dayboat journal: ART REVIEW & ESSAY: Textiles: The Value of the Decorative Essay&Photos

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Textiles have a powerful continuing fascination for me - as an object class, they serve the most daily, intimate, bodily and domestic needs, but cultures almost immediately begin to embellish them with images that retain undeniable authenticity. It's impossible to escape communicating status, aesthetic values, and personal identity when donning a garment of any kind. They function as brand, prison, transparency, and mirror. To wrap the body is the first, continuing, and last act of human life, the most poignant care the family and society performs for each other.

Since textiles are impossible to redact, their power has relegated them to a separate class of art object - domesticana - as the Chicano art movement terms art products made by women with traditional female-gendered material and messages.

Dean MacCannell in The Tourist, describes tourism as a compensatory perceptual stance and relational form, an attempt at "moral involvement" (p. 40) because "everyday people...[are]...condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for...authenticity, to catch...a...glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others' "[cultures] (p.41). Global capitalism and materialism has destroyed human unity with the natural world and only simulated realities are available.

"I hate traveling and explorers". Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, quoted in Artforum, April, 2010, p. 174

I would go further, suggest that the collector/aesthetician-stance may serve a similar purpose. MacCannell, whose critique, chilling and undeniable as it is, seems to me to leave us in an all too familiar unidimensional wasteland. Might as well become a freegan. Then I look at Claude Levi-Strauss describing a transformational energy in culture that reverses negative meanings, rendering them positive. An example is cannibalism. Christianity has created a symbolic sacrament of the body and blood that functions to incorporate power from the god, as cannibals believed they could when they consumed their enemies. (Thomas Crow, Artforum, April, 2010, p. 171).

Psychologists like Erick Erickson also describe behaviors that while neurotic in some, may be mature ego function in others. (Childhood and Society). Always, dependent upon the context. So, I aim for a post-modern informed, contextual integration. It is the task of individual to create a purposeful stance, which though subjective, will be convincing.

I realize that I want an aesthetic that is both journey to enjoyment and transcendence. It must not deny irrationality, hypocrisy, and grief. No scolding or preaching either. Don't bleach me dry traveling to distant conceptual plateaus. Tricky navigation is challenging and welcome. Oh, and please, an occasional humorous side trip. The experience of life on this wasted industrial plain still is our life to live. Reductionism is a reverse disposal of perspective, cramping open-ended possibility and creative action.

Then, to return to my interest in textiles and tourism. These are my mother's old handkerchiefs. Born in 1910, surely she used them for decades until kleenex convenience replaced them. I found them in an unironed, but clean, wadded-up ball when I went through her possessions. I kept them for a long time, until, unable to bear it no longer, one summer day with little to do I carefully ironed and folded them all, and put them away in a special box. At least I still had room for them.Then I saw photos of Rachel Whiteread's studio, a few objects on display. How wondrous strange - that this minimalist sculptor of newly-filled volumes that moved me to mourn and face death would display objects, no matter their formal properties.

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Barbara Kruger

Martha Stewart's Living Magazine articles on collectible textiles (June, July 2010) showed me I could display the handkerchiefs, but it wasn't until writing this today that I find this choice purposeful, battling myself as I do over sentimentality and kitsch. I do not claim art status for them, but to use them to trace the domesticana chain from function to craft to modern textile/fiber art.