Bauhaus Weaving Theory
‘Albers’s books also participated in a wider discourse within modernism concerning medium specificity… she analyzed ì basicî and ì modifiedî textile structures, nar rated the loomís technological history, and argued for a tactile sensibility, the activation of a distinctive textile trait: the tactile blueprint or latent perceptivity of matiere.’ Smith, pxiii
Bauhaus weavers began writing essays to develop parameters (and justifications) for their woven objects. Unlike most of their craft workshop colleagues at the Bauhaus, the weavers were avid about the practice of writing; they were pre occupied with formulating (and reformulating) a theory of their craftís Stoffgebiet (material field) or Gestaltungsgebiet (formal field). Through texts that explored weavingís material elements, loom practice, and functional applications, a Bauhaus theory of weaving emerged. And against a backdrop of political and social upheaval in the Weimar Republic, weavers like Anni Albers, Gunta Stˆ lzl, and Otti Berger harnessed at different moments (and to different ends) the rhetoric of expressionist painting, Neues Bauen architecture, and Neue Optik photography, often defying the categorical bound aries that defined modernism. What they accomplished was a pro found step in the recognition of weaving as a specific craftó one that could be compared to, and differentiated from, other media. …This book thus wrestles with the problem implicit in Stˆ lzlís statement regarding the ì picture made of woolî : how, in other words, did the weavers come to terms with the specificity (and apparent inadequacies) of their field with respect to others (like painting or architecture), and how did they go about giving it a theoretical voice? ppxiv –xvii
As it turns out, the 1926 text by Stˆ lzl followed on the heels of another essay by student Anni Albers, titled ‘Bauhaus Weaving’, which argued that weaving’s processes, structures, and materials are best explored through direct experimentation on a loom. …What Albersís essay precipitated was a language for understanding how craft and design at the Bauhaus were always boundó one was dependent on the other. Perhaps most remarkable about Albersís essay, published five years after the opening of the Bauhaus, is not just that it counts as her first text on the workshopís craft, but that it might also count as the first attempt to specify a modernist approach to weaving practiceó one that embraces an ìoldî method of ìhandworkî in order to consider the fundamental elements of the weave, and to experiment and create new fabrics from within these constraints.15 P xvii
Albers, by contrast, describes how Bauhaus weavers were attempting to renew a direct, manual contact with materi als through work at the loom. In this text and others by Albers or her Bauhaus colleagues, we find a textual exploration of weavingís material elements, its technical practice, functional applications, and similarities to (or differences from) other media in order to determine what constitutes a specifically modern practiceó one suited to creating various kinds of textiles for modern life. In other words, a modern theory of weaving does not emerge until the stu dents of this Bauhaus workshop begin coming to grips with their craftís ì basic conditions. P xviii
The weaving workshop tended for many decades to be an after thought in historical discussions of the institution.19 This changed in the early 1990s when Sigrid Wortmann Weltge published Bau haus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop.20 Crucial in framing the history of the workshop and bringing the original work of the weavers to an English speaking audience, Weltgeís text documented the activities of the workshop and showed how the sta tus of textiles at the school was largely problematic given the fact that it was associated with ì womenís work. P xviii
There has been no investigation of the ways that weaving, as it was theorized through the weaversí writing and practice, retex tures the Bauhausís discursive field. This is not to say that the weav ersí writings, or the fact that they wrote, are unaddressed; Nicolas Fox Weber and Brenda Danilowitz have, for instance, commented extensively on the crucial role of writing in Anni Albersís practice.25 But very little of the extant literature on the workshop provides a sustained view of the Bauhaus weaversí writings within the schoolís and Weimar Republicís theoretical landscape, or that of postwar discussions of media more generally. The present volume thus finds new value and significance in the work they did as writers.
….how is a particular craft’s value a function of social categories (of gender, or manual versus intellectual labor)? Does weaving’s association with women require us to reconsider a general (neutral) understanding of craft practices, forms, and skills? Conversely, how are notions of gender and femininity complicated when confronted with the techniques, functions, and art historical or modern industrial metaphors that are used to define textiles? Pxix – xx
In focusing on the weavers’ texts about their objects and practice, Bauhaus Weaving Theory confronts a long standing assumption in art history that the crafts are manual or technical, but never intellectual, arts. P xxi
Craft, it seems, is by definition not an ì intellectual exercise. …
According to Adamson’s account, the concept of craft is organized around ‘material experience’ on the one hand, and ‘skill’ on the other. Indeed skill, as he argues following Pye, may be ‘the most complete embodiment of craft as an active, relational concept rather than a fixed category’. 36 (To put it another way, unlike this word art, the word craft can be used in a sentence as both a noun and a verb.) Thus, it applies to the sculptural work that Constantine Brancusi shapes out of stone as much as it applies to Peter Voulkosís work in clay something connected to the history of ceramics, a so called handicraft or decorative art with all of the assumptions about amateurism and skill that go with it. And as a process, craft is not just a distinct category but is the veritable ‘horizon’ of (all) art’ that which yields its possibilities yet disappears in the process. Citing Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, Adamson ultimately argues that craft must be understood as that which is ‘supplemental’ to the ‘autonomous’ (modern) work of art. Craft is pervasive (everywhere in art and design), and yet mostly unrecognized. As the concepts of art come to the fore, the work’s craft is that which recedes, or moves to the periphery, like a frame. Pxxii
…medium took over from the particular arts as the lingua franca of the mid twentieth century, it stressed the distinction held by Kant between art and handicraft, affirming that the process of each particular art was ‘free’ and ‘purposive . . . in itself’ (whereas the crafts were mere ‘work’). Kantian aesthetic autonomy was fully conflated with medium specificity; Greenbergís (rather positivist) ‘ medium’ could be ‘art’ precisely because it was defined by clear material and practical parameters. Pxxv
whether to call weaving a craft or a medium. The point of bringing the word craft into dialogue with medium is not meant to legitimate weaving practice as ‘art’ (As Adamson reminds quite bluntly: ‘Anything can be taken for art, craft included, and that is all there is to say on the matter.’) Rather, an investigation of the weavers’ theories, if framed by this relationship, has the radical capacity to shed light on each category’s already hybrid nature the fact that, even within early twentieth century modernism, a textual understanding of any practical field (be it weaving, painting, architecture, or photography) was always striated by the terms of other media, other crafts. Emphasizing the craft of weaving, nevertheless, bears a political weight, insofar as it becomes necessary to grant that thinking indeed emerges within manual practices, within labor. Perhaps craft and labor are not about turning off the brain but about reactivating different centers. As the weavers’ writings and textiles show, ideas became manifest in their physical manipulation of the loom, either unwittingly or with a bit of savvy. P xxv –xxvi
‘It is interesting . . . to observe that in ancient myths from many parts of the world it was a goddess, a female deity, who brought the invention of weaving to mankind. When we realize that weaving is primarily a process of structural organization this thought is startling, for today thinking in terms of structure seems closer to the inclination of men than women.’ (Albers in Smith, 2014, pxvii)
Weaving and gender: It seems that the physical material of thread and the process of handling it might have, as Muche thought, threatened his status at the school, for weaving with its grounding in manual (not intellectual) abilities is intrinsically feminine. Weaving’s femininity was not simply a matter of subjects but also of objects, practices, and semantics p xviii
Weaving occupied a feminized status at the Bauhaus institu tion in many ways, but perhaps primarily because its materials and practices were considered subordinate to the more fundamental practice of form and color theory (taught by painters like Johannes Itten or Kandinsky) or the functionalist logic of architecture. Espe cially early on, the Bauhaus masters mostly dismissed weaving as an applied art, whose secondary (or tertiary) position afforded it no intellectual dimension of its own. As a manual practice, weav ing was seen merely to borrow or apply the formal and functional theories that painting or architecture developed.60 So more than its connection to a female subject who weaves, weaving was feminized as a ‘linguistic absence' in the language of artistic media.61 The fact that weaving could not reference a longer history of theoretical inquiry into its specificity as found, for instance, regarding painting (from Leonardo to Kandinsky), or regarding architecture (from Vitruvius to Adolf Behne) contributed to its feminine role pxviv
the discursive connections that gender weaving also sprout from a dual history of domestic (amateurish) production on the one hand and industrial (wage) labor on the other. While the Bauhaus tended at first to view weaving practice as a gentle, domestic craft best suited to the female sex, in Germany at this moment the identification of textiles with industry involved the image of women toiling in factories, or striking for twenty two weeks to achieve a ten hour work day.65 Karl Marx wrote of the new surplus of women who entered textile factories in the late nineteenth century once the deployment of ‘machinery dispense[d] with muscular power’, allowing for the employment of ‘workers of slight muscular strength’. 66 And so by the 1920s, the association of textiles, machines, labor, and women had become so pervasive in the popular imagination that these terms were inextricably bound. P xxx
the Bauhaus weavers were rather born from a theoretically charged matrix, where the articulation of ideas was as important as the practice. They had to secure their status at the school by way of text. It was not enough to do a practice, like weaving; they also had to establish the ‘basic laws’ of their medium, in writing, for the workshop’s products to be considered valid in the eyes of the school. P xxii
The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt NonnÈ , and Gunta Stˆ lzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings and catapulted itself toward a technological future, a modernist theory of weaving was born. Harnessing the functionalist (Sachlichkeit) discourse of the Neues Bauen movement (Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius), they specified the use of textiles in architectural space. Chapter 3 examines how weaving student Otti Berger drew on L· szlÛ Moholy Nagyís arguments regarding the ì opticalî nature of photography to develop a complementary theory of tactility as it pertained to cloth. While close up photo graphs of Bauhaus textiles in magazines and brochures worked to sell the workshopís products, Berger reflected on the simultaneous visuality and ‘holdability’ (Haltbarkeit) of the woven medium pxxxiv
weaving is as much a craft and medium as it is an apparatus (dispositif), in the Foucauldian sense. It is as much a specific practice (set of materials, tools, and way of putting things together) as it is a network connecting a ‘heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms . . . propositions, in short, the said as much as the unsaid.’ 73 Weaving is at once this particular technique as opposed to that one (say, painting or architecture), and also the network that in various concrete, practical, and theoretical modes links together the competing discourses of modernism.
Writing and weaving, Anni Albers
it was also here that she had to negotiate the impasse brought on by a certain incommensurability: that between (physical) practice at a loom and writing, or ‘touching’ material and touching on its ideas.4 Shifting gears in On Weaving, this former Bauhaus student began to speculate that textile structures, found in woven artifacts, were underpinned by certain principles, ones whose fundamentals and methods might be relevant beyond the terrain of textiles proper, textile things.5 (See plate 9.) While returning to a discussion of their ontic identity, she asked after their potential, as media, through which to grasp or work through various related problems. Thus she writes in the book’s preface: ‘Tangential subjects come into view. The thoughts, however, can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread.’ 6 The intertwining of threads specific to textiles hence becomes a philosophical lens or, more precisely, a philosophical net. So, for example, Otti Bergerís thoughts on the haptic identity of textiles, discussed in chapter 3, are repurposed toward what could be described as a tactile, textile philosophy. Albers redresses what she identifies in her post Bauhaus moment as an insistence on ‘progress’ that advances some areas (‘reading and writing’ or vision) only to produce regression elsewhere (a ‘tactile sensibility’ ).p143
….What she does is to harness two competing directions within the use of medium in the postwar landscape. On the one hand, she considers the medium as grounded in the materialó say, paint and canvas or thread; and on the other, she picks up a notion of medium as a vehicle of communication, a technical apparatus that transmits messages or ideas.8 (In other words, she participates both in the development of high modern ist art criticism and in the emergence of media and communica tion studies.) Anni Albers thus inserts herself in the aporia between these two quite different understandings of that term. p143
Anni Albers was also beginning to confront the difficulties of translation in another sphere: in her attempt to bring the practice of structuring and combining threads on a loom into text. Hence in her first essay in English from 1937, ì Work with Material,î she ultimately fixates on the maxim of listening. It is important, she argues, to recognize the limitations or ì veto of the material.î 10 For ì more than an active process,î what is needed ì is a listening for [its] dictation.î (The good designer should allow the material, for a moment, to become active, rendering her the receiver of its identity.) But here, the first set of paradoxes begin to be introduced:
while imploring (her student) designers to listen to materials that somehow ì speakî or ì dictateî their use, Albers also suggests that those materials were in some sense ineffableó a n ì original stateî of ì stuffî that had to be accessed physically without ì informa tionî clouding the relationship.11 (Materials both can and cannot communicate.) And yet at the same time any transfer from practice to text (or speech p144 -145
Albers found some parity between the practices of weaving and writing. It was never that one was fully on the side of ineffable materiality whereas the other was about information and communication. And she understood that ì threadsî had in many cultures long func tioned as ì transmitters of meaning.î 14 She even came to approach the act of writing as she would her work at the loom, her method for one bearing ì a stunning resemblance to the processî of the other: Using her manual typewriter, she would write her text on ordinary 8½ - by- 11- inch sheets of paper and then tape the pages together as if to create a scroll. She felt that only in this way could she achieve the flow continuity of the completed essay; at least initially, she did not want the barrier imposed by the need to turn the page.
‘We often look for an underlying meaning of things while the thing itself is the meaning. Intellectual interpretation may hinder our intuitive insight. Here education should undo the damage and bring us back to receptive simplicity. It is obvious that a solely intellectual approach to art is insufficient and that we may have to try to redevelop those sensibilities which can lead to immediate perception’ Albers in Smith p145
a designer or weaver can only hope to reengage ì immediate perceptionî through practice, another kind of mediation of the material.p145
In writing essays, she built sentences on continuous stretches of paper, analogous to the layering of weft, the building of a scroll like swath of fabric on the loom. So in some sense she saw these two media to be both specific and functionally analogous and was determined, according to Weber, to understand and articulate the parallel ì rhythmsî of each. She sought to fully grasp the craft of manipulating words in order to translate the potential of the for mer, weavingís meaning as a practice, its idioms and its ì code.î 16 Writing (or typing) would become another medium through which she understood her woven practiceó this becoming perfectly meta phorized in her studies for fabric patterns on a typewriter. It was in the back and forth (the mediation) between these two mediaó the two languages as they touched on one anotheró that she grappled with the problems of translation, or the complicated relationship between communication and materiality within her practice. P146
the material functions within weaving as metaphor. P146
like the activity of putting thoughts on paper, working with material (or listening to it) functions to medi ate the ineffable. As metaphor, material operates as a means of communication, or, rather, it enables a movement from one space to another.18 In this system, any experience of material is never quite direct. It is only accessed metaphoricallyó as an experience of an experience.p 146
the designs in ancient Peruvian textiles were an eloquent substitute for written language…. While aware of the way that threads were some of the earliest transmitters of meaning, Albers was ì not interested in deciphering or copying particular written languages; rather she explored the idea of marks and signs as language distributed across a surface in a way that recalls the structure of a text.î 20 She doesnít seek to convey information or ì carry discrete information about the world.î 21 Instead, through the ì act of ëdrawingí with thread,î and by considering ì the semantic implications of elementary geo metric formsî found, for instance, in ancient Precolumbian weaves, Albers sought to evoke ì linguistic characters and systems through the rectilinear arrangement of ideographic signs p147
But more than reference the idea of language as such, these signs appears to trace, reflexively, the function of the weave. Troy sees this as an example of Albersís fundamentally modernist ì self referentialî approach to weaving.23 And indeed, the tapestry seems to communicate nothing but its own code; rather than communicate other information, external to its form, the black lines of code appear only to transmit the operation of weaving weft through warp, the tapestryís own methods or procedures. P148
(Of Code) The floating of black lines through a densely entwined weave seems to present the material (literally) only to hide, at the same time, the method through which this fabric was made p149
(of thenotation of weaving) While the weave draft is not essential to the act of weaving, this little diagram articulates the layer or process that intervenes between production and product, process and artifact. So this is not a diagram of the object but, rather, of the mediumó the in between. It is something of an algorithmic codea s image. P150
Even when codified, the fabric is also born from the ì subtle playî or ì interrelationî between material and structure p150
Thus the system of the draft notation, like any language, can never be fully exhausted
(Table)Page from Anni Albers, Anni Albers: O n D esigning (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). “Diagrams of Constructions.”
through the utterance of threadsó some being more ìobedientî or ì resistant,î others more ì charmingî or ì dull.î A woven textile (a piece of fabric) is never just the direct consequence of a given plan. The practice of weaving, Albers suggests, is also bound to the par ticular ì event of a threadî ó which, in its ìsubmissiveness,î some what paradoxically limits or ì dictatesî what can and cannot be accomplished with it. Even in the space of practice, any access to the metaphors of the material is only won through the mediation. P151
we begin to understand Albersís quite expanded understanding of medium. As weíll see, if she defines it at all, then it would be a technique or operation (say, in the gerund form, weaving), whose ì potentialities and . . . limitations are never quite determined by the object alone (the verbal noun, a weaving).p151
Then in the 1939 essay, Anni uses the word medium and moreover seeks to define her understanding of this term:
Recognizing in matter its potentialities and its limitations may also help us clarify the ideas of the medium in art when it is immaterial. This idea of the medium in art is often misunderstood. A distinction is necessary, to any artistic end, between the medium serving a purpose outside itself and the medium in its own right as for instance words used for reporting vs. words used in poetry. Some media have to be released from their representative meaning to make them fit for artistic purpose. Words and gestures, as an example, are binary in that sense. As they are often not clearly recognized in their specific capacity as elements of form, they are often chosen as means by those who feel some vague urge for expression. They seem to be materials familiar to us through their daily use. But as media of art they have to be newly mastered just as any other material has to be.p151
But it is telling that Albers turns to the example of language to define medium, which must be distinguished by its endsó one ìserving a purpose outside itselfî and the other in ì its own right.î The two options are linked but not necessarily the same. These may be divided between reporting and poetry, where the understanding of the limitations of the mate rial (the word) may develop into a new form, as ì media released from their representative meaning.î On the one hand, a medium is a vehicle for communicating something external to itself; on the other, it is about grappling with the material. Significantly, then, the definition of medium is at once singular and split; it functions or transmits information transparently, as in daily use, or it is ì mas teredî and made strange. Whereas all material, she argues, ì dic tatesî certain structures or ì limitationsî that the artist or poet must recognize, insights gained from direct ì work with a substanceî pro vide the only viable method to grasp its parameters and work with it productively. Or, rather, the medium is less a thing than a specific kind of action taken toward the material, a process of ì recognizing in matter its potentialities and limitations. P152
Media debate: The word medium, that ì barbarous term,î as Rosalind Krauss recalls invoking Foucaultís terminology, grew over a few decades to become the veritable ì objectî of a discursive field.35 Two intellectual milieus were born out of debates around this single term. On the one hand, there was the development of high modernist art criticism in the writings of Clement Green berg, a doubling down on the materiality of artistic objects, the empirical fact of flatness for painting.36 On the other, there was the newly emergent field of media studies in the writings of Mar shall McLuhan, who by 1962, in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, postulated that media exert effects on the way humans perceive and understand the world, which in turn affect social organization. (This would also form the basis of his axiom ì the medium is the message,î further elaborated in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.)37 The two concep tions of medium, which consolidated by the mid 1960s, were at odds with one another.38 While Greenberg insisted on the mate rial identity of the medium, McLuhan focused on its perceptual and social effects; and where the former ultimately located purity, the latter described the inherent hybridity of mediaó e ach new medium (say, television) ì remediatingî earlier media forms (film and broadcast radio). P152-3
Albersís approach to the link between medium and transla tion was quite a bit different. First of all, she focused more readily on questions pertaining to practice, not identities or substrates, as Greenberg and McLuhan did. And the material never stood on its own, as an empirical thing (say, a flat surface) that would require a single approach to it over another (abstraction). While the mate rial may ì dictateî its limits, through the mediumís practice, the weaver may recognize and pursue multiple possibilities. And if the medium, according to Albers, has ì effectsî on human experience, they are not intrinsic to the sensorial space of its substrate alone. P154
Neither the mediumís identity nor its effects are a given. Any access to the material is neither inevitable nor transparent in a singular form but only arrived at over time. ì It takes a long time to get to point zero,î she exhorted.42 Thus the problems of translation come in, initially, at the moment the practitioner interfaces with the mate rial, attempts to ì learn of its subtleties,î and works with it. And subsequently, with much difficulty, she attempts to relay that expe rience into words. The problems of translating a medium happen across two vectors. P154
Art and performance: ‘thus form demands unending performance’ Josef Albers in Smith p 154
Indeed, the notion of performance, or the emphasis on process over empirical ì data,î is a central theme throughout Josefís writing.
Further, color was at once the medium and the method that determined his method. Because it interacts in a certain way that is temporal, color requires a temporal practiceó a life spent performing and reperforming (or ì rehearsingî ) the same scene again and again, switching out the characters. (Of Josef Alber’s colour theory as performance)
Anni Albers proposed in her two books an understanding of designing and weaving that exploits the question of actionó the fact that the medium is, at least in English, a gerund and a verbal noun. P154
Anni (and Josef) sought to rend meth ods of practice from withinó to make ìtheoryî experiential rather than preconceived. So in the essays that make up her first book, Albers seeks to explore the limits of theory by pushing process to the fore. What emerges is a conception of medium as a space for active learning. P 157
Social consequence of practice: ‘ The point was not to intellectualize the process but, rather, to open manual practice and experimentation with the material (or the ì medium of Understanding,î according to Whitehead) to thought beyond itself not just utility in the abstract, but to economy and society.’ P 158
Out of her consideration of Whiteheadís philosophy, Albers redefines her approach to practice as a maker and a teacher (the two going hand in hand). In her articulation of weaving, through out the forties and fifties her interest in the medium is not in its identity but the ì fluxî of materiality that the practice affords. Thus Albersís medium specificity, if we can call it that, is not about self reflexivityó a líart pour líart, an echo chamber in which the ì pureî ontological identity of the medium is voiced back to itself. Rather, it is a space in which to act, to make decisions (decide which avenue to follow) based on what is and isnít possible within a limited terrain of possibilities. While medium specificity becomes for Greenberg (by 1960) a religion, which ultimately renders that medium in a ì groove,î for Albers the practice of ì listeningî to the specificity of materials is an ethic. The principles of this ethic do not so much precede the process of weaving as much as they emerge in their countless variability within it. And this goes back to the space of pedagogy and learning. The point is not to define the mate rial or medium for its own sake, but to enable a student to arrive at an experience of practice. She felt her role was to ì teach not from the top down, but from the bottom up. P 160-161
Thus the first step, in Albersís mind, was to ì listenî to the material rather than force oneís authorial agenda on it. In such an activity, the medium is no readymade stamp, and designing doesnít have to be ì form imposed on the material.î Designing rather becomes a method of engaging with materialó a space of actionó l ike weaving. Both, again, in the gerund form. P161
(Anni Albers) is determined, as the penultimate chapter of On Weaving makes clear, to resuscitate a ì Tactile Sensibility. îA lopsided orientation toward vision, she suggests, presupposes too much focus on the eye (or a centering on the ì Iî of the designer), whereas touch is about accessing relationships, thinking through oneís quite physical relationship to the material and how by exten sion that material might affect others in its path. P162
Rather, it is that, as media, textiles are so adaptable to historical shifts, new uses and means. (Indeed, we would be better off to use the plural form media instead of ì mediumî here.) For Albers, understanding textiles requires a kind of methodological reticulation, a netting of the past, present, and future. P167
Thus despite (or perhaps because of) its modernist, synthetic goal, On Weaving insists on the timelessness of this ì ancient craft,î and this means a kind of collapsing of past, present, and future p167
Albersís book, in fact, might be best understood as an attempt to reset the ground for understanding what is specific to textile mediaó especially modern textilesó that is, the hybrid vocabulary necessary to understanding those media that interlace threads. But also, more important, the questions that this plurality consistently evokes. If On Weaving asks questions about and tries to define a spe cific medium, or textile media, that object also forms the method by which she can ask about ì textile problemsî in other fields. The medium dilates beyond itself. Hence we begin to understand the statement made in her bookís introductory note, which bears worth repeating: ì My concern here was to comment on some textile prin ciples underlying some evident facts. By taking up textile funda mentals and methods, I hoped to include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems.î History, in some sense, is reticulated according to a textile method. P168
Birth of Fiber art: Indeed, if the medium of weaving that Albers discusses in her final treatise begins to take on a new shape and point to new meth ods, this may be for several reasons. For just as Albersís book was being written, its object was being replaced not just within the tex tile industry but also within this mediumís division of the so called fine arts. The tapestry as the traditional area of nonutilitarian, artistic practice using threads would soon be replaced by some thing called ì fiber art.î Following on artist weaver Lenore Taw neyís breaking of the warp beam and the loomís rectilinear grid to bring curves into the fabricó as in Tawneyís Dark River (1962), which is reproduced as plate 107 of On Weavingó a variety of off loom techniques came to be harnessed in the late 1960s. Various methods of knotting and felting would quickly take over and the field of threads would begin to resemble something more three dimensional like sculptureó or, rather, like those postminimal ist objects that defied categorical boundaries and introduced the viewer to phenomenological experience.95 In 1968, having recog nized the loss (or reshaping) of this modernist medium, Albers would complete her final tapestry, the title of which metaphorized the apparent death of the loomís grid, Epitaph. P 171
Code: on the matter of method: sometime between 1997 and 2000, Rosalind Krauss began to rethink the concept of medium.97 Prompted by a concern over developments that had led from the conceptualistsí investigation of the ì generic category Artî in the 1960s to the proliferation of installation art (the ì post medium conditionî ) in the 1990s, this October editor found herself redrawn to the Greenbergian language of medium specificity, even as it seemed completely obsolete. Krauss resuscitated the concept of medium specificity by reframing it as a ì recursive structureó a structure some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the struc ture itself,î which is, importantly, ì something made rather than something given. And so, less ontically than structurally moti vated, Krauss developed a new method for understanding what was medium specific about Colemanís particular, incongruous use of slide tape (projected images and voice over) and Kentridgeís use of drawing and film. In Kentridge, for instance, the medium was to be found in the procedure of walking back and forth from draw ing surface to filmic cameraó the film registering like a palimpsest this process of drawing, erasing, and pushing a buttonó a recursive act, a new language. As these two artists had each in their own way ì invented a medium,î Krauss invented a method for understand ing them. P171-172
With Kraussís new understanding of medium in mind, I am compelled to ask one final question: could we align her method with that of Albersís, or with my reading of the weaving work shopís texts throughout this book? Does a discussion of this verbal noun, weaving, ultimately benefit from Kraussís understanding of the medium as a recursive procedure and language? The medium is in some sense similarly expanded. But the historianís and the weaverís approaches to this concept are also quite different, and hereís why. First of all, in Kraussís method, each newly invented medium is rather tethered to a certain artist, whose particular body and method of working with various techniques are ultimately specific to that particular artistís praxis, a proper name: Coleman, Kentridge, or Christian Marclay. By contrast, textile media as specific materials, structures, and techniques more frequently run amok in the land of anonymity. Moreover, weaving is not just a set of processes: it is also, as Iíve indicated, a certain mediation of the semiautonomous zones of form and history. Textiles are so overtly bound up in the modes of production that define precapitalist and capitalist societies, and the gendered problematics that circum scribe labor, that they can rarely if ever be called ì art.î Krauss may be interested in expanding the mediumís parameters, and even rec ognizing, for instance, how Kentridgeís medium helps him make connections between mines and capitalists in South Africa. But she is still a structural formalist at heart. In Kraussís method, the notion of medium has come a long way since the mid twentieth century treatises of Greenberg, whereby it seemed so simple, so self evident, but the medium remains nevertheless still rather formal for Kraussó that is, rather unified under a singular practice. And perhaps most significantly, to avoid confusion with the word media, she insists that the plural of artistic medium must be mediums, each being a specific art, not a culture industry infiltrated field that is bothered by the problems of communication. P 172-3
the thing about (Bauhaus) weaving that is most particular, as we have seen, is that its very specificity lies in its ability to absorb so many other disciplines or, alternatively, shed light on ì textile problemsî across other fields. And as Albersís investigations into ì material as metaphorî clarify, the medium occupies, for her, the aporia between materiality and communicationó or ì touchingî and ì touching on.î
following on statements made by German media theorist Josef Vogl, I would summarize this and the previous chapters by saying that ì no such thing as a medium exists in any permanent sense.î 102 What does exist is a medium ì eventî ó ì a complex formation comprising mate rial, discursive, practical, and theoretical elements.î 103 Bauhaus weaving is (was) an event that stretched out and absorbed the lim its of other media in its path.
For if media are ì self referential, world creating organs,î Vogl writes, they are also
events in a particular and double sense: the events are communicated through media, but the very act of communication simultaneously communicates the specific event-c haracter of media themselves. Media make things readable, audible, visible, perceptible, but in doing so they also have a tendency to erase themselves and their constitutive sensory function, making themselves imperceptible and “anesthetic.”105
174 CONCLUSION Vogl calls this condition of mediaó most evident in a mediumís initial moment of inventionó a ìdouble becoming,î a (Heidegger ian) mode of presencing that simultaneously erases itself. By con trast, in the most literal sense, weaving has no definable moment of invention. Itís simply been around too long, in too many differ ent geographical contexts and in too many different forms. There is no singular event, for it always adapts and readapts. As discussed by the Bauhaus weaving workshop weavers and later expanded by Anni Albers, its continual reinvention (in pictorial wall hangings, functional prototypes, optical tactile things, patented objects and so on) was subtended by its ever present gerund form. Moreover, the medium of weaving, unlike, say, Galileoís telescope or photogra phy, can never quite erase itself to yield anesthetic objects of intel lectual inquiry (like the shape of the universe). What the medium of weaving and other forms of thread interlacing make visible, or rather tangible, in the end is their material stuff, their physicality as evidence of a practiceó however inaccessible that practice is in the space of the cloth. And yet textiles do, simultaneously, stretch the limits of perception: as we wear or sit on them, we tend to forget they exist. This is a rather different version of the ì double becoming. P173
Adamson and Pye
Smith, T (2014) Bauhaus weaving theory: from feminine craft to mode of design Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
‘Albers’s books also participated in a wider discourse within modernism concerning medium specificity… she analyzed ì basicî and ì modifiedî textile structures, nar rated the loomís technological history, and argued for a tactile sensibility, the activation of a distinctive textile trait: the tactile blueprint or latent perceptivity of matiere.’ Smith, pxiii
Bauhaus weavers began writing essays to develop parameters (and justifications) for their woven objects. Unlike most of their craft workshop colleagues at the Bauhaus, the weavers were avid about the practice of writing; they were pre occupied with formulating (and reformulating) a theory of their craftís Stoffgebiet (material field) or Gestaltungsgebiet (formal field). Through texts that explored weavingís material elements, loom practice, and functional applications, a Bauhaus theory of weaving emerged. And against a backdrop of political and social upheaval in the Weimar Republic, weavers like Anni Albers, Gunta Stˆ lzl, and Otti Berger harnessed at different moments (and to different ends) the rhetoric of expressionist painting, Neues Bauen architecture, and Neue Optik photography, often defying the categorical bound aries that defined modernism. What they accomplished was a pro found step in the recognition of weaving as a specific craftó one that could be compared to, and differentiated from, other media. …This book thus wrestles with the problem implicit in Stˆ lzlís statement regarding the ì picture made of woolî : how, in other words, did the weavers come to terms with the specificity (and apparent inadequacies) of their field with respect to others (like painting or architecture), and how did they go about giving it a theoretical voice? ppxiv –xvii
As it turns out, the 1926 text by Stˆ lzl followed on the heels of another essay by student Anni Albers, titled ‘Bauhaus Weaving’, which argued that weaving’s processes, structures, and materials are best explored through direct experimentation on a loom. …What Albersís essay precipitated was a language for understanding how craft and design at the Bauhaus were always boundó one was dependent on the other. Perhaps most remarkable about Albersís essay, published five years after the opening of the Bauhaus, is not just that it counts as her first text on the workshopís craft, but that it might also count as the first attempt to specify a modernist approach to weaving practiceó one that embraces an ìoldî method of ìhandworkî in order to consider the fundamental elements of the weave, and to experiment and create new fabrics from within these constraints.15 P xvii
Albers, by contrast, describes how Bauhaus weavers were attempting to renew a direct, manual contact with materi als through work at the loom. In this text and others by Albers or her Bauhaus colleagues, we find a textual exploration of weavingís material elements, its technical practice, functional applications, and similarities to (or differences from) other media in order to determine what constitutes a specifically modern practiceó one suited to creating various kinds of textiles for modern life. In other words, a modern theory of weaving does not emerge until the stu dents of this Bauhaus workshop begin coming to grips with their craftís ì basic conditions. P xviii
The weaving workshop tended for many decades to be an after thought in historical discussions of the institution.19 This changed in the early 1990s when Sigrid Wortmann Weltge published Bau haus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop.20 Crucial in framing the history of the workshop and bringing the original work of the weavers to an English speaking audience, Weltgeís text documented the activities of the workshop and showed how the sta tus of textiles at the school was largely problematic given the fact that it was associated with ì womenís work. P xviii
There has been no investigation of the ways that weaving, as it was theorized through the weaversí writing and practice, retex tures the Bauhausís discursive field. This is not to say that the weav ersí writings, or the fact that they wrote, are unaddressed; Nicolas Fox Weber and Brenda Danilowitz have, for instance, commented extensively on the crucial role of writing in Anni Albersís practice.25 But very little of the extant literature on the workshop provides a sustained view of the Bauhaus weaversí writings within the schoolís and Weimar Republicís theoretical landscape, or that of postwar discussions of media more generally. The present volume thus finds new value and significance in the work they did as writers.
….how is a particular craft’s value a function of social categories (of gender, or manual versus intellectual labor)? Does weaving’s association with women require us to reconsider a general (neutral) understanding of craft practices, forms, and skills? Conversely, how are notions of gender and femininity complicated when confronted with the techniques, functions, and art historical or modern industrial metaphors that are used to define textiles? Pxix – xx
In focusing on the weavers’ texts about their objects and practice, Bauhaus Weaving Theory confronts a long standing assumption in art history that the crafts are manual or technical, but never intellectual, arts. P xxi
Craft, it seems, is by definition not an ì intellectual exercise. …
According to Adamson’s account, the concept of craft is organized around ‘material experience’ on the one hand, and ‘skill’ on the other. Indeed skill, as he argues following Pye, may be ‘the most complete embodiment of craft as an active, relational concept rather than a fixed category’. 36 (To put it another way, unlike this word art, the word craft can be used in a sentence as both a noun and a verb.) Thus, it applies to the sculptural work that Constantine Brancusi shapes out of stone as much as it applies to Peter Voulkosís work in clay something connected to the history of ceramics, a so called handicraft or decorative art with all of the assumptions about amateurism and skill that go with it. And as a process, craft is not just a distinct category but is the veritable ‘horizon’ of (all) art’ that which yields its possibilities yet disappears in the process. Citing Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, Adamson ultimately argues that craft must be understood as that which is ‘supplemental’ to the ‘autonomous’ (modern) work of art. Craft is pervasive (everywhere in art and design), and yet mostly unrecognized. As the concepts of art come to the fore, the work’s craft is that which recedes, or moves to the periphery, like a frame. Pxxii
…medium took over from the particular arts as the lingua franca of the mid twentieth century, it stressed the distinction held by Kant between art and handicraft, affirming that the process of each particular art was ‘free’ and ‘purposive . . . in itself’ (whereas the crafts were mere ‘work’). Kantian aesthetic autonomy was fully conflated with medium specificity; Greenbergís (rather positivist) ‘ medium’ could be ‘art’ precisely because it was defined by clear material and practical parameters. Pxxv
whether to call weaving a craft or a medium. The point of bringing the word craft into dialogue with medium is not meant to legitimate weaving practice as ‘art’ (As Adamson reminds quite bluntly: ‘Anything can be taken for art, craft included, and that is all there is to say on the matter.’) Rather, an investigation of the weavers’ theories, if framed by this relationship, has the radical capacity to shed light on each category’s already hybrid nature the fact that, even within early twentieth century modernism, a textual understanding of any practical field (be it weaving, painting, architecture, or photography) was always striated by the terms of other media, other crafts. Emphasizing the craft of weaving, nevertheless, bears a political weight, insofar as it becomes necessary to grant that thinking indeed emerges within manual practices, within labor. Perhaps craft and labor are not about turning off the brain but about reactivating different centers. As the weavers’ writings and textiles show, ideas became manifest in their physical manipulation of the loom, either unwittingly or with a bit of savvy. P xxv –xxvi
‘It is interesting . . . to observe that in ancient myths from many parts of the world it was a goddess, a female deity, who brought the invention of weaving to mankind. When we realize that weaving is primarily a process of structural organization this thought is startling, for today thinking in terms of structure seems closer to the inclination of men than women.’ (Albers in Smith, 2014, pxvii)
Weaving and gender: It seems that the physical material of thread and the process of handling it might have, as Muche thought, threatened his status at the school, for weaving with its grounding in manual (not intellectual) abilities is intrinsically feminine. Weaving’s femininity was not simply a matter of subjects but also of objects, practices, and semantics p xviii
Weaving occupied a feminized status at the Bauhaus institu tion in many ways, but perhaps primarily because its materials and practices were considered subordinate to the more fundamental practice of form and color theory (taught by painters like Johannes Itten or Kandinsky) or the functionalist logic of architecture. Espe cially early on, the Bauhaus masters mostly dismissed weaving as an applied art, whose secondary (or tertiary) position afforded it no intellectual dimension of its own. As a manual practice, weav ing was seen merely to borrow or apply the formal and functional theories that painting or architecture developed.60 So more than its connection to a female subject who weaves, weaving was feminized as a ‘linguistic absence' in the language of artistic media.61 The fact that weaving could not reference a longer history of theoretical inquiry into its specificity as found, for instance, regarding painting (from Leonardo to Kandinsky), or regarding architecture (from Vitruvius to Adolf Behne) contributed to its feminine role pxviv
the discursive connections that gender weaving also sprout from a dual history of domestic (amateurish) production on the one hand and industrial (wage) labor on the other. While the Bauhaus tended at first to view weaving practice as a gentle, domestic craft best suited to the female sex, in Germany at this moment the identification of textiles with industry involved the image of women toiling in factories, or striking for twenty two weeks to achieve a ten hour work day.65 Karl Marx wrote of the new surplus of women who entered textile factories in the late nineteenth century once the deployment of ‘machinery dispense[d] with muscular power’, allowing for the employment of ‘workers of slight muscular strength’. 66 And so by the 1920s, the association of textiles, machines, labor, and women had become so pervasive in the popular imagination that these terms were inextricably bound. P xxx
the Bauhaus weavers were rather born from a theoretically charged matrix, where the articulation of ideas was as important as the practice. They had to secure their status at the school by way of text. It was not enough to do a practice, like weaving; they also had to establish the ‘basic laws’ of their medium, in writing, for the workshop’s products to be considered valid in the eyes of the school. P xxii
The second chapter examines the initial theories of weaving, written by Anni Albers, Helene Schmidt NonnÈ , and Gunta Stˆ lzl between 1924 and 1926. As the school abandoned its experimental beginnings and catapulted itself toward a technological future, a modernist theory of weaving was born. Harnessing the functionalist (Sachlichkeit) discourse of the Neues Bauen movement (Adolf Behne and Walter Gropius), they specified the use of textiles in architectural space. Chapter 3 examines how weaving student Otti Berger drew on L· szlÛ Moholy Nagyís arguments regarding the ì opticalî nature of photography to develop a complementary theory of tactility as it pertained to cloth. While close up photo graphs of Bauhaus textiles in magazines and brochures worked to sell the workshopís products, Berger reflected on the simultaneous visuality and ‘holdability’ (Haltbarkeit) of the woven medium pxxxiv
weaving is as much a craft and medium as it is an apparatus (dispositif), in the Foucauldian sense. It is as much a specific practice (set of materials, tools, and way of putting things together) as it is a network connecting a ‘heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms . . . propositions, in short, the said as much as the unsaid.’ 73 Weaving is at once this particular technique as opposed to that one (say, painting or architecture), and also the network that in various concrete, practical, and theoretical modes links together the competing discourses of modernism.
Writing and weaving, Anni Albers
it was also here that she had to negotiate the impasse brought on by a certain incommensurability: that between (physical) practice at a loom and writing, or ‘touching’ material and touching on its ideas.4 Shifting gears in On Weaving, this former Bauhaus student began to speculate that textile structures, found in woven artifacts, were underpinned by certain principles, ones whose fundamentals and methods might be relevant beyond the terrain of textiles proper, textile things.5 (See plate 9.) While returning to a discussion of their ontic identity, she asked after their potential, as media, through which to grasp or work through various related problems. Thus she writes in the book’s preface: ‘Tangential subjects come into view. The thoughts, however, can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread.’ 6 The intertwining of threads specific to textiles hence becomes a philosophical lens or, more precisely, a philosophical net. So, for example, Otti Bergerís thoughts on the haptic identity of textiles, discussed in chapter 3, are repurposed toward what could be described as a tactile, textile philosophy. Albers redresses what she identifies in her post Bauhaus moment as an insistence on ‘progress’ that advances some areas (‘reading and writing’ or vision) only to produce regression elsewhere (a ‘tactile sensibility’ ).p143
….What she does is to harness two competing directions within the use of medium in the postwar landscape. On the one hand, she considers the medium as grounded in the materialó say, paint and canvas or thread; and on the other, she picks up a notion of medium as a vehicle of communication, a technical apparatus that transmits messages or ideas.8 (In other words, she participates both in the development of high modern ist art criticism and in the emergence of media and communica tion studies.) Anni Albers thus inserts herself in the aporia between these two quite different understandings of that term. p143
Anni Albers was also beginning to confront the difficulties of translation in another sphere: in her attempt to bring the practice of structuring and combining threads on a loom into text. Hence in her first essay in English from 1937, ì Work with Material,î she ultimately fixates on the maxim of listening. It is important, she argues, to recognize the limitations or ì veto of the material.î 10 For ì more than an active process,î what is needed ì is a listening for [its] dictation.î (The good designer should allow the material, for a moment, to become active, rendering her the receiver of its identity.) But here, the first set of paradoxes begin to be introduced:
while imploring (her student) designers to listen to materials that somehow ì speakî or ì dictateî their use, Albers also suggests that those materials were in some sense ineffableó a n ì original stateî of ì stuffî that had to be accessed physically without ì informa tionî clouding the relationship.11 (Materials both can and cannot communicate.) And yet at the same time any transfer from practice to text (or speech p144 -145
Albers found some parity between the practices of weaving and writing. It was never that one was fully on the side of ineffable materiality whereas the other was about information and communication. And she understood that ì threadsî had in many cultures long func tioned as ì transmitters of meaning.î 14 She even came to approach the act of writing as she would her work at the loom, her method for one bearing ì a stunning resemblance to the processî of the other: Using her manual typewriter, she would write her text on ordinary 8½ - by- 11- inch sheets of paper and then tape the pages together as if to create a scroll. She felt that only in this way could she achieve the flow continuity of the completed essay; at least initially, she did not want the barrier imposed by the need to turn the page.
‘We often look for an underlying meaning of things while the thing itself is the meaning. Intellectual interpretation may hinder our intuitive insight. Here education should undo the damage and bring us back to receptive simplicity. It is obvious that a solely intellectual approach to art is insufficient and that we may have to try to redevelop those sensibilities which can lead to immediate perception’ Albers in Smith p145
a designer or weaver can only hope to reengage ì immediate perceptionî through practice, another kind of mediation of the material.p145
In writing essays, she built sentences on continuous stretches of paper, analogous to the layering of weft, the building of a scroll like swath of fabric on the loom. So in some sense she saw these two media to be both specific and functionally analogous and was determined, according to Weber, to understand and articulate the parallel ì rhythmsî of each. She sought to fully grasp the craft of manipulating words in order to translate the potential of the for mer, weavingís meaning as a practice, its idioms and its ì code.î 16 Writing (or typing) would become another medium through which she understood her woven practiceó this becoming perfectly meta phorized in her studies for fabric patterns on a typewriter. It was in the back and forth (the mediation) between these two mediaó the two languages as they touched on one anotheró that she grappled with the problems of translation, or the complicated relationship between communication and materiality within her practice. P146
the material functions within weaving as metaphor. P146
like the activity of putting thoughts on paper, working with material (or listening to it) functions to medi ate the ineffable. As metaphor, material operates as a means of communication, or, rather, it enables a movement from one space to another.18 In this system, any experience of material is never quite direct. It is only accessed metaphoricallyó as an experience of an experience.p 146
the designs in ancient Peruvian textiles were an eloquent substitute for written language…. While aware of the way that threads were some of the earliest transmitters of meaning, Albers was ì not interested in deciphering or copying particular written languages; rather she explored the idea of marks and signs as language distributed across a surface in a way that recalls the structure of a text.î 20 She doesnít seek to convey information or ì carry discrete information about the world.î 21 Instead, through the ì act of ëdrawingí with thread,î and by considering ì the semantic implications of elementary geo metric formsî found, for instance, in ancient Precolumbian weaves, Albers sought to evoke ì linguistic characters and systems through the rectilinear arrangement of ideographic signs p147
But more than reference the idea of language as such, these signs appears to trace, reflexively, the function of the weave. Troy sees this as an example of Albersís fundamentally modernist ì self referentialî approach to weaving.23 And indeed, the tapestry seems to communicate nothing but its own code; rather than communicate other information, external to its form, the black lines of code appear only to transmit the operation of weaving weft through warp, the tapestryís own methods or procedures. P148
(Of Code) The floating of black lines through a densely entwined weave seems to present the material (literally) only to hide, at the same time, the method through which this fabric was made p149
(of thenotation of weaving) While the weave draft is not essential to the act of weaving, this little diagram articulates the layer or process that intervenes between production and product, process and artifact. So this is not a diagram of the object but, rather, of the mediumó the in between. It is something of an algorithmic codea s image. P150
Even when codified, the fabric is also born from the ì subtle playî or ì interrelationî between material and structure p150
Thus the system of the draft notation, like any language, can never be fully exhausted
(Table)Page from Anni Albers, Anni Albers: O n D esigning (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). “Diagrams of Constructions.”
through the utterance of threadsó some being more ìobedientî or ì resistant,î others more ì charmingî or ì dull.î A woven textile (a piece of fabric) is never just the direct consequence of a given plan. The practice of weaving, Albers suggests, is also bound to the par ticular ì event of a threadî ó which, in its ìsubmissiveness,î some what paradoxically limits or ì dictatesî what can and cannot be accomplished with it. Even in the space of practice, any access to the metaphors of the material is only won through the mediation. P151
we begin to understand Albersís quite expanded understanding of medium. As weíll see, if she defines it at all, then it would be a technique or operation (say, in the gerund form, weaving), whose ì potentialities and . . . limitations are never quite determined by the object alone (the verbal noun, a weaving).p151
Then in the 1939 essay, Anni uses the word medium and moreover seeks to define her understanding of this term:
Recognizing in matter its potentialities and its limitations may also help us clarify the ideas of the medium in art when it is immaterial. This idea of the medium in art is often misunderstood. A distinction is necessary, to any artistic end, between the medium serving a purpose outside itself and the medium in its own right as for instance words used for reporting vs. words used in poetry. Some media have to be released from their representative meaning to make them fit for artistic purpose. Words and gestures, as an example, are binary in that sense. As they are often not clearly recognized in their specific capacity as elements of form, they are often chosen as means by those who feel some vague urge for expression. They seem to be materials familiar to us through their daily use. But as media of art they have to be newly mastered just as any other material has to be.p151
But it is telling that Albers turns to the example of language to define medium, which must be distinguished by its endsó one ìserving a purpose outside itselfî and the other in ì its own right.î The two options are linked but not necessarily the same. These may be divided between reporting and poetry, where the understanding of the limitations of the mate rial (the word) may develop into a new form, as ì media released from their representative meaning.î On the one hand, a medium is a vehicle for communicating something external to itself; on the other, it is about grappling with the material. Significantly, then, the definition of medium is at once singular and split; it functions or transmits information transparently, as in daily use, or it is ì mas teredî and made strange. Whereas all material, she argues, ì dic tatesî certain structures or ì limitationsî that the artist or poet must recognize, insights gained from direct ì work with a substanceî pro vide the only viable method to grasp its parameters and work with it productively. Or, rather, the medium is less a thing than a specific kind of action taken toward the material, a process of ì recognizing in matter its potentialities and limitations. P152
Media debate: The word medium, that ì barbarous term,î as Rosalind Krauss recalls invoking Foucaultís terminology, grew over a few decades to become the veritable ì objectî of a discursive field.35 Two intellectual milieus were born out of debates around this single term. On the one hand, there was the development of high modernist art criticism in the writings of Clement Green berg, a doubling down on the materiality of artistic objects, the empirical fact of flatness for painting.36 On the other, there was the newly emergent field of media studies in the writings of Mar shall McLuhan, who by 1962, in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, postulated that media exert effects on the way humans perceive and understand the world, which in turn affect social organization. (This would also form the basis of his axiom ì the medium is the message,î further elaborated in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.)37 The two concep tions of medium, which consolidated by the mid 1960s, were at odds with one another.38 While Greenberg insisted on the mate rial identity of the medium, McLuhan focused on its perceptual and social effects; and where the former ultimately located purity, the latter described the inherent hybridity of mediaó e ach new medium (say, television) ì remediatingî earlier media forms (film and broadcast radio). P152-3
Albersís approach to the link between medium and transla tion was quite a bit different. First of all, she focused more readily on questions pertaining to practice, not identities or substrates, as Greenberg and McLuhan did. And the material never stood on its own, as an empirical thing (say, a flat surface) that would require a single approach to it over another (abstraction). While the mate rial may ì dictateî its limits, through the mediumís practice, the weaver may recognize and pursue multiple possibilities. And if the medium, according to Albers, has ì effectsî on human experience, they are not intrinsic to the sensorial space of its substrate alone. P154
Neither the mediumís identity nor its effects are a given. Any access to the material is neither inevitable nor transparent in a singular form but only arrived at over time. ì It takes a long time to get to point zero,î she exhorted.42 Thus the problems of translation come in, initially, at the moment the practitioner interfaces with the mate rial, attempts to ì learn of its subtleties,î and works with it. And subsequently, with much difficulty, she attempts to relay that expe rience into words. The problems of translating a medium happen across two vectors. P154
Art and performance: ‘thus form demands unending performance’ Josef Albers in Smith p 154
Indeed, the notion of performance, or the emphasis on process over empirical ì data,î is a central theme throughout Josefís writing.
Further, color was at once the medium and the method that determined his method. Because it interacts in a certain way that is temporal, color requires a temporal practiceó a life spent performing and reperforming (or ì rehearsingî ) the same scene again and again, switching out the characters. (Of Josef Alber’s colour theory as performance)
Anni Albers proposed in her two books an understanding of designing and weaving that exploits the question of actionó the fact that the medium is, at least in English, a gerund and a verbal noun. P154
Anni (and Josef) sought to rend meth ods of practice from withinó to make ìtheoryî experiential rather than preconceived. So in the essays that make up her first book, Albers seeks to explore the limits of theory by pushing process to the fore. What emerges is a conception of medium as a space for active learning. P 157
Social consequence of practice: ‘ The point was not to intellectualize the process but, rather, to open manual practice and experimentation with the material (or the ì medium of Understanding,î according to Whitehead) to thought beyond itself not just utility in the abstract, but to economy and society.’ P 158
Out of her consideration of Whiteheadís philosophy, Albers redefines her approach to practice as a maker and a teacher (the two going hand in hand). In her articulation of weaving, through out the forties and fifties her interest in the medium is not in its identity but the ì fluxî of materiality that the practice affords. Thus Albersís medium specificity, if we can call it that, is not about self reflexivityó a líart pour líart, an echo chamber in which the ì pureî ontological identity of the medium is voiced back to itself. Rather, it is a space in which to act, to make decisions (decide which avenue to follow) based on what is and isnít possible within a limited terrain of possibilities. While medium specificity becomes for Greenberg (by 1960) a religion, which ultimately renders that medium in a ì groove,î for Albers the practice of ì listeningî to the specificity of materials is an ethic. The principles of this ethic do not so much precede the process of weaving as much as they emerge in their countless variability within it. And this goes back to the space of pedagogy and learning. The point is not to define the mate rial or medium for its own sake, but to enable a student to arrive at an experience of practice. She felt her role was to ì teach not from the top down, but from the bottom up. P 160-161
Thus the first step, in Albersís mind, was to ì listenî to the material rather than force oneís authorial agenda on it. In such an activity, the medium is no readymade stamp, and designing doesnít have to be ì form imposed on the material.î Designing rather becomes a method of engaging with materialó a space of actionó l ike weaving. Both, again, in the gerund form. P161
(Anni Albers) is determined, as the penultimate chapter of On Weaving makes clear, to resuscitate a ì Tactile Sensibility. îA lopsided orientation toward vision, she suggests, presupposes too much focus on the eye (or a centering on the ì Iî of the designer), whereas touch is about accessing relationships, thinking through oneís quite physical relationship to the material and how by exten sion that material might affect others in its path. P162
Rather, it is that, as media, textiles are so adaptable to historical shifts, new uses and means. (Indeed, we would be better off to use the plural form media instead of ì mediumî here.) For Albers, understanding textiles requires a kind of methodological reticulation, a netting of the past, present, and future. P167
Thus despite (or perhaps because of) its modernist, synthetic goal, On Weaving insists on the timelessness of this ì ancient craft,î and this means a kind of collapsing of past, present, and future p167
Albersís book, in fact, might be best understood as an attempt to reset the ground for understanding what is specific to textile mediaó especially modern textilesó that is, the hybrid vocabulary necessary to understanding those media that interlace threads. But also, more important, the questions that this plurality consistently evokes. If On Weaving asks questions about and tries to define a spe cific medium, or textile media, that object also forms the method by which she can ask about ì textile problemsî in other fields. The medium dilates beyond itself. Hence we begin to understand the statement made in her bookís introductory note, which bears worth repeating: ì My concern here was to comment on some textile prin ciples underlying some evident facts. By taking up textile funda mentals and methods, I hoped to include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems.î History, in some sense, is reticulated according to a textile method. P168
Birth of Fiber art: Indeed, if the medium of weaving that Albers discusses in her final treatise begins to take on a new shape and point to new meth ods, this may be for several reasons. For just as Albersís book was being written, its object was being replaced not just within the tex tile industry but also within this mediumís division of the so called fine arts. The tapestry as the traditional area of nonutilitarian, artistic practice using threads would soon be replaced by some thing called ì fiber art.î Following on artist weaver Lenore Taw neyís breaking of the warp beam and the loomís rectilinear grid to bring curves into the fabricó as in Tawneyís Dark River (1962), which is reproduced as plate 107 of On Weavingó a variety of off loom techniques came to be harnessed in the late 1960s. Various methods of knotting and felting would quickly take over and the field of threads would begin to resemble something more three dimensional like sculptureó or, rather, like those postminimal ist objects that defied categorical boundaries and introduced the viewer to phenomenological experience.95 In 1968, having recog nized the loss (or reshaping) of this modernist medium, Albers would complete her final tapestry, the title of which metaphorized the apparent death of the loomís grid, Epitaph. P 171
Code: on the matter of method: sometime between 1997 and 2000, Rosalind Krauss began to rethink the concept of medium.97 Prompted by a concern over developments that had led from the conceptualistsí investigation of the ì generic category Artî in the 1960s to the proliferation of installation art (the ì post medium conditionî ) in the 1990s, this October editor found herself redrawn to the Greenbergian language of medium specificity, even as it seemed completely obsolete. Krauss resuscitated the concept of medium specificity by reframing it as a ì recursive structureó a structure some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the struc ture itself,î which is, importantly, ì something made rather than something given. And so, less ontically than structurally moti vated, Krauss developed a new method for understanding what was medium specific about Colemanís particular, incongruous use of slide tape (projected images and voice over) and Kentridgeís use of drawing and film. In Kentridge, for instance, the medium was to be found in the procedure of walking back and forth from draw ing surface to filmic cameraó the film registering like a palimpsest this process of drawing, erasing, and pushing a buttonó a recursive act, a new language. As these two artists had each in their own way ì invented a medium,î Krauss invented a method for understand ing them. P171-172
With Kraussís new understanding of medium in mind, I am compelled to ask one final question: could we align her method with that of Albersís, or with my reading of the weaving work shopís texts throughout this book? Does a discussion of this verbal noun, weaving, ultimately benefit from Kraussís understanding of the medium as a recursive procedure and language? The medium is in some sense similarly expanded. But the historianís and the weaverís approaches to this concept are also quite different, and hereís why. First of all, in Kraussís method, each newly invented medium is rather tethered to a certain artist, whose particular body and method of working with various techniques are ultimately specific to that particular artistís praxis, a proper name: Coleman, Kentridge, or Christian Marclay. By contrast, textile media as specific materials, structures, and techniques more frequently run amok in the land of anonymity. Moreover, weaving is not just a set of processes: it is also, as Iíve indicated, a certain mediation of the semiautonomous zones of form and history. Textiles are so overtly bound up in the modes of production that define precapitalist and capitalist societies, and the gendered problematics that circum scribe labor, that they can rarely if ever be called ì art.î Krauss may be interested in expanding the mediumís parameters, and even rec ognizing, for instance, how Kentridgeís medium helps him make connections between mines and capitalists in South Africa. But she is still a structural formalist at heart. In Kraussís method, the notion of medium has come a long way since the mid twentieth century treatises of Greenberg, whereby it seemed so simple, so self evident, but the medium remains nevertheless still rather formal for Kraussó that is, rather unified under a singular practice. And perhaps most significantly, to avoid confusion with the word media, she insists that the plural of artistic medium must be mediums, each being a specific art, not a culture industry infiltrated field that is bothered by the problems of communication. P 172-3
the thing about (Bauhaus) weaving that is most particular, as we have seen, is that its very specificity lies in its ability to absorb so many other disciplines or, alternatively, shed light on ì textile problemsî across other fields. And as Albersís investigations into ì material as metaphorî clarify, the medium occupies, for her, the aporia between materiality and communicationó or ì touchingî and ì touching on.î
following on statements made by German media theorist Josef Vogl, I would summarize this and the previous chapters by saying that ì no such thing as a medium exists in any permanent sense.î 102 What does exist is a medium ì eventî ó ì a complex formation comprising mate rial, discursive, practical, and theoretical elements.î 103 Bauhaus weaving is (was) an event that stretched out and absorbed the lim its of other media in its path.
For if media are ì self referential, world creating organs,î Vogl writes, they are also
events in a particular and double sense: the events are communicated through media, but the very act of communication simultaneously communicates the specific event-c haracter of media themselves. Media make things readable, audible, visible, perceptible, but in doing so they also have a tendency to erase themselves and their constitutive sensory function, making themselves imperceptible and “anesthetic.”105
174 CONCLUSION Vogl calls this condition of mediaó most evident in a mediumís initial moment of inventionó a ìdouble becoming,î a (Heidegger ian) mode of presencing that simultaneously erases itself. By con trast, in the most literal sense, weaving has no definable moment of invention. Itís simply been around too long, in too many differ ent geographical contexts and in too many different forms. There is no singular event, for it always adapts and readapts. As discussed by the Bauhaus weaving workshop weavers and later expanded by Anni Albers, its continual reinvention (in pictorial wall hangings, functional prototypes, optical tactile things, patented objects and so on) was subtended by its ever present gerund form. Moreover, the medium of weaving, unlike, say, Galileoís telescope or photogra phy, can never quite erase itself to yield anesthetic objects of intel lectual inquiry (like the shape of the universe). What the medium of weaving and other forms of thread interlacing make visible, or rather tangible, in the end is their material stuff, their physicality as evidence of a practiceó however inaccessible that practice is in the space of the cloth. And yet textiles do, simultaneously, stretch the limits of perception: as we wear or sit on them, we tend to forget they exist. This is a rather different version of the ì double becoming. P173
Adamson and Pye
Smith, T (2014) Bauhaus weaving theory: from feminine craft to mode of design Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press