One String After Another: Labor and Lace in Contemporary Art LACED WITH HISTORY John Michael Kohler Arts Center 608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan 920-458-4473 www.jmkac.org Through May 20, 2007 By Regan Golden-McNerney What is the role of manual labor in our service driven economy? When 80% of the American workers are employed by the service industry, different techniques and products of manual labor are increasingly lumped together. What distinguishes the factory worker at the metal forge from the quilter at home? As an artist living in Milwaukee--a fading hub of industrial production and a booming locus of DIY (do-it-yourself) craft culture-- understanding and anticipating an individual's responses to these questions is an important part of navigating and experiencing the city. In Milwaukee, the balance between the service industry and labor industry has reached a crossroads. Artists and curators know this. I would like to take this unique opportunity to compare the work of contemporary artists in two current exhibitions about art and labor: Maximinimalist at the Inova gallery inside the Kenilworth building (a remodeled ammunition factory), and Laced With History at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (partially funded by the Kohler Company). Laced with History is a compact and intricate exhibition modeled after the very material it addresses--lace. While the exhibition is full of ethereal works, delicately made, Ursula von Rydingsvard's Lace Collars (2001-2002) is the exception to this rule. This piece brings physicality and weight through the cutting, sawing, marking and stacking of wood into enormous "lace collars". Rydingsvard substitutes thick cedar panels for cotton thread and hack saws for needles, but the effect is to remind the viewer of the weight of these conventions whose absence is as palpable as the dominance of the wood yokes. These conventions include not only the technical history of the lace making, but also the feminine norms of cleanliness and confinement that lace represents in Euro-American culture. The body that would wear these enormous lace collars would be a tremendous woman of mythic portions. Despite the scale of these works, familiarity is an important part of connecting Rydingsvard's piece to more traditional forms of lace. The brutish worn wooden structures somehow manage to have all of the coziness and simplicity of Sandy Harman's Lace Collar, which is only a few inches in diameter made of neutral colored thread held together with a glistening, thin white ribbon. In contrast to these soothing, tactile works, Marna Brauner Goldstein's Curiosities 16 ½ - 35 (2006) is truly discomforting. Brauner burns tiny lacy patterns into the stiff plastic inserts found inside shirt collars and cuffs. I swallowed hard when I saw these imaging the tightness of the buttoned collar around my neck. My sense of unease around these objects was multiplied by their yellowy stains created by sweat and age, exaggerated by the soft brown rings around the burn holes. Brauner's delicate, yet disrupting, piece makes an important point about how gender is subtly inscribed on the body through clothing. The tiny burn holes reference a kind of Braille, like a lacy text that codes and decodes the body. Without buttons closing off the collars and cuffs, Brauner suggests that the process of learning and relearning our gender, the work of making and remaking our identity is both carefully circumscribed and entirely unresolved. In this respect, Brauner's Curiosities resonates with the opening quote used by the curator that describes lace as a liminal space with no interior or exterior. By decorating and displaying the typically hidden inserts inside clothes that lie somewhere between the body and the surface of the garment, Brauner suggests that the liminal space lies somewhere between inside and outside, seen and unseen. Two adjacent works further the discussion about the liminal nature of lace: Barbara Broughel's Lace #1 (2005) and Merrill Mason's Lace Well (2004). Broughel's painting depicts the watery imprint of a lacy border submerged in a sea of oily black. Building on the idea of lace as liminal, it is unclear whether the frilly border is foreground or background. Similarly, Merrill Mason's piece Lace Well reveals only the imprint of a lace collar. As a plastic mold, from which limitless lace collars could be formed, Mason also suggests the importance of lace as a matrixinal structure. Matrix is derived form the word the latin word "mater" meaning mother, material, and also source of meaning. Mason's piece Lace Well suggests the potential of lace as a source for forming and multiplying symbols of femininity. Elaine Chow's works on paper also address the multiplicity of feminine identities. Chow's Lace Handkerchiefs (2005) transforms paper into lace. Her meticulously painted boxes contain hand-painted handkerchiefs on folded watercolor paper. Through the watery, gray paints, Chow gives the illusion that these boxes and their contents are aged and worn. However, the stiffness of the paper quickly gives it away that these are fabricated and leaves us wondering where are the "real" versions. Through this careful transformation of materials, Chow's works forces to us to ask, what outdated models of femininity have been discarded or could be recuperated? Chow's work also touches on the theme of detritus that underlies many of the works in the show. In several works, a piece of lace may first appear pristine, but reveal a yellowy edge--an unsettling reminder that all things bodily decay. These ideas are particularly prevalent in Anne Wilson's Mendings (1995). Using found scraps of lace, Wilson elaborates the tiny holes in the fabric with hair juxtaposing the symbolic body as represented in the clean, white lace with the real body as represented by the soft, tiny hairs. Wilson's tiny pieces are then splayed between pins and posed in a display case like specimens. In Wilson's collection, any attempt to preserve these fragments of the feminine are countered by decay and unraveling. Anya Kivarkis's derelict cameos in untitled (2006) reflect a similar process of a slow, slide into the formless. The tiny metal pins painted with enamel are almost white, like many works in the show, and it is their almost purity that causes us to fixate on the smallest patch of discoloration. Kivarkis exaggerates this Victorian symbol of wealth and prosperity, until the tiny cameos appear to be spewing thin gold chains from lacy orifices. The intimacy of the pins resonates with Wilson's Mendings, as well as the use of materials. Both artists partially transform materials that signify prosperity and purity into waste through the use of weight, lowness, and degradation. The association between lace and Victorian aesthetic is made clear through the historical examples provided by the curator. Including earlier examples of lace making that are not meant to be ironic critiques makes the work of Contemporary artists who borrow these techniques all the more powerful. Lace, and other Victorian crafts such as hair wreaths, played an important role in remembering and memorializing friends and women who had passed on. This dimension of the lace making process is evident in many of the works in the show, but particularly Donna Sharrett's Passionate Kisses (2003-2005) made of rose-petals, hair and beads embedded in wax poured over stretched canvas. Be it painting or tatting, this labor allows time for the maker to think, remember, and process everyday life. The techniques, materials, concepts and text-like structure of traditional crafts are rampant in the Contemporary painting, sculpture, fibers and ceramics. This exhibition begs the question, where we do we draw the line between these disciplines? And what does that achieve? In the age of the post-medium condition though, where the specificity of medium's conventions and history have renewed importance, where do these works lie? What conventions have these contemporary artists revived and for what purpose? The works in Laced with History suggest that the sense of touch is equally important as the sense of sight, which has long prevailed in the tradition of painting and display of art in museums. Despite the emphasis on touch, few works in the show engage the body of the viewer inside the space. This is partially due to the configuration of the space and the delicacy of the materials. For instance, Betsy Brandt's large colorful, swirl of lace made from the drippings of a hot glue gun is enclosed in a room and roped off, which detracts from the experience of the piece and limits the scope of the work in the show. Even Brandt's piece was shipped in for the show and unrolled. The only work in the exhibition that discusses the labor of installation is Jennifer Pollock Harris' Electrical Cord Piece (2006). Tremendous lengths of black electrical cords are carefully pinned to the wall in a pattern that alludes to Victorian wallpaper. The cords transgress the space between the gallery and viewer by spilling out onto the floor. The light bulb fueled by the energy that is looping through the cord is a symbol of the illumination that craft techniques, such as lace making, continue to provide for generations of new artists. Jennifer Pollock Harris's work provides a conceptual bridge between the decorative and the industrial. This piece and others in the exhibition resonate with much of the work in the current show, Maximinimalist, at the new Inova/Kenilworth gallery. This show was reviewed by Debra Brehmer for Susceptible to Images. To think of these two exhibitions in relationship to each other, is to ask, what do we know about labor? What do craft techniques, industrial production and the aesthetics of minimal art share? Donald Judd famously described his task as a Minimalist artist to be putting "one thing after another" (see Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood"). Judd implies the connection here between the labor of making Minimal art and the labor of making an industrially made object--the gesture of the factory worker and the artist are both endlessly repetitive and fractured. Where is the body of the laborer in this paradigm? Lost in a sequence of hand movements, subsumed in a world of concrete and steel? How does craft fit into this scenario? Based on the works by Rydingsvard and Pollock in Laced with History and the works by Michelle Grabner and Jill Sylvia in Maximinimalist, contemporary artists are bringing craft techniques like lace making into their practice in order to humanize the aesthetic of Minimalism. Or to go one step further, these artists attempt to humanize industrial production and elevate the routine gestures we perform in everyday life. The majority of the artists in both exhibitions are women; what does it mean for women in the art world and in society to return these more traditional techniques? Is it a reaction against feminism, or an embrace of the feminine, or both? Is it because we are freed from the necessity of making our families' garments that we can embrace these techniques as liberating, as art, or as leisure? Lastly, in an era during which service industry jobs predominantly go to women--particularly those that are lower in pay and demand service with a smile, why aren’t more women artists participating in this critique? The service industry has been heavily critique by contemporary artists, but predominantly by men such as Rirkrit Tiravanija or Santiago Sierra. How does returning to the concepts and techniques of Minimalism, craft, and/or industrial production contribute to the critique of a service-based economy? Regan Golden-McNerney is a Milwaukee-based artist and frequent contributor to Susceptible to Images. Comments? Email comments@susceptibletoimages.com <<<<<Back to contents page Copyright 2007. 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| Marna Brauner Goldstein, Curiosities: Festooned, 2003. Found textiles and beads. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center. |
| Jennifer Pollock Harris, Electrical Cord Piece, 2006. Electrical cord and bulb. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center. |
| Betsy Brandt, Whirl (detail), 2001. Hot glue and pigments. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center. |
| Artist Anna Peach during installation of work, Spirit House, 2003-2005. Found textiles. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center. |