Archives: seeking memories, making meaning, creative practice

Monday 24 October 2016 | Rose Sinclair | Archives and archivists,

I am asked on a daily basis to describe who I am: one day I am an academic, another a researcher, and then a textiles practitioner. My name is Rose Sinclair and I am all of the aforementioned, but it is my researcher role that brings me to the archive, to seek out fabrics in a place perhaps often perceived from the outside as being full of paper.

Beyond the façade of bricks and mortar is another world and space in which I become so engaged time drifts away. If I could relocate my studio practice with all its ‘stuff’ for a month to just start to examine the designs, understand the prints, weaves, embroideries, in context, location iconography, one word… wow. I would be in design heaven.

Using my academic perspective I see the benefits of students seeing, handling, understanding the evolution of design, thinking against a backdrop of cultural evolution extending the reach of the archive into teaching and learning into creative practice with students, who on a daily basis curate and archive their own lives in digital spaces. 1 As a researcher I am interested in the ‘before and after‘, the stories and the memories, times before and times after. Textiles from an archive can be one vehicle that can tell those stories.


‘…but in archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there is not very much there (…) the archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentation that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there.’ 2

As a researcher, my first entry into the archives was one of awe and thinking, ‘wait a minute: how on earth will I be able to locate what I need, and how can paper lead me to textiles?’

Indeed Steedman’s quote could leave you thinking an archive is just made up of mounds of paper, and you will be sitting in room surrounded by mounds of books; that can happen and does happen. I call it serendipity that archives also contain cloth and other ephemera, fabrics, which are tangible things, material objects, which speak of approaches to technology, design, process, practice, making, crafting. The designs can also speak about how culture can be interpreted and reinterpreted.

The design register is a form of archive that allows an exploration about the design practice of British manufacturing companies that designed, crafted and then manufactured products for distribution not only in the UK but across the world. Companies sought to register their designs, and in some cases re-register after the five year registration process elapsed, speaking of the popularity of a design or product. The register speaks of design taste, the changing technology of manufacturing practices, colour, dyes, design motifs, aesthetics tastes, responses to market or markets, or the opportunity to perhaps usurp the local market.

As a textiles practitioner it is material object that triggers my research question, my practice, my ‘other’ knowledge. The design register is one such archive, of 3 million pieces of fabric. Once you realise that the numbers in the catalogue relate to a designed object, ephemera, it gets exciting as a box is delivered to your desk, you undo the ribbon, and you say ‘wow’.

My first delve into the archive was assisted by Julie Halls and Sandra Shakespeare at The National Archives. I was looking for fabrics that highlighted the migration process from Caribbean to the UK, and what I located was fabric that seem to indicate design operating in the other direction, starting in the UK and going to the Caribbean and the wider diaspora. This fabric, and its design, has lead me down other research paths, both through The National Archives and other archives. This fabric raises questions of material culture, object speaking, design history. Why would such a fabric – designed by an Irish company, made from Sea Island cotton, printed in Manchester – depict designs that showcase Caribbean cultural traditions such as Junkanoo and the Goombay dance? The history of the company that created the fabric also makes interesting reading, adding another layer to an already diverse range of questions.


Orange with Goombays, design registration 451013 (catalogue number: BT 52/6654)

Note however the first visit located one fabric. It would take more research and further visits to locate further fabrics.

For me as a practitioner the excitement is that I can use fabrics in a creative workshop that speak directly to cultural traditions I know of from stories from my own childhood or background. I am excited to be sharing this workshop on 12 November 2016 with other makers, researcher and crafters.


Blue and white Junkanoo, design registration 474392 (catalogue reference: BT 53/161)

Archival research is not fast, but it throws up the unexpected. It highlights for me the place the archive plays in the research practice space, both in the institution and also in the space of the practitioner, as you seek to interpret the findings outside of the space of the archives, working from your own photographs, notes, sketches, images, making sense of the wider and broader story of making, and its relation to the wider world. More will be revealed about these fabrics and their provenance at my forthcoming talk.

Variatons of White

 http://miiaautio.com

How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.

Installation view, Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Tim Tiebout, courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

PHILADELPHIA — Riotously colorful, densely patterned, and unassailably fabulous, Vlisco fabrics have, for decades, been tailored into shift dresses, power suits, and formal gowns for Central and West Africa’s cosmopolitan elite. Their patterns and palettes evince an instantly recognizable aesthetic. And there are scores of Vlisco imitators: Chinese knockoffs are sold on city streets all over the world. But are any of these fabrics in fact African? The exhibition Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as part of a suite of shows and programs called “Creative Africa,” poses this question in an indirect but intriguing way, by explaining the company’s origins in the Dutch colonial empire and demonstrating its products’ lasting popularity, in African fashion and beyond. Art enthusiasts, for instance, might recognize Vlisco fabrics from the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who has used the them to fashion Victorian-style gowns and waistcoats for the generally headless human figures in his haunting installations. In Shonibare’s work, the fabrics do conceptual double duty: they act as a symbol of “African culture,” for those who perceive their patterns to be indigenous, and as a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world, for those who understand the complexities of their origins.

Textile pattern by Constance Girard for Vlisco on view in Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The story of Vlisco begins not in Dakar, Lagos, or Accra, but in the small Dutch city of Helmond, where, in 1846, industrialist Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen purchased a textile factory with the goal of selling upholstery fabric, bedspreads, and handkerchiefs abroad. Van Vlissingen began creating imitation batik fabric based on designs from Indonesia — then known as the Dutch East Indies — with the goal of capitalizing on new roller printing technology that could effect the look of batik without all the labor-intensive work required to make the real thing. Batik originated in China and India in the 8th century, and it was refined in 13th-century Indonesia with the development of a new tool for applying hot wax to fabric known as canting, likely an anglicized form of the word tjanting. When Dutch imitators such as van Vlissingen entered the business, Indonesians noticed small flaws in their fabrics — namely a “crackle” effect, the result of small veins of pigment leaking through the wax resist — and the Dutch East Indies even went so far as to ban their sale in the 19th century. But other areas of the Dutch empire provided a ready, if unexpected, marketplace. Vlisco fabrics became a popular item in a different part of the Dutch colonial ecosystem, starting in Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast.
The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

Between 1855 and 1872, approximately 3,000 Ghanian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. They returned home, as servicemen often do, with a taste for items they encountered abroad. As the story goes, the soldiers had learned to appreciate the look of genuine batik but didn’t mind the crackle of the van Vlissingen version, so they purchased bolts of it for their female relatives back in Ghana. By the turn of the century, despite the ceding of the colony to the UK, the sale of Dutch-made faux batik in the Gold Coast was robust. By the 1930s, it was being adapted to suit Ghanian tastes, not by accident, but by design. According to Dilys Blum, the PMA’s senior curator of costume and textiles who organized the exhibition, the trend was so popular that several companies based in England, France, and Switzerland began producing faux batik fabrics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Van Vlissingen responded by consolidating its grip on the marketplace and buying up several smaller concerns. Thus, a fabric produced in Europe with Asia in mind never quite hit the mark in its intended marketplace, but found an enthusiastic audience at the opposite end of the empire.

Toril Johannessen Unlearning Optical Illusions (III)

Jeriman (uit: Benoit, Voyage a Surinam, 1839)/ Stoffverkau

Messages from a New America

    
    
October 25, 2015
10th Mercosul Biennial
Messages from a New America
October 23–December 6, 2015

www.fundacaobienal.art.br
The 10th Mercosul Biennial has opened to the public in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and runs from October 23 to  December 6. This edition of the biennial is dedicated exclusively to art from Latin America, searching for its roots and presenting a new curatorial model that goes against the grain by including works from the early 18th century to the present. Titled Messages from a New America, this large-scale exhibition seeks to break new ground on shifting the attention to innovative curatorial platforms for the art of Latin America. The 10th Mercosul Biennial is curated by art historian and curator Dr. Gaudêncio Fidelis (Brazil), Chief Curator Márcio Tavares (Brazil), Adjunct Curator, Assistant Curator Ana Zavadil (Brazil), and Educational Curator Cristián G. Gallegos (Chile).

The Biennial consists of seven major exhibitions, interconnected and built to encompass a number of issues concerning the art of the region, some of which are dealt with for the first time anywhere, such as smell and dust as material reality of the art objects. The exhibitions are: The Biography of Urban Life; Modernism in Parallax; Neobaroque Anthropophagy; Olfactory: Smell in Art; Body Apparatuses; Dust and the World of Objects; and Marginália of Form. The Biennial occupies several venues throughout the city of Porto Alegre, including the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art, Santander Cultural, Mercosul Museum of Human Rights, Usina do Gasômetro, CEEE Cultural Center, Acervo Independente, and InstitutoLing.

"This biennial represents a unique opportunity to view a vast range of work alongside each other and introduces a new model for exhibitions within a biennial context. It was created by choosing specific works, encompassing an extensive arc spanning from the historical to the contemporary. Instead of representing artists, we sought to highlight their artistic contributions related to specific issues," says Mr. Fidelis.

"This platform abandons the model of commissions that is typical of biennials and focused instead on searching for works that show the extraordinary field of aesthetics that appears throughout the historical trajectory of creativity that brings forth sources for innovation and creativity. The exhibition takes into account legibility, cultural specificity, historical priority and criticism of the Western canon, thereby reactivating, producing and circulating original knowledge about these works instead of just celebrating them."

The curatorial platform of the 10th Biennial includes canonical and non-canonical works, as well as works considered by the curators as "blind spots" due to a conspicuous absence from criticism, art history narratives and curatorial endeavors which have failed to take such works into account.

the male version

Ornamentbegriffe

Der Ornamentbegriff in der Renaissance

In Anlehnung an Vitruv schreibt der Architekt und Theoretiker Leone Battista Alberti in seiner „De re aedificatoria“ („Über die Baukunst“, 1452): „In tota re aedificatoria primarium certe ornamentum in columnis est.“ Säulen sind also für Alberti in einem Ornamentbegriff als Schmuck des Baus eingeschlossen. (Buch 6, Seite 2). Weiter definiert er auch figürliche Wandmalerei als Teil dieses „Bauschmucks“.

Der Ornamentbegriff im Barock

Der Kunsttheoretiker und Künstlerbiograf Filippo Baldinucci schrieb in seinem 1681 in Florenz erschienenen „Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del Disegno“ („Toskanisches Inventar von der Kunst des Entwurfs“): „Abellimento, e dicesi propriamente dicose materiali, che si aggiungiono intorno che che sia, per farlo vage e belle.“ („Verzierung nenne ich es, wenn Materialien zum Gegebenen hinzukommen, um es schön und eigenartig zu machen.“)
In Frankreich ist der Begriff ornemens gleich dem lateinischen ornamentum zu setzen und taucht in der Kunstliteratur seit dem 16. Jahrhundert auf.
Im deutschen Sprachraum sind die Begriffe Zierrat, Zierung, Beizier bis ins 19. Jahrhundert vorherrschend, so z.B. schon in der ersten deutschen Ausgabe Vitruvs, übersetzt von Walter Rivius (auch Walter Ryff, „Vitruvius Teutsch“, Nürnberg, 1548), in der es in Buch 4, Kapitel 2, heißt: „Columnen, sampt deren etlichen angehorigen theil glidern und ornamenten oder zierungen.“
Im wichtigsten deutschen enzyklopädischen Lexikon des Barock, im „Grossen vollständigen Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste“ von Johann Heinrich Zedler (1732 ), findet sich der Verweis „Ornamentum siehe Zierrath“ und die Definition: „Schmuck, Putz, Ornat, Zierrath, Ornatus oder Ornamentum, heißt überhaupt alles dasjenige, was zwar auf dem Leibe, nicht aber so wohl zu nötiger Bedeckung desselben als vielmehr nur zum Staate und Pracht getragen wird.“ (Band 35, Spalte 471)In der kritischen europäischen Ornamentdebatte des 18. Jahrhunderts, wesentlich von den Akademien ausgetragen, wurde den Ornamenten schließlich ein Eigenwert zugestanden, der sie aus der Rolle einer eher untergeordneten Kunstgattung befreite.

Abgrenzung Muster / Dekoration

Das Muster ist eine einfache Linienkomposition, die von Ornamenten abgeleitet sein kann, wie zum Beispiel der griechische Mäander.
Als Dekoration hingegen bezeichnet man eine objektgebundene Flächenkomposition aus einzelnen Ornamenten. Ornament und Dekoration stehen einander spannungsreich gegenüber. Das Ornament ist ungebunden und frei versetzbar, die Dekoration an die durch das Objekt vorgegebene Fläche streng gebunden. Während das Ornament als stilisiertes Einzelmotiv in beliebiger Wiederholung auftreten kann, bildet die Dekoration eine ausgewogene Gesamtkomposition. Die Dekoration unterliegt zeitgebundenen Variationen und Veränderungen, das Ornament einer strengen Tradition. Daraus ergibt sich, dass mit nahezu gleich bleibenden Ornamenten höchst verschiedenartige, stilistisch wandelbare Dekorationen gestaltet werden können.

Ornament und Rhetorik

Bei Vitruv und Alberti leuchtet die schon in der griechischen Antike gegebene Herkunft des Ornamentbegriffs aus der Rhetorik durch. Es besteht eine Verbindung zum rhetorischen ornatus unter dem Eindruck des Horaz’schen „Ut pictura poesis erit“ („Dichtung ist wie Malerei“), das heißt der Begriff wird über Redekunst und Dichtung hinaus auf die Architektur und die bildenden Künste im allgemeinen angewendet, in der frühen Neuzeit vor allem aus dem Geist des Humanismus heraus. So lässt sich die Integration der Baudetails in die Ornamentik in der Neuzeit erklären, besonders bei Alberti, der ja selbst aus der Dichtung seinen Weg zur Kunsttheorie fand.
Der römische Rhetor Quintilian legte in der 1415 von Poggio Bracciolini in der Bibliothek des Klosters Sankt Gallen für die Neuzeit wieder entdeckten „Institutio oratoria“ (92–96 n. Chr.) fest: „Das Geschmückte ist alles, was mehr ist als nur klar und genau.“ Schmuck wird so als das Wesentliche eines Kunstwerks herausgehoben, acutum (Witz), nitidum (Glanz), copiosum (Fülle), hilare (Lebhaftigkeit), iucundum (Charme), accuratum (Sorgfalt) werden als die Komponenten der gratia bei Quintilian genannt, die in seiner Sicht eine Rede zum Kunstwerk macht.
Derartige Begrifflichkeiten werden bis ins 18. Jahrhundert außerrhetorische Kunsturteile mitbestimmen. Die Ornamentik wird auf diese Weise auch zu einer Art Sprache, dem gebildeten Betrachter in ihrer Rhetorik verständlich.

islamische architektur

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Arabian Antiquities of Spain

http://surfacefragments.blogspot.ch/

But it's true that it's hard to know what to write about. Take a post about the book Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815); it could be about murals, designing tessellations, Islamic Architecture and the Alhambra, or the history of Orientalism in Western Art. There's just too much good stuff out there. Sorry, but ponies are way down on the list.

In the meantime, these incredible etchings could serve as a complete source for any mural or stencil.

I posted a whole set of large images from this book here, illustrated beautifully by James Cavanah Murphy. Poor bugger died a year after this book came out, apparently he "fell a victim to his labours."

Just in case you're feeling a little too lazy to draw these patterns yourself; here is one as an Illustrator file. Nice! Dover has of course published a book on Islamic designs with a CD containing a ton of vector art, so you could go that route.

Or you could buy and download SymmetryWorks by Artlandia; an amazing little plug-in for Illustrator that enables you to create any kind of pattern. Great for wallpaper designers or for those tricky Islamic patterns. Beats learning Geometry.

For those interested in the patterns of the Alhambra, there is a fantastic textbook on designing tessellations called, not very surprisingly, Designing Tessellations, by Jinny Beyer. And it's not just for quilters and Escher freaks. The Mathematics is understandable, and the lessons valuable. Here's a sample page from the book.

I found a great Illustrator file online of a Hilbert Curve. Open it and have fun, but whatever you do, don't try following that line with your eye! This would make a great standing screen if you laser-cut the design out of wood.

Lewis F. Day writes in Pattern Design about the development of the 'Arab lattice':

Well, the way this post unfolded, I guess it's about Islamic pattern. I'll just have to do a different one on the subject of the dubiously named 'Orientalist' painters of the 19th Century.

By the way, there's a great book called The Alhambra, downloadable in it's entirety for free here. When I say 'great' I mean it's got a great set of plates. It's unreadable garbage, written by one of those toffee-nosed prats who fancied themselves as 'Oriental', as in this image of it's Victorian author, Albert T. Calvert, in full regalia.

new_patterns

destroyed mic

destroyed cell pphone

pattern: destroyed harddisk