needled

Needled reviews: The F-Word. Tuesdays, 9pm, Channel 4
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008)

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like The F-Word, but it is worth watching it occasionally for a few cheap laughs. You know the bit I mean: when Gordon tells you how to make his pea and lettuce soup in just one minute, all in words of just one syllable. Riotous! We are somehow meant to see Gordon’s failure to use any adjectives at all as the signature of his virility, “full of balls, energy, and really great food,” as the Channel-4 tag-line puts it. (Full of balls? Sure is. . .) And the gender stereotypes peddled in Gordon’s brisk how-tos are just as strange and crass as those associated with Nigella. Man does not describe. Oh no. Describing words redundant, and unmanly. Man only know how to use imperative. Imperative style of cooking instructions works best with short, firm words. More difficult with two syllables. Very hard to make the word “mushrooms” sound manly. “Mushrooms” does not sound like manly decree. Man quickly mutters “mushrooms” then gets on with real business of shouting Real Man Words. “WHISK! TOSS! STIR!” etc. If Nigella’s mellifluous, adjectival style is supposed to be read in direct relation to her cleavage, then the F-Word’s use of the imperative might be seen as the culinary equivalent of a wanking circle, with wee Gordon in the centre, braying out commands (Shaft! Girth! Beat! Etc)

Gordon.

But I bring the F-word to your attention because of a particular moment in Tuesday’s show. The redoubtable Janet Street Porter appeared on set, fresh from her carefully stage-managed experience of rearing and slaughtering two veal calves. The viewer had already been treated to the money-shot of the poor beasts’ deaths, and what we clearly needed now was Janet to preach at us about our lamentable food-buying habits. We must never buy cheap meat again. No we mustn’t. Instead, we should feast only on luxury meat products humanely reared by media luminaries. While dispensing her new-found farming wisdom, Janet was dressed in a formless top, machine-knit in a vibrant shade of puce. It was a truly hideous garment (sorry, Janet).

“I suppose you knit that yourself?” said Gordon, inferring that Janet’s experience of slaughtering “her boys” had turned her all rustic, or something.
“No I fooking didn’t, Gordon,” retorted Janet, “this is a designer item.”

puce

Now, I know that I’m more sensitive than your average jane to anti-knitting slurs, but this was about so much more than knitting. Janet enthused about how raising the calves, and watching the process of their lives and deaths, had completely transformed her perception of meat. She now knew what was involved with what she put on her plate. And everyone should think about how the meat they eat is raised and killed. Apart from the patronising attitude, and the unavoidable questions Janet did not address about cost, class, and the ethics of raising a niche luxury product like veal, this is sort of fair enough. Yes, Janet. We should all think about process, and production. But, the problem is, that she hadn’t really engaged with process at all. She had merely played a game to camera: a game with a neatly plotted narrative arc, with contrived hooks and encounters, with a particular rhetorical language (that of reluctant maternity—quite bizarre) and with moments of typically ‘direct’ and ‘irreverant’ Street-Porter-like entertainment. “’Oh no, it’s pooing again’, moans Janet,” to quote The F-Word website. Janet had engaged about as much with the slow processes and difficult realities of farming as she had with the making of her sweater, and her quick retort about the obvious superiority of ‘designer’ to ‘hand-made’ spoke volumes.

So is it just me, or does so much of this currently popular moralising about process (particularly as it concerns food) have an incredibly hollow ring? It is just far too easy for Gordon, Janet and their like to preach to the middle classes about the importance of the means of producing edible luxuries, before nipping out to snap up, promote, or sell other commodities with little thought about the process of their making—or the livelihoods of their makers, for that matter.

But one place where such discussions of process are neither hollow or easy is in Richard Sennett’s excellent new book, The Craftsman. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should. In a series of radical, lyrical essays, this venerable sociologist makes the case for a reassessment of the idea of work itself. The making of things for use or beauty are never, he argues, a matter of individual brilliance, the romantic imagination, or isolated talent. Rather, for him, excellence lies somewhere between the eye and hand, in material practices and processes, and the slow engagement with them over time. Sennett’s notion of craft is something equally applicable to the design of a mobile-phone or a line of linux code, as much as a Stradivari violin , or a particular recipe for Poulet a la d’Albufera. For him, all these ‘crafts’ involve the same struggle with tools and processes, the same issues of encountering and solving problems, of developing and refining skill and focus, of learning how repetition itself can be creative, and of coming to know the singular pleasure of doing something well for its own sake. It is a book of tremendous breadth and sweep but which is also rich in details. In fact, for me, Sennett’s singularity, both as a writer and a public intellectual, is found in such details: in the bumper that really bothers him in the parking garage of a post-modern building; in his discussion of the symbolic values of bricks; in his thoughtful self-awareness of being an outsider as he watches a group of healthcare professionals transfixed by the image of a troublesome large intestine. And any man who can begin a sentence with the words “consider, for instance, an irregular tomato” and from that opening build an argument about the how an idea of virtue inheres in thing-ness, is OK by me.

Epinglier (pin making) Diderot, Encyclopedie (1762)

Lurking around the back of Sennett’s thesis is a familiar argument about the de-humanising effects of the modern and post-modern division of labour. He is quite explicit about his fondness for the all-encompassing curiosity of the mid-eighteenth century, or the undifferentiated artisanal labour of the medieval workshop. Not for him Adam Smith’s efficiently produced pins. This practical resistance to the division of labour—and the division of knowledge too, perhaps—is something he clearly applies to his own intellectual craft-work. He writes about the way children treat the spaces and equipment of playgrounds just as articulately as he does about Martin Heidegger.

Sennett’s thoughts about process have multiple and resonant contexts for me. For example, his remarks about being-in-the-thing came to my mind very strongly, when I read Mandy’s account of the pleasure of the rhythm of knitting her swallowtail shawl:

“We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labour, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organised as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metapmorhose, improve, but the emptional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled crafsman has extended rhythm to the hand and eye.” (p. 175)

. . .and his section on mess chimes very strongly with Felix’s and Kirsty’s Messy Tuesdays posts:

“To arrive at that goal [that of being fit-for-purpose] the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.” (p.161)

And what Sennett has to say about the importance of modesty, and the awareness of one’s own inadequacies, while engaging with material processes is very moot too. Perhaps this is something for Janet and Gordon to bear in mind.

*You can hear Richard Sennett talking with Laurie Taylor and Grayson Perry about craftsmanship, and process in this episode of Thinking Allowed.

You may be wondering what has happened to Belle’s quilts. Well, it is taking time. I have to choose the right moments to work on them. They feel and smell of Belle. Making them is not an easy thing. But there has been some progress recently.

For the first quilt I chose twelve of Belle’s many stripey t-shirts. I cut them up and pieced them. The cutting was emotionally rather difficult. Once I had the pieces, though, the process became more abstracted and easier to do. I was making something, not cutting up her clothes, and the t-shirts were becoming another thing.

So the block design I chose is (rather loosely) based on those used in ‘bedspread 31′ in this book:

(There are some really lovely designs for all sorts of things in here and, because the diagrams are so clear, you do not need to read Japanese.)

Piecing the T-shirts was quite tricky at times, because of the different mix of fabrics. Some are made of pure, and rather heavy cotton jersey, others are lighter, and contain different percentages of viscose, lycra, and elastene. Not only did the pieces (being made of essentially of knit stockinette) want to curl up, each separate piece behaved differently under the sewing machine because they were made of different fibres. And the fact that I wanted my stripes to go in different directions — often against the grain of the fabric — complicated matters even further. Aigh!

Here are the pieced blocks laid out:

you can see how they like to curl. I tamed those babies with pins and sewing machine . . .

. . . and then put them all together:

Hurrah! I have now finished piecing the quilt top, and this is as far as I’ve got.

This quilt is supposed to have a seaside aesthetic — deck chairs and beach huts — and I’m pleased that it seems to suggest this (well it does to me in any case). Because of the unruly nature of the fabric (and perhaps, too, my own ineptitude) there is nothing neat about the piecing, but:
1) I really want the quilt to look like it is made, for its origins to be suggested, if not entirely visible
2) wobbly is a good look. Oh yes. A look I like.

Though cotton jersey — in various percentages and weights of cotton — is certainly not ideal quilting material, the resulting top is satisfyingly soft, and very fluid. I rather like it so far. But rather than face the horror of feeding acres of jersey through my machine again, I am going to quilt it all by hand. This might prove interesting as I’ve never attempted this before. I’m actually looking forward to it, though, which, given the emotional and difficult nature of the project, is a good thing.

Speaking of cotton jersey, I’ve been reading Natalie Chanin’s Alabama Stitch Book. All her projects involve pieced jersey, and all of them are sewn by hand. No feeding lycra mixes through your machine for her! Chanin designs clothes and accessories rather than quilts, and she certainly has lots of interesting ideas for recycling and refashioning cotton — putting a notoriously high-impact commodity to good new use. Admiring the idea of the book immensely, I felt almost ashamed that there was nothing in it that I actually really liked or was inspired by. This is probably because I just don’t go for stencils or reverse applique, or something. However, it was certainly refreshing to read an introduction from a designer who clearly thinks about the meanings of fabric, is sensitive to different textile traditions and histories, and makes these things integral to her design process. But though I enjoyed the book’s introduction, and found Chanin thoughtful and intelligent as well as creative, I did think that the particular spin she put on the history of cotton in the South was weirdly obfuscatory at times. To put it bluntly, it all felt a bit white.

Anyway, more from the t-shirt quilt soon. Have a nice weekend.

The postie has been bringing me a right bag of treats lately. Here’s a selection.

Big thanks to Lara, Felix, Jesse, Annushka, and Philippa!

The top pic shows some absolutely delicious Oxford Kitchen Yarn’s sock yarn in the plum colourway. The colour (which is not quite true in the photo) has a precise and very evocative childhood association for me — of blackcurrant jam mixed into rice pudding (thanks so much, L!) You see here also lovely buttons, badges and ribbons, as well as the Fantastical Reality Radio Show activity booklet which has brought me untold joy over the past few days. It has also made me strangely — nay, not a little obsessively — aware of ordinary household sounds. Mr B was bemused to discover me with a dictaphone, recording the sounds of making a pot of tea. And you’ll see from the last photo that I’m already putting Philippa’s red grossgrain to good use. More of this later.

Meanwhile, miscellaneous weekend things.
A sunday lunch of bread and beer:

I made the bread (unusual, this, as I don’t bake much) but not the beer. It is a dark mild - much lighter and more refreshing than it looks in that picture - delicious.

Also, I made a keyring with a bee in it. Just because I could.

did you know you can get a bag of blank keyrings for around 3p each on ebay? well you can . . .

Finally, something to see and something to avoid from the past couple of days.

ONE TO SEE: The Writing in The Sand, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Amber Films (1991).
Having frequented the Side Gallery, cinema and cafe in Newcastle, and admiring the work of the Amber collective, I was looking forward to this DVD immensely, and it did not disappoint. Built out of of Konttinen’s fabulous photographs of the beaches and people of the North East, The Writing on the Sand is a miracle of editing: narrative-driven and highly cinematic. I am fond of British documentaries about leisure, and particularly seaside-associated leisure, but am often troubled by how treatments of this theme patronise their subjects. Lindsay Anderson’s O! Dreamland is a case in point (much as I love Lindsay Anderson). Written in the Sand, though, is a frank and affectionate, exuberant and celebratory portrait of people enjoying themselves outside. It’s really a great piece of work. And, as well as being a stunning document of the changeable and well-loved beaches and climate of the North East over the past 20 years; and providing an evocative, poetic critique of the effects of marine pollution, this short film also also conveys a very powerful message about the importance of public (and particularly recreational) space, and the threat to it from the wholescale privatisation of the British landscape — our beaches in particular. Eat that, Donald Trump (together with your plans for turning the dunes of Balmedie into golfing-hell)

I’m now very tempted to buy this book of Konttinen’s original photographs.

ONE TO AVOID:
Why, when I read the blurb (Michael Jackson connects with Marilyn Monroe on a Scottish island retreat for celebrity impersonators) did I think it might be a good idea to go and see Mister Lonely? Why, having disliked with a passion every other film I’ve seen by Harmony Korine did I still go and see it? I suspect the presence of Samantha Morton swung it for me, but that was two hours of my life I will never get back again. If I start going on about just how bad a film this was I’ll never stop . . .but it was seriously vacuous twaddle, made all the worse the worse for thinking that it actually had something to say. I soon got bored of noticing James Fox and David Blaine, or wondering what on earth Werner Herzog was doing there &c &c, and had to divert myself for the last hour and a half of the film (groan) by thinking about the design and construction of the lacy cardigan worn by the Shirley Temple impersonator. One final thing, though: by anybody’s standards, Diego Luna makes a terrible Michael Jackson.

Needled reviews Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study.
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Until July 6th.

I like Louise Bourgeois. I like what she stands for. She’s a woman whose early work challenges and outlasts so many of her surrealist contemporaries, with their ludicrous, dick-swinging excesses. I like her investigative, excavatory treament of sexuality and power. I particularly like her beautiful and evocative manuscript-textiles.

(Louise Bourgeois, Hours of the Day (cover), 2006)

Threads of complicity and humour, reproach and chutzpah run through her work. And despite its inward-looking self-scrutiny, what she makes has always seemed to me to be generous and dialogic in character. I can take or leave the psychoanalytic turn some approaches to her art have taken, but I like Louise Bourgeois. So I was really looking forward to the exhibition of her new work at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. I visited the exhibition about ten days ago. I’ve been profoundly troubled by it ever since.

In Inverleith House’s tradition of creating conversations between new art and old archives, Bourgeois’ work is set alongside the collections of John Hutton Balfour, one of the Botanic Gardens’ most important early patrons, and a teacher of plant science. Balfour’s teaching aids, notebooks and illustrations were downstairs; Bourgeois’ gouaches and objects upstairs.

It was interesting to see Balfour’s teaching illustrations in the nineteenth-century spaces in which they might actually have been used. But I really wasn’t sure what to make of these three-foot high illustrations. The apparatus of the exhibition didn’t really help much. We were probably told enough about Balfour: his obsession with the economy of nature as evidence of divine workmanship seemed predictable enough. But these were just enormous teaching aids. It was like being in an undergraduate powerpoint lecture illustrated with (even by nineteenth-century standards) really bad slides.

I was at the exhibition with a biologist. He was mildly interested by the approach to scientific inquiry and pedagogy that Balfour’s illustrations evidenced, but felt that most other people at the exhibition wouldn’t really be concerned with this at all. “People just like the way this stuff looks,” he said, “like the way that old microscope slides are reproduced with a sort of empty fascination all over the internet. People say, ooh, that’s pretty, but don’t really ask why they like looking at hundred year-old insects”

I confess that I do like looking at such things, but I also like thinking about the why of that looking as well. Unlike my biologist friend, I believe it’s possible to regard such things not just as generic scientific ‘curiosities’ but as objects that are aesthetic and critical and contextualised (such as in the work of this talented designer, whose ‘creature series’ displays a careful reverence for the historic traditions of scientific illustration, as well as capturing the essential melancholy of the scrutinised object.)

But the thing was that Balfour’s illustrations didn’t invite this kind of looking. Rather than being (like other botanical images of their era) careful or critical or questioning, they seemed crude, expository, brazen, even. And I was completely bamboozled by what kind of relationship I was meant to conceive between these giant didactic images—whose sole purpose was instruction—and the art of Louise Bourgeois.

(Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait (detail), 2007. Photograph Chris Burke. Courtesy Cheim & Read.)

Upstairs, the walls were awash with delicate puce daubs. Breasts multiplied in bloody repetition. This was vintage Bourgeois. These new gouaches respond, like so much of her work, to human parts and parting: separation, integrity, abjection. Femininity appears in these images as a something that’s in process—a process as disturbingly repetitive and perpetual as Psyches tasks. Bleeding, feeding, replicating—constantly iterating and re-iterating. Bourgeois’ gouaches also display her characteristic ability to shape-shift through several subject positions, using the natural transitions that a series of repetitive images provides (here most obviously between the positions of greedy, needy mother and child). And the formal quality of these gouaches—bright pink smears that are loud and fleeting, almost rowdy—add to the sense of impermanence and questioning and process in the work.

But why oh why were Bourgeois’ gouaches exhibited alongside Balfour’s teaching aids? What sorts of ways did the curators imagine that these two sets of incredibly different ‘nature studies’ speak to each other? There was no conversation or connection that I could see at all, apart from the obvious inference that the sexual parts of plants and women are, um, a bit like each other. Surely this unbelievably crass association between femininity and flowers couldn’t be what was meant here? And it wasn’t just that the two sets of images were dissimilar, but that they were produced in such completely different discursive contexts, at very different moments, for completely different purposes, and addressed to totally different kinds of audience. What was to be gained from their contiguity? This question bothered me the whole time I was looking at Bourgeois’ work. It has bothered me since. In fact, puzzling about Balfour got in the way of my enjoyment of Bourgeois. I really didn’t see how any sort of appreciation of her work was helped by accompanying it with thirty enormous and rather rudimentary diagrams through which young Victorian men might learn about the parts of plants. Where were the “strikingly similar themes” between the two bodies of work, mentioned in the exhibition blurb?

I’m still troubled by what was going on in the space between upstairs and downstairs at this exhibition. And somehow the whole experience has made me like Bourgeois less. But am I missing something? Am I misrepresenting Balfour? According to Catriona Black in The Herald, the pairing of Balfour and Bourgeois was the result of a “casual conversation” between the exhibition’s New York and Edinburgh curators. If anyone thinks that there is more to it than that, can you let me know?

“Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-Century Bluestockings” National Portrait Gallery, until 15th June.

On Thursday evening I stood in a packed room at the National Portrait Gallery. Men and women of all ages jostled to get a look at a three-quarter length portrait of an eighteenth-century writer. This was Catharine Macaulay, author of a radical history of England; essays about the politics of the American and French Revolutions; and an important educational treatise which argued, among other things, for women’s intellectual equality.

Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (c.1775). National Portrait Gallery.

In the gallery with Macaulay, several other “brilliant women” were displayed. There was Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was received, in mid-eighteenth century Britain, as a national triumph. There was Hannah More, the important moralist and playwright, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, literary essayist, political pamphleteer, and author of the wonderful, mordant poetry her contemporaries recognised as the best of the age. These were women whose writings were the focus of international acclaim. They were eighteenth-century celebrities. And yet their fame had nothing to do with their faces or their bodies. They were women whose significant intellectual achievements were regarded as proof that the age of enlightenment had finally arrived.

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. Page after Richard Samuel (1777)

Unfortunately we now seem to live in a less enlightened age. For how else are we to read Brian Sewell’s recent complaint in the London Evening Standard that Catharine Macaulay just wasn’t pretty enough? Sewell, who clearly requires that images of women address his senses rather than his intellect, dismisses this important exhibition as “blowing feebly on the dying embers of feminism.” According to Sewell, “almost everything the sane man needs to know about bluestockings is to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary.” It’s a shame that he didn’t bother to look at the catalogue accompanying this edifying and carefully curated exhibition, or he might have learnt something that would lead him to question the sanity of his entrenched prejudice. But clearly Sewell has, at one time or another, actually read something other than the dictionary, as he is able to trot out every sexist assumption ever levelled at women of learning. One of the key points of this exhibition is to show how British women intellectuals were, in the eighteenth century, the focus of celebration and esteem as much as they ever were of satire. They may well have provided fodder for misogynistic caricaturists like Sewell, but they were also thought to add value to the stock of national achievement. Sewell displays a predictably sad masculine response to women of learning by, like eighteenth-century satirists, castigating their sex rather than engaging with the troubling matter of their intellects.

Macaulay as Libertas (Liberty). Giovani Battista Cipriani (1765)

Faced with the imposing and assured portrait of Catharine Macaulay by Robert Edge Pine Sewell writes: “It is a long time since my reaction to a picture was a burst of laughter, but it happened here, in front of the amazingly Plain Jane that Catharine Macaulay was in her mid-forties.” In this superbly bold image, Macaulay self-consciously associated herself with the figure of Minerva, who inspires, as Freud reminds us, the fear of emasculation. Perhaps this was the source of Brian’s anxious giggles. But not content with damning the wise and defiant Macaulay as unlovely, Sewell is daft enough to question her intellect. According to him, Macaulay’s production of an eight-volume History of England was a freakish and pointless activity: freakish simply because she was a woman and pointless because the men who came after her told the same story: “if we have forgotten Catharine Macaulay’s history it is because the other Macaulay, Thomas Babington, covered the same ground.”

Sewell is — despite himself — right: we have forgotten Macaulay’s history because she was a woman, and because other historians wrote other histories. But this is not because her monumental achievement in The History of England from the Accession of James the First to that of the Brunswick Line was either freakish or pointless. It is because the men who came after her found the historian and her history challenging, both intellectually and politically. Men like Sewell—conservative men, men of small minds and small-minded adherence to the normative status quo—found Macaulay’s writing deeply worrying. For she dared to say that it was fine to kill a king; to establish a democratic republic in his stead; to extend the franchise to those who worked to buy their bread; for colonies to declare their independence from the empire; and for women to claim equal rights as rational creatures. Sewell knows nothing about Macaulay because of the success of men like him in erasing and forgetting women’s intellectual achievements generally, and their articulate questioning of the establishment in particular.

It is actually hard to overestimate just how famous Macaulay was, or just how influential her arguments were during the eighteenth-century’s revolutionary decades. While her face was, as Lord Lyttleton put it, “on every printsellers counter”, her words were on the lips of every radical in London, Newcastle, or Sheffield then engaged in the popular struggle for parliamentary reform. In 1770, the town of Boston wrote and asked her to intervene on its behalf with the British government. Every self-respecting son of liberty along America’s Eastern seaboard had read her History and regarded Macaulay as the personal spokeswoman of their rights. Two decades later, as the French Revolution shook Europe, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote and told her how she entirely “coincided” with Macaulay’s “opinion respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world.” Macaulay didn’t live to applaud women’s attaining of that rank, or see the kind of constitution that she had imagined for America. In 1790, a few months before she died, she told the editor of the Monthly Review how well she knew that her “democratic spirit” and her “recommendation of a learned education for women” meant that her publications would be relegated by conservative men to “the lining of trunks, or other ignoble purposes.” For more than two centuries this was unfortunately the case.

Print after Katharine Read’s portrait of Catharine Macaulay (1769)

But the wonderful exhibition in which Macaulay now features at the National Portrait Gallery has already attracted several thousand visitors. An associated conference, organised by the team of brilliant women who curated the exhibition, was massively over subscribed. All of this suggests an encouraging level of interest in the achievements of the learned women of the past. And yet Brian Sewell’s review, which includes a gleeful rubbing together of grubby hands at the demise of Women’s Studies as a separate discipline in British universities, is depressing evidence that the struggle Catharine Macaulay fought—and suffered for—is far from over.

We went on a jaunt to the National Museum of Costume outside Dumfries, to see the “Hip Knits” exhibition. In the Museum’s permanent collections, there were some fabulous nineteenth-century dresses and shoes on display, but my favourite thing of the day was this:

incredibly fine linen whitework, backed with pink silk, and made by one Jenny Grant in 1724.

I have to say that the so-called knitting exhibition was something of a disappointment. As it was being held in a branch of the National Museum of Scotland, and given the rich variety of knitting traditions Scotland has to boast, I was hoping to see at least something about the history and techniques of Scottish knitting. But no. There was not a Sanquar glove, a Shetland shawl, or a Fair isle Sweater to be seen. The emphasis of the exhibition was firmly on the contemporary commercial appeal of machine knitted and woven woollen products. This would have been fair enough if there had been some sort of curatorial direction as to how to interpret the objects on display. But the viewer wasn’t given any sort of context to aid understanding of the small range of garments arranged about the room. A catalogue, or display cards, might have told us, for example, about the history of machine knitting and weaving; the emergence of distinctively Scottish modes of textile production; the evolution of industrial techniques; the importance of different regional knitting traditions, and so on. But there was very little of this nature for the viewer to get a handle on. There was no exhibition catalogue, and the information on the display cards told us only, in the briefest of terms, about the designers and producers of particular garments.

Donna Wilson’s Cuddly Clouds

While there was an overkill of the sort of brightly coloured, machine knit cashmere that tourists to Scotland seem to find endlessly appealing, objects and artefacts made in distinctive locales by innovative new Scottish designers were relegated to the edges of the exhibit. The most interesting things there (for me at least) were Donna Wilson’s witty machine knitted objects (Wilson also collaborates with the successful Orkney company Tait & Style) and Andrea Williamson’s beautiful muffler, influenced by both Shetland and Scandanavian design traditions. I liked looking at these things, but I wasn’t sure, in the end, what sort of relationship I was meant to conceive between these objects and the Vivien Westwood suit made up of jigsaws of woven tweed, or the pair of turquoise cashmere knickers. And while one could buy, in the musuem gift shop, Sarah Dallas’s Scottish Inspirations , in the exhibition proper one saw very little Scottish hand knitting at all. In the end, all these “hip-knits” said to the viewer was: here are a few woolly things that happen to be made in Scotland. And given how vital and intriguing the contemporary world of Scottish textiles is at the moment, that’s not really saying enough. . .

On a different sort of wool-front, the spring fields were alive with sheep and lambs all the way from Edinburgh to Dumfries. I ate this non-woolly one.

I have been making a start thinking about Belle’s quilts. She lived near Blackpool, and the first quilt will be a jolly sea-side-y affair, made up entirely of her stripey tops and T-shirts — of which she had over thirty. In the summer she was always in stripes. I’ve been looking at different methods of piecing and quilting striped fabrics:

. . .and getting lots of inspiration from the way that Jude makes — and writes — about the texture of memory.

Then yesterday I read Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts, and it completely blew me away.

Arkhipov is an artist, who, for the past decade and a half, has travelled all over Russia collecting and exhibiting ordinary and marvellous hand-made objects. The objects, and the human stories behind their making, are documented in this super book. The bigger picture here is Perestroika and Russia’s economic and political crises from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s — a period when not not only items of luxuriant or complex manufacture were difficult to get hold of, but when everyday commodities became both scarce and pricey. All of the objects in this book are useful, and the vast majority are born out of necessity — but scarcity and privation are only part of the story here. Arkhipov, and the individual makers whose work he brings to light, show how conditions of necessity produce a particular material grammar; a poetry of ingenuity out of the aesthetics of use.

Here is a poetry of mending quite different from those eighteenth-century darning samplers I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Lubov Arkhipova, Socks, Kolomna (1995)

Arkhipov describes his archive of hand-made objects as “socially responsible art . . . in which people are [authors] of their own histories, histories that have unique illustrations — the self-production of everyday things.” His collection shows individuals as creators not just of things, but of meanings, as each maker accounts for their object in their own words. These short texts and multiple voices often produce intriguing dialogues between the makers and their objects through the narratives, memories, and desires with which they are invested. For example Aleski Solomkin’s contribution to the collection is a doormat made of beer-bottle tops that his neighbour and drinking partner kept flicking over the fence into his garden. Forced to clear up the debris of several evenings’ drinking, Solomkin felt “it would have been a shame to just chuck them all away,” and created an object that, beyond its immediate function, is also a quiet celebration of booze, friendship, and neighbourly-ness.

Many makers also speak persuasively about the pleasure of everyday materials and the creative process. For example, this beautifully made leather cap is formed out of an old Soviet punch bag and a worn out pair of leather boots:

Aleksandr Yakimovich, Cap, Moscow (1993)

Aleksandr Yakimovich talks about how the leather of the punchbag softened up over fifteen years of hard use, and of the “great pleasure” he derived from “making something out of something else” and subsequently wearing it. “Its one of my masterpieces” he says of the cap.

In terms of my own thinking about piecing cloth and memory together, the object I was most drawn to was this quilt made by Galina Svistakova for her son, out of the clothes of his brother, his father and his grandmother.

Galina Svistakova, Quilt, Ryazan (c.1990)

Of this wonderful cloth Svistakova’s son says “I think that things possess the aura of their owners, of a person who may very well no longer be with us, that things all carry information and inform us, and harmonise with other people’s things. I believe they live their own independent lives and that we need to. . . harmonise with them and be sensitive to them, in order for them to work in our favour.” This is the sort of functional poetry I can only aspire towards.

I nipped out this lunchtime to visit the Edinburgh Quilt Show. I spent quite a bit of time with the themed exhibitions, among which I saw several quilts, all of them nice variations on the same sampler design, made by students of Mandy Shaw.

This is how these quilts were described:

I confess I was rather puzzled by this. For starters, 2007 did not mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, but rather the bicentennial of the British government’s abolition of the slave trade. Slavery itself persisted in the British colonies until 1833, and was not abolished by the United States until 1865. And there were other anomalies to puzzle over as well. Here were quilts, made by British quilters, commemorating the moment when the British government decided to stop exchanging human beings as commodities. Yet these quilts were not about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade at all, but apparently told the story of Harriet Tubman, an African-American woman rightly famous for her political activities and work with the ante-bellum underground railroad. So the quilts did not actually commemorate Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, but were rather about a moment and a culture four thousand miles and half a century away.

I noticed (and was disappointed by) a similar sort of historical mis-quilting, in the TAFF quilt exhibited in various venues last year:

This quilt is an amazing — and deeply moving — collaborative achievement. It carefully and beautifully documents the geography of the Atlantic Triangle and the conditions on board slave ships; explores several different ways of claiming and representing historical African identites, and accurately illustrates the activities of black and white British abolitionists. But while a block on the left meticuloulsly reproduces the text of the 1807 act to abolish the slave trade, an identificatory block on the right wrongly associates the quilt with the “200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery”

The TAFF quilt simply made one factual error — an error which I have noticed being corrected in depictions of the quilt in recent magazines. But the mis-quilting in the “Harriet Tubman” quilts I saw today was more worrying, and, I have to say, more pernicious as well. For it is not simply a case of a minor historical inacuracy — an inaccuracy that one might excuse as understandable given the (often confusing) ways that the bicentennial was ‘officially’ celebrated in Britain last year. Rather, associating Harriet Tubman with the abolition of the slave trade is incredibly misleading, and in fact performs a certain harm to the memory of both the important African-American woman and the long-overdue British parliamentary act. It is the same kind of wrongful harm that, in a recent edition, illustrates the narrative of Harriet Jacobs with the portrait of Phillis Wheatley — two completely different, completely unrelated, African-American women writers.

In illustrating the work of one woman with the portrait of another, this bizarre book cover has the effect of suggesting that black women writers are somehow interchangeable, that they all, in essence, tell the same story — the terrible story of Slavery with a capital S. But while they may both be women of colour, a hundred years, very different experiences of slavery, and a whole aesthetic world divides Wheatley from Jacobs, just as the Atlantic ocean and a completely different abolitionist culture divides Harriet Tubman from the British parliamentary act of 1807.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of Mandy Shaw and her students in making these quilts. But, particularly at this moment when the associations of quilts and slavery are so contested and so controversial**, one really has to ask oneself what political work these quilts are doing. It is simply not OK to remember one thing (the abolition of the slave trade) while actually remembering another (Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad). Rather than forming (as I’m sure they were intended to do) a thoughtful and powerful act of historical commemoration, these quilts are actually disguising history, falsely covering it over, neatly wrapping it up rather than bringing it to light. And in doing so, they add another quiet, but nonetheless significant act of falsificatory violence to slavery’s numerous, different, and particular violent histories. The textile practices of a specific cultural and historical moment are here wrongly appropriated in the service of the wrong story. At least the TAFF quilt was trying to tell it like it is. But these quilts — in a manner dangerously sentimental as well as historically misleading — do a disservice to contemporary quilting practice by telling it like it never was.

** For a careful and thorough account of the racial politics of contemporary quilt scholarship, see Shelly Zegart’s article “Myth and Methodology,” in Selvedge (January 2008).

needled reviews:
Debbie Stoller, Son of Stich ‘n Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Men (Workman, 2007).
Wendy Baker and Martin Storey, Classic Knits for Men (Rowan, 2007).

In the 25th anniversary issue of Vogue Knitting, Trisha Malcolm speaks of the “grief” she received in 2002 for publishing a special issue of the magazine exclusively featuring men’s designs. “For some reason,” she says, “books and issues that focus on men don’t sell.” If that was the case a few years ago, then several recent books and articles have sought to buck that trend. From Knitty’s “top ten men in knitting” to Michael del Vecchio’s Knitting with Balls, there has been a spate of publications either tapping into a new and vibrant market of male knitters, or seeking to provide contemporary patterns and ideas for women who knit for “Him.” The most prominent of these publications are Debbie Stoller’s Son of Stich ‘n Bitch and Martin Storey and Wendy Baker’s Classic Knits for Men, with its intriguing non-UK title of Knitting for Him: 27 Classic Projects to Keep Him Warm.

Whether or not you regard your “classic” man as a “him” in need of knitted warmth, it is certainly true that men’s tastes and interests have until late been rather poorly represented in the world of modern knitting and crochet. While different feminine preferences are addressed in a dazzling variety of ways, and women of all sizes and ages find their knitwear needs catered for in manners both stylish and contemporary, men’s patterns can often seem homogenous, oddly old-fashioned or just jaw-droppingly repellent. And though there are certainly many recent designs for women that do not speak to my tastes, I can honestly say that hardly any of these make me gasp in consternation, or induce mild hysteria, as is the case with so many men’s cardigan and sweater patterns. A large part of the problem are conventions of photography and styling which, where men’s knitwear is concerned, seem weirdly fixed in an aesthetic most usually seen in clothing catalogues circa 1979. For example, can you believe that this advertisement appeared in a prominent American knitting magazine in 2006?

Ye gods! Beyond the hollow horse-laugh of kitsch or irony, can this image hold any possible appeal for either man or woman? The facial expression of the model—which is perhaps meant to suggest quiet self-satisfaction with one’s own manliness and knitwear—rather speaks to me of near-physical pain. I can almost hear him imploring someone, anyone, to get him out of that oppressive faux-mahogany interior and the terrible, shapeless sweater.

Another problem with men’s knitwear (perhaps until very recently) was The Fassett, whose ubiquitous, crazed man-intarsias were guaranteed to produce a migraine-like reaction in any who dared to make. . . or indeed look at one.

Aigh!

My personal antipathy to intarsia, however, should not be an issue here. Because what’s really at stake is the paucity of good and interesting patterns for knitted garments that men would really like to wear . . . or, indeed, that they might like to knit for themselves. Do these two publications fill this gap? Baker and Storey introduce themselves by dividing the world into two gendered camps: the ‘guys’ who wear the knitting and the ‘womenfolk’ who knit for them. While the first, according to Storey and Baker, are immediately put off by anything too ‘gaudy’ the latter are rendered bored or restless by the 5000000 acres of monochrome stocking stitch perceived to be required for the average man-sweater. Baker and Storey describe their patterns as appealing to a notionally ‘classic’ masculinity, while offering concessions of stitch and colour interest for the ‘usually’ female knitter. And despite its inclusion of several patterns by male designers, Stoller’s book is also firmly addressed to women who knit for “Him” rather than to men who knit for themselves or other men. Though Stoller describes how all of the patterns in Son of Stitch ‘n Bitch were all carefully ‘road tested’ by men, it is still the female knitter who is the subject, and the man-in-his-sweater who remains the elusive object, of her book.

It has become far too easy to be snippy or snarky about Debbie Stoller, and I personally find much to applaud in all her publications, but there are a couple of things to take issue with in her introduction to this book. The first is its condensation of “800 years of men in knits” into four brief pages, which include several historical inaccuracies and the (perhaps predictable) prioritising of the history of Dutch knitting to the expense of other national and local traditions. It also seems odd that Stoller would use this space to reinforce questionable early-twentieth-century gendered myths in which women’s knitting is always represented as a labour of love . . . rather than as just labour. I am speaking, of course, of those over-sentimentalised accounts of wartime sock knitting (which conveniently ‘forget’ about the mechanisms and power of patriotic propaganda) or the often-debunked fables of the identification of drowned fisherman by their knitwear. (The reader will find an interesting source of the latter in JM Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) and a much more careful and accurate account of the debate surrounding it in Richard Rutt’s History of Handknitting than in Stoller’s brief and misleading ‘history’.)

I enjoyed reading the rest of the introduction with its lively and chatty discussion of the sweater curse and Stoller’s own experiences of knitting for men, but I confess I found something odd in her implication of an intractably gendered division of taste. Do women really need to be told that a bloke who wears brown is asserting an active colour preference? That men think about style ‘as much as we do’? Perhaps so. Perhaps Stoller is right to address her introduction primarily to female knitters, and perhaps some women really do need to be reminded that men are entirely capable of thinking for themselves where clothing is concerned. But because of her account of men’s tastes as particular and elusive, and perhaps also because there was so little sense of knitting and knitwear design as activities in which many men engage (box-insert of brief soundbites from male designers notwithstanding), I left Stoller’s introduction with the persistent sense that men were incalculable, strange, and alien beings: man-size doll things just sitting around waiting to be dressed up in our cosy sweaters. As in Baker and Storey’s preface to their patterns, then, in Stoller’s introduction there is emphatically a HER who knits and a HIM who wears; and while HE is acknowledged to possess tastes and preferences HE still remains less an active and integral part of the knitting process than an object to be lovingly adorned and proudly displayed.

But perhaps Stoller is just doing what she can: perhaps there is no way of getting around the unmistakeable fact that, at this moment, it is, indeed, mostly women who knit, and that these women will always tend to objectify an idea of the masculine, in one way or another, whenever they knit something FOR HIM. Indeed, I am prone to this myself. I confess that a man in a sweater, like a man in a kilt, is a thing of suggestive loveliness to me. And I find that my attitude to, say, a bloke on TV can radically alter if I see him in a nice or ‘interesting’ item of knitwear. Indeed, I found that when I was leafing through Stoller’s book of patterns, just one of them stood out for me (Lauren Lax’s Mixology). I showed it to Mr B and was surprised when he said he did not like it at all. I had convinced myself that I had selected this pattern because it spoke most to HIS tastes. But in fact, when I thought about it, what I was really admiring was an image of a man with flowing locks wearing a reasonably nice sweater that was an, um, much tighter fit than the rest of those depicted in the book. O bad objectifying female gaze! O shallow me!

Laura Lax’s Mixology.

This experience shows that I am clearly incapable of being objective when discussing men’s knitwear. I shan’t comment on the designs in Storey and Baker and Stoller’s books, then, except to say that in both collections it was, once again, disappointing to find no shaping at all. In women’s knitwear design, the shape of a size 0 is very different from that of a size 14, yet virtually all bloke’s sweaters are designed as if men came in ascending and regular grades of rectangle. Why not taper sweaters for a better fit? Also, in both books the sizing tends toward the (to me) ludicrously generous. For many of the designs in the Stoller book the smallest chest measurement is 42”. Do men start off that wide? Why not begin standard sizing at 38”?

But the real test is whether or not Stoller’s, Baker’s and Storey’s designs actually appeal to the men who are meant to wear them. So I gave both books to Mr B. In Son of Stitch ‘n Bitch, he felt there were far too many ‘embarrassing’ skulls, and didn’t like the assumption written into so many of the patterns that men were interested in booze, wrestling, and pole dancing (really, Debbie, what were you thinking when you included that hideous and repellent scarf?). Out of the eighteen patterns for sweaters, slipovers and cardigans he liked five. His two favourites were Jared Flood’s Smokin’ (though not in lobster red) and Drew Steinbrecher’s Ernie Sweater. Out of the twenty-one patterns (again just for sweaters, cardigans and slipovers) in the Storey and Baker collection he also liked five, his favourite being Wendy Baker’s Ribbed Cardigan, though not in the colourway depicted. To Mr B liking around one in four sweater patterns means, in his book, that both collections are a success. But most disturbingly for me, he found many of the garish argyle socks, scarves and slipovers in both collections very appealing. If he thinks I’m knitting intarsia, he can think again. So please, Jared, hurry up and publish a collection of lovely, tasteful, tweedy patterns by Him and for Him without the vaguest whiff of the golf course, or an intarsia skull in sight . . .

Last night I dreamt I was reading a sweater. I stood at the front of a full room. The sweater was my script and I read aloud from its stitches as if they were braille. Perhaps this dream suggests my mind’s happy ability to mingle together what I do for a living with what I do in my ’spare’ time. On the other hand, it may be a more disturbing indication of how thoroughly the world of yarn and textiles has invaded my subconscious.

Either way, I have had both words and stitches on the brain since my day at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate. In the quilt competition, my sister and I were both struck by Sara Impey’s contribution:

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

Her Quilt Blog is a truly beautiful thing – the sheer quality of stuff and technique really sings out of the stitches. But it is also a serious meditation on the conflict between the momentary and the slow process, particularly as that regards ideas of making. One’s first instinct when looking at the quilt is to understand it speedily, almost instantaneously—to read it as a straightforward message to the viewer from the maker. Following the words from left to right, you quickly trace a narrative questioning the process of making (‘. . . find yourself asking why anybody bothers making things in this age of instant gratification. . . ’). But, in the act of unpicking that narrative you start to notice how the characters emerge out of the negative spaces on the fabric canvas. It is almost as if the quilt is writing itself. Impey stitches only in the spaces between her thoughts. She makes us look at the process of making under and behind the words we read. In so doing, we contemplate the gap between vision and labour—the gap that is the time of the quilt’s making, its slow process. So we are prompted to think in a rather different way about her art, her fabrication. Rather than seeing the quilt as a lovely thing conveying a message to us in a moment, we consider it more fully as an object made over time . . . the time of its stitches . . . a long time! The quilt is both doing, and meditating upon, what it is saying—acting itself out, and thinking about itself with some considerable aplomb.

Sara Impey, detail of Quilt Blog (2007)

The narrative time of stitching was also an issue in the Primmy and Jessie Chorley exhibition. I found Jessie Chorley’s fabric-books and book-fabrications particularly intriguing. Like Louise Bourgeois, Jessie Chorley reflects powerfully on books, stitches and lives as made-up things; as narrative processes; and as numinous objects full of meaning. But though her books are certainly suggestive in their stitching-up of time and memory, I confess I found the Chorleys’ oppressively cutesy household aesthetic something of an impediment to what was most interesting about their art. In that small exhibition space surrounded by the work of the Chorleys’ I felt as if I were trapped in a 1980s fantasy of Edwardian femininity—a sort of hollow Holly Hobbie world with little basis in, or recourse to, the lived traditions of women’s domestic creativity. However carefully considered their familial self-presentation is in its appeal to memory, fantasy, and the uncanny, the Chorleys’ aesthetic had (for me at least) the unfortunate — and certainly misleading — effect of suggesting that their art had little to say to the world beyond itself.

My reaction to the work of Tilleke Schwarz was completely different. Both my sister and I were completely blown away by it and could have spent the whole day with her embroidered canvases alone. In one way or another, Schwarz’s art is often compared to graffiti. She clearly possesses a certain urban chutzpah, but because hers is so definitively an art of stitch and the slow process, I find the graffiti association a little misleading. A more moot association might be with white noise or radio interference — as the momentary or incidental constantly intrudes upon the slow-time of stitching, living, and remembering. All of her canvases somehow suggested aural interference to me. And her mixing of different stitch techniques and genres, as well as the intrusion of other bits of the material world into the stuff of the canvas itself, conveys how the ephemera of everyday life disrupts and yet defines narrative comprehension of ourselves and our histories.

Tilleke Schwarz Beware of Embroidery (1997)

Schwarz has an ability — unparalleled to my mind in contemporary textile art — of mingling wit and poignancy in stitch. In Beware of Embroidery a banner bearing familiar SWEET ‘N LOW lettering flies blithely and bullet-like toward the anguished visage of twentieth-century Jewish cultural memory. In the same canvas, an enormous and slightly scary bottle of brown sauce divides and illuminates a figure whose ghostly whites and reds seem to suggest material pain and spiritual salvation simultaneously. Embroidered cats sport anarchically over every path of meaning. Neat and ostensibly prim cross-stitched figures kick each other up the arse. Overheard snippets of conversation, advertising copy, scraps of text, and the walk-don’t-walk imperatives which allow us to successfully negotiate the confusing labyrinth of ordinary living all gather together, reminding us that there is never the one story to tell ourselves about ourselves. Schwarz’s stitches say that the stories are always going to be interrupted, the narrative constantly disturbed, by the fabric of life itself.

Tilleke Schwarz, Count Your Blessings

In Count your Blessings Schwarz stitches the familiar image of a coffee-cup lid telling its drinker to ‘sip with care.’ In someone else’s work, there might be something obvious about rendering a disposable thing in an art form that is so emphatically not about disposability. But there is nothing obvious here. Schwarz’s coffee cup speaks beyond that simple contrast between the slow-stitch-medium and the ephemeral commodity. It says something about how the disposable might actually take care of the human; about how, even as we wander distracted in a world of terrible, alienating things and events, the cup we drink from will remind us not to burn ourselves. In stitch, the cup is re-appropriated as a messenger of caution and resolve. Yet even as embroidered art lends this thing an agency almost human, elsewhere in her canvas Schwarz reminds us of how chillingly de-humanising the process of appropriation or representation can be: “members of aboriginal communities are respectfully advised,” stitches Schwarz “that a number of people depicted in photographs in this room have now passed away.” It is this dialogic and inconclusive quality of each canvas that is so refreshing and ultimately modest about Schwarz’s art. It is as if just by listening to the symphony of everyday life Schwarz has turned herself into an instrument and played it all back to us—in words and in stitches, with quiet accomplishment, with breathtaking virtuosity. And it is up to us what we make of it in the end.

Images reproduced by permission of the artists.