the Hierarchy of Art
The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34
Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–80 Elissa Auther
Elissa Auther is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her essay for the Journal of Modern Craft is derived from her book manuscript about the innovative use of fi ber across the art world in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent publications about the position of craft under modernism include “The Decorative, Abstraction and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27(3) (December 2004) and “Andy Warhol, Wallpaper and Contemporary Installation Art,” for the forthcoming edited collection Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art.
Abstract “Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960– 1980” both explores the artistic, historical, institutional and extra-aesthetic forces affecting the formation of the fi ber movement and evaluates the curatorial strategies of Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen to negotiate the hierarchy of art and craft in order to elevate fi ber as a medium of “high art.” The analysis considers the emergence of the category of fi ber art in the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural contexts in which fi ber or textiles were utilized in the period, strategies of transcending the hierarchy of art and craft, and other relations of dominance and subordination that defi ned fi ber’s marginality in the hierarchy of the arts and shaped the responses of artists, critics and curators to aesthetic boundaries.
Keywords: fi ber, craft, feminism, decorative, hierarchy, modernism, Mildred Constantine, weaving.
The Journal of Modern Craft
Volume I—Issue I March 2008 pp. 13–34
Reprints available directly from the publishers
Photocopying permitted by licence only
© Berg 2008
14 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther
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In 1972, Mildred Constantine—a former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York—reproduced Adams’s Construction in Beyond Craft, the fi rst in-depth study of the emerging fi ber art movement.1 This important text, co-authored with textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, chronicled the movement’s evolution, defi ned its aesthetic priorities and defended work made of fi ber as “fi ne art.” In 1963, Adams’s unorthodox woven works had been included in New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts’ exhibition Woven Forms (Figure 3), a show that Constantine and Larsen’s study singled out as groundbreaking.2
Signifi cantly, critic Lucy Lippard also exhibited Adams’s Construction in her eclectic, “post-minimalist” show Eccentric Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966 (Figure 4). Unlike Beyond Craft, Eccentric Abstraction situated Adams’s Construction among avant-garde work by such emerging artists as Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman and Keith Sonnier. The show’s works utilized a variety of non-traditional, fl exible media, including wire mesh, vinyl, cloth and rope.
Saret exhibited Untitled in 1970 in New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery’s January group show String and Rope (Figure 5), alongside works by Christo, Fred Sandback, Bruce Nauman and Robert Morris. Arts Magazine, one of the era’s major fi ne-art periodicals, reproduced Saret’s piece and a critic writing for the Christian Science Monitor noted the use of fi ber as an autonomous abstract element. The “artists included,” he wrote, “use string or rope (or thread), not as line, but as falling, tangling, stretching, or coiling matter” (Andreae 1970: 58).3
Fig 1 Alan Saret, Untitled, 1968, rope and wire, variable dimensions.
Alan Saret’s Untitled (1968) (Figure 1), a work of rope and wire and Alice Adams’s Construction (1966) (Figure 2), of rope and steel cable, share signifi cant formal similarities. Both works are fl oor based, of similar size and shape, and both utilize materials associated with “craft,” hand labor or industry. Indeed, one could conclude that the same artist made both works. But this is not the case, and the two artists were associated with very different artistic circles in the 1960s: Saret was an anti-form sculptor, whereas Adams was associated with what came to be known as the fi ber art movement. Moreover, the works were exhibited and received very differently. Comparing the varied reception of these two similar objects reveals not only fi ber’s arrival as a new medium of “high art” but also how this elevation of fi ber issued from multiple sites or positions, each with a distinct location within the complex network of power relations governed by the application of the term “craft” in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Studies like Beyond Craft (1972), exhibitions such as Woven Forms (1963), Eccentric Abstraction (1966) and String and Rope (1969), and works in fi ber like Saret’s and Adams’s are representative of a number of projects in the 1960s and 1970s that signaled fi ber’s potential as a fi ne-art medium and illustrate different relations to the art world’s center of power. In each case, fi ber, that is, craft—typically dismissed or even invisible as a force shaping the art world in this period—was in actuality central to its
constitution. Beyond Craft and Woven Forms attempted to elevate fi ber from the realm of “craft” to that of “art” and were undertaken by individuals and institutions dedicated to legitimating new work in materials traditional to craft. The goal of legitimating so-called fi ber art as “Art” sets these projects apart from exhibitions such as Eccentric Abstraction and String and Rope, which attempted to capture sculpture’s latest vanguard. Here craft functioned as a conceptual limit, essential to the elevation of art—in the words of
Fig 2 Alice Adams, Construction, 1966, rope and steel cable. Robert Mates photographer. Courtesy of the artist.
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Fig 3 Installation view of work by Lenore Tawney in Woven Forms, Museum of Contemporary Craft, New York, 1963. Ferdinand Boesch photographer. Courtesy of the American Craft Council Library/Museum of Contemporary Craft Archives.
Fig 4 Installation view of Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, 1966. Rudy Burckhardt photographer. Courtesy of the Fischbach Gallery records, 1954–1978. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Glenn Adamson, as “a border that can never be reached, but is nonetheless intrinsic to any sense of position” (Adamson 2007: 2). Eccentric Abstraction and String and Rope were both produced by members of the art
world whose authority in itself legitimated the work in question, a privilege not fully extended to Constantine and Larsen. Rather than focusing on whether Saret’s Untitled was a work of art, these exhibitions theorized the artistic use of fi ber and fi ber-like materials in relation to previous examples of non- traditional media in sculpture and to other
Fig 5 String and Rope, Installation view, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1969. Photographer Geoffrey Clements.
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conditions, such as craft, that oppose the defi nition of art.
Despite these differences in the projects’ orientations and goals, they all probed fi ber’s symbolic power, paradoxically generated by its subordination in the history of art through deep-rooted associations with utility or craft, a phenomenon Saret’s and Adams’s works also illuminate. In challenging the subordination of fi ber as a medium of craft or of primarily utilitarian value, Adams’s and Saret’s works additionally illustrate the role fi ber played in testing the art world’s aesthetic boundaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, with the exception of Adams’s Construction, which circulated widely, the status of “high art” remained elusive for the objects that Constantine and Larsen featured in Beyond Craft. In fact, fi ber art in this period was typically viewed as neither art nor craft, but as between the two categories, thwarting the works’ potential to undermine the hierarchy of media responsible for fi ber’s low aesthetic status.
This article examines the efforts of Mildred Constantine—the movement’s principal architect and supporter—and her collaborator Jack Lenor Larsen to eliminate this ambiguity, securing fi ber’s identity as a medium of high art. Their strategy was defi ned by the goal of assimilating fi ber-based work to the fi ne arts and did not address the fact that the boundary separating art from craft is constructed rather than natural. Although this strategy led to an unfortunate collusion with the very hierarchy of media they sought to transform and in hindsight might seem obviously fl awed, my analysis suggests that the options available to them as defenders of fi ber art were tremendously constrained by the period’s artistic discourse
defi ning the work of art, particularly its autonomy from social contexts and practices outside the art world with which fi ber was intimately connected. The reasons surrounding the art world’s resistance to fi ber art were complex and varied, involving the cultural connotations of fi ber, popular trends in fi ber crafts and gender bias deriving from fi ber’s association with women and the domestic realm; with such factors working against their project, perhaps no curatorial strategy Constantine and Larsen could have adopted at the time would have fared better.
The Aesthetic Status of Fiber in the 1960s and 1970s In 1961, with Lenore Tawney’s solo exhibition at the Staten Island Museum, fi ber art as it would be recognized in the following two decades made its public debut in a fi ne-art context. The show consisted of forty works produced between 1955 and 1961 in a technique now referred to as open-warp weave: a structure in which large parts of the warp are left unwoven. The reception of this and subsequent work demonstrates that from the start fi ber artists experienced considerable resistance from the realms of both craft and fi ne art for the way their work violated conventions of both practices. Tawney recalled that her early “open-warp weaves . . . caused quite a controversy [amongst weavers]. No one had done this kind of weaving … It’s against the rules and those people who go by the rules were against it” (Tawney 1978: n.p.).
However, posing a challenge to the defi nition of weaving in the 1960s did not automatically confer the status of “art” on Tawney’s work; in the “high” art world too, her work’s identity was unstable. For instance,
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the small catalog for Tawney’s 1961 exhibition reveals that on the one hand the show was sponsored by the “Section of Handcrafts” but elsewhere attempts to position Tawney as a “fi ne artist.” In particular, the appreciation written by Tawney’s close friend, painter Agnes Martin, defends her artistic identity, praising the work’s “originality” and its relation to larger art-world trends toward exploring new media.
Before Tawney’s Staten Island Museum show was even mounted, the artist had started using her open-warp method to combine different weave structures in a single work by dividing and redividing the warp as the weave was in progress. The resulting works, which she called “woven forms” (see Figure 3), were monumental in scale, departed from the rectilinear shape of loom-woven fabrics and were not even remotely utilitarian. Given their size, which ranged from 11 to 27 feet (3.3 to 8.1 m) in height, their abstraction (like some of her earlier open-warp weaves, the “woven forms” have no pictorial content) and Tawney’s method of hanging them from the ceiling, her work sharply departed from the conventions of the “decorative wall hanging,” the category in which weaves without everyday utility were normally classifi ed in the 1960s.
Yet this work too fell between accepted divisions between art and craft. For instance, Tawney’s 1962 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago was installed in the Textiles Department and Woven Forms, the 1963 group show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts that included her work, also institutionally situated her weaving as craft. Even so, a reviewer for the New York Times remarked that Tawney “is more
than just a weaver—she is also an artist. Unfortunately, craft work has for many years implied to the general public work done by amateurs . . . with little merit . . . Miss Tawney’s craft is in marked contrast to this mistaken concept and her woven forms are considered by experts to be works of fi ne art” (O’Brien 1963).
This reviewer’s willingness to embrace Tawney’s work as “fi ne art” against prevailing sentiment that connected craft media to the amateur or hobbyist, however, was more the exception than the rule. Subsequent reviews continued to question her work’s artistic status. As late as 1990, on the occasion of Tawney’s retrospective at the American Craft Museum, Roberta Smith drew a negative conclusion in her review for the New York Times, leaving the impression that the intervening years had done little to resolve questions about the works’ status and identity within the art world: “Mrs. Tawney’s work exists in a limbo that is endemic to much contemporary craft: it has departed from craft and function without quite arriving at art . . . Handsome and impressive as her best efforts often are . . . [m]ost of them sustain comparison neither to such achievements in weaving as Navajo blankets, nor to contemporary painting and sculpture” (Smith 1990).
Smith’s evaluation presents another facet of the picture that often consigned Tawney’s work to an art world “limbo,” the artist’s refusal of the utilitarian associations of craft. Instead of exploring this aspect of her work, however, Smith uses Tawney’s departure from utility or function to reassert the differences between craft (Navajo weaving) and art (painting and sculpture) that the woven forms actually complicated.
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These equivocations over the value of Tawney’s woven work indicate the institutional obstacles artists, critics and curators of fi ber art faced in trying to legitimate their work or the genre of fi ber art. Examining Constantine and Larsen’s efforts to consecrate fi ber art provides an opportunity to look more systematically at the questions of artistic legitimacy that Tawney’s work provoked.
Wall Hangings The fi rst major American exhibition of the new genre of fi ber art was MoMA’s Wall Hangings (Figures 6 and 7), co-curated by Constantine and, at her invitation, Larsen. With this exhibition, the two established themselves as the fi ber movement’s leading experts and also set the canon of vanguard fi ber art (or “Art Fabric,” as they called it). Wall Hangings presented to the American museum-going public the fi rst international survey of primarily large-scale, abstract woven and off-loom work in fi ber.
Planned by Constantine since 1966, the exhibition toured eleven cities in 1968, returning in early 1969 to MoMA, where it was installed, at Constantine’s insistence, in the museum’s fi rst-fl oor special exhibition galleries, rather than in the Department of Architecture and Design. To the American fi ber world’s leading triumvirate of Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks (Figure 8) and Claire Zeisler, Constantine and Larsen added Kay Sekimachi (Figure 9), Walter Nottingham and Ed Rossbach, among others. Some of the exhibition’s most advanced work came from abroad, including that of the Swiss Françoise Grossen, Yugoslavian (Croatian) Jagoda Buic, and Poles Magdalena Abakanowicz and Wojcieh Sadley, whose woven forms radically departed from the conventions of tapestry as practiced in Europe at the time.
Regrettably, given the exhibition’s importance in the history of the American fi ber movement, the only national art-world press Wall Hangings received was a review that Craft Horizons commissioned from
Fig 6 Wall Hangings, Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969.
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Fig 7 Wall Hangings, Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969.
Fig 8 Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife Goes On, 1977, silk, linen, and wool elements ca. 180 in. long, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.
sculptor Louise Bourgeois.4 Bourgeois’s response to the show contrasts strikingly with the curatorial statement written by Constantine and Larsen for the exhibition catalog. Whereas they asserted: “During the last ten years, developments in weaving have caused us to revise our concepts of this craft and to view the work within the context of twentieth-century art” (1969: n.p.), Bourgeois concluded:
The pieces in the show rarely liberate themselves from decoration . . . A painting or a sculpture makes great demand on the onlooker at the same time that it is independent of him. These weaves, delightful as they are, seem more engaging and less demanding. If they must be classifi ed, they would fall somewhere between fi ne and applied art. (Bourgeois 1969: 33f)
These opposing evaluations speak to the period’s symbolic boundaries between
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art and non-art and such boundaries’ centrality to maintaining a hierarchy of media separating fi ne art from craft. They also point to a set of real and conceptual obstacles heavily borne by fi ber artists and their supporters, who sought to transcend the aesthetic boundaries structuring the art world in the 1960s and 1970s. It is
clear that although Bourgeois disagreed with Constantine and Larsen about the works’ value, the question of their identity preoccupied them all. This preoccupation continued to burden Constantine and Larsen and subsequent scholars of fi ber art, who took up issues of category over the nature of the work itself. Bourgeois also exhibits concern about categories of art, which she strategically upheld in this review by using fi ber art to explain what painting and sculpture were not.
Bourgeois’s evaluation of the works in Wall Hangings as “decoration” traded upon the distinction between art and craft, reasserting the aesthetic boundaries fi ber artists and their supporters sought to overcome.5 In her words, the objects were “delightful” and “engaging.” In the writing of modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg, to be either was to succumb to the decorative by making “immediately pleasing” what true artists achieved through rigorous intellectual struggle and risk-taking (Greenberg 1945; 1986: 41). Bourgeois reasserts the high-art status of painting and sculpture by claiming that these genres place a “demand” upon the viewer absent in fi ber art. The opposition she reinforces—that between the merely attractive object and that which requires sustained attention—is central to the hierarchy of art and craft, which associates art with the cognitive realm, craft with mere surface effect.
In an interview, Constantine related her reaction to Bourgeois’s review of Wall Hangings: “I was furious,” she reported. “It represented exactly the attitude we were trying to work against” (conversation with the author 1999). Despite their awareness of the negative art-world attitudes concerning
Fig 9 Kay Sekimachi, Nagare VII, 1970, woven monofi lament, 80 × 9 × 9 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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media traditionally associated with craft, Constantine and her co-curator attempted to assert fi ber’s art status by introducing the new genre into the fi ne art world on the terms set by that world. This strategy required that they adhere to the dominant philosophy of art voiced by Bourgeois and that they collude in maintaining the hierarchy of media responsible for fi ber’s general exclusion from “high art.”
Two factors in particular made this strategy meaningful to Constantine and Larsen, factors that were themselves effects of the hierarchy of art and craft and indicate its self-perpetuating nature. The most important such factor was that contesting the hierarchy of art and craft rather than assimilating select objects (those without utility, for instance) into the category of “high art” would have been to destabilize the very artistic status they claimed for fi ber artists. The identity of fi ber artists, because they worked in a medium traditional to craft, required authorization different from that bestowed upon artists working securely within the “high art” world. The necessity of establishing one’s art as art was a handicap that belonged only to the artist working in craft media. An excellent example of the nearly automatic security afforded the artist with a position within the “high art” world is demonstrated by the critic Hilton Kramer’s review of Lucy Lippard’s 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction for the New York Times. About the show, which featured work that radically fl outed sculptural conventions of the time, Kramer wrote: “[although the] work is neither painting nor exactly sculpture . . . art—of some sort—it is” (1966). The lack of legitimacy afforded an exhibition such as Wall Hangings illustrates that this basic security
was not extended to fi ber artists in the 1960s and 1970s.
A second factor informing Constantine and Larsen’s approach was the fact that overtly challenging the hierarchy of art and craft might also undermine their authority as curators, with negative consequences for fi ber art’s legitimation. Constantine, like others of her generation at MoMA (she joined the staff in 1948), was committed to the museum’s mission of identifying and collecting modern works of the highest achievement in art and design, a goal that included examples of applied art or craft to the extent such objects conformed to modernist norms of innovation and abstraction. Anni Albers’s solo exhibition in 1949, MoMA’s fi rst exhibition of weaving, exemplifi es this approach to craft and design. Albers’s association with the Bauhaus, her commitment to experimentation and her adaptation of non-objective form to weaving all refl ected the museum’s vision of the modern in art.
In the 1960s, exemplary objects of craft and design were still subject to this form of evaluation, which helped to shape Constantine’s curatorial vision for Wall Hangings. An anecdote of Constantine’s about her experience as a curator while MoMA was directed by René d’Harnoncourt is revealing in this regard. Sometime in the mid-1960s a hand-thrown vessel by the celebrated Japanese potter Kitaoji Rosanjin was under consideration for acquisition. In Constantine’s account, d’Harnoncourt put this rhetorical question to his curators at the acquisitions meeting: “Do you know when a pot is no longer a pot but a work of art?” (in conversation with the author).6 To Constantine, such a question affi rmed
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that the distinction to be found between art and craft resided in the object rather than being culturally projected onto it. Such an assumption underscores Constantine and Larsen’s confi dence regarding the art status they asserted for the objects exhibited in Wall Hangings.
The story also foregrounds the authority that rested in the curator (in the capacity of his or her “eye”) to discern quality in objects of cultural signifi cance—that is, to distinguish between good and bad, “high” and “low,” “fi ne art” and mere “craft.”7 A theory of boundary maintenance in the arts that pointed to the role of extra-aesthetic factors such as gender, different contexts of production, or cultural presumptions about craft in the production of distinctions of value had the potential to undermine this curatorial and ultimately institutional form of power in the 1960s. To the extent that the authorization of an object as art is only as good (that is, as convincing) as the authority of the authorizer, undercutting the myth of the “good eye,” could result in the forfeiture of institutional validation required by a new genre or movement.
A straightforward way of approaching the conception of value that Constantine and Larsen used—a conception of value as intrinsic to an object—is to consider it alongside the recontextualization of non-Western objects from ethnographic specimens to works of art, a taxonomic shift to which Constantine and Larsen’s conception is related. Recent anthropological and art historical considerations of shifts in classifying objects previously recognized for their ethnographic value demonstrate that museum strategies of acquisition and display that elide issues of context, technique and
utility in favor of disinterested contemplation of an object according to a modernist theory of art are premised upon art’s autonomy from the social realm.8 As Mary Anne Staniszewski has shown in her study of the history of exhibitions at MoMA, the type of installation now considered standard in fi ne- art museums—in which works are spotlit, arranged at eye level on a neutral-colored wall and widely spaced—emerged in the US in the 1930s.9 This type of installation, which “facilitated appreciation of the singular artwork,” was also applied to the exhibition of ethnic “artifacts” in museums in the 1930s and 1940s, refl ecting a growing aesthetic appreciation of non-Western objects. In general, the aestheticized display of ethnographic objects suppressed issues of utility and highlighted form, creating an atemporal, formalist viewing experience unencumbered by the social formations that gave rise to the work. As scholars of exhibition history have pointed out, this reconceptualization confi rms the aesthetic categories and assumptions of the West’s “high art,” leaving intact the hierarchy of the arts and stripping those aspects of non-Western objects in confl ict with that hierarchy’s values.
Constantine, who assisted d’Harnoncourt in a major exhibition that employed this strategy—1954’s Ancient Art of the Andes—was familiar with such a curatorial strategy and it undoubtedly infl uenced the conception of Wall Hangings and subsequent fi ber-art projects. As installation photographs of the show suggest (see Figures 6 and 7), Constantine and Larsen hung the work according to a method of displaying painting and sculpture calculated to enhance the objects’ visual impact and autonomy.
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Although such installation was by then typical at MoMA for painting and sculpture, its adoption in Wall Hangings can be seen as strategic given fi ber’s lack of autonomy— that is, its extensive use in cultural and practical contexts outside the art world. The exhibition displayed works in relative isolation within the austere, white-walled special exhibition galleries. This strategy was carried over to the catalog, which lacked detailed information about technique and enhanced the works’ formal qualities by using photographs in which each object was suspended in space against a dark ground, a classic mid-century method of photographing ethnic objects that privileged form over implied utility.10
Constantine and Larsen’s approach to the consecration of fi ber art has a logic rooted in a belief in formalism as a democratic, legitimating discourse capable of transforming any work into an object of pure, aesthetic contemplation. As the negative reception of Wall Hangings suggests, however, applying a formalist exhibition strategy did not resolve the hierarchy of art and craft Constantine and Larsen sought to transcend. An important factor at play here is the way fi ber’s “low” aesthetic status derived in part from its extensive use in cultural and practical contexts outside the art world. Briefl y examining these contexts illuminates the larger challenge that Constantine and Larsen faced in attempting to elevate fi ber as a medium of “high art.”
Utility and Amateurism Outside the “high” art world, fi ber gained a new visibility in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s with revivals of the traditional crafts of hand weaving, quilting,
embroidery, dyeing, knotting and basketry. The social and artistic contexts and practices surrounding these revivals included the back-to-the-land and hippie movements, the renewed interest in folk art around the American Bicentennial, trends in the personalization of clothing like the adoption of African dress by African Americans, the feminist recuperation of women’s history, the revival of traditional arts of minority communities in the South and Southwest, and the popular craze of macramé. Increased funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to support regional arts and a burgeoning commercial market for craft and folk art bolstered interest in such work.11 These contexts and practices demonstrate both the richness of what ought to be defi ned as a major craft revival in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and the diffi culty, for fi ber artists, of distinguishing their work from this nebulous conglomeration.
The frequent connection made between fi ber art and macramé—an association encouraged by fi ber artists’ extensive use of off-loom techniques such as knotting, looping, linking and plaiting—shows why fi ber artists strove to distinguish their work from popular craft. The term macramé, which denotes a form of lateral knotting probably Arabic in origin, referred in the late 1960s and 1970s to a genre of useful objects (jewelry, belts, handbags, lampshades, plant holders and hammocks, for instance) produced using “decorative” knotting techniques. Macramé’s enormous popularity is attested to by the fact that fi ber artist and macramé specialist Mary Walker Phillip’s best-selling book Step- by-Step Macramé (1970) had sold more than a million copies by 1976. In 1971, macramé’s
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mass cultural appeal even led the Museum of American Folk Art in New York to organize a major exhibition on the subject as part of its NEA-funded series, Rediscovery of Grass Roots America.12 Unusually, this exhibition placed contemporary macramé within the larger history of knotted-fabric construction, bringing together, among other examples, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European lace, knotted fabrics and jewelry of North American Indians, the decorative knotted work of sailors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the large- scale knotted work of fi ber artist Françoise Grossen, which emphasized the fi ber art- macramé connection.
The macramé hobby craze was problematic for the fi ber movement because it reinforced assumptions about fi ber as a woman’s medium or of “low” art status. In her 1979 interview for Arts Magazine, Claire Zeisler (Figure 10) took advantage of a question about technique to distinguish her knotting (often in macramé) from the “decorative” knots used by “macramé artists,” suggesting the sensitivity of the topic for artists working in fi ber.
J. PATRICE MARANDEL: In your own mind, do techniques such as knotting or cutting . . . set you apart from other fi ber artists?
CLAIRE ZEISLER: When I fi rst started knotting, it was not a trend . . . You certainly have heard the word macramé. Some people referred to my work as Claire Zeisler’s macramé. That’s when I hit the ceiling . . . I do mind the word macramé because macramé today means a decorative knot and I use my knotting technique as structure . . . The knot becomes the base for the piece, like
the canvas is the base for a painting. (Arts Magazine 1979: 151f)
Zeisler’s insistence on distinguishing between her work and popular craft underscores the degree to which macramé had become a cultural phenomenon that impinged upon the fi ber movement’s bid for status as art. It is likely that Zeisler’s discussion of technique in the pages of Arts Magazine—then a leading periodical of contemporary art that rarely dedicated copy to work in traditional craft media—was a deliberate attempt to persuade readers that work in fi ber shared important features with art rather than the popular hobby of macramé. Her reference to knotting as integral to the “structure” of her pieces emphasizes her art’s formalist nature, as does her explicit parallel between her work and painting. The latter comparison places her work fi rmly in the category of “high art” by invoking its pre-eminent medium to highlight not craft-oriented technique but art-oriented practice. Zeisler’s rhetorical strategy was similar to that adopted by numerous fi ber artists and their supporters who were work ing to change the place of fi ber in the art world’s traditional hierarchy, dismissing its con nections to activities classifi ed as “non-art.”
This effort was actually initiated some years earlier by Anni Albers, who in 1940 entered into a debate over the function and value of hand weaving with Mary Atwater, America’s leading spokesperson for the non-professional weaver, in the pages of The Weaver, a nationally distributed quarterly for the American hand-weaving community. Atwater and Albers’s confl ict over the meaning and role of textiles not only helps to demonstrate how deep the association of
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Fig 10 Claire Zeisler, Coil Series III—A Celebration, 1978, natural hemp and wool, 66½ × 34 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase.
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amateurism with fi ber runs, but also points to another serious hurdle fi ber artists (working on or off the loom) faced in defi ning their work as art in the 1960s and 1970s—fi ber’s gendered associations.
Atwater, perhaps best known as the founder of the Shuttle Craft Guild and its correspondence course in weaving in 1920, advocated a view of weaving as a leisure-time or therapeutic activity. She also researched nineteenth-century weaving traditions, publishing her fi ndings alone or in publications for hand weavers. Her research was instrumental to the survival of these historical and regional practices, but her practical how-to approach ran counter to the idea of weaving as an art form. As Ed Rossbach put it, “She told Americans what to weave, how to weave, [and] what to do with their weavings” (Rossbach 1983: 22).13
Unlike Atwater, Albers regarded herself as an artist and was particularly outspoken regarding hand weaving’s potential to move beyond a leisure pursuit with utilitarian imperatives. She encapsulated her views in a statement from 1959 that implored, “let threads be articulate … and fi nd a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at” (Albers 1959: 5).
Albers’s article for The Weaver commented upon the state of contemporary hand weaving in the United States and illustrated textiles produced by her students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.14 The publication coincided with the height of the Appalachian craft revival, in which weaving played a major role, providing the immediate context for her sharp critique of “recipes” and “traditional formulas, which once proved successful”
(Albers 1940: 3). Albers argued that “such work is often no more than a romantic attempt to recall a temps perdu” and that it refl ected the state of “isolation” and “degeneration” of US hand weaving in the period (Albers 1940: 3). Albers called for a return to “fundamentals” and free experimentation on and off the loom to foster innovation and she suggested that the resulting development of new forms in fi ber could be art.
Atwater, who had no interest in the imperatives of industry, modern design, or art, responded to Albers with the predictably titled piece “It’s Pretty—But is it Art?” which she published in her advice column for The Weaver.15 Not surprisingly, Atwater took offense at Albers’s criticisms of faithfulness to tradition and reproduction of historical patterns (or “recipes,” as Atwater called them). Atwater found the idea that a textile might lack utility or be considered art preposterous and she asserted that fi ber and weaving were essentially useful and of value primarily as an “escape from the distresses or the hum-drum detail of our daily lives” (Atwater 1941: 13). Atwater responded to Albers’s emphasis upon experimentation, imagination and the creation of new forms (key elements of modernism in the arts) with similar disdain, defending the right of her readers (mostly women isolated at home with little access to artistic training) to draw aesthetic pleasure from weaving regardless of their level of expertise or whether they relied upon a pattern. Atwater’s acceptance, even promotion, of her audience’s amateurism raises the issue of fi ber’s connections to femininity and domesticity, associations that plagued fi ber artists in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Femininity and Domesticity As Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock asserted over twenty-fi ve years ago in their groundbreaking study Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, “the sex of the artist matters. It conditions the way art is seen and discussed” (Parker and Pollock 1981: 50). This is nowhere more evident in the late twentieth century than in the history of the fi ber movement, whose status and reception was affected by weaving’s near-universal association with women and the domestic realm.
At its worst, the effort to challenge the gendering of fi ber as “women’s work” actually reinforced its association with femininity and its low place in the art-world hierarchy. In the late 1960s, when off-loom techniques rose to prominence, the work of fi ber artists adopting these techniques was interpreted as free from the craft tradition’s conventional values by virtue of their rejection of the loom. Critics such as Rose Slivka posited an antithesis between loom and off-loom construction techniques, praising the latter’s superior artistic quality. In the provocatively titled piece “Hard String,” her review of the 1972 group exhibition Sculpture in Fiber for Craft Horizons, Slivka characterized the loom as an impotent instrument, a gendering of technology that had the unintended effect (as did the title of the show) of associating off-loom fi ber art with the perceived masculine virility of modern art.16
Not surprisingly, given this context, the housewife is a key fi gure in critical considerations of fi ber art, where she signifi es amateurism and lack of creativity. In criticism about fi ber art, this set of associations often had to be overcome before the writer could consider a work
of fi ber art worthy of discursive attention. Fiber’s problematic association with the domestic accounts for the distinctly confessional tone or hedging found in fi ber- art criticism that invokes the fi gure of the housewife. Katherine Kuh’s article about the work of Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler for Saturday Review in 1968, “Sculpture: Woven and Knotted,” is typical. Despite her eventual enthusiasm, Kuh opens the article by admitting her own negative assumptions about weaving, shared, presumably, by her readers: “Until recently, I always considered weaving a ladylike pursuit for frustrated housewives, but I am drastically changing my mind. The best weavers are, to be sure, still women, but some of them are also fi rst-rate artists” (Kuh 1968: 36). The use of the qualifi cation “also,” as in “also fi rst-rate artists,” echoes George O’Brien’s language in his review of Tawney’s work in the 1963 exhibition Woven Forms cited earlier. In that piece, Tawney is “more than a weaver—she is also an artist,” a qualifi cation that O’Brien used later in the review to question craft’s amateur associations. In Kuh’s assessment, the amateur associations of craft are now infl ected by gender, yet another barrier to participation in the art world in this period faced by fi ber artists—a problem shared by female artists generally, in fact. Critic Gregory Battcock’s review of Claire Zeisler’s show at the Richard Feigen gallery in 1969 provides another example of how the image of the housewife was used to great effect in backhanded compliments during the 1960s:
Mops, fl oppiness and house-wifey dumpiness might distract the viewer, but only momentarily. The colors are certainly more arresting than the Sheriff
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in Darien Conn. and the general tone is more elegant than The Hilton Inn. Zeisler’s sculptures emphasize texture at the expense of form and since texture is emphasized in just the right way, it’s O.K. (Battcock 1969: 65)
For Kuh the housewife is capable but frustrated, while for Battcock she is dumpy— differences that might have to do with the differing gender of the two critics or the audience for whom they were writing. In any case, Battcock’s idea of the housewife and the comparison of Zeisler’s work to mops remove fi ber from even the sphere of craft, downgrading it to drudgery. Ultimately, Kuh’s and Battcock’s language permits notice of Zeisler’s work only to the extent that their own critical authority regarding the evaluation of art is assured.
This brief examination of fi ber’s extra- aesthetic associations sheds additional light on Constantine and Larsen’s approach to elevating fi ber in a manner that completely elided its history as a craft and its presence in numerous contemporary non-art contexts. Alternate approaches proved no more successful and further demonstrate the severity of the constraints they faced in championing a material historically categorized and marginalized as craft.
For instance, hybrid categories that could bridge the divide between “art” and “craft,” presumably better accommodating fi ber art, also faced serious resistance in the art world. Two such categories were “soft art” and “soft sculpture.” Both functioned as organizing rubrics for several shows in the late 1960s and 1970s such as the New Jersey State Museum’s Soft Art (1969), curated by Ralph Pomeroy; Lucy Lippard’s traveling exhibition
for the American Federation of the Arts, Soft and Apparently Soft Sculpture (1968–9); and the New York Cultural Center’s traveling exhibition, Softness as Art (1973). Soft Art included work by Tawney as well as Richard Tuttle, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse and Claes Oldenburg. Softness as Art included one work by Françoise Grossen, amongst that of Jackie Ferrara, Harmony Hammond, Richard Serra, Robert Morris and Hannah Wilke. Fiber artists recognized the potential of the categories “soft art” or “soft sculpture” to bridge the divide separating art from craft. In a 1970 article for Craft Horizons, “When Will Weaving Be an Art Form?” Virginia Hoffman observed that “soft sculpture”
could logically include any three- dimensional form made by fl exible joinings, fi brous materials, modules with no fi xed beginning or end, soft materials made hard and vice versa . . . One thinks of . . . works by Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, Robert Morris, [and] Alice Adams. (Hoffman 1970: 18)17
However, art critics were not as enthusiastic about the soft art phenomenon. Some went to great lengths to reassert boundaries between genres and materials that the rubric blurred. In his Artforum review of the New York Cultural Center’s exhibition, Soft as Art, James Collins asserted, “one of the things artists shouldn’t do today is to make art with anything soft” (Collins 1973: 89). Most problematic for him was the category itself, which “denies criticism the luxury of a single critical framework” (Collins 1973: 89). His response to this dilemma was to divide the work in the show into four categories: “process,” “revamped painting,” “craft/fetish,” and “novelty art.” In his review these categories redrew boundaries distinguishing
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“art” from “craft” through a separation of works in fi ber into either the “process” category or the “craft/fetish” category. In the “process” category, Collins singled out a felt work by Robert Morris (along with a work by Richard Serra) as worthy of attention for its “theoretical underpinnings” (Collins 1973: 89). The rest of the work in the exhibition was “neither experientially nor theoretically interesting” (Collins 1973: 90). In the “craft/ fetish” category, Collins placed the work of Françoise Grossen, Jackie Ferrara and Brenda Miller, all of whom exhibited work in fi ber.
Anticipating readers’ objections to his application of the term craft to the work of three female artists working in rope and other forms of fi ber, Collins asserted that “labeling a work as craft orientated isn’t an attack on women” (Collins 1973: 90). He continued:
[it] is only to say they give the impression of manual over mental dexterity and people who are manually dextrous aren’t necessarily interesting artists . . . Both Jackie Ferrara with her Four Balls II made of cotton bailing, rope and chains and Brenda Miller’s Abscissa, consisting of a numbering system dictating the structure of a twine wall piece just by the use and association of their materials suggest a “grass skirt” reference—a gender neutral one. (Collins 1973: 90)
That the term “grass skirt” in this context is not gender neutral hardly requires elucidation. By rejecting the hybrid category “soft art” and reinforcing fi ber’s association to femininity and primitiveness, Collins neatly maintains the boundary between art and craft. Given the degree to which fi ber’s associations to craft overwhelm Collins’s
response to Ferrara and Miller’s work, one can imagine how easily the hybrid character of work by fi ber artists such as Grossen, Sheila Hicks, or Ed Rossbach could be dismissed as illegitimate.
Thanks to such challenging associations, Constantine and Larsen’s goal of elevating fi ber art, in Wall Hangings and subsequent projects, was diffi cult if not impossible to accomplish in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, their acceptance of the division between “high” and “low” art—and, one might argue, their refusal to engage with the very non-art connotations of fi ber that were so problematic for their goals—left art-world prejudices intact. Despite Constantine and Larsen’s efforts, the work of Alan Saret—a male artist who had worked previously in other media and was part of the “high” art world—was critically received as art, while Alice Adams’s remarkably similar work— emerging from her previous practice as a weaver—was viewed with skepticism.
Despite these setbacks, however, evidence suggests that Constantine and Larsen’s work did make an impact, albeit one that did not come to fruition until fairly recently. In 1993 the well-known independent curator Mary Jane Jacob wrote about the infl uence of Constantine upon her own innovative, unorthodox, curatorial mission, which has been instrumental in promoting an open use of non-traditional materials without regard to the art world’s hierarchical distinctions:
Unbeknownst to me, I began following [Constantine’s] work as a young visitor to The Museum of Modern Art on frequent occasions from 1965 to 1969. Reading and just looking at the images in Beyond Craft sent my own curatorial work in
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another direction. Most of all, her avant- garde philosophy of inclusionism remains compelling and her career—battling to bring into the mainstream art and artists from the outside—is a model of independent vision and courage. (Jacob 1993: 9)
Dramatic change in the use and reception of fi ber in the art world has occurred since the 1970s, thanks in part to curators such as Jacob, as well as artists of the fi rst-wave feminist art movement, who set as one of their goals the analysis of the hierarchy of art and craft and women’s low position within it through the incorporation of fi ber into their work. For feminists, fi ber craft played a role in the construction of an alternate history of art making. A shared marginality between the female traditional artist and the contemporary feminist artist helped the latter negotiate the paradoxical goal of seeking recognition in the mainstream art world, while at the same time attempting to critique it. In this context, the once negative associations of fi ber or craft with femininity and the home were recast as distinctive and culturally valuable features of an artistic heritage specifi c to women.
While I’m not convinced that the use of fi ber by artists today demonstrates the complete effacement of the hierarchy of art and craft, the medium’s ubiquitous use in contemporary art no doubt represents an important stage in a decades-long process of art-world assimilation of the medium. The evolution of Louise Bourgeois’s attitude toward fi ber—from one of dismissal in the 1960s to full embrace with her latest soft sculptures made from her personal collection of linens and fabric remnants—is only one
Fig 11 Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2002, tapestry and aluminum. 17 × 12 × 12 in.; 43.1 × 30.4 × 30.4 cm. Private Collection, courtesy of Cheim & Reid, New York. Christopher Burke photographer.
example of the medium’s new currency. The limitations of their strategy aside, the work of Constantine and Larsen in the 1960s and 1970s to legitimate fi ber as a medium of art represents a historically important moment in this process.
Notes
1 Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor. 1972. Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric. New York: Van Nostrand. For an assessment of Constantine’s career see Sorkin, Jenni. 2003. Way Beyond Craft: Thinking Through the Work of Mildred Constantine. Textile 1(1): 30–47.
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2 Woven Forms. 1963. New York: Museum of Contemporary Craft.
3 See also Atirnomus, “String and Rope at Janis.” Arts Magazine. February 1970: 58.
4 Bourgeois, Louis. 1969. “The Fabric of Construction.” Craft Horizons 29 (March): 31–35.
5 On the subject, see my 2004 essay “The Decorative, Abstraction and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” in Oxford Art Journal 27(3): 339–64.
6 Constantine also recounts this experience in The Art Fabric: Mainstream (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981, p. 8).
7 Thanks to Judith Bettelheim, Constantine’s daughter, for helping me clarify this point.
8 On the subject, see Marcus, George E. and Myers, Fred R. (eds). 1995. Traffi c in Culture: Refi guring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
9 Staniszewski, Mary Anne. 1998. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, chapter two, passim.
10 See Price, Sally. 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and Staniszewski (1998).
11 See National Endowment for the Arts. 1977. To Survey American Crafts: A Planning Study; and McLean, John. (ed.). 1981. National Crafts Planning Project. National Endowment for the Arts.
12 See Macramé. 1971. New York: Museum of American Folk Art. See also Mary Walker Phillips’s review of the exhibition for Craft Horizons (December 1971): 62.
13 Rossbach also reported that “[Atwater’s] writings were consulted (often a bit sheepishly) by many who deplored her approach to textiles, who did not believe that weavers should be provided with ‘recipes,’ as she called them, for works that ought to have been creative and individual. I remember the small regard I once felt for Atwater and her coverlet weaves, even
though my fi rst weaving experience consisted of following a pattern carefully selected from her book” (1983: 22).
14 Albers, Anni. 1940. Hand Weaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College. The Weaver 6(1): 3–7.
15 Atwater, Mary. 1941. It’s Pretty, But is it Art? The Weaver 6(3): 13–14 and 26.
16 Slivka, Rose. 1972. Hard String. Craft Horizons (April): 16–17.
17 See also Meilach, Dona Z. 1974. Soft Sculpture and Other Soft Art Forms with Stuffed Fabrics, Fibers and Plastics. New York: Crown Publishers.
References
Adamson, Glenn. 2007. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Albers, Anni. 1940. Hand Weaving Today: Textile Work at Black Mountain College. The Weaver 6(1): 3–7.
Albers, Anni. 1959. Pictorial Weaves. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Andreae, Christopher. 1970. String and Rope. The Christian Science Monitor, January 23.
Atwater, Mary. 1941. It’s Pretty, But is it Art? The Weaver 6 (3): 13–14, 26.
Battcock, Gregory. 1969. Claire Zeisler. Arts Magazine, 43(6): 65.
Bourgeois, Louise. 1969. The Fabric of Construction. Craft Horizons 29: 31–5.
Collins, James. 1973. Review. Artforum 11(10): 89–93.
Constantine, Mildred. 1999. Personal interview with the author, February 23.
Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor. 1969. Wall Hangings. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor. 1972. Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric. New York: Van Nostrand.
Greenberg, Clement. “Review of Exhibitions . . .” 17 November 1945. The Nation. Reprinted in John O’Brian, ed. 1986. Clement Greenberg, The Collected
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Essays and Criticism. Vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949: 39–42.
Hoffman, Virginia. 1970. When Will Weaving Be an Art Form? Craft Horizons 30: 18.
Jacob, Mary Jane. 1993. Beyond Craft: Curating for Change. Small Works in Fiber: The Mildred Constantine Collection. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, pp. 1–9.
Kramer, Hilton. 1966. And Now “Eccentric Abstraction”: It’s Art But Does It Matter? New York Times September 25: 27.
Kuh, Katherine. 1968. Sculpture: Woven and Knotted. Saturday Review. July 27: 36–7.
Lenore Tawney: A Personal World. 1978. Brookfi eld, CT: Brookfi eld Craft Center.
Lippard, Lucy. 1966. Eccentric Abstraction. New York: Fischbach Gallery. Reprinted in The New Sculpture 1965-1975: Between Geometry and Gesture. 1990. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, pp. 54–8.
Marandel, J. Patrice. 1979. An Interview with Claire Zeisler. Arts Magazine 54(1): 150–152.
O’Brien, George. 1963. Many Materials Used in Unusual Technique. New York Times. April 29
Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. New York: Pantheon Books.
Phillips, Mary Walker. 1970. Step-by-Step Macramé: A Complete Introduction to the Craft of Creative Knotting. New York: Golden Press.
Rossbach, Ed. 1983. Mary Atwater and the Revival of American Traditional Weaving. American Craft 43(2): 22–26.
Smith, Paul. 1963. Woven Forms. New York: Museum of Contemporary Craft.
Smith, Roberta. 1990. Lenore Tawney’s Work in Fiber and Beyond. New York Times. May 18.
String and Rope. December 1969/January 1970. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery.
