Christy Matson: Every Painting is a Weaving and Every Weaving is a Painting
(Originally published in SNAG, Volume 1, 2017)
I was sitting in the audience at Cranbrook Academy of Art last fall when a man raised his hand and asked the speaker, Christy Matson, “Why does your weaving look more like a drawing?” Both Matson and I interpreted his question as, “Why are you imitating drawing, when you’re not drawing, you’re weaving.” This is a fair enough question considering modern art theory and its’ rubric of medium-specificity has only recently begun to vanish from museum exhibitions and art historical scholarship. It seemed plausible then, that the audience participant, might still measure contemporary art with standards defined in its modern awakening. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century both modern art and design formed around the positivist notion (which became something of a moral and qualitative value) that art should represent the conditions of its making or that the function of an object should determine its form, in which case a woven fabric should look like a sea of rectilinear interlocking yarns with a structure and texture indicating its particular function. The trouble, of course, is that woven fabrics have myriad purposes. In any case, according to modern art principles, upheld by a few heralded critics, woven textiles shouldn’t look like drawing on fabric, which is to say, not like Matson’s Landscape #12 (2014) with its bumpy lines and sketchy, pencil-like shading.
Around the mid-twentieth century there were woven textiles, however, which appeared “medium-specific,” in that they were devoid of colonial patterns and pictorial imagery, and instead emphasized their gridded nature. Although weaving (as tapestry or wall-hanging) rarely fell within the parameters of fine art, one weaver did, in fact, succeed in this regard. The German émigré weaver Anni Albers followed the modern art dictum rendering “medium-reflexive” images in grid-like compositions. She drew our attention back to weaving’s most basic construction and process, the vertical crossing of warp threads under/over horizontal weft threads. In 1949, Albers had her first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art (a rare occasion for a woman, and even rarer for a weaver). It marked one of the few instances in a long midcentury when weaving was studied for the broader public for its aesthetic and structural integrity. Yet, despite following the same “codes” deeming successful a work of modern art, Albers’ “pictorial weavings,” as she called them, never held the same status as painting. In the end, the medium with its gendered materials was simply marginalized.
Ironies and double-standards abound in this particular midcentury moment, for example, in the climax of the 1950s cultural powerbrokers praised weaving for its crafty, handmade quality (frequently a misleading attribution because of the use of power-looms in the final stage of design), yet also lauded abstract painting for the gestural (read: handmade) brushwork, which was believed to transmit the artist’s heroic individualism. Now in the twenty-first century Matson reminisces on an earlier time and packs a punch with her Landscape #12 and Untitled (Rose, Aquamarine, Amber) (2016) while doing so. Both woven works appear to be painted or drawn, loosely, with the pretense of abandon, stream-of-consciousness, and a Rothkoesque meditative thought – all hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism. Parodying the values of modern art critics with these works, or simply showing weaving for what it is, Matson exploits the negotiations between the appearance of a free-formed, unmediated square of color and its rule-guided construction of tightly-woven threads.
When I spoke to Matson on the phone she emphasized her interest in “truth to materials” and in utilizing new technologies to explore creative forms. She expressed a profound affection for the digital-Jacquard loom (unlike many fiber artists in the 1960s and ‘70s who moved to off-loom weaving). Matson relies heavily on this machine – an advanced loom that comes with a digital interface. It helps her plot out weavings as a painter or draftsperson would in preparation for making a work, while still allowing her to improvise with weft threads directly on the loom. In Plot #05 (2014) she produces squiggly lines, a splattering effect, and gradual shading, much like a painted mark. She doesn’t work against the process of weaving, instead, she works with it. Her work manifests the modernist ethos of allowing the process to define the uniqueness of the medium. She is a modern artist as a contemporary artist.
In Art in the Making (2016), the art historians Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson define painting as an artist’s preoccupation with pigment (literally and through metaphor) instead of merely as oil or acrylic brushed onto canvas. Thus, they expand the idea of painting to encompass works like Matson’s, who uses color-dyed or “painted” threads. Interestingly, Matson expressed an affinity to painting (the distinction between weaving and painting she felt was, in the end, not so relevant). Weaving with colorful threads she creates an object, like that of Untitled (Rose, Aquamarine, Amber), which from a distance, looks like a painting. As the viewer steps closer, s/he admires the intricately woven threads belied by the monochromatic plane. It’s almost impossible to show the woven structure without showing a close up, a fraction of the whole.
If painting can be extended to include Matson’s weaving, or any woven material for that matter, then the opposite also holds true. Weaving is painting. For is the canvas not an object tightly woven in a plain weave to which an artist fixes a stretcher and then applies paint? Weaving is simply the reverse process of painting: color is applied to threads first which are then stretched in the loom, which becomes a frame. Matson’s work both performs and visualizes this tautology: painting is weaving and weaving is painting. In doing so, she helps us think through the medium’s fraught history and its reception as art.