Weaving, knitting, knotting: Show argues fibre art key to modernism | Canada Voices

The Woven Histories exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada includes a large room hung entirely with rectangles and squares. One of them is an important abstract painting, a fine grid pencilled onto a ground of pale grey gesso by the Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin in 1977. Most of the others are woven wall hangings, their grids created in three dimensions by alternating threads or strips of textile. Placed alongside works such as the minimalist Martin, they make their point emphatically: They are just as central to the history of modernism as paint on canvas.

That is the thesis of curator Lynne Cooke, who organized this travelling exhibition for the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In art history, fibre art has been relegated to the sidelines, a secondary medium diminished by its association with craft and, let’s face it, with women. Modernism was a macho movement but as it passed out of fashion in the 1980s, time was cruellest to the minor works – everybody still recognized Jackson Pollock or Donald Judd but relegated those macrame wall hangings to the dustbin. This show, subtitled Textiles and Modern Abstraction, is a powerful reminder that the best fibre art should not be associated with the leavings but displayed alongside the masterpieces of the movement.

Cooke starts with key pieces from the 1960s by American weavers such as Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks and juxtaposes them with paintings and drawings of the same era, often by the same artists. So, she places handwoven art firmly in modernism’s triumphant march toward minimalist geometric abstraction … and beyond.

Several works in the show’s second room, that gallery full of rectangles, represent motherboards or computer chips. In one instance from the 1990s, Intel Corp. commissioned Navajo weaver Marilou Schultz to create a tapestry representing the microprocessor it was building in a factory on Navajo/Diné land, drawing a direct line between Indigenous know-how and technological modernity.

The motherboard and chip pieces suggest these patterns can be representational rather than purely abstract. It’s a point made by what is perhaps the most important painting in the show: Jackson (1976) by Valerie Jaudon. With broad, outlined bands of brown paint on a ground of the same colour, Jaudon establishes a monochromatic grid of circular and diagonal forms that is clearly a weave. For all its hard-edge technique, the painting rejects the canonization of art-for-art’s-sake, eliding the distinction between decorative craft and self-referential art. Her forms refer to the decorative motifs of Islamic or Celtic art but also to patterns that can have a practical function to provide warmth or hold goods. The point is carried forward with the impressive three-dimensional works that surround the painting, where basketry techniques are deployed to create pure sculpture.

Jaudon was a second-wave feminist involved in the Pattern and Decoration movement, inspired by non-Western art and dedicated to reviving the decorative impulses rejected by modernism. The current interest in textiles is certainly a feminist project, committed to rediscovering women artists, but Cooke’s revisionist exhibition is larger than that: About half the artists are men and, if Martin is the most prominent painter, Ed Rossbach is one of the most prominent textile artists of the classic period of the 1960s and 1970s. He is represented by several works including Damask Waterfall, a metre-square multimedia weaving that is both grid and plaid.

Even by the 1970s, however, the hierarchy of media had all but collapsed – ignoring, if you dare, the frenzied revival of painting in the 1980s – and any material could qualify as an artistic medium. So, as this exhibition moves forward in time, it is necessarily less pointed and more defuse; textiles became just one of many equally plausible options.

Cooke now focuses on particular trends in fibre art. A room devoted to the intersection with fashion, or self-fashioning, reintroduces viewers to the work of Andrea Zittel, whose formless striped fabrics and Swiss-cheese dresses represent an intersection of abstract art and clothing, and Rosemarie Trockel, the German provocateur who knitted misshapen ski masks, tuques and sweaters with political implications. My Dear Colleagues, for example, hints naughtily at emasculations and amputations. It features a male shirt form of clear plastic that ends in a practical hanger at the top but is outfitted with knitted sleeves culminating in blood-red cuffs. (There is next-to-no Canadian work in an exhibition featuring American, Japanese and German artists; in this section, it would have been interesting to see art about the body and fashion by Jana Sterbak, creator of the notorious Flesh Dress sewn from raw meat. Instead, the National Gallery is showing Canadian and Indigenous textiles from its own collection separately.)

There follows a section on art related to the textile industries: An entire show could be devoted to the environmental and labour issues that arise, and this documentary and political work seems to fall outside Cooke’s rethink of modernism. Still, it’s a delight to catch a few moments of Carole Frances Lung’s four-and-a-half hour video during which, in the persona of Frau Fiber, she knits a single sock as she sits beside a computerized machine that makes 99 pairs in the same time.

Like Trockel’s knits, Lung’s video provides a rare moment of levity in this serious reconsideration of art history. And yet, Woven Histories is not the least dry or dour: Its large rooms are beautifully installed, filled with big, inspiring wall hangings and sculptures all jockeying for their place in the canon.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction continues at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to March 2.