The Brooklyn Rail

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction is the rare kind of exhibition that comes to feel irrevocable. Its claim is simple: textiles and modern abstraction need to be thought together. But the “and” of the title—a coordinating conjunction—acknowledges a holding relation not an equivalence between its terms. If anything, questions of connection between textile materials and technologies and abstract art structure Lynne Cooke’s revisionist account of the long twentieth century. From the implications of the industrial loom to the economics of cottage industries, the aspirations of the creative workshop to the exploitative conditions of factories belching fast fashion, her reorientation forces a consideration of process engaged with the gendered labor of production without suggesting something reducible to techno-determinism. Perhaps this is because she likewise emphasizes consumption, which is to say use, from the first gallery. There, the prospective social dimension of functionalism is given the unambiguous rubric “Materialist Abstraction, Design, and Utopian Social Visions.” Anchored by a troupe of mannequins sporting clothing made by Sonia Delaunay and Andrea Zittel, it further establishes the show’s chronological and geographic span, from Europe of the 1920s to North America of the 2020s. The six episodic sections that follow move chronologically, yet also prove recursive in modeling a kind of reception history in the making.

Across some 150 objects, Cooke suggests that the intergenerational re-motivation of technique and form expresses something “rhizomatic and entangled,” as she puts it more promptly in the preliminary text-panel. In this, one might recall an emphasis on trans-medial as well as trans-personal exchange given visual form in the network diagram opening Leah Dickerman’s 2012 salvo, Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, at the Museum of Modern Art. (Woven Histories will finish its tour there in Spring 2025.) However, where Inventing Abstraction included painting, sound poetry, non-narrative dance, drawing, and film, among others, to argue for an active interdependence of emergent practice, it was precisely the same plurality that precluded naming a primary reference. In centering weaving—thread, fiber, and cloth—Woven Histories differently tracks adaptations from within the frame of its traditions. (A closer analogue, then, is Rike Frank and Grant Watson’s 2013 show, Textiles: Open Letter: Abstractions, Textiles, Art, at Museum Abteiberg, organized around Paul Klee’s idea of the thread as an organic line.) In her catalogue essay, Briony Fer finds evidence of a textile “chronotope” in this attempt to trace moments “where the qualities of a textile process … take on a particular intensity, most often drawing attention to the fact of making itself.” Pedagogical institutions like the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and the University of California, Berkeley, figure prominently in accounting for the transmission of the system of warp and weft.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anni Albers and the legacy of her weaving workshop serve as an intellectual and practical lodestar. Still, an especially tight installation pairs Sheila Hicks and Eva Hesse, two students of Josef Albers (the former clearly maintaining his interest in pre-Columbian open weave textiles). Others clustered nearby also took line, filament, and thread, in Cooke’s terms, “as a cognate,” which might yield a painting for Agnes Martin or a wall hanging for Lenore Tawney. The point not only becomes that shared inputs yielded a diverse set of outputs—if all instances of geometric abstraction that open onto a selection of painted grids—but also that these resulting works historically have been slotted into separate discourses, exhibitions, and markets. Craft is the elephant in all of these rooms, and the shifting categories of its definition and containment are then reciprocally constitutive of those of fine arts. Woven Histories complicates this still further by raising without resolving matters of cultural appropriation, from Sophie Taeuber-Arp to Hicks. Nevertheless, a single section, “Basketry as a Textile Art,” does much of this heavy lifting while trying not to recapitulate discredited, would-be humanist ethnographies of “world cultures.” In this installation, sculptures by Ruth Asawa and Martin Puryear that employ basketry techniques for holding space exist alongside Japanese bamboo lattices by Nagakura Ken’ichi and Tanabe Yōta, and the spliced work of Indigenous artists such as Yvonne Koolmatrie (Ngarrindjeri Country in South Australia) and Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band of Cherokee).

Allusive as they are descriptive, headings like “Basketry as a Textile Art” negotiate pre-loom knowledge—in this case, the net and basket—and global contemporary art. Such moves are less necessary in the final sections though, which forward work with imminent devices (e.g., Rosemarie Trockel makes paintings by way of computer-generated knits) or implicate present conditions as their subject (e.g., Sascha Reichstein takes on low-wage manufacturing work in Sri Lanka furnishing traditional lederhosen for the German tourist market). It helps to know that the vast majority of the objects in Woven Histories are created by female-identifying artists, a fact largely unremarked but everywhere intended, if made particularly resonant amidst this more recent work situated vis-à-vis various feminisms and liberation politics. The ultimate grouping, “Community and the Politics of Identity,” insists upon the potential for textiles to act, to queer; they are imbricated in both individuated self-fashioning and mutual belonging—the last predicated on disidentification with dominant cultures, as in the performative garments made by Griz (Liz Collins and Gary Graham). Here, where it pushes art history’s occupation with craft further, Cooke comes clean about the stakes of the project; a panel none-too-subtly reads: “Today, when issues of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sovereignty dominate national and geopolitical discourse, textiles articulate and embody expressions of community and kinship.” Throughout though, the heightened tactility of textile adorning the mortal body forces critical recognition of embodiment as difference.