era. Examined under language, something that can perhaps be experienced as social trig- a microscope this ger points. Her works and installations often touch on the body’s wool fibre resembles relation to society at large and its need for protection, routine and barbed wire. order. Another constantly recurring theme has to do with ascribing 24. Like Ryggen, value, how we arrange things in a material and symbolic hierarchy. November Høibo A hallmark of November Høibo’s art is its insistent tactile qual- uses a warp- ity. She often uses a wide range of low-status materials, substances weighted loom, one that tend to fall outside the usual art historically sanctioned media. of the oldest types of Works such as the large, framed monochromes in differing varia- loom. tions of green vinyl, Untitled (Sparkle Green), for example, or the 25. The reference moss green Untitled (Mose) from 2014, are so sensuous one feels 25 to nature also hints, compelled to touch them. both ironically By virtue of their form of presentation, the materials in these and humorously, works have assumed painting’s place. At the same time the artist at the material’s makes us aware that the price of being placed in a frame — of being paradoxical visual a painting, in other words — is that the work is now beyond tactile resemblance to reach. A similar move is made in Christopher Burden on my Shoulders natural materials. from 2012, where November Høibo cast eight ordinary squares of

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 15 05/01/2017 19:40 instant noodles in bronze and stacked them, one on top of another. Thus they acquired a certain gravity and became inedible. An early key work in Ann Cathrin November Høibo’s oeuvre is Symbolic History, 2010, in which she framed three different woven pieces and a grey hoodie. All four textiles are attached to the surface in a way that appears as though they are hanging on coat hooks. The textiles give the impression that they belong to different cultures and different eras, and the mode of presentation reinforces the perception that they have been removed from the bodies and contexts to which they once belonged and contextu- alised as art. The grey hoodie thus functions somewhat like a self- portrait. In a simple and extremely elegant way November Høibo extends a bridge from Philomela’s time to our own. These themes are also revisited in the installation Not yet titled, 2012, which November Høibo made in collaboration with Tori Wrånes and Else Marie Jakobsen. The latter was November Høibo’s favourite weaving instructor. For this work Wrånes and November Høibo made a plaster cast of a nude male. The classical antique allusion is, however, immediately deflated by the fact that the model was wearing tennis socks when the cast was made, and that the sculpture is mounted on a plywood box rather than a marble pedestal. The figure’s hands clasp a textile consisting of small woven pieces that Wrånes and November Høibo made in Jakobsen’s studio. The gathered fabric is suggestive of a mantle of scraps from a cultural history stretching far back in time. Where Philomela and Ryggen transform tapestry into a kind of text through their weaving, November Høibo’s way of working is more an extension of ‘histos’: a history of materials created on the basis of tactile qualities and knowledge, primarily perpetuated by women. Ryggen and November Høibo each work according to their own traditions. One aspect that unites them is their unflinch- ing self-confidence and insistence on behalf of art’s expressive and own value, and that their treatment of the relation between social reality and memory is as raw and sensitive as it is assured and adroit. n

Marit Paasche is an art critic and historian, curator and writer. She is Associate Professor of Art Theory, associated with the Oslo Academy of Fine Art.

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6_ESSAY_Marit Paasche_FINAL.indd 16 05/01/2017 19:40 Debate/Share/Make Aware/ Enjoy

Rosa Martínez

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7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:44 n Venice, and subsequently in many other places, 2005 was a year Ifor celebration. It was the first time in the 110-year history of the Venice Biennale that the event was curated by women. Ever since its foundation in 1895, each Biennale had been directed by a man and when the organisation eventually decided to include a woman on its list of candidates, the then president chose two, María de Corral and myself, so that we could each articulate an exhibition: María’s for the Italian Pavilion and mine for the Arsenale. It was already decided that the following Biennale in 2007 would be curated by a man: American academic and critic Robert Storr. Rumour had it that his refusal to direct the 2005 Biennale, alleging lack of time, made the consideration of our selection possible. At the press conference, sensitive female journalists critically asked whether two women were needed to equal one man, and wondered whether strategic reasoning sufficiently satisfied the patriarchal unconscious that the president (a banker who had previously been a Fiat executive) represented. However, both María de Corral and myself were thankful that the task had been divided up between us. Together, we advocated freedom of judgement in order to articulate our respective exhibitions, forming a common front to help us contend with all sorts of obstacles such as the complex administrative red tape or the outmoded attempt to impose an Op Art design for the advertising. The hypnotic and decorative geometry of Op Art had nothing at all in common with the spirit of our exhibitions and so we both refused to accept it. The aesthetic and ideological impact of the unequivocally feminist statement of the exhibition Always a Little Further still resounds in the history of the Biennale. The happy coexistence of the giant, almost cinematographic posters of the Guerrilla Girls alongside the monumental sculpture A Noiva, 2001, by Joana Vasconcelos transformed the Arsenale entrance into an obvious recognition of the need to question the place assigned to women at the onset of the third millennium. The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous female collective of American activists who fight for equality in the field of art. The statistics cited on their legendary poster of 1989: ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female’ were updated in Venice in 2005 with site-specific

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7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:44 recounts. By means of poster distribution in the entrance hall to the Arsenale, the Guerrilla Girls revealed the negligible presence of female artists in Venetian museums, the national pavilions and the history of the Venice Biennale: 2% in the first show in 1895 and 9% in the 1985 show, a century later. The bright colours and icon- ographical strategies of the advertising posters blatantly and ironically evinced that the supposed equality between men and women was (and still is) far from being a reality. Simultaneously, what appeared to be a huge 18th-century lamp was anchored in the centre of the space. Majestic and serene, it gravitated from the ceiling, almost brushing the floor, like a newly rediscovered axis mundi: A Noiva, an extraordinary sculpture that Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos had made in 2001 and revised in 2005. A Noiva measures six metres high and three metres in diameter at its widest point. Vasconcelos replaced the classical glass teardrops with minute OB brand tampons, whose plastic wrappers rustled and sparkled in the light. In Venice, the iconic association with the nearby lamps of Murano provided an additional contextual reference that did not detract in the least from the work’s fundamental meaning as a feminine statement. What linguistic strategies make A Noiva a boundless metaphor of virginity — ‘of the artistic sumptuousness of hygiene’, as art critic Jorge Lima Barreto posited? And above all, how does it celebrate woman’s ability to speak publicly of her ‘secrets’? How does it transform the traditional obligation of concealing herself, of hid- ing her menstrual flow, into a celebration of another way of looking, thinking and feeling? In her work, Joana Vasconcelos modernises the tradition of Pop Art by recreating domestic items of furniture and everyday objects. The aesthetic operations on which her oeuvre are based are formal appropriations, increases in scale, conscious exercises in the symbolic replacement of usual materials with other elements with different uses, and the rhetoric of repetition and of accumula- tion. In this way, Vasconcelos arrives at an absurdity — sometimes ironic, sometimes sarcastic — that provokes new political and ideological meanings. The enlarged scale is also a way of appropriating space. In the artist’s hands, it is a clear indicator of the desire to leave behind the private register of intimate, domestic delicacy in which women

7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:44 Joana Vasconcelos, A Noiva [The Bride], 2001-2005, OB tampons, stainless steel, cotton thread, steel cables, 600 x ø300cm

7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 4 06/01/2017 19:10 have traditionally been placed. Debating, sharing, raising awareness and enjoying the expansion of feminine visions are ways of conjuring up a new euphoria of representation, a paradigm located beyond the rationalist logic of modernity where the feminine always remained hidden, as if it were somehow obscene. In A Noiva, the impact and presence of women in the public sphere is removed from the sexist and utilitarian representations of the post- pornographic era. In her series of ceramic animals covered in crochet, Joana Vasconcelos celebrates her Portuguese genealogy and updates popular tradition from a feminine view- point. Originally, the 19th-century naturalist works designed by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro represented different animals, from which Joana selects the most disconcerting, such as snakes, frogs or crabs. By covering them with a second skin of handmade crochet or crocheted lace from the Azores, she affords them a lace prison, opening up multiple interpretations of the notions of decoration, protection and domestication. When creation is in the hands of conscious, critical and visionary women, the art that emerges is fearless; it is an art that communicates and bal- ances, that challenges patriarchal man- dates to create other forms of ethical and aesthetic play, other forms of laughter and of pleasure — in other words, healthier consciences. Like the Guerrilla Girls and Joana Vasconcelos, at different though shared registers, many of us women are seeking new ways of living together in the hope that our daughters, and the men and women still to come, may enjoy a more egalitarian world. We defend feminine power to be, to grow and to expand the female becoming that both the planet and its inhabitants are so much in need of. n

Rosa Martínez is an art historian and curator based in Barcelona, Spain. She was Co-Director of the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.

7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:44 Left: Joana Vasconcelos, Slash, 2011, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro faience, painted with ceramic glaze, handmade cotton crochet, 25 x 55 x 125cm. Above: Joana Vasconcelos, Eboli, 2013, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro faience, painted with ceramic glaze, Azores crocheted lace, 31 x 115 x 90cm

7_ESSAY_RosaMartinez_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:44 Sidsel Paaske: On the Verge

Stina Högkvist

Anna Karin Bratteli wearing Rosa moll, ca 1978

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:51 ‘I have faith in something in myself but still don’t know what kind of thing it is.’ – Sidsel Paaske’s diary, Christmas 1959

n 1980, Sidsel Paaske was busy finishing a major commission Iat the new Norwegian School of Veterinary Science in Oslo. The work was a monumental triptych about life and death, and the eternal cycle between the two. The plan was to fill three large Perspex boxes with dried grass, which she would collect from the area around her family’s summer cottage in the mountains. But for a while now, she had been suffering severe headaches. She had also noticed problems with her memory. When writing, the letters would come in the wrong order. Sometimes the words would be back to front, as if written in a mirror. She passed away on 15 September 1980. She never made it to the mountain. The autopsy discovered a massive brain tumour, which had caused a fatal stroke. She was 43 years old. Before the funeral, some of her friends took a trip to the mountains. The shimmering pink grass they collected was carefully arranged around the church. For the preceding 15 years, Paaske had been like a force of nature on Oslo’s art scene. Her Brent Fyrstikk (Extinguished Match) from 1966 has been described as Norway’s first Pop Art work. Twenty-one years later, Claes Oldenburg, the father figure of American Pop Art, would make his own version of the same idea. By the time of her all-too-early death, she had already had ten solo exhibitions and contributed to as many group events. She had sung with the American jazz musician Don Cherry, published, illustrated, curated and debated. She had been politically active and collaborated on audio-visual projects with both Arne Nordheim and Jan Garbarek. But what happened then? In the standard edition of Norsk Kunsthistorie (The History of Norwegian Art), Volume 7, published just three years after Paaske’s death, she isn’t even mentioned. Although she was editor of Billedkunstneren, a fine art magazine, from 1978 to 1980, the journal noted her death with nothing more than the headline: ‘Sidsel Paaske is dead’ and a short, elegiac poem. Signed Gro, the latter was a personal message from her friend and

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:51 fellow artist Gro Jessen. The editors never issued a formal statement or full obituary. It wasn’t until 1989 that a commemorative exhibition was organised. Following that, there was almost complete silence until 2013, when Elise Storsveen and Eline Mugaas presented the group exhibition Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di (Keep A Rock-Solid Grip On Your Stuff) at Kunsthall Oslo. The exhibition was widely reviewed, prompting a new interest in Paaske and her fellow women artists of the period.

THE SHE-SHED While preparing an exhibition about the Swedish-Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark in 2013, I came into contact with Paaske’s only child, Carl Størmer. Slettemark and Paaske had been a couple in the mid 1960s, and Størmer had some photographs he wanted to show me. When I visited him at his home, he asked if I would be interested to see some of his mother’s art as well. We went down into a basement piled high with her stuff, and it wasn’t long before I realised Størmer was sitting on a gold mine. We agreed that I should go through the material, write about it and arrange an exhibition. In a kind of cathartic process, he began to empty the basement. Load after load began to fill a formerly empty office at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, which gradually transformed itself into my she-shed. Whereas many people in Størmer’s situation would have felt a need to look through such treasures before committing them to a stranger and more public scrutiny, Størmer was different. The many bags, sacks and boxes arrived at the museum totally uncensored. When I showed him around the exhibition shortly before it opened, more than once he exclaimed, ‘What?! Was all this down in my basement?’

S.PAASKE Although many in Paaske’s social circle seem never to have taken her career quite seriously, everything indicates that she certainly did. Her artistic estate includes letters, diaries and other writings. They cover a period stretching from early childhood through to her death. The material is dated and sorted, mostly by herself. Around the time of her first exhibition (in the mid 1960s), she also began keeping fair copies of selected letters and diaries. She did not make significant changes to their content, confining her editing to linguistic matters. Some of the fair copies of her diaries even have

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:51 tables of contents. In the case of other texts, she made many copies by hand. It is as if she expected that at some point in the future someone would study all this material, and damned if she wasn’t going to prepare it properly! Seen in this light, transcribing one’s diary seems about as natural as vacuuming the house before receiv- ing guests. When writing about Sidsel Paaske it is impossible to ignore her status as a woman. It was a fact that affected not just her opportunities as an artist, but also what people expected of her and the way her work was received. In 1956, she was accepted at the National College of Art and Design in Oslo. But after just six months, she learnt she was pregnant. As an unmarried mother with an illegiti- mate child, she was obliged to abandon her studies (it would be another 12 years before pregnant women would be allowed to study). She married, but filed for a divorce after just three years. Being a self-taught woman artist and a single parent at the same time would have an impact on her career and her art for the rest of her life. Many doors were closed to her. The opportunities were fewer. It was, however, considered socially acceptable for someone in her position to work with textiles or in a school, and so, from 1960 to 1962 she studied at the national vocational college for women, eventually qualifying as an art teacher. She herself said that textile work didn’t suit her, since it required too much patience and precision. When at last she got a chance to exhibit, she eagerly turned her attention to painting instead, which she felt was better suited to her temperament. It is worth noting that at this time Paaske didn’t want the art world to realise she was a woman. Accordingly, she signed her pictures S.Paaske or just SP. She believed she would do better in her career if people weren’t aware of her gender. The first pictures she signed with her full name make their appearance around 1970. It is probably no coincidence that this coincided with the awakening of her interest in feminism.

GOING NATIVE! In 1962, Paaske travelled to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she came into contact with various African influences. For a time, she had a relationship with Tjeck Baleba, a dancer from the National Ballet of Cameroon. She herself said that it was he who opened her eyes to Africa. In her diaries

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:51 Randi Hultin wearing Rødt, natt, ca 1975

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:51 she describes how they spent whole nights dancing the merengue: ‘I was intoxicated by drums, merengue, trickling sweat. Then it was out into the rain, sitting on some steps half asleep until 5:30 and the first Metro. Oh, what a night! I managed to get their attention with my dancing! What a compliment!’ Interest in other cultures was very much the in-thing in France at the time, and there was much talk about the French trend for ‘going native’ in sociology circles. One of the most influential thinkers behind this trend was Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his book Tristes Tropiques, 1955, Lévi-Strauss introduced his structuralist worldview. He also helped to influence international support for the idea of global decentralisation. In Norway social anthropology was introduced as an academic subject in 1964. With cultural rela- tivism as their foundation, anthropologists sought to show that cultures and societies can only be understood on the basis of their own logic; they cannot be studied in terms of an evolutionary model. This new, expanded worldview had an impact on the fields of both art and crafts, where people were tired of austere modernism and hungry for inspiration from other cultures, their art and ways of life. But decentralisation also generated an interest in folk art from closer to home. In 1975 Paaske noted in her diary the affinity she felt for folk art and women’s art:

Folk art, women’s art, both here in Norway and elsewhere in the world, has utterly different values, expresses completely different things. It is concerned with and characterised by ornamentation and hence rhythm, which is related in turn to music, folk music. Ornamentation in woodcarving, rose painting, rug weaving and Selbu mittens, Hardanger needlework and Hardanger fiddles. These things are the source of most women’s art. I too have taken what I can from these fields. I find them to be a rich and inexhaustible pasture for the experience of festive and mundane occasions, rhythm and rhyme, excitement and tranquillity, even tears and laughter!

Around the same time that she began painting, she also began making jewellery. Her earliest jewellery works consist mainly of beads. A major change occurred in 1965, when she installed an enamelling kiln in her kitchen. She worked with enamel to create both independent artworks and jewellery.

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:51 The considerable risk of failure, the need for extreme precision, the demands on craftsmanship and the lengthy times required to produce enamel work all help to explain why enamelling is one of the most expensive and highest-prized skills in the jeweller’s reper- toire. Paaske began experimenting with the material despite these obstacles. With her anti-authoritarian attitude, she threw herself straight into the process. She invented her own colour combina- tions and created patterns using stencils and other techniques. In addition to using metal nets, she often made patterns from materials she found at home, such as baking paper and pastry cutters. She also experimented with the effects of urinating on hot plates, and even used dynamite on a few occasions.

BACK TO THE ROOTS It is in her jewellery that Paaske’s romantic attitude to folk art finds its clearest expression. Paaske was a pioneer in the field, and it was in her jewellery that her ethnic orientation found its first clear articulation. Paaske believed that jewellery originated from the use of amu- lets in primitive societies. She wanted to return to jewellery’s roots and to revive the function of jewellery objects as charms against accidents, sickness, death and evil powers. She was critical of contemporary notions of jewellery that placed the emphasis on finan- cial value and fine materials. In Paaske’s hands, supposedly ‘worth- less’ natural materials were used for their inherent magic powers. She declared enthusiastically that:

Hair, skin, bones, teeth, horn, feathers and the skulls of lynxes, elephants, cows, snakes, lizards, kingfishers, mountain grouses, turtles and snail shells, all have winked at me from the roadside, the water’s edge, the forest floor or the seabed. They have long been lying safely in my treasure chest. Now is the time to fetch them into the light of day and bring them together, as they have been begging me to do.

In addition to collecting materials out in nature, or from along the roadside, she often bought cheap or tarnished jewellery from flea markets, which she used as a foundation for her own creations. Discarded or worn-out everyday objects also served her pur- pose. It is worth considering her approach to jewellery in light of

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:51 Lévi-Strauss’ thoughts on bricolage. Like the bricoleur, Paaske didn’t start out with a clear aim, but instead used whatever she had to hand. She mixed techniques and materials in a style that is frag- mentary and irregular. In 1975 Paaske married Jan Erik Vold. For their honeymoon, they spent a year travelling round the world. The trip began in Stockholm, where they took the train into the USSR, before trans- ferring onto the Trans-Siberian Railway, which carried them deep into Asia. There they journeyed on to Japan, the Pacific Ocean and the islands of Guam, Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Majuro and Hawaii. The last leg of the tour took them across the United States, from San Francisco to New York, where they finally boarded a plane back to Oslo. It was an inspiring journey, during which Paaske filled numerous sketchbooks. She found ideas for new jewellery and collected materials to take home to Norway. The jewellery she made on returning grew bigger, until it could be described as body adornments. Her pieces lost their evident practical function and frequently featured a greater use of exotic materials. One clear example of this is Hans Iguana må ikke såres (His Iguana Must Not Be Hurt) from 1980, a piece made from crocodile skin and bird feathers that resembles a reticule; but the ‘bag’ is two-dimensional and can neither be opened nor filled. The work To Yap, 1980, is a homage to the island of Yap in Micronesia, which she and Vold visited on their honeymoon. Here she has evidently been inspired by the indigenous materials used on Yap, which include cactus fibre and snail shells. Paaske’s work consists of a half-metre long strip of raffia with a tuft of fur attached to one end and a sea shell to the other. Exactly how this item is to be worn or used is a matter for the owner alone to decide.

BY WOMEN FOR WOMEN Paaske wanted her jewellery to accentuate the wearer’s personality, and consequently she preferred to know who would be wearing her work before she designed it. She writes:

In my jewellery I have sought to bring together various aspects of myself, ornament and the sense of colour, the joy of craftsmanship, the thrill of finding something out for oneself, and not least, the joy of wanting to create something for the individual. A piece of jewellery is more personal than a picture.

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:51 It changes character depending on who wears it. If it’s done properly, and you’re fortunate in the combination of person and jewellery, the character and human type of the wearer will be emphasised. A jewel is an adornment and a protection.

Having presented her clients with their jewellery creations, she would ask them to have pictures taken of themselves wearing the items to send to her as documentation. For the Norwegian author and illustrator Kari Bøge, Paaske made Påfugl og jade (Peacock and Jade). Bøge writes that:

Sidsel’s jewellery is organic. It accentuates the body’s lines and curves, while also saying something about what goes on between mind and body. The form of her pieces, the chains, pendants, highlight and emphasise body movements… This necklace is one of the objects I would be most reluctant to part with, and when I’m wearing it, I realise why people in ancient cultures were buried dressed in their jewellery.

When preparing an exhibition of her jewellery in 1975, Paaske sought to emphasise the natural elements. She formulated her ideas in a letter to her gallerist:

… with regard to jewellery hanging on the wall, I find suede/ and long-/short-haired furs work very well as backgrounds, since they allude to the ‘folkloric’ aspect of my objects and the matt surfaces offer a contrast to the enamel and glass beads. Cork and various fabrics such as beige or grey corduroy for everyday jewellery and rough, unbleached linen and Thai silk (for more festive jewellery). As for the pieces that are arranged flat in display cases, beach sand would offer a soft and neutral background. Reindeer moss, autumn leaves, and bark would also be a good idea.

Paaske’s artistic estate includes hundreds of slides that document her creations. When photographing her jewellery, she often placed them in what she regarded as their natural habitat. She would hang a necklace in a bush, another on the trunk of a birch tree; a pair of earrings were laid out on a rock. Although Paaske wanted to emphasise the folk elements of

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:51 both art and the exhibition space, the critics weren’t always behind her. One typical response to Paaske’s craft creations was to dismiss them as decorative fetishes that were only comprehensible to the initiated and had no place in an art exhibition.

THE STORY OF A WOMAN Reading through Paaske’s diaries one notices that from early on she was conscious of her position as a woman. In her unpublished text Brev til George Sand (Letter to George Sand), written in 1960, she makes it clear how tired she is of the double standards implicit in the woman’s role that society has imposed on her. In the mid 1970s her feminist awareness became steadily more intense. Eventually, she began addressing issues of women’s rights in more organised and active ways. She was a proud and outspoken difference feminist and was happy to emphasise what she regarded as a woman’s unique qualities. The United Nations designated 1975 the international year of the woman, with the explicit aim of eliminating all forms of dis- crimination against women. Eager to contribute to the initiative, Sidsel Paaske, the artist Synnøve Anker Aurdal and the sociolo- gist Aina Helgesen contacted Kunstnernes Hus with an idea for an exhibition. Together with a committee formed from members of the National Council of Norwegian Women and the National Gallery, they devised the exhibition Kvinnen og kunsten (Women and Art). The aim of the exhibition was to redress the imbalance between male and female artists. Of the 386 artists represented in what was then the latest edition of the Norsk Kunstnerleksikon (Norwegian Encyclopaedia of Artists), only 68 were women. Regarding the exhibition as a national event, the committee wanted to reach out to the entire country. There were at the time nearly 400 women artists registered in Norway, and a letter was sent to every one of them encouraging them to apply for exhibition space. 177 women and one man responded. The exhibition focused on how women and their role in society have been viewed throughout history, and how these views have been reflected in art. It consisted of three main parts: the woman as a theme in fine art, women as practising artists, and documentary material about the conditions under which women artists live and work. By showing what women artists in Norway

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:51 had been working on up to 1975, Paaske hoped that the uniquely feminist exhibition would help to strengthen women’s ‘confidence in their own powers, strengthen our genuine self-esteem, inspire further progress and pave the way towards a stronger sense of community’. It is something of an irony that a woman who fought so hard to have other women written into art history was herself written out of it. It is sad to have to note that the project of gaining recognition for Norwegian women artists is still on-going. Forty-one years after Paaske and her colleagues organised the exhibition Kvinnen og Kunsten, here I am doing precisely the same thing. How should we explain Paaske’s own disappearance from Norwegian art history? A few answers lie hidden in the archives. Take for example Norafjølsen, the public commission she was working on at the time of her death. The work was completed posthumously by Paaske’s fellow artist Gro Jessen. But despite being so characteristic of Paaske’s art, Norafjølsen is consistently attributed to Jessen alone in the printed material relating to it. You have to dig deep into the archives to discover that Jessen merely completed the work in accordance with Paaske’s sketches. The same applies to a number of television productions in which Paaske played a part. She collaborated on three artistic productions for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), but only one of them mentions her in the credits. If her name can be omitted from the credits of such television productions, it comes as no surprise that the archives pass over her in silence, thus excluding her from history. It was only after I had tracked down the long- since retired producer who had invited Paaske to bring her visual expertise to the programme that I discovered the facts, was able to view the films in the NRK archives, and to ask the NRK to add Paaske’s name to the relevant entry in the database. Paaske’s improvisational, anti-authoritarian attitude to art was another factor that contributed to her being ignored. People simply did not know where to place her. Who was she really? In her art, Paaske was opposed to the vertically oriented system of quality assessment and worked instead horizontally. In an age when artists were expected to stick to a single medium, and pref- erably to explore every last possibility of a single form, she more or less devoted every exhibition to a new idiom. As the child of a pioneering era, she was well attuned to the general interest of the

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 11 05/01/2017 19:51 Jofried Eriksen wearing Brudetårer, ca 1975

8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 12 05/01/2017 19:52 Above: Sidsel Paaske wearing her own necklace, ca 1978. Right: Sidsel Paaske working on an enamel piece, Rainweather over the Nile, on her balcony, ca 1978-1979

period in exploring new ism-free territory. With the joy of experimentation in her bones, she immersed herself in a broad range of expressive forms, working freely with techniques as diverse as watercolour painting, textiles, ceramics, music, writing, book illus- tration, sculpture and jewellery. In the media, Paaske was criticised for being undefinable. She was wrongly accused of being superficial and decorative, while in reality she was courageous. She didn’t give a damn about current conventions and requirements and did whatever she wanted. In her quest to express her own rapid pace of life, perfection was by no means a virtue. It is easy to fall into the trap of dividing Paaske’s oeuvre according

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 13 05/01/2017 19:52 to the classic dualism between fine art and crafts. Although we are inclined to view these categories as mutually exclusive, they are nothing of the sort. Paaske herself never defined her creations as belonging to either category. She didn’t waste time on defining her work in terms of disciplines. In her exhibitions, she showed everything at once, often with jewellery and paintings side by side. In Norway, the separation between fine art and craft was almost hermetic, and the skills and knowledge of materials traditionally associated with craft ran counter to Paaske’s emphasis on spontane- ity and pleasure in her work. With her disdain for self-censorship, Paaske’s exhibitions were anything but minimalist. She wanted everything to be shown, and her lists of works rarely contained fewer than 50 items. For the media, this overwhelming approach was sometimes perceived as confusing, and Paaske was criticised for being inconsistent with regard to both genre and techniques. She refused to play along with the commercial art world’s demands for a signature style, but devoted herself instead to her own experiments. This is where we find her authenticity. Her personal exploration of materials makes her a true materialist. Her method was improvisational, and often she didn’t know what the finished result would be before she saw it. With glee as her guide, she poured paint on the canvas and gripped marker pens between her teeth. What path the spit-drenched pen would take she couldn’t predict. She willingly relinquished control and let perfection give way to curiosity. She invited the public to come and watch her practise as she played. Paaske was flexible in an inflexible system. She was explo- sive and decorative. She leapt about freely among disciplines, and was criticised for her anarchic attitude. But she wasn’t interested in defining herself in terms of predetermined rules. She rejected explanations and all demands for her to explain herself. She provided her viewers with no key, leaving them instead to find their own answers. This was something new. This was confusing. This was On the Verge... n

Stina Högkvist is a curator in The Contemporary Art Department at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo. Högkvist’s retrospective of Sidsel Paasake, On The Verge, was shown at The National Museum of Art from October 2016 to February 2017.

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8_ESSAY_StinaHogkvist_FINAL.indd 14 05/01/2017 19:52 9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 19:55 Material Girls: From Garage to Factory

Karen Wright

Christiane Löhr

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:55 Joana Vasconcelos

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:55 Joana Vasconcelos

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:55 9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 19:55 Ursula von Rydingsvard

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:55 Paola Anziché

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:55 Marion Baruch

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:55 or almost four years I wrote a weekly ‘In The Studio’ col- Fumn for Radar, The Independent newspaper’s magazine. When I naïvely requested a train ticket to visit Martin Parr in Bristol a few weeks in, I was brusquely told, ‘no expenses, do London studios!’ Undeterred, I begged, pleaded and used the increasingly limited resources afforded to journalists to travel and visit artists I considered important, often discovering new ones along the way. I find being in a studio with the artist a wonderful privilege. Looking at what is lying around or pinned to the wall is often more interesting to me than an artwork in a gallery. In January 2016, during a trip to an industrial estate outside of Cologne, I entered a shed, the creative space of Christiane Löhr. Having seen pictures of her works, but not having seen any in the flesh, I was intrigued by them. But I was unprepared for the sheer power and energy that small works made of singular materials could produce. Löhr incorporates natural elements in her delicate works, and often uses horsehair, an obsession that started when she won a pony at the age of 12. Working on such a small scale, nothing is easy for this artist: ‘For me it’s really fighting for every centimetre.’ It was during a trip to Iceland that I first met Margrét H. Blöndal. It was January, the midst of winter, and we sat by can- dle-light as the gloaming darkness engulfed us. In this setting, I fell under the spell and powerful modesty of Blöndal’s work and her country, and I was determined to return. It is no coincidence that there are so many Nordic artists in this exhibition. Maybe it is this darkness and cold that leads to an acceptance of time-consuming, repetitive meditation. Perhaps it is fuelled by the existing weaving traditions in places such as Trondheim and other parts of Scandinavia. The youngest artist in Entangled: Threads & Making is Iceland- based Arna Óttarsdóttir. I visited her home that she shares with her husband Guðmundur Thoroddsen, who is also an artist. I had seen work of hers on the website of her representative gallery — i8 in Reykjavik — but again nothing prepared me for the reality of the final tapestry, freshly cut from her small, home loom. Óttarsdóttir begins by note-making, drafting ideas and slogans and scribbling them on paper. This is translated into her weavings — the threads and colours show rips, piercings and process; their temporality makes them very different in style to the solid Jacquard weavings of other artists.

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:55 Caroline Achaintre

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:55 When I phoned American artist Ursula von Rydingsvard to ask if we could put her name forward for a Baring grant for creative practitioners over the age of 70, her instantaneous response was: ‘I don’t feel that old, Karen!’ However, she agreed to make a new work with the grant money, at first experimenting with leather and other materials before deciding to return to cedar — a material she loves even though she is extremely allergic to it. When I visited her studio, a former factory in Bushwick, von Rydingsvard donned a mask and suit to show me the work in progress. At the end of the process, her own personal analysis was: ‘The sculpture makes string into something that is very car- nal and very different in scale.’ While all artists’ studios vary in size — some are small and intimate, sometimes in artists’ own homes — none are like the ‘factory’ of Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos works on all scales but revels in producing big works. Her studio is highly organised like any factory; indeed it is officially classi- fied as a ‘medium-sized factory’ in Portugal. The difference is Vasconcelos’ treatment of her assistants, providing massage and meditation. Under her management, the space is, like any good family, holistic, caring, ambitious and ground-breaking. At the opposite end of the scale, when visiting Caroline Achaintre, I was surprised by the modesty of her studio. Achaintre has recently been recognised for her powerful vision with a solo exhibition at the BALTIC, Gateshead, and her inclusion in British Art Show 8. To create her distinctive, shaggy wool works, she initially used a discarded tufting gun she found at university. After experimenting and purchasing one for herself, she has furthered her technique, mixing varying lengths of wool to give the works different textures. She gave me a brief demonstration; it was noisy and very fast. In her process, Achaintre embraces the freedom of accident, the antithesis of control. While all of these women work in spaces of differing sizes, with or without assistants, they are united by the vitality of the touch of the hand and their fearless exploration of materials. n

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 11 05/01/2017 19:55 Arna Óttarsdóttir

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 12 05/01/2017 19:55 Francis Upritchard

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 13 05/01/2017 19:55 Laura Ford

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 14 05/01/2017 19:55 9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 15 05/01/2017 19:55 Margrét H. Blöndal

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 16 05/01/2017 19:55 Tatiana Trouvé

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 17 05/01/2017 19:55 Kate MccGwire

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 18 05/01/2017 19:55 Aiko Tetzuka

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 19 05/01/2017 19:55 9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 20 05/01/2017 19:55 Annette Messager

9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 21 05/01/2017 19:55 9_STUDIO_Portfolio_FINAL.indd 22 05/01/2017 19:55 Things are Inexplicable: In Conversation with Kiki Smith

Karen Wright

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 19:59 he idea for this exhibition came from a studio visit that I made Tin the East Village in New York City. It was the home and workplace of Kiki Smith, an artist with whom, after a rocky start, I had become friends. Prior to our meeting, as the editor of Modern Painters, I had printed a particularly punitive text on Smith by an ultraconservative American male critic. Later, when introduced to Smith through a mutual friend I tried to hide my identity. She faced me and said, ‘I know who you are and I forgive you,’ and with these words we moved on. Unlike other occasions at her home I was not there to formally interview or oversee a photo shoot, but merely to catch up. As usual, Smith did not stop what she was doing to chat. Previously she had told me that she never just talked; she often drew while talking to help focus on the conversation. Today she was working on a cartoon for Sky, one of a series of tapestries that she was making with Magnolia Editions in California. She explained that the tapestries were woven on an electronic, double-headed Jacquard loom, for which Smith’s collages are translated into digital files at just 25 DPI, as opposed to the 300 DPI of high resolution photographs. The cartoon Smith was working on came from drawings that she made to scale: ‘I want to get in as much information on the initial drawing then put it into the computer, then I will make a one-third scale print out of it and make the corrections that we are doing today.’ Her studio assistants, two young women, were helping unroll the flimsy paper and pinning it down on the floor for Smith to see. Whilst talking to me, she walked on the paper and eventually placed a small stool on it, where she crouched, drawing with short direct strokes emphatically so they were incising into the paper. Sitting back at the table she continued to watch intently, direct- ing the girls to cut and collage as they overlaid some of the paper, obscuring marks she was no longer happy with. She was totally transforming the original design, in particular, playing with the bottom strip, which came alive in front of my eyes. Smith enjoys art history books, maintaining that she likes the history of decorative arts the best: ‘It is a kind of study that is neglected for long periods and then everyone is interested in it. Oil paintings were initially poor man’s tapestries. So it has a long and distinguished history.’

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 19:59 Kiki Smith, Sky, 2012, cotton Jacquard tapestry, 287 x 190.5cm

10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 19:59 For me, Smith’s work perfectly encapsulates the experimentation of materials and the input of the artist’s hand, which is so clearly imprinted on top of the technical expertise of the weaving studio.

KAREN WRIGHT: OK. So I want to take you right back, to the 1980s. Which, when you are in the middle of setting up for a new installation, is a bit mean, but I was just reading a book by David Wojnarowicz, and he was talking about how you were working as an electrician and how your first show was at The Kitchen. Can we just talk a little bit about that? Can you put your mindset back into the mid 1980s?

KIKI SMITH: So, that was because a friend of mine, Lynne Tilman, was a friend of Amy Talben, the curator at The Kitchen and she introduced me to her work. Or no, the other way round, her to my work. So she asked me to make an exhibition. I made an exhibition using text from newspapers about women that had resorted, or finally resorted, to killing their spouses or relatives, or some relation to them that had been physically, sexually or psychi- cally killing them.

KW: Cheery little numbers!

KS: I just had this idea that this was an affirmative action, ultimately, because this was life over life. It wasn’t necessarily the best strategy. But it was a legitimate strategy to consider or to speak about. And it was also one of the first times when it was happening with fair frequency and women were being imprisoned for it. So, there was a discussion about it — about whether people who were victims and fight back are equal, you know, as a mode of self defence. So it was about that mostly. And I made films. I asked David Wojnarowicz if we could make films. So we went to a doctor’s office, no a testing lab. We were going to make CAT scans but instead we made X-rays. I asked him to help me because I needed a man. So we made X-rays of us beating each other up. We also made pixelated films. Quick single shot films, just single frame by frame, of us covered in blood. I went to the butcher and bought blood and we covered ourselves in it. We made photographs. So part of it was a slide show. I mixed up microscopic

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 19:59 images with images from satellite photographs of the earth and then double layers of these photographs of us covered in blood. It was all mixed up and projected on phosphorescent paintings of skeletons. So when the lights would turn on it would go ‘slide, slide, slide’ and then the light would turn off and you would just hear a heartbeat and see all of these skeletons in the room.

KW: Wow.

KS: For me, it was really fun. But it also made me realise that people hate installation. People working in places hate installations. Because it is making noise all the time and it is a repetitive noise; it never lets you alone; it’s dark. So although I had made some other installation things, I sort of stopped.

KW: That stopped you, really? And what else influenced you?

KS: My mother used to go into the town with the Dalai Lama. Her friend was a monk, so she would go out with the Dalai Lama. It was a little bit before he became a superstar, a world leader. He was a world leader, but he wasn’t one in the cultural vocabulary as much. Both my parents were very spiritual people. How that was explicitly manifest, I don’t know. But it was very much part of both of their characters. But I didn’t really grow up in a religious environment. I went to catechism or something like that, but probably after I was 13 we didn’t go to mass anymore. You know, I always say that I am culturally Catholic. But it is more because I am very attracted to icons.

KW: It is something to do with ritual, isn’t it?

KS: Yes, though not even the ritual part. It’s more the iconography. As an adult, part of it is the gradation of iconography from belief system to belief system. All of these religions and philosophies are interwoven and historically interfering with and influencing one another. For me, I am just interested in symbolic languages — visual symbolic languages. All the time it’s something I am playing with. It’s just a vocabulary I am attracted to. It’s not particularly Catholic, but I like all the different ways that spiritual or belief systems build their own space. I am not interested in how all those

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 19:59 belief systems manifest in people, as that is often a lot less attractive than the iconography itself. I am not that interested in people, though I have a personal attachment to people. The things that engage me the most are what people make — what people made historically or what they make in the contemporary world, how they make order or sense of their life, through object making. Religious space is a space and a great deal of it is about social control.

KW: Tell me about the drawing thing, because we were talking about that yester- day. I found it very interesting that you drew when you were growing up. Was that one of the main things you did?

KS: No, no, I knitted when I grew up.

KW: So did I!

KS: Oh, then I just thought making art is just like knitting, but it lasts longer! So it is just the same activity, it’s repetitive. You see a lot of my work is just repetitive activity. I find that calming and free. It’s also just work.

KW: It allows your mind some space?

KS: Yes, it gives my mind some space. But it’s also work. It occupies your time. Probably because I don’t have any idea what to do with myself. My first ten years was me basically drawing on cardboard or drawing on muslin.

KW: But was it the whole [Kurt] Schwitters thing, or was it just because it was there? Or did it attract you as a material?

KS: I like it as a material. But I had no money, as well. And also, I went very briefly to art school and I don’t really know how to make things. I am very interested in craft but I don’t know how

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 19:59 to make things. So, for me, the first ten years in New York were spent learning about materials. And I think the interest for me, in materials, is that it is a struggle and an opportunity to learn something that you don’t know — to keep yourself engaged. It is a dis- covery or an experiment. Hey, you get to see what happens as they reveal themselves in unexpected ways. Also, you get to play within a tradition and appreciate it. I am very old fashioned. I am someone who feels the most kindred with pre-Renaissance art. To work that still reacts in a visceral way and also engages your spirit in some way. That is like a talisman. Yes, my work actually began when I went to Mexico, because I had been making work about life growing on death; life coming from death. After I went to Mexico it switched. It became about life coming from life; life on life. And now of course it goes in all different directions.

KW: Because you said that Frida Kahlo was very important to you?

KS: To me, I have this pretend idea that Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and the other women Surrealists are the foundation, in a way, of contemporary art. Some of the other Surrealists used themselves, but they didn’t use their own bodies in the way the female Surrealists did to create a personal psychological fortress, of interior life and the external world. In their work the personal and the political go together, this non- separation of which was also the lesson of the feminist movement. Also, using the body, the visceral aspect of the body as an iconic way to construct. It comes from Mexico but it also comes from [Kahlo’s] German side. You know, like Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, where Expressionism is within the body, which you have in Spanish art and German art as well. And of course, you have it as well in Mexico coming from the Baroque. It is this history, which is insistent on the flesh of the body.

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 19:59 KW: It is narrative, isn’t it, which is different?

KS: It is more about something voluptuous.

KW: Do you think it is man’s art?

KS: No. I don’t know what it is. But I am just not interested in it.

KW: What about Louise Bourgeois? Because in a way you had par- allel working techniques. Was Bourgeois not important to you; you never mention her?

KS: Well you know, in terms of my formative years I didn’t see her work until I was sort of in my own trip already. It didn’t come out of her. I didn’t know anything about her. I think Bourgeois was much more important to artists ten years younger than me. Because when they were in their formative years she was in. Richard Tuttle, Agnes Martin, Lee Bontecou and also Nancy Spero were all my real influences. Those people were very significant to me in forming my artistic life. And then a billion other people too, and certainly my father’s [Tony Smith’s] work. But Louise Bourgeois, I think is our greatest American women artist, along with Agnes Martin. I think what is really interesting about her is that she existed for such a long time, so she could freely use the vocabulary of multiple generations and multiple cultures. She was one of the great print makers of the twentieth century. She was extremely economical in her work, which I try to learn from.

KW: I think also that she was embracing her sexuality; it is this thing about allowing everyone to say exactly what they wanted to say. She gave people that licence.

KS: It’s not a Catholic thing, but I am a little bit prudish. I try to keep my sexuality a little bit more in my private life than in my art. It’s not that I wish I was different. Everyone is just who they are. But actually she was extremely interesting in her manipulation of language. She was an extraordinary, extraordinary artist. And also, for me the most significant thing about her work, is something that maybe because of my family background I have

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 19:59 always slightly shied away from, but I now see more and more as a necessity for my work, is that she rather fluently moved from abstraction to representation. For me that is the real strength of her work — that she could imbue abstraction with a psychology. That is why I think people such as Rachel Whiteread are significant in relation to her, because they can mediate between these different realms.

KW: Again, it is about internal and the external.

KS: Yes, the seeming realms.

KW: I think this moving between the internal and external world is something that is central in both your and Bourgeois’ work.

KS: Well I am still trying to work it out.

KW: I saw a film about the hanging in Venice once. It was a work made in paper.1

KS: I went to Morocco when I was younger and they had all these wall tapestries to keep walls warm. The same as European tapestries to try to keep the cold out a little bit. I think it primarily comes from that.

KW: Ah, really? Tapestries?

KS: I think so. They were working in stone buildings, which are freezing. I mean, I live in a stone building and it is freezing cold.

KW: So do you have tapestries hanging up?

KS: No, but I think it is interesting, this idea of blankets and quilts — of quilting and blanketing, and what the term ‘blanket’ means. 1. Homespun KW: But what about sewing and femininity, and the fact that this is Tales: Stories of ‘women’s’ work? Home Occupation, Fondazione Querini KS: I had this aunt, Graziella Valenti Smith who taught me knit- Stampalia, Venice, ting and sewing and how to make things and about a spiritual life. 2005.

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 11 05/01/2017 19:59 My mother had no interest in any craft. I don’t want to be limited by things that are traditionally associated with women. That is often a misunderstanding. In different cultures it is radically different who is sewing and who is weaving. It is something for me that I embrace as my inheritance. I love the passivity of sitting around with other people all doing activities. You have social interaction or community interaction and at the same time you get to do something that is yours. Or, sometimes people work on quilts together, but I like doing my thing. I had a relationship for about five or six years with a friend and we just worked together. He was making drawings and I was doing what I was doing. It was very compatible and sympathetic. In the same way that I work in the print shop.

KW: And you like having assistants, which is the same thing.

KS: My father had assistants when I was young. So I had that model. And when I was younger and worked by myself, you get into the daily psychology of whatever you are reacting to when you wake up in the morning. For me in general, I have a very orderly life. I structure my life because it helps me go out and be present in the general world rather than in my internal world. Having assistants, you have to show up and you cannot be endlessly egocentric. Although, I am fairly egocentric.

KW: It comes back to this enlivening. There is this wonderful quote where you say when you go to a museum the sculptures come alive and tell you what to do. Having that kind of imagination must be quite hard to live with?

KS: Well, I don’t think so. I like to be told what to do. I like the idea that things become apparent to you, that they make you

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 12 05/01/2017 19:59 attentive and they tell you that there is information there, that is given to you. Creativity is given freely and things become apparent. Like an apparition, or epiphany. One has an epiphany, which is like God talking to you. Or things are apparent to you. Or they say pay attention! You know, there is either a material or the way people are using material. Or there is the spirit, the living spirit. And that for me is most profound. But also things that are inexplicable, because I think that things are inexplicable and outside your understanding — either your formal understanding, cultural understanding or period understanding. Those things give you space for the internal things that are incomprehensible to you. They connect you to a more open construction of the world, or meaning of the world, less daily concerns. There are a lot of possibilities for what is attractive. I go to attraction. Things that are repugnant to you, or diametrically opposed to your limited belief systems, are as attractive as things that are comfortable. It is just a wondering, I guess. I am just wan- dering around having some experiences.

KW: Are you happy?

KS: Sometimes. If I am not caught up in myself I am completely happy. The sky is nice, the piazza is nice. I think that is very easy to be happy if one is free of self-consciousness. Sometimes there are very overt circumstances that are difficult. But often it is the being bound to the self that is crippling in life. When one sort of forgets about oneself it is pretty easy to be happy. And I go to extremes. I go from those extremes to other extremes.

KW: Who doesn’t!

KS: In a certain way one’s work comes out of lots of contra- dictory spaces within oneself and that necessitates some sort of movement. n

Karen Wright is an art critic, curator and writer. She was co-founder and Editor in Chief of Modern Painters from 1987 until 2002. She has a regular column in The Independent.

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10_KikiSmith_FINAL.indd 14 05/01/2017 19:59 Made in Margate

Anna Ray

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11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 20:03 Far left: Work in progress on Margate Knot; above: Anna Ray’s studio; left: installation view of Knot, 2007, Edinburgh Visual Arts and Crafts Award, Edinburgh Art Festival, Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh, 2009

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11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 20:03 11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 20:03 11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 20:03 Making the Margate Knot: Anna (standing, far right) and assistants at work at Turner Contemporary

11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 20:03 have always thought of textiles as three dimensional. My work is I driven by the language of fibre: stitches, ends, warps, loops, seams and knots. I trained and later taught in the Tapestry Department at Edinburgh College of Art, where the philosophy was that concepts and making go hand in hand. Ten years ago, I created an artwork entitled Knot based on the forms of under-wires from bras and the children’s game Pick Up Sticks. Knot consists of 1,000 elements in six multi-colours. I have always thought of this work as a test piece for a larger assem- blage. 2,000 sewn fabric elements in 16 colours make up the Margate Knot. Twenty female assistants from the local area were paid to work on Margate Knot, along with the generous support of half a dozen volunteers. I wanted the project to provide experience, training and income for women in the community. The only requirement was the ability to use a sewing machine. Participants have been involved in all aspects of making and installation of the work. The original concept was to create an artwork that has no specific focal point. Instead the entire surface holds the viewer’s gaze. For the duration of Entangled: Threads & Making, the work will be displayed on the wall and subsequently all elements will be untied and reinstalled as a floor piece in a public performance. The colour palette is taken from the seaside of Margate: the red harbour marker posts; the wine coloured and acid green seaweed; the colours of wild flowers growing up chalk cliffs; the brightly painted beach swings; a turquoise plastic ice cream sculpture; the buoys and knotted ropes that decorate the harbour arm. In a painting, the paint covers and stains the surface of a canvas. In contrast, a tapestry or a piece of knitting or embroidery has surface depth. The front and back of the textile play a part in a sculptural way: the colour runs deep. Margate Knot is an exaggera- tion of the experience of depth: a magnification of the intricacy of a textile. ■

Anna Ray is an artist based in Hertfordshire. Her project Margate Knot was speciﬁcally conceived and produced for the exhibition Entangled: Threads & Making at Turner Contemporary, Margate.

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11_STUDIO_AnnaRay_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 20:03 A Way of Waiting Peacefully: Some Works in Entangled

Sarah Martin

Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled (Amaca, red-white), 2000, wool, linen, 40 x 195 x 125cm

12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 20:08 any of the artists in Entangled: Threads & Making use abstraction Mto articulate the language of their material experiments, from Rosemarie Trockel’s fabric collages to Caroline Achaintre’s psyche- delic, tufted wool-hanging, made specially for the exhibition. In contrast to the near monochrome palette of Trockel’s Pattern is a Teacher, 2013, Untitled (Amaca, red-white), 2000 is an explosion of red and white strands — part rug, part sculpture, made in her signature material, wool. Sheila Hicks has been producing her delicate, woven miniatures or ‘minimes’ (literally ‘very small’) for five decades. Although more dimin- utive than her monumental sculptures made from synthetic fibres, the minimes, such as Stuart Shifts, 2010, are no less compelling. Woven from cotton, silk, linen and other natural threads, they are studies or sketches as well as bold experiments in colour. As a child, Hicks recalls being taught how to use thread purely as a pastime or ‘a way of waiting peacefully’ — an apt metaphor for the connection between repetitive making and meditation that underpins many of the works in Entangled. An artist for whom the association between compulsive making and thought was particularly pertinent was Judith Scott, who produced a singular body of work between 1987 and 2005. Working at the Creative Growth Center in California, whose enlightened programme was the first in the US to offer studio space to disabled artists, Scott, who was born with Down’s syndrome and was profoundly deaf, found her medium in the form of everyday objects and discarded materials, which she wrapped with lengths of coloured cord and yarn. Like Hicks, Scott was associated with the Fiber Art movement but, in contrast, she did not weave, sew or embroider. Instead, Scott cocooned her objects in complex webs of thread, incredibly, never once repeating a colour scheme or three-dimensional form. The act of wrapping and binding is also intrinsic to the work of Sonia Gomes who, like Scott, began her artistic career in earnest in her 40s. Gomes’ assemblages, made of found or donated fabric bundled around wire armatures, bear testament both to her upbringing in Caetanópolis, a town at the heart of the textile industry in Brazil, and the folk culture of her Afro-Brazilian heritage. Gomes sews, binds and knots her materials to create sculptures such as Untitled, 2013, from the Torção (Twist) series. Although abstract, the work of Gomes, along with many of the artists in Entangled, is nevertheless infused with the memory of its materials and making. These narratives and histories are ours to unravel . n

Sarah Martin is Head of Exhibitions at Turner Contemporary.

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12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 20:08 Sheila Hicks, Stuart Shifts, 2010, cotton, silk, linen, 23.5 x 14cm

12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 20:08 Sheila Hicks, Stuart Shifts, 2010, Caroline Achaintre, Bernadette, 2016, cotton, silk, linen, 23.5 x 14cm hand tufted wool, 284 x 240cm

12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 20:08 Above: Judith Scott, Untitled, 2003, wool, yarn and various materials, 33 x 49 x 43cm Right: Sonia Gomes, Untitled, Torção series, 2014, sewing, binding, different fabric on wire

12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 20:08 12_HAUSER_WIRTH_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 20:08 Women and Hair: Materialising the Abject

Kathryn Lloyd

Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter, Nonsicles and Furlings, 2014, synthetic hair, 18 x 14cm

13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 20:10 y the time hairs are long enough to show through your scalp Bthey are dead. Despite this irredeemable demise there is an esti- mated £70 billion global industry centred around the perpetual, pseudo-scientific quest for healthy hair: ‘purified at the roots’, ’perfectly re-balanced’, ’platinum strength’. This crystallises the most paradoxical fact about hair. We wash, brush, style, cut, straighten and condition the hair on our head to give it ‘life’, irrespective of its innate death. While considered seductive on the head, hair evokes disgust when its death is revealed, viewed as detritus, sepa- rated from the body — on clothing, in the plug hole, in food. A single, lone hair, detached from its owner, finding a new home in a bar of soap or the sudden interior of our mouths is unacceptable, a disorder of our own bodily systems. Hair marks our outermost physical limits, continuously tres- passing its own boundaries. It is both private and public, it reaches out and engages with our environment, while rooted in our scalp. Now and again, seemingly through its own autonomy, it leaves the house of our heads, expelling itself into the world. There is a consistent bodily shock when greeted by the familiar sight of a shed hair; even if clearly our own through proximity or logical deduc- tion, it is incomprehensible as ours. Through its emancipation it becomes alien and other. In her 1980 publication Powers of Horror, French philosopher Julia Kristeva explores the body as a site of abjection. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is jettisoned; waste, dead skin, bodily flu- ids, nail clippings and hair are regularly expelled from the body. These excretions result in a loss of distinction between the inner and outer, the self and the other, and are a physical reminder of our bodily volatility. What comes out or comes loose is a sign that what we are made of can break down, mutate, dissolve or simply leave us behind. In its liminal continuity, hair is perhaps the most complex of these expulsions. Our imposition, or lack of imposition, on our hair is a quest for identity. Hair is also historically understood as a possible site for gender, religious, cultural and ethnic distinctions. Along with tattooing and clothing, forms of hair management manifest as a performance — one which happens at the boundaries of self-expression and social identity — and creativity and conformity. There are stereotypes born out of all hair types, but most persistent is the fetishisation of hair as signifier of femininity.

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 20:10 Feminine associations with hair — specifically sexual — are perpetuated in contemporary society both by their glorification and their specifications. Advertising in the mainstream female beauty industry almost exclusively centres around images of women with long hair. Haircare products are rarely sold on the image of a woman with short hair. Instead, long hair is caressed and titillated in slow motion, flicked and stroked, lathered and blown. This reinforces the notion of female hair as a signifier of sexuality, and by consequence, the act of cutting it as a deliberate nega- tion of this sexuality. In advertising, female hair is equated with the female character: ‘strong hair can do anything’, ‘go a shade more you’. These given attributes encompass the various, and con- tradictory, things a woman is expected to be: strong, dazzling, unique, vibrant, vital, full of life, full of energy, beautiful, compli- ant, no-nonsense, soft. In the archetype of advertising, hair is a calculated construction of femininity and sexuality, formulated and maintained by, and for, a male gaze. This sexuality, paradoxically advertised as innate and bottle-able, is also acknowl- edged in its suppression and appropriation. The loss of hair is often used throughout folklore as a methodology for punishing women, in order to ‘remove’ their sexuality or fulfilment. An épinal print from 1888 entitled Blonda and Portrait: Christiane Fairy Caprice shows the story of Blonda, a young girl with blonde Löhr working hair long enough to touch the ground. One day, she is visited by on horse hair the Fairy Caprice, who says she will satisfy each of her ‘fancies’ in column, Kunsthaus exchange for one hair. Over the years, Blonda makes numerous Baselland, 2016 wishes and she loses her hair strand by strand, until she is bald. She grows bored of her riches and her baldness, and asks Fairy Caprice for happiness instead. She is told that she will be happy when she has won back her hair. At first confused, Blonda begins to notice that every time she does a good deed a hair appears on her head. So, she takes care of her family, and becomes charitable, and in doing so regains her hair and ‘lost beauty’. While the story primarily preaches about honesty and kindness, it also equates Blonda’s fortune with the length and fullness of her hair, and her misfortune

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 20:10 Christiane Löhr, Haararbeit Ragusa (Ragusa hair work), 2006, horse hair, needles, approx. 52 x 48 x 5cm

13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 20:10 with a lack of it. Her educational trajectory relies on the punish- ment of losing her hair and regaining it through good deed. Similarly, or conversely, women were also mythically punished by, or because of, the addition of hair — specifically, in ways that mimic traditional masculinity. Wilgefortis is a female saint whose legend arose around the 14th century. A young Christian noble- woman, her father had arranged for her to marry a pagan king. Reluctant to marry someone outside her own faith, Wilgefortis prayed for God to make her repulsive to her future husband. The following morning she awoke with a beard. As a result, the engagement was broken and her enraged father had her cruci- fied. The fate of Wilgefortis exemplifies the mythic associations between women and hair, and how closely the female status is bound up in its placement. For the woman, hair and hairiness are very different.1 Both the role that hair plays in the representation of female identity, and its crystallisation of the abject, render it a uniquely potent material for female artists. Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum, Helen Chadwick, Doris Salcedo and Louise Bourgeois, among others, have incorporated hair into their practice, either as a physical material for weaving, sculpting and drawing, or as a visual symbol for the female body. Hatoum, in particular has regularly included long hairs from the head and pubic hairs (mostly her own), in her work since the mid 1990s, paralleling the abject with 1. See Warner, the conventionally unacceptable elements of female visibility. Marina, 1994, From Hair Necklace, 2013, is a necklace constituted of large bead-like, The Beast To The round balls of Hatoum’s hair, which she began collecting in 1989. Blonde, Vintage, The necklace juxtaposes the private body with the public, through Chapter 21. the conventions of a typically female garment. Her collection of 2. See McKellar, hairballs manifests as a signifier for her own body, and the arche- Leila, ’Hairpieces: typal female body that may have shed them. Unifying them into Hair, Identity and one wearable form presents the opportunity for the hair to come Memory in the work 2 back into contact with the body that has expelled it. While we of Mona Hatoum’, (evasively) accept the death of hair when connected to our body, Cheang, Sarah to continue this proximity once it has been removed transgresses and Geraldine this admissible boundary. Biddle-Perry Memorial jewellery has incorporated hair throughout the his- (Eds.), 2009, Hair: tory of craft work. It flourished in the Victorian period, under the Styling, Culture and rule of the Queen’s intense mourning. There are several methods Fashion, Bloomsbury for working hair into jewellery: locks were braided and woven Academic.

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 20:10 into necklaces or bracelets; for intricate designs on brooches, hair was mixed with an adhesive, and used to create detailed mourning scenes or flowers. In its most contemporary form, the hair is simply placed under glass in a brooch or locket, and worn close to the chest. Capitalising on hair’s similarity to thread or line, these items transform the abject into something delicate, beautiful and, in most cases, unrecognisable as human hair. In emblematic form, the jettisoned bodily matter is a direct reminder of the death of its owner. Taking hair from her own, living body, Hatoum references the incongruity of adopting the material as a form of commemoration: to celebrate a life through a substance that was always dead. In Hair Necklace Hatoum’s exaggerated bead-like forms become weighty around the meticulously carved wooden bust on which they hang. The shed hair, delicate at first glance, becomes repulsive in revealing its constitutional material, and restrictive in its encroachment around the neck. Hatoum often employs hair as an indicator of female presence, and the societal restrictions applied to their roles in historical, and contemporary, society. Recollection, 1995, is an installation which was first exhibited in the Saint Elisabeth Béguinage in Kortrijk, Belgium — a collection of buildings inhabited by a lay sisterhood of the Roman Catholic Church. The work consisted of hairballs scattered across windowsills and floorboards, strands of hair hung from the ceiling, a bar of soap germinating pubic hairs, and a small loom which, as though recently abandoned, held a partial fabric of woven hair. In this setting, Hatoum’s hairballs are reminiscent of dust and mothballs, gathered over the course of the sisters’ daily activities. Their clear abject status, rolled into forms of detritus, parallels their presence with the private, concealed existence of the sisters themselves. Hatoum’s loom, in which hair is woven into a formulated, regular pattern, attempts to reestablish an order to the displacement of hair when removed from the body. It also equates the liminal appearance of hair with threads. Weaving, as a historically female tradition, is here applied to a historically female material. The techniques we apply to hair, on and off the head, in terminology and action, mirror conventional craft techniques: braiding, plait- ing, weaving, ironing. In securing hairstyles, the technique of hair sewing has recently proliferated in the fashion industry. An act of

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 20:10 Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter, Imaginary Friend (My Sister and her Sock), 2008, wood, human hair, putty, paint, mesh, 91.4 x 30.5 x 30.5cm

13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 7 05/01/2017 20:10 removing hair is called threading. In short, there is not much we do with threads that we do not also apply to our hair. The constitutional makeup of hair also mirrors that of threads. Singularly they are frail and discarded. Compositely, they gain strength. Compositely, they can be manipulated and shaped; they create something that can be worn or performed, and construct genuine instances and archetypes of identity and gender. Hair can be seen as an organically grown thread. It is a creative fibre, ripe for play and experimentation. German artist Christiane Löhr references these similarities by directly combining the two in her work. Ragusa hairwork, 2006, is a web-like structure, which is formulated through the weaving of horsehair, fixed in its intricate pattern by needles. Concentrated in the middle, the design resembles a dream- catcher, with the long, coarse hair spiralling out into a humanistic disarray. Although the work is made up of horsehair rather than human hair, it retains a fundamentally feminine quality. The long manes and tails of horses are reminiscent of human hair in their need for grooming. To continuously brush long hair, to tease out knots and tangles, is traditionally linked to typically female bodily care, framed by fairytales Shoplifter in her such as Rapunzel and The Goose Girl. Löhr’s use of horsehair along- studio side needles brings together archetypes of femininity: the production of craft signified by a sewing needle — embroidery, tapestry, cross stitch, — and long, thick, virile hair. In Central American folklore, there is a supernatural character called La Siguanaba, which typically takes the form of a woman with dark, long hair when seen from behind. Usually detailed as bathing near a river, she lures men away before revealing her face to be that of a horse. Unable to show her face until this point, La Siguanaba is only able to seduce men with her hair and her female body. The crux of the tale, of course, relies on the contradiction between woman and horse, but it is also dependent on the believability of the composite form — that the mane of the horse could be interpreted as the mane of a woman. Through hair, two very different creatures are visibly linked.

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 8 05/01/2017 20:10 When unrooted, hair is fragile. It can easily break, split, or simply be blown away. Löhr’s work both embraces and negates this nature, showcasing its delicacy, producing works that appear on the verge of disappearing, while anchoring or securing them together. The needle, used to combine threads or engrain them into fabric, here functions as a utility pole. The deliberation with which it pins its subject in place is precarious; if one comes down, it all comes down. Like the body, and the archetypal female image, it is a construction awaiting, but resisting, collapse. Hair is a malleable substance. Gender is an increasingly malleable attribute. Despite this flexibility, stereotypes concerning female hair have persisted in mainstream advertising and social commen- tary since the self-awareness of human fashion. Without fail, hair is a paradox of unique choice and conformity. The work of Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir a.k.a. Shoplifter embraces this dualis- tic phenomenon. Shoplifter’s works are brightly coloured, intricate and often garish formations of synthetic hair. Rather than simply equating hair with threads and textiles, Shoplifter selects hair that is also a textile. Her decision to incorporate hair into her practice stems from an admiration of vanity as a creative tool, but her decision to exclusively use non-human hair reinforces the inauthentic- ity of the gendered presentations that surround it. Shoplifter’s series of works, Nonsicles and Furlings, 2014, have the appearance of regurgitated furballs or bezoars. Compact creations of multi-coloured hair, they also resemble the discarded rem- nants from a day of crafting. Unlike Hatoum’s pristine collection of hair, Shoplifter’s forms look as through they have been processed through the human body before being coughed up or cut out. While Hatoum and Löhr manipulate hair into delicate forms that acknowledge its abject status through the juxtaposition of beauty and repulsion, Shoplifter eulogises hair’s ability to be matted, dirty and apart from the human body. Nonsicals and furlings are creatures in themselves, grown out of discarded human material. Another series, Imaginary Friends, 2008 is a group of wooden poles, on which various wigs, furs and fabrics are arranged, creating a host of strange characters. These odd creatures do begin to look capable of human interaction; their horizontal form equates them with humans rather than animals, as does the concentration of embellishments at the top of the wooden structure. Shoplifter’s characters demonstrate how much we rely on the human head to

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 9 05/01/2017 20:10 reveal a social and personal identity. The simple arrangement of a rope-like wig and a wooden pole has clear anthropomorphic qualities. It is the hair on the head that makes it human. Shoplifter’s Imaginary Friends are very different from one another. These differences have been achieved solely by the dress- ing of hair and fabrics. In doing so, she acknowledges the genuine creativity that can be achieved when using hair as a material. Shoplifter celebrates the abject nature of hair, employing it as a generative material. Thereby she also celebrates the feminine associations with hairstyling and hair care. She describes vanity as a productive tool, as an indicator of our choices. The works offer this acknowledgement through a material that resembles the natural, but ultimately, is not. In Shoplifter’s works the artificial is an emblem of active protest. Her creations remain gendered through the social conventions they reference, but they appeal for the universal right for unprejudiced creativity. The human body is an image of society. Hair’s flexibility affords it a unique power. While being an intrinsic part of the body, it retains an ability to reform and reflect our personal identities and larger societal shifts. However, it cannot escape gendered looking. (Long) hair as a female signifier is so engrained that it retains female ‘associations’, even when ascribed to men, animals or constructions of hair — wigs, weaves, extensions — which have been removed from, or never came into contact with, any human body. The fundamental abject nature of hair can be equated with its persistent feminine status. The difficulty of accepting the death of hair, as it detaches itself from our body, parallels the perpetu- ation of entrenched and gendered representation. For female artists, hair is a material that is simultaneously specific and universal in its symbolism. It can be used as a metaphor for the female body, for the dislocation and invisibility of women, for the various political and social expectations placed upon women, for the constricted, and constricting, images of women in the beauty industry, and for the prejudice attached to everyday vanity. For women, and only women, hair is a subversive tool for questioning the female status and the human condition. n

Kathryn Lloyd is an artist and writer based in London. She is a regular contributor to art magazines including Art Monthly, and was Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts in 2016.

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13_KathrynLloyd_FINAL.indd 10 05/01/2017 20:10 Susan Hiller: Analysis and Ecstasy

Karen Wright

Susan Hiller in her studio in Swiss Cottage, London

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14_SusanHiller_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 20:12 hen I met Susan Hiller in London she was waiting for me Win a wine bar close to her soon-to-be demolished studio in Swiss Cottage. The building has been condemned for containing asbestos, but Hiller thinks it’s an excuse for putting up yet another expensive block of flats. Instead, she is using a studio in a building owned by SPACE in Bow, with a commute that takes her over an hour. The building is full of other artists who have had similar evictions due to buildings condemned by gentrification. She does not mind the long commute — she reads on her way, but she does mind that the studio is unheated when she arrives. She tells me, ‘I never wanted to do art. I came to Europe with a large grant in 1965 to finish my PhD in anthropology. I had discovered a book by Margaret Mead at school about anthropology as a career for women. Mead was famous when I was growing up. Sex here and sex there. All these titles.’ (To set the record straight, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) is the only publication that Mead wrote with the word ‘sex’ in the title.) ‘In the 1960s the books were becoming more and more trendy. [Mead is credited with kick-starting the sexual revolution in America.] She was an adviser to presidents. Growing up, she was empowering.’ Hiller continues, ‘What was wrong in anthropology? It was the residue of colonialism and therefore anthropology reverted to con- servatism. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, men would go into the field and interview men about the women who were huddled at home who worked at crafts. I went back to my advisers in anthropology to describe what I wanted to do. They said they didn’t want the subjective experience. You had to use objective language. That was the decisive reason for me to make the switch.’ ‘Although, I am glad I studied anthropology. Very few societies valorise or treasure art works. In Africa and Asia they make wonderful things for ceremonies and after — who cares? The Eskimos carved ivory in their igloos in winter and when the snow melted they would move on to hunt and would abandon everything in the mess. They would make beautiful ivory things in the winter out of boredom. The art was in the making, not in the artefact. We like the object as it tells us about the making. In other societies they pass on the making.’ Some of Hiller’s works about ‘the making’ will appear in the exhibition Entangled: Threads & Making. Work in Progress, 1980, resulted from a two week period at Matt’s Gallery, London. The

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14_SusanHiller_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 20:12 work was beautifully described by Jean Fisher in 1990 as ‘a narrative about the nature of creative utterances’. Fisher continued:

During the first week, the artist was continuously present in the Matt’s Gallery, evolving the project and discussing its progress with visitor. One aim was to use the existing dual function of the space as studio and gallery — a place of play and invention — as well as place of display. The artist had begun by moving into the space her work table and several paintings that had been exhibited earlier. She then proceeded to unravel the weave of one canvas, thread by thread. At the end of each day, the pulled strands were hung in skeins on the wall. At the end of the first week, each skein was hand-worked, by knotting, looping or braiding, so that they became individual three-dimensional “thread drawings” or doodles, while the remaining canvases were cut into small rectangles, baled into little bundles and given a date stamp. The “doodles” were pinned to the walls and the bundles displayed on small shelves and exhibited during the second week. These vivacious figures were therefore not predetermined; they arose from the artist’s “feeling for the materials” and her response to the energy of the space, and represented “the internal processes” which [were] invisible during the monotonous craft-like pulling of thread.1

When I met Susan, she placed a sheet of her writing about her works, which she terms ‘painting blocks’, down on the table between us. I incorporate it fully here:

These paintings used and misused the Minimalist grid. The grid undergoes adventures and deformations when adapted to soft materials. Colours fare similarly, as Minimalist monochromes in soft or deep colours, edible and spicy, reclaim sensuality. At the same time that a principle of order is established, it is subverted. At the same time that colour is reduced to 1. Susan Hiller, a single hue, its range of tints and shades is extended. 1990, Matt’s Gallery, In this series, my conceptual approach intersects with London, Mappin Art domestic techniques (dyeing and sewing) for the simple reason Gallery, Sheffield, that it seemed to me a good way to “construct” a canvas object Third Eye Centre, taking the form of a painting — I had no feminist agenda I Glasgow.

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14_SusanHiller_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 20:12 was aware of at that time, but a set of skills available for use. In these works (and in Transformer [1973] and various paperworks which also emphasise the grid), I was setting out an approach to materials which carried through everything else I’ve done. Allowing individual units to vary although produced similarly from a recycled original, and progressing or permeating these units in an orderly, sequential grid pattern proved to be an approach suitable for cultural as well as “raw” materials. Equally related to comparative techniques in, say, descriptive linguistics, and to the importance of repetition in certain meditative or mystical practices, this method reveals surprising results in terms of ideas and in terms of beauty. I have sometimes said that I am equally interested in “analysis” and in “ecstasy” — this means that I know that orderly presentation (langue) is the best way to reveal and present the pleasures of difference (jouissance). When I was offered my first exhibition of paintings and drawings in London [Garage Art Ltd.], I thought about showing these works, but the [Piero] Manzoni show at the Tate [March-May 1974] had just exhibited some of his sewn works, and since there had been no intention on my part of referring to them — in fact I was unaware of their existence — I changed my plans. The strange thing is that the works I did show, which referred backwards to an earlier series of mine, and by extension also to Manzoni, attracted a lot of disapproval from English art critics and curators. One said to me “there is no such thing as conceptual painting”, although they’d all seen the Manzoni show and ought to have known better. My show was a failure but a specific kind of failure, maybe a failure of context... and of course my sewn works are not at all like Manzoni’s.

I ask Hiller when she decided she was going to start making art. ‘I knew that I had to leave anthropology. It all happened in a moment when I was in a lecture about African tribes and I found myself drawing the objects rather than listening to the lecturer. I had always done art. I had a drawing table in my room when I was growing up. My father was a frustrated artist. There was a lot of art at home. We went to museums. People have such short memories though. I have just curated a

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14_SusanHiller_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 20:12 small show in Chelsea about artist Monica Ross. There is a newspaper article in a vitrine that is dated 1980 with the headline “No Grants For Woman Artists”. Not a single grant from the Arts Council or British Council. There were women working then and they were known but not well known. Bourgeois had work in MoMA in the 50s and 60s — who knew? I was saying in those days “Why do we not know about women?” People ask all the time “Was Bourgeois a role model of yours?” I never heard of her until I was in my 40s. Georgia O’Keefe was my role model.’ Success has happened for Hiller, but she fights against it in her typical feisty fashion. She tells me about how Lisson Gallery took one of her ‘automatic writing’ paintings to an art fair. There was a bidding war. They took another one to a different fair and it sold on the first day. ‘They want the name and that is easy to buy. You look at artists’ rankings; I am up there, but not in terms of auction prices.’ When I ask if she is happy she counters with the core of the female lament: ‘Women are unhappy with false success.’ It may be all about definition in the end. When I question Hiller as to whether craft is high art, she retorts: ‘It is interesting to discover that ceramicists in the South West were women and that was considered craft, whereas in Japan where men make ceramics it was considered art. Every country has its good artists. The Americans are better at publicity. New York has the magazines. Other people get written in later. But people think, “So What?”.’ I finish this collage of Hiller’s words and texts with another anecdote she told me over lunch: ‘I was at a dinner seated next to Andrew Samuels, a famous Jungian analyst — he wrote a book and was married to Rozsika Parker. He wanted to talk to me about woman artists as Rozsika wrote a lot about them before she died. [Parker wrote The Subversive Stitch and was a member of Spare Rib.] He was relating to me Freud’s theory about male artists. What do male artists want? Why do they pursue this unrewarding and often parlous career? They want money and the love of beautiful women. He asked me, “What does a woman artist desire?” I said, “I do not know.” He replied, “They want to be loved!”’ n

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14_SusanHiller_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 20:12 Exhibiting Artists

CAROLINE Guggenheim Dubbino, Turin, Centre, Dallas, ACHAINTRE Collection; the 2016. In 2015 2015 and set at (b. 1969, Toulouse) Antonio Ratti she was artist in Fruitmarket Gallery, grew up in Textile Centre at residence at HIAP, Edinburgh, 2015. In Germany and now the Metropolitan Helsinki and artist in 2017 Barlow lives and works in Museum of Art, residence at YARAT represented Great London. Recent New York, and the Contemporary Art Britain at the 57th solo presentations Victoria & Albert Space, Baku. Venice Biennale. include a major Museum, London. survey exhibition at HRAFNHILDUR MARION BARUCH BALTIC Centre for GHADA AMER ARNARDÓTTIR / (b. 1929, Timişoara, Contemporary Art, (b. 1963, Cairo) lives SHOPLIFTER Romania) lives Gateshead, 2016, and works between (b. 1969, Reykjavik) and works in and BP Spotlight: New York and Paris. lives and works in Gallarate, Italy. Caroline Achaintre, Recent solo New York. Her work Recent exhibitions Tate Britain, 2014. exhibitions include has been exhibited include Sviluppo She is included in Ghada Amer at internationally, — Parallelo at British Art Show 8, Kewnig, Berlin, including shows Kunstmuseum 2015-17. 2016; Love.Earth. at Capricious Luzern, 2015 and Fire at Leila Heller 88 Gallery, New solo exhibitions ANNI ALBERS Gallery, Dubai, 2015 York; The Nordic include Teatro (1899-1994), born and Rainbow Girls House, Tórshavn della Memoria, in Berlin, was a at Cheim & Read, and Trolley Gallery, Teatro del Polopo, German-American New York, 2014. In London. In 2011 Universita del Melo, textile artist and 2007 she was one she won the Nordic Gallarate, 2015. printmaker. Albers, of the artists in the Award in Textiles. along with her first African Pavilion KARLA BLACK husband Josef, at the 52nd Venice PHYLLIDA (b.1972, Alexandria) taught at Black Biennale. BARLOW lives and works in Mountain College. (b. 1944, Newcastle Glasgow. Black Her work is included PAOLA ANZICHÉ upon Tyne) lives had a recent solo in numerous public (b. 1975, Milan) and works in exhibition at the collections including lives and works London. Solo Irish Museum The Brooklyn between Turin and exhibitions include of Modern Art, Museum; the Milan. Recent solo the Tate Britain Dublin. In 2011 Museum of Modern exhibitions include Commission, she represented Art, New York; 36.000 Knot at 2014, tryst at Scotland at the the Peggy Laboratorio del Nasher Sculpture 54th Venice

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 1 05/01/2017 20:15 Biennale, and was Museum of Art, Brătescu’s work was Abbot Hall Art nominated for the New York. exhibited Gallery, Kendal, Turner Prize. at MoMA, New York 2016. Ford’s LOUISE as part of group work is included MARGRÉT H. BOURGEOIS exhibition in numerous art BLÖNDAL (1911-2010) was Transmissions: Art in collections including (b. 1970, Reykjavik) born in Paris and Eastern Europe and Tate, National lives and works in spent most of her Latin America, Museum and Reykjavik. In 2006 life in New York. 1960-1980 in 2015. Galleries of Wales, and 2008 she was Works by Bourgeois the Arts Council nominated for the can be found in SONIA DELAUNAY Collection and Icelandic Visual Arts most significant (1885-1979) was Penguin Books. Awards. Recent museum collections a Ukranian-born solo exhibitions worldwide. She has French artist, who XIMENA include i8 Gallery, been the subject spent most of her GARRIDO-LECCA Reykavik, 2016 and of major travelling working life in Paris. (b.1980, Lima) lives Meander at Galerie retrospectives Alongside her and works between Thomas Fisher, organised by Tate husband Robert, she Lima and Mexico Berlin in 2015. In Modern, London; co-founded the art City. In 2016 2002 Blöndal was Centre Georges movement she was part of the recipient of The Pompidou, Paris; Simultanism. In FLAAC, Workplace Richard Serra Prize. The Brooklyn 1964, Delaunay was for visual artists, Museum and the first living female Genk. Recent solo REGINA BOGAT The Kunstverein, artist to have a exhibitions include (b.1928, Brooklyn) Frankfurt. retrospective Smoke Architecture lives and works in exhibition at the at 80m2 Livia New Jersey. Bogat’s GETA BRĂTESCU Louvre, Paris. In Benavides, Lima, first solo exhibition (b. 1926, Ploiești, 2015, Tate Modern 2015 and Toma was at The Country Romania) lives and presented The EY de tierra at Galería Art Centre, Spring works in Bucharest. Exhibition: Sonia Casado Santapau, Valley in 1956, In 2015 Brătescu Delaunay. Madrid in 2015. and her work has had a retrospective since been shown exhibition at LAURA FORD SONIA GOMES internationally. Tate Liverpool. (b. 1961, Cardiff) (b.1948, In September In 2016 she had lives and works in Caetanópolis, Brazil) 2017 Bogat will solo exhibitions London. Recent solo lives and works in be part of the at Hamburger exhibitions include Belo Horizonte, group exhibition Kunsthalle, Laura Ford, Brazil. Gomes was Delirious: Art at the Hamburg and Strawberry Hill, nominated for Limits of Reason at Galerie Barbara London, 2015, and the PIPA Prize in the Metropolitan Weiss, Berlin. Seen And Unseen, 2012 and 2016.

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 2 05/01/2017 20:15 Gomes’ work was held a large-scale Fruitmarket Gallery, Hiller was included included in the retrospective of her Edinburgh, 2009 in the 5th Berlin group exhibition work. Hatoum was and at Camden Biennale for Revolution in the awarded the Joan Arts Centre, Contemporary art, Making: Abstract Miró Prize in 2011. London, 2009/10. 2008 and in Sculpture by In 2016 Hauser & documenta 14, Women, 1947-2016 MARIANNE Wirth Publications 2012. Most recent at Hauser Wirth HESKE (b.1946, published her solo presentations & Schimmel, Los Alesund, Norway) diaries. include Susan Hiller: Angeles, 2016 and lives and works Magic Lantern, the 56th Venice in Oslo. Her work SHEILA HICKS (b. Surcock Museum, Biennale, All The is included in 1934, Nebraska) Beirut, 2016 and World’s Futures numerous public lives and works in Susan Hiller: Lost in 2015. Gomes was collections including Paris. In 2016, Hicks and Found, Perez included in New Centre Georges participated in the Art Museum, Miami, Shamans/Novos Pompidou, Paris; 20th Biennale of 2016. Xamãs: Brazilian The National Sydney; Glasgow Artists in The Rubell Museum of International and MAUREEN HODGE Family Collection Contemporary Weaving & Me, (b. 1941, Perth, Contemporary Art, Oslo and Hangzhou Triennial Scotland) lives and Arts Foundation, Bonnefanten- of Fiber Art. Recent works Miami, 2016/17. museum, solo presentations in Edinburgh. From Maastricht. Heske include Sheila Hicks: 1973 to 2006 Hodge MONA HATOUM represented Material Voices, was in charge (b.1952, Beirut) Norway at the Joslyn Art Museum, of the Tapestry lives and works Venice Biennale Nebraska, 2016 and Department in London. Solo in 1986, and Expo Sheila Hicks at the at Edinburgh exhibitions include 2000 in Hannover, Hayward Gallery, College of Art, now presentations at Germany. London, 2015. re-named the Centre Pompidou, Intermedia Paris, 1994; EVA HESSE SUSAN HILLER Department. Hodge Museum of (1936-1970), was (b.1940, Florida) represented Britain Contemporary Art, born in Hamburg lives and works at the International Chicago, 1997; The and lived in the in London. Hiller Tapestry Biennale in New Museum of US for most of her has had numerous Lausanne in 1965 Contemporary Art, life. Surveys of mid-career survey and 1967 and the New York, 1998 her work include exhibitions, First Triennale of and Museum of a retrospective including ICA, Textile Art in Lodz, Contemporary Art, at Tate Modern, London, 1986; Tate Poland in 1975. Sydney, 2005. In 2002/03, and Liverpool, 1996 and 2016 Tate Modern exhibitions at The Tate Britain, 2011.

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 3 05/01/2017 20:15 CHRISTIANE Paris. Her work lives and works Los Angeles, 2014 LÖHR (b. 1965, was included in between London and SIC Space for Wiesbaden, the exhibition and Brazil. In 2010, Contemporary Art, Germany) lives and Glasstress 2015: the New Museum Helsinki, 2014. works between Gotika at the 56th in New York Köln and Prato. Venice Biennale. presented a major LUCY + JORGE In 1996, at the survey of her work ORTA (b. 1966, Kunstakademie ANNETTE entitled Rivane Sutton Coldfield; Düsseldorf, Löhr MESSAGER Neuenschwander: A b.1953, Rosario) live was a Master (b.1943, Berck) Day Like Any Other. and work in France. student of Jannis lives and works Neuenschwander Lucy + Jorge Orta Kounellis. In 2016 in Paris. Recent won the Yanhyun co-founded Studio she was awarded exhibitions include Prize in 2013 and Orta in 1992, and the Pino Pascali solo presentations was shortlisted for work under the co- Award, with a at Marian Goodman the Guggenheim authorship Lucy + solo exhibition Gallery, New York, Museum’s Hugo Jorge Orta. In 2016 at Fondazione 2016; Museum Boss Prize in 2004. Attenborough Arts Museo Pino Pascali, of Modern and Neuenschwander Centre, Leicester Polignano a Mare. Contemporary held the Children’s presented a solo Other 2016 solo Art Strasbourg, Commission at exhibition of their exhibitions include 2012; Musée the Whitechapel work as part of its Gunby Estate, des Beax Arts de Gallery, London, official opening Lincolnshire Calais and La Cite 2015. ceremony. and Kunsthause Internationale de Baselland, Basel. la Dentelle et de ANN CATHRIN ARNA la Mode, Calais, NOVEMBER ÓTTARSDÓTTIR KATE MccGWIRE 2015 and Museum HØIBO (b.1979, (b.1986, Reykjavik) (b.1964, Norwich) of Contemporary Kristiansand) lives and works lives and works Art, Sydney, lives and works in Reykjavik. in London. She 2014. In 2016 in Kristiansand, Óttarsdóttir graduated from she was awarded Norway. November graduated from the the MA Sculpture the Praemium Høibo has exhibited Iceland Academy course at the Imperiale Global internationally, of the Arts in 2009. Royal College of Arts Prize, Lifetime with recent solo Óttarsdóttir has Art in 2004. Solo Achievement in presentations at had numerous exhibitions in 2016 Sculpture Carl Freedman solo shows in include Secrete Gallery, London, Reykjavik including at Galerie Huit, RIVANE NEUEN- 2014 and 2017; presentations at Hong Kong, and SCHWANDER STANDARD, Oslo, i8 Gallery, 2015; Scissure at La (b.1967, Belo 2016; Michael Kunstschlager, Galerie Particulière, Horizonte, Brazil) Thibault Gallery, 2013; Artíma gallerí,

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 4 05/01/2017 20:15 2012 and Gallerí with her solo Brussels, 2015 the Distinguished Crymo, 2009. presentation Why and Looking Back, Women in the Arts Look At Animals? Park — Platform for Award, presented SIDSEL PAASKE AGRIMIKÁ, 2015. Visual Arts, Tilburg. by the Museum of (1937-1980) was Contemporary Art, a Norwegian ANNA RAY HANNAH Los Angeles. In artist who lived (b. 1975, Leeds) RYGGEN 2016, Fondazione and worked in lives and works (1894-1970) was a Prada presented a Oslo. Recent in Hertfordshire. Swedish-born solo exhibition of presentations of her Ray studied with Norwegian artist. Saar’s work entitled work include the Maureen Hodge In 1964, Ryggen Uneasy Dancer. group exhibition in the Tapestry was the first female Art in Europe Department at artist to represent JUDITH SCOTT 1945-1968, ZKM, Edinburgh College Norway at the (1943-2005) was an Karlsruhe and of Art, where she Venice Biennale. American sculptor. solo exhibition On also taught for In 2015 Moderna Scott was born with the Verge: Sidsel six years. Recent Museet and Down’s syndrome Paaske (1937- exhibitions include National Museum and was profoundly 1980), the National The Cordis Prize of Art, Architecture deaf. Her work Museum in Oslo, at the Royal and Design, Oslo is included in Norway, curated Scottish Academy, produced a large the permanent by Stina Högkvist. Edinburgh, scale retrospective collections of the Entangled: Threads 2016, and Craft of Ryggen’s work. Museum of Modern & Making is the first Generation, St Entangled: Threads Art, San Francisco; presentation of her Andrews Museum, & Making is the first Irish Museum of work in the UK. which toured across presentation of her Modern Art, Dublin Scotland. work in the UK. and Intuit (The MARIA Centre for Intuitive PAPADIMITRIOU MARIA ROOSEN BETYE SAAR and Outsider (b. 1957, Athens) (b.1957, Oisterwijk, (b.1926, Los Art), Chicago. In lives and works the Netherlands) Angeles) lives 2015, Brooklyn between Athens lives and works and works in Los Museum, New York and Volos. In in Arnhem, the Angeles. Saar has presented the first 2003 she won the Netherlands. Recent received numerous comprehensive U.S. DESTE prize for exhibitions include awards including survey of her work. contemporary Best Mooi, Lily en two National Greek art. Maria, Galerie Fons Endowment for the SAMARA SCOTT Papadimitriou Welters, 2014; solo Arts Fellowships; (b.1985, London) represented presentation Fruits a Flintridge Visual lives and works Greece at the 56th of Love at Roberto Artists Award, in London. She Venice Biennale Polo Gallery, 1998 and, in 2013, graduated from

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 5 05/01/2017 20:15 the Royal College AIKO TEZUKA Agnelli, 2016 Gallery, Wellington, of Art in 2011. (b.1976, Toyko) and Study #14. 2016 (touring) and Recent solo lives and works Oh Mystery Girl Francis Upritchard, exhibitions include in Berlin. Recent 3, David Roberts The Hammer Developer at solo exhibitions Art Foundation, Museum, Los Pumphouse Gallery, include Stardust London, 2016. Angeles, 2014. London, 2016; Letters, Hyogo Still Life at Jupiter Prefectural Museum TATIANA JOANA Artland, Edinburgh, of Art, Hyogo, TROUVÉ (b.1968, VASCONCELOS 2015 and Silks at 2015; Lessons Cosenza, Italy) (b.1971, Paris) is Eastside Projects, for Restoration, lives and works a Portugese artist Birmingham, 2015. MAGO, Eidsvoll, in Paris. Recent living and working Akerhus, 2015 solo exhibitions in Lisbon. In 2013 KIKI SMITH and Unraveling, include The Sparkle she represented (b.1954, Restoring, Ayala of Absence, Red Portugal at the 55th Nuremberg) lives Museum, Manila, Brick Museum, Venice Biennale. In and works in 2015. Her work Beijing, 2016; From 2012, Vasconcelos New York. Smith is included in Alexandrienstrasse was the first has exhibited numerous public to the Unnamed woman to present extensively collections including Path, König Galerie, a solo exhibition worldwide and has the National Berlin and Desired at the Château de presented over Museum of Modern Lines, Central Park, Versailles, Paris. 25 solo museum and Contemporary New York, 2015 in exhibitions, Art, Korea. collaboration with URSULA von including Kiki Public Art Fund. RYDINGSVARD (b. Smith: Prints, Books ROSEMARIE 1942, Deensen) lives and Things, The TROCKEL (b.1952, FRANCIS and works Museum of Modern Schwerte, Germany) UPRITCHARD in New York. Art, New York, 2003 lives and works in (b.1976, New Solo exhibitions and Kiki Smith: A Cologne. Trockel Plymouth) lives and include Yorkshire Gathering, Whitney has won numerous works in London. Sculpture Park, Museum awards, including In 2009 Upritchard 2014/15. Recent of American the Roswitha represented major commissions Art, New York, Haftmann Prize, New Zealand at for public 2007. In 2016, 2014 and the the 53rd Venice spaces include the International Goslar Kaiserring, Biennale with her Massachusetts Sculpture Centre 2011. Recent solo presentation Save Institute of awarded Smith presentations Yourself. Recent Technology, Boston, their Lifetime include Reflections/ solo exhibitions and Princeton Achievement Riflessioni, include Jealous University, New Award. Pinacoteca Saboteurs, City Jersey.

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15_ARTIST_BIOs_FINAL.indd 6 05/01/2017 20:15 CREDITS The publishers have made every effort to Page 65: Private Collection, London. trace copyright holders but apologise for Pages 66-79: Text translated from the any omissions that may have inadvertently original Norwegian by Peter Cripps. been made. Photos courtesy Stina Högkvist. Page 80: Photo: David Ertle Cover: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & (www.davidertl.de). Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne. Page 82: Photo: Luís Vasconcelos. Courtesy Page 17: Private Collection. Photo: Unidade Infinita Projectos. Christopher Burke, © The Easton Page 84: Photo: Morgan Daly. © Ursula von Foundation/VAGA, New York/DACS, Rydingsvard. Courtesy Galerie Lelong. London 2016. Page 86: Photo: Francesco Bernardelli. Page 20: Photo: Tate Photography, 2016. Courtesy Paola Anziché. Page 23: Hauser & Wirth Collection, Page 87: Photo: Elisa Sighicelli. Switzerland; © DACS 2016. Photo: Page 89: Photo: Teri Pengilley Christopher Burke. (www.teripengilley.com). Page 24: Hauser & Wirth Collection, Page 91: Photo: Gudmundur Thoroddsen. Switzerland. Photos: Marian Iwan Courtesy i8 Gallery. (Hypostasis of Medea VIII); Cosmin Page 92: Photo: David Sandison. Bumbutz (Carpati). Page 93: Photo: Teri Pengilley Page 35: © The Josef and Anni Albers (www.teripengilley.com). Foundation/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New Page 94: Photo: Ari Magg. York and DACS, London/© DACS 2016. Courtesy i8 Gallery. Page 39: Louise Bourgeois Trust, Courtesy Page 96: Photo: Alastair Miller Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Reid, (BOUR- (www.millerphoto.fr). 4782). © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, Page 97: Photo: David Sandison. New York/DACS, London 2016. Page 99: Photo: Oliver Mark Page 44: Text translated from the original (www.oliver-mark.com). Norwegian by Katia Stieglitz. Photo Page 101: Photo: Alastair Miller courtesy NTNU University Library, dept. (www.millerphoto.fr). Gunnerus Library, Trondheim, Norway. Pages 102-115: Photography: Page 52: Courtesy Nordenfjeldske Sebastiano Pellion di Persano Kunstindustri museum, Norway. (www.sebastianopellion.it). © DACS 2016. Page 105: © Kiki Smith. Courtesy Page 57: Private Collection, Los Angeles, Timothy Taylor, London and USA. Courtesy STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo. Magnolia Editions. Photo: Vegard Kleven. Page 116: Photo: Viliina Koivisto. Page 60: Text translated from the original Page 117: Photos: Anna Ray, Anna Spanish by Josephine Watson. Pettigrew. Page 63: António Cachola Collection, Elvas. Pages 118-120: Photos: Anna Ray. Work produced and restored with the Page 122: © Rosemarie Trockel, Bonn support of Johnson & Johnson, Lda. 2017 (respectively UK equivalent). Courtesy Photo: Luís Vasconcelos. Courtesy Unidade Sprüth Magers © DACS 2016. Infinita Projectos. Page 124: Hauser & Wirth Collection, Page 64: Private Collection, London. Switzerland; © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,

15_BOB_v4.indd 1 06/01/2017 19:11 Page 124: Hauser & Wirth Collection, Page 128: Photo: Hvefisgalleri. Switzerland. Photo: Archive Hauser & Wirth Pages 130-131: Photo: Salvatore Mazza. Collection, Switzerland © DACS 2016. Page 134: Photo: Svavar Trausti Stefansson. Page 125: Courtesy Arcade, London. Page 135: Photo: Magnus Unnar. Photo: Andy Keate. Page 138: © Susan Hiller. Courtesy Lisson Page 126: Photo: Caroline Smyrliadis, Gallery. Photo: Carla Borel Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne. (www.carlaborel.co.uk). Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Suisse. Page 141: Image courtesy of the artist and Page 127: Private Collection. Matt’s Gallery, London.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to the following organisations and individuals for their support of this exhibition:

Arts Council England i8 Gallery, Iceland Kent County Council Norwegian Embassy Arcade, London Office for Contemporary Art Norway Art Fund The Baring Foundation Atelier Joana Vasconcelos The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Egill Skallagrimsson Fund STANDARD (OSLO) Embassy of Iceland Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany And those supporters who wish to remain Hauser & Wirth anonymous

Turner Contemporary is a registered charity that depends on donations to realise its vision. Registered charity no. 1129974

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