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Why Weaving Now?

(originally printed in the exhibition catalogue Painted Threads at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2019)

Read essay in exhibition catalogue here.

Weaving is a form of digital technology. It operates on a binary code just like a computer, using warp and weft threads instead of ones and zeros. Like a digital image, a textile’s pattern or pictorial design comprises a matrix of encoded data written specifically for computation by a loom—a type of computer processor. A textile’s physical form and visual elements are the result of a certain combination of threads moving over and under each other at right angles, sometimes intersecting along multiple planes in space. But no computer programmer can write code that designs software and builds a hard product simultaneously—unless the programmer is a weaver. To weave, then, means to work along a spectrum of practices, with engineering at one end and programming at the other. The weaver must know how to physically build the textile form but must also be fluent in the computational language used to design its appearance. Today, a third option is emerging as weavers incorporate analog forms of art making into their practice.

Given that the invention of weaving occurred thousands of years ago, it seems strange that we align our current era—the Information Age—with the so-called advent of a digital revolution.[1] The notion that the future yields societies of greater intelligence, defined, in part, by the proliferation of digital systems tethered to ever-larger storage files accessed at faster rates, also registers as somewhat naïve, as the historian of technology George Dyson has argued. Dyson believes that a stronger communication tool lies in analog technology (an unimpeded, material-based channeling of data; a model of a model, not a symbolic translation or algorithmic sequencing), or rather the interdependence of the two forms of informational exchange, digital and analog.[2] His theories, supported by experts in large companies such as Google and Intel, reflect the practices of many contemporary weavers who, since the early 2000s, have experimented with a range of diverse techniques in their art. In the last decade, several of them have extended the complexity of weaving through the application of the analog technology of painting. Blending the most digitally heavy weaving practices (multiplane or compound, on-loom weaving) with free-form painting, they reflect the hyperconnectivity of digital and analog experiences that shapes our 21st–century spatial and communicative realities.

To understand the relevance of weaving now, it is helpful to know a little about its past. Before the birth of modern-day computing systems (or rather, before Microsoft and Apple became the corporate kings of information exchange), the kings of the Peruvian and Chinese empires, among others, literally wore information on their sleeves. Their garments featured patterns so rich and detailed that even today their structural codes are only partially understood.[3] Woven with silk threads wrapped with precious metal strips and elaborately dyed fibers, the patterns would have been perceived as superior due to the quality of their color and textural gradation, the range of their tonal harmonies, and their intricate detail. Such visual effects, while indebted to artisans with expert knowledge in dyeing and spinning, derived primarily from weavers using compound weave structures made up of two or more sets of warps and/or wefts.

Fast-forward to the 1930s, during the early development of modern-day computing, when weaving practices in western cultures began to fracture along several fine lines. For the purposes of this essay, I briefly discuss two of those lines: machine weaving and fiber art. Advancements in the construction of machine or power looms at this time reflected the way technology was being deployed in the building of computers: Both devices were designed to store large amounts of information and retrieve it at a faster rate. As such, they became catalyzing forces in the rise of mass culture, affording more possibilities for information exchange—material and conceptual—among the majority, even when those opportunities came with a price tag.

Technology, however, has not always been associated with mechanized processes or with tools possessing increased speed and memory. Ancient cultures utilized it often for the purposes of producing art rather than to more quickly produce and acquire utilitarian goods (though both uses can exist simultaneously, as in craft).[4] A second direction in modern weaving—fiber art—is comparable to this understanding of technology. In the 1960s and ’70s, fiber artists, many of whom were weavers, partly or fully left the loom in acts deconstructing the technology of weaving. As they did so, they moved into analog-specific modes of making, exploiting the material components commonly used in weaving: fibers.[5] While continuing to weave, some artists, such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, began to unravel their constructions, pulling out threads and twisting or looping them around other threads in practices more akin to knitting and lacemaking—a kind of drawing with fiber. Still other weavers, such as Sheila Hicks, momentarily left weaving altogether, preferring to wrap or knot threads around each other, sculpting forms that were sometimes thick and giant, other times threadbare and small. Ultimately, these weavers mined the inherent properties of their materials, indulging their spatial-textural behaviors to achieve imaginative ends. Weaving, then, became a means to a greater goal, a technology to subvert, to abandon, or to use to showcase materials; it was not itself a site of extraordinary experimentation. Today, that has changed.

In recent years, contemporary artists have returned to the most digital-heavy form of weaving, synthesizing it with analog practices of painting. They begin by writing a draft or code for the making of a textile. Then, during the process of weaving, they apply a pigmented liquid to their threads, altering the colors and patterns in the draft or, in some cases, amplifying them. The works of Samantha Bittman, Victoria Manganiello and Crystal Gregory are examples of the latter: These artists magnify weave structures in ways that point to the sublimity of their technical properties. In Computer 1.0 (2018) (Images 1 and 2), for example, Manganiello, in collaboration with Julian Goldman, incorporates clear polymer tubing as weft, weaving it through a banner-style textile that she suspends in spiral formation from the ceiling. She then activates analogically the digital structure of her white, plain-woven form, shooting dark fluid through the tubing at intervals, interspersed with bubbles of air, as if transmitting a telegraphic signal along wires. The entire effect is comparable to watching a late nineteenth-century film by the Lumière brothers with its constant flickers of light and shadow, made surreal by its projection on a screen that spins in circles above viewers’ heads.

Bittman and Gregory equally explore the sublime in their work. In Bittman’s case (see Untitled, 2015) (Image 3) it occurs through analogic mimicry of the digital. She paints over her weaving, carefully following the angular form of the woven pattern, sometimes revealing it, other times covering it up, to the point where the two modes of conveying information blend seamlessly together. As we look at her work, we begin to lose track of what we know, incapable of discerning surface from structure from construction, an experience not unlike lucid dreaming or inhabiting virtual reality. Gregory’s sculpture (see Variation on a Theme, 2019) (Image 4) uncannily stops all information flow, fossilizing the digital data of the weave structure within hardened clay while letting the remaining portions of the material droop, obscured within folds and lying dormant.

Oriane Stender, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, Sarah Parke, Mark Barrow, and Desire Moheb Zandi work within the spatial architecture of weaving, placing paint within or on layers of threads, in works that undermine the pervasive assumption that a textile is flat. If anyone could poke serious, critical fun at the ideas of the art critic Clement Greenberg, it would be one of these weavers. Their work expressly demonstrates that all painting is decoration—something Greenberg viewed as a liability—in the sense that it ultimately ornaments a physical object, often a textile (a canvas) with a taut, woven structure. Parke and Barrow, a power team in the world of contemporary art, playfully engage with this long-established dogma of painting as being pigment on canvas by painting on patterned, hand-woven fabric stretched over a wood frame (see Origin, 2019) (Image 5). They allow the varied twill weave structure of their canvas to dictate their composition, painting over the path of individual threads, highlighting their rise and fall through the material, and exposing their disappearance and resurfacing—the action that defines weaving. In other works, however, Parke and Barrow flagrantly defy the pattern of the weave, painting playful forms that dance over large expanses of fabric, treating the canvas as it has traditionally been used by painters, as a flat picture plane.

Stender and Jónsson—also fans of spatially extending the matrix of weaving through processes of painting (pre)woven threads—have devised innovative techniques to create free-form pattern (Images 6 and 7). Putting aside the complicated logic of weave structure, they invent their compositions through painting layers of (un)woven warp threads. Their techniques create a veil-like quality that evokes the idea of soft design—that is, the concept of visual information’s impermanence, its mutability, and its lack of attachment to a specific material substance. (Web pages, which can be infinitely redesigned, are good examples of soft design.)

The work of Moheb Zandi (see Maze, 2019) (Image 8) harks back to the fiber art movement with its analog demonstrations of materiality—bulbous, twisting forms, meandering along their own path yet built within a binary-structured foundation or plain or twill weave. As such, Moheb Zandi’s forms appear as an organic take over of a digital system, a process that occurs naturally to a man-made structure left untouched over time. One can’t help but see in Maze a tension between these two modes of growth: one analogic and human-like, the other mechanistic and rule-bound.

The interdependence of analog and digital technologies within a single operating system has structured many of our experiences in the world. It makes it possible to wander without ever getting lost (via GPS); or to converse with one friend in Venice while having coffee with another in Brooklyn (via video chat), all three connected visually while situated at different points on the globe. No other medium has nearly the same potential to reflect this particular spatial-visual complexity as weaving does now; no other medium can build a pictorial design that is also necessarily inscribed within its principal architecture. As described above, contemporary weavers have interjected into the algorithmic perfection of weaving a very human sensibility, not one of distortion or imperfection (which is how we tend to describe the products of a human hand), but one that, through painting processes, contemplates the experience of our hypermedia information exchange. If woven textiles are fossils of our intelligence, then those in Painted Threads are imprints of our life right now.

[1] Although the development of advanced semiconductor devices, among other things, has afforded this revolution, the layperson’s misunderstanding of the Information Age is that it is a specific technology (the digital), instead of particular technological relationships, that has defined the era.

[2] See George Dyson’s “The Third Law” in John Brockman’s Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI (New York: Penguin, 2019), 33-40.

[3] Last year Martina Ferrari, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Janina Poskrobko, the museum’s Conservator in Charge, began to develop a new system to document the complexity of compound weave structures in ancient textiles. Though only in the early stages of her research, Ferrari has discovered a handful of structural formations (a means of building pattern) that are not entirely known or understood by textile historians. Ferrari’s renderings have the potential to revolutionize the way we think about and visualize the color sequences and patterns of textiles.

[4] One of the many writings on ancient cultures’ understanding and use of technology is Heather Lechtman’s essay “Technologies of Power: The Andean Case,” in Configurations of Power: Holistic Anthropology in Theory and Practice, ed. John S. Henderson and Patricia J. Netherly (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 245–73.

[5] While the exhibition catalogue Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present, edited by Jenelle Porter (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2014), is a recent classic, two exhibition catalogues by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen offer the best, most comprehensive surveys of fiber art from this time: Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973) and The Art Fabric: Mainstream (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970).