Anni Albers
- Medium specificity: limits and principal elements of each craft
- tools: loom..
- materials: thread..
- tactile sensibility: the activation of “a distinct textile trait”, “tactile blueprint”, or “latent perceptivity of matiere”
- weave and choice of raw material, the subtle play between them in supporting, impeding, or modifying each other’s characteristics is the essence of weaving
- Bauhaus Weaving: direct experimentation on a loom craft and design are bounded
In Bauhaus year, Albers, Gunta Stolzl, and Otti Berger established theoretical ground for waving as a specific craft that can be compared to other media (XV)
- Weaving at the Bauhaus by Gunta
- functionalist
- not a picture made of wool, need to find basic laws specific to the field of weaving
Sigrid Wortmann Weltge
- Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop
Virginia Gardner Troy monograph with Anni Albers, interest in ancient textile artifacts and South American textiles
The book sheds light on weaving theorized through the weavers’ writings and practice. The book confronts “a long standing assumption in art history that the crafts are manual or technical, but never intellectual, arts” binary between manual and intellectual
Questions:
- How might weaving challenge modernist assumption about specific media, like painting or photography
- …
Glenn Adamson
- craft is a way of doing things, material experience and skill
- craft is both noun and verb, unlike art
- craft is pervasive yet unnoticed
When Moholy-Nagy brought his photographic and typographic practice to the Bauhaus in 1923, his texts on “optics” published in avant-garde journals like i10 were among some of the initial attempts to capture the conditions of this instrument and its light-produced images, setting the stage for subsequent investigations of media that deployed distinctly modern appara-tuses. That the Bauhaus weavers looked to architectural and then photographic theory for their initial theories of the craft is telling. A formal vocabulary borrowed from Paul Klee’s and Kandinsky’s ideas about the pictorial arts is certainly apparent in their writings, but more notable were the Sachlichkeit discourses of architecture and photography. Perhaps the student Otti Berger, who in 1929 related textiles to photography and architecture in her first essay on “Stoffe im Raum” (Fabrics in Space), recognized a potential that was otherwise unattainable (and outdated) in the academic arts. 53 It could even be said that media and crafts were determined by a similarly peripheral identity at that time. xxv
the fact that, even within early-twentieth-century modernism, a textual understanding of any practical field (be it weaving, painting, architecture, or photog-raphy) 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.
What the work and writing of the Bauhaus weaving workshop reveal is that no medium or craft, however specific, can be divorced from the network of other media—and the political landscape—in which they come alive, (reproduce, and reside.
Important to understanding weaving’s identity as a craft or medium at the Bauhaus is an investigation of its apparently feminine gender and the contradictions that this identity entailed. In a passage from her 1957 essay “The Pliable Plane: Textiles in Architecture,” Anni Albers reflected on what she identified as the paradox of weaving’s “feminine role” in modern culture: 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.55
“definition of weaving is entwined with the question of gender”
“more than its connection to a female subject who weaves, weaving was feminized as a “linguistic absence” in the language of artistic media”