Carol Westfall first Guest Post is up. To Read FibernFutures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, click Guest Post Above;
Hitomi Nagai (1954- ). Birth, 2011. Cotton; waffle weave. 79 x 43 x 11 in. (200 x 110 x 28 cm). Photo: Mareo Suemasa.
We visited Monhegan Island inMaine http://www.monheganwelcome.com earlier this month in search of seafood and photos and some of Maine’s most beautiful coastline. The island has no paved roads — but miles of trails, that are easy to navigate thanks to Monhegan Associates’ trail maps available in stores and trailside boxes all over the island. Visitors are advised not to miss the shipwreck, lighthouse, museum, and the many
artists’ studios open to the public and to appreciate the abundant plant life and bird population. One of our favorite sites, however, was not listed in any of the literature. We were delighted when we stumbled upon an art colony of tiny structures populating Trail 11. Reminiscent of the World Beach Project https://arttextstyle.com/2010/05/14/eco-art-news-world-beach-project, in which beachgoers create sculptures of stones, visitors to Trail 11 have created small sculptures of sticks, bark, pinecones, leaves and shells. Some are more accomplished than others, but it was the sheer
volume that impressed us. We stopped counting at 100, but until then, we had great fun looking behind tree roots, around rocks, in branches and creeks to find as many as we could. And, we couldn’t leave without making a contribution; Carter, our budding artiste, created the word “ART” out of large sticks.
Carter’s contribution to trail 11, Monhegan Island photo by Tom Grotta
Who says you can’t learn things from watching television? in In a recent episode of Covert Affairs on USA, CIA operative Annie Walker and her sister discuss the world’s largest ball of yarn located in Lamar, Missouri. Got me wanting more information. Turns out that the competition for largest twine ball (some call them yarn balls, but apparently, they are mostly really twine balls) is pretty fierce and Missouri has only two of several contenders.
Darwin World Largest Ball of Twine created by 1 man photo by Mykl Roventine
Darwin, Minnesota boasts a ball that weighs 9 tons and is 12-feet wide and was mentioned in Crazy Al Yankovic’s video for the song, White and Nerdy. It was rolled by one man, Francis A. Johnson, between 1950 and 1979 http://www.darwintwineball.com. Darwin residents look down on a rival twine ball in Cawker City, Kansas.
Cawker City World Largest Twine Ball http://www.worldslargestthings.com/wllist.htm
World’s Largest Ball of Twine Cawker City, Kansas By jimmywayne http://www.flickr.com/photos/auvet/860982521/
While it was begun by one man in 1953, it was completed by townspeople in a Twine-a-Thon in 2003 http://skyways.lib.ks.us/towns/Cawker/twine.html. A local artist, Cher Olsen, has integrated the twine ball into her paintings, reworking American Gothic and Mona Lisa and the like and these are on display at the Masterpiece Twine Walk http://www.getruralkansas.org/Cawker-City/61Explore/258.shtml. Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin has it’s own contender.
Created by James Frank Kotera who started in 1979, JFK estimates that it weighs 19,336 pounds, which may make it the heaviest twine ball. Only one entry has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s the one at Ripley’s Believe it or Not in Branson, Missouri that’s 41.5 feet in circumference http://www.ripleys.com/branson. (Though some say it shouldn’t qualify as it’s made of nylon twine.) As for the one in Lamar, Missouri –I couldn’t find it but there is an attractive multi-colored ball at the Pattee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri http://www.washburn.edu/cas/art/cyoho/archive/MidwestTravel/Patee and reportedly one made of postal string at the American Bowman Restaurant and O’Malley’s Pub in Weston, Missouri. If you’re vacationing in the Midwest this summer — check ’em out. You can get hats, start-your-own-twine-ball kits and great We-Were-There photos.
“In strictly financial terms, art investing is unattractive. Its risks include attribution errors, fakes, forgeries, thefts and physical damage. Furthermore, it involves high transaction, insurance, maintenance and restoration costs, and it has no current cash flow––money comes only when works are sold. Artworks are heterogenous, illiquid and sold on the subjective, segmented and almost monopolistic market in which no valuation guidelines exist. Investors must perform their own due diligence. But art works, unlike stocks, bonds, real estate and certain funds, provide aesthetic returns as well as financial ones. It is when these aesthetic aspects are combined with the financial behavior of the assets that it gets interesting.” Roman Kraeussl, Professor at VU University Amsterdam, specializing in research on art investment.
From “A Conversation with Roman Kraeussl,” Art + Auction, April 2011, page 48. For more on art as an investment, track down Art + Auction’s April issue, which features the magazine’s annual art investment guide: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37392/april-2011-table-of-contents/.
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Oksana-Domnina-and-Maxim-Shabalin
Contemporary textile artists’ work is often rich in references to other cultures. Traditional techniques are used to generate new forms; images and themes from other cultures are re-envisioned and contemporized. Through her study of Peruvian gauze weavings, Lenore Tawney discovered a reed that she was able to adapt to create the innovative slits and openings that characterized her work.
Shrouded River detail by Lenore Tawney
Carol Eckert’s coiled sculptures feature animal figures that are inspired by African ceremonial head dresses of the Yorubas; Kirsten Wagle and Astrid Løvaas
use old Norwegian tapestry techniques on unconventional materials from aluminum cladding to pantyhose;
Løvaas & Wagle create tapestries that are visually captivating, beautiful, surprising, and rich in references to art historical sources
Nancy Moore Bess’s baskets are informed by her travels to Japan, most recently re-interpretations of the jakago/snake baskets used in Asia to bind stones at the edge of a river or lake to prevent soil erosion; and Jin-Sook So reinvents Korean pojagi by creating patchworks of gold-plated steel mesh instead of the traditional scraps of ramie and hemp.
(Pojagi-inspired work) by Jin-Sook So
Is there a point at which cultural “borrowing” stops being an acceptable compliment and becomes unacceptable co-option? That’s the criticism being made of Russian figure-skaters Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, whose multicultural ice-dancing theme, based on aboriginal costumes, music and dance, have drawn the ire of Australian Aboriginal activists. On January 28, 2010 in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten reviewed the Olympic controversy, similar arguments made about white musicians having no right to play jazz, and recent cross-cultural creations by the likes of Paul Simon and Vampire Weekend.
In “On Thin Ice: Two Russians Skate off the Reservation,” Felten cites T.S. Eliot as endorsing artistic appropriation, quoting him as saying, “bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Felten argues that it is too much to expect “cultural interlopers” to make something better; it should be enough that the borrowing “makes for something different”. And sometimes that something different will be more than different. It will be art.
Writer Akiko Busch has drafted an essay for the catalog 10th Wave III: Art Textiles and Fiber Sculpture, which is being printed this week. Busch is the author of The Uncommon Life of Common Objects (Metropolis Books), Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live (Princeton Architectural Press) and, most recently, Nine Ways to Cross a River: Midstream Reflections on Swimming and Getting There from Here (Bloomsbury). A former writer for Metropolis Magazine, Busch writes about culture and design for a variety of publications. She is a regular contributor to the Considerings column in American Craft Magazine. About the work in the 10th Wave III, Busch writes,
“And what so many of these pieces suggest, of course, is the ease with which the narrative capabilities of the fiber arts converge with more abstract expression. Meaning need not always be so literal. The woven form has an inherent ambiguity; it can be about containing and letting go at once.”
The 164-page color catalogs can be ordered from http://www.browngrotta.com/Pages/catalog.34.html beginning October 30, 2009.
Don’t miss this week’s New York Times Op Ed by Denis Dutton: “Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opinion/16dutton.html?pagewanted=1&em.
Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, who takes a skeptical look at the long-term investment value of conceptual artwork.
In his editorial, Dutton questions whether conceptual art, i.e., work we admire not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept, has staying power. Human beings have a permanent, innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts, observes Dutton, while the appreciation of contemporary conceptual art depends not on recognizable skill, but “on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” Dutton’s prediction: “Future generations, no longer engaged by our art ‘concepts’ and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.” Not to worry. “There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills,” concludes Dutton. We agree.
Books Make Great Gifts 2011: Artist Recommendations
This year we asked the artists we represent just one question:
What was the most enjoyed/most inspirational book you read this year?? Here are their wide-ranging replies:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney (Little, Brown; National Book Award) . This is a semi-autobiographical novel by award-winning author, poet and film-maker, Sherman Alexie. Alexie has been named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and has been lauded by The Boston Globe as “an important voice in American literature.” He is one of the most well-known and beloved literary writers of his generation, with works such as Reservation Blues and War Dances. He also wrote the screenplay for the film, Smoke Signals, based on a short story from his book, Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. In his novel, Alexie tells the heartbreaking, hilarious, and beautifully written story of a young Native American teen, Arnold, as he attempts to break free from the life he was destined to live. Arnold’s drawings illustrate the book.”
Sensual Relations by David Howes (University of Michigan) is Deborah Valoma’s recommendation.