With her recent writing and curatorial work, Dr. Lynne Cooke is plaiting the twine of modern abstraction, the metaphysical and the formal, with a "third thread," the interdisciplinary practices of Twentieth Century women artists working with textile and abstraction as indivisible, notably Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, among others. This reknotting is the subject of her latest curatorial project,, the forthcoming exhibition "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction." Recovering these inconspicuous modernist techne, Dr. Cooke warps the traditional art historical narrative, the deprecative "women's work," with the weft of the historical conditions and artistic singularities that generated them. As such, she effectively alters the orientation of their reception. The Woman does not exist but the artistic byproducts of her know-how do, via each woman, these women, each One.

Robert Beck: For the last several years you’ve been working on a curatorial textile-based project that you provocatively described to me as spanning “from the loom to the QR code.”

Lynne Cooke: I've long been interested in textiles, and as I started exploring the interface between textiles and abstraction, something I thought was obvious but understudied, I found there were a considerable number of artists, like Anni Albers and Sonia Delaunay, who were involved with both. They are amongst a cohort of five or six women artists in different cities across Europe at the beginning of the century, who, for one reason or another, mostly because they're motivated by a utopian social vision, see textile design as a means to contribute to social transformation. Some of them, like Lyubov Popova, were painters who gave up painting. Famously, Anni Albers was thwarted when she went to the Bauhaus in that she wasn’t allowed to join the painting workshop, and so entered the weaving workshop. But others, like Sonia Delaunay, kept the two practices as one in a larger sense. Those women artists have always been part of my pantheon, but my desire to explore this subject came out of the present. In the last ten years, I’ve been struck by the number of artists from many generations whose practice in some way intersects with textiles. This trend is still gaining traction. It’s everywhere.

RB: As you wrote in your essay, “Innovation, Invention, Evolution,” for the exhibition “Buen Diseno Designs” at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, “rigorously abstract textile design constituted a tool for social change … and located abstraction once more at the heart of social vision –– a good design as a means to create a better world.”

LC: Yes. The idea has its roots in William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but in the interwar years it becomes linked to industrial fabrication. All these artists, in their different ways, recognized that power-looming was the way to produce textiles for furnishings and apparel in the modern era, and therefore that’s where one had to insert oneself or one’s ideas.

RB: Your work emphasizes how pliable these practices are, primarily Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Gunta Stölzl. Is it their awareness of the means and practicalities of production, and the political and economic developments of their time, that opens their practices to the idea of social change?

LC: Sometimes, but sometimes, the social vision comes first. It’s also because they didn’t impose a hierarchical evaluation on these practices. Various reasons, often relating to economic necessity, had led each of them to work in what would be called the applied arts. Even when freed from that financial need, some continued to switch back and forth. They saw one informing the other, especially the potential of manual experimentation to generate ideas that could be applied to modes of mechanical fabrication. But it could go in the other direction too, into the ways, or processes, they used in abstract art.

RB: This work is not so much situated against modernism but around or through it. Unfixed, as you write in your Artforum review of “Sonia Delaunay: Mighty Brave,” a recent retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. Unfixed to any signifier for woman. There was a necessity to be, let’s say, amphibious, conducting different practices at once.

LC: That’s a great term, amphibious. Yes, that’s true, and therefore their modes of modernist practice were not constrained by a canonical devotion to a certain kind of painting and the high arts, so-called.

RB: Amphibious. In your writing about these practices you use descriptors like, cross-pollination, crystallize, constellation, motion, movement. Reading them, I began to think of the byproducts less as art works, per se, than feathers, scales or skin –– what falls from a body – to use Lacan’s metaphor from Seminar XI. This metaphor applies to what I would call evolutionary practices, wherein artists adapt to social or cultural forces that come along. We’ll go in this direction. Can do! We’ll try something else…

LC: Yes, that’s very much the case if one thinks about how Anni Albers worked. In 1933, she left Germany due to the rise of fascism and ended up in North Carolina at Black Mountain College, where she taught until the late Forties. Unlike the next generation of artists who worked with fiber or yarn, she continued to design for industry. By the late Forties she had begun to give more time and attention to making what she called pictorial weavings, which were unique textile statements to be framed and hung as art on the wall. Or, if larger in a format, as what were called wall hangings or tapestries. (Those two terms were loosely used interchangeably, and might even include nonfunctional rugs.) When she and Josef Albers moved to Yale where he took a teaching position, she wasn't able to teach because Yale didn't employ women in those years. She turned more and more to writing and for a time continued also to weave. The book she wrote, On Weaving, is probably the single most celebrated book on the subject, certainly in the 20th century. Her practice evolves as she goes deeper and deeper into the subject. And finally, when for physical reasons, she finds working on a hand loom too difficult, too arduous, she takes up printmaking and does something entirely unprecedented with it. Conceptually, that shift makes sense –– is meaningful within what she’d done before in other media and with other processes.

RB: Had any of these women artists received the same amount of attention as their male counterparts would there have been the same level of experimentation and discovery? Ultimately, their work benefited from those social restrictions. It could be said that those historical conditions occasioned the multiple ways women, one by one, developed a know how with techne, practice, art? Along with that, why do you think this work comes to greater fruition now?

LC: That’s a great question. There’s an anecdote about Sonia Delaunay from the late 1970s. She’s being interviewed by a young art historian or critic who says something about the victimization of women artists, and asks: was it different then? She replies, “I was never a victim. I did what I wanted.” She was the breadwinner for the family after her inherited source of income dried up during the Soviet Revolution. I agree with you. I think of other women, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who sometimes were forced to continue teaching beyond the time she might have wanted to because she was supporting Hans Arp, her partner, as well as herself. I’m not sure they felt victimized in the way we think of it in the later 20th century. They navigated other routes. And actually, as you say, had they been acclaimed earlier on for their high art achievements they might not have carved out such broad-ranging, constantly searching kinds of practice.

RB: Consequently, they were also more finely attuned to the technological, economic, and political forces at work.

LC: Yes, in that they were making things which had a function, or, at least, some of the things they made were utilitarian.

RB: We know what multidisciplinary means but I feel like we need another signifier, like trans-disciplinary or multifarious, one that signifies practices that are more capacious, radiated, fluid.

LC: I agree, since their practices involved engaging with the skill sets and conceptual issues particular to whichever art form they were dealing with in that instance. What we see a lot at the moment in the contemporary art world is that multimedia ways of working have become standard practice. Often, when an artist moves into another territory with a material new to them, if they are going to make the work themselves, they acquire skills as needed, which doesn’t necessarily imply a highly skilled level of production. That’s fine if it works, but it doesn’t always. Some things are just badly made. I don’t think that this way of approaching techniques that are essentially professional crafts came into play earlier. There was a sense that moving into another terrain required getting up to speed with what the technical standards and norms were.

RB: There is a hands-on quality with the work by women you’re interested in. I can’t imagine the term “fabricator” being used by them.

LC: Albeit for very different reasons, in the cases of Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova in Moscow, and Delaunay in Paris, technicians or artisans took the designs –– the pencil or gouache sketches they made –– figured out the repeats and prepared them for printing, industrial roller printing in the case of the Soviet artists, and manual block printing for Delaunay. Unlike her Soviet counterparts who were not permitted to engage further in the production process, she was sent tests back and forth. For her, as for Albers and the Bauhaus weavers, it wasn’t a matter of handing something over and waiting for it to be returned fully realized.

RB: Things move so much more quickly now. They had the time, ostensibly, to be working in a more integral way with their production.

LC: Albers makes the point that, technically, the basic loom has not changed over millennia. What’s different with a mechanized loom, or an automated jacquard loom, is the speed of manufacturing. If you’re a weaver who’s worked on a handloom, you understand what’s going on. That said, some finishing processes, such as water proofing, done in post-production are not always easily understood by someone not trained in those techniques.

RB: So much about these practices in your hands is revelatory. Let’s return to Sonia Delaunay and her gouaches. You write, “Related gouaches depict models and mannequins –– it’s often hard to differentiate between them –– wearing garments in the same Simultaneist patterns as the interior décor. Abstracted and decorporealized, their bodies are literally absorbed in the environs –– wallpaper, carpets, rugs, and screens –– of her own making.” This moves in many different directions at once. Could you say a bit more?

LC: In Delaunay’s case, she’s talking about what she called “living paintings”, which, at their most radical, involve a fusion of environment with the swathed wearer. There is a painting by Matisse from 1911, Interior with Aubergines, which depicts the studio with a big screen in the center of the room on which patterned fabrics are draped. On a low table in front of that there’s a differently patterned cloth on which the aubergines lie. A painting made up of patterns, it’s almost completely flat. Painting, mural and textile are totally intermeshed: equivalent and self-same. And there’s an earlier painting, Embroidery, 1985-86, by Edouard Vuillard in MoMA’s collection that, as so often in his oeuvre, shows female family members at work, embroidering or stitching. Again, they are suffused into their environs; curtain, foliage and wallpaper occupy the same plane. Since everything’s painted the same way in a close-toned palette, the whole surface feels like a woven textile – a materialized ambiance – a domestic world in which all labor and skill sets are gendered female.

RB: Patterned fabrics cover the screen and table of Matisse’s studio –– and the walls?

LC: The floor and walls are covered with the same pattern; the free-standing screen and the still life with yet other patterned fabrics. To me, it prefigures Delaunay’s milieu, albeit without the traces of bodily presence: pattern after pattern parallel to the surface plane.

RB: It’s Delaunay and the decorporealized body that fascinates me. I’m thinking of Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin too, mimicry and metonymy –– cuttlefish, chameleon, tree bark moths. Work by the women artists we are talking about introduces a metonymic or horizontal paradigm. This is what makes it, and your work of re-knotting it art historically, so contemporary, and locates its logical moment. In other words, we couldn’t have –– didn’t! –– apprehended it before. But we can now.

LC: Can you say a bit more about the horizontal paradigm?

RB: I'm using metaphor and metonymy as defined by semiotics and psychoanalysis. Metaphor is a vertical axis of substitution, or condensation, while metonymy, or displacement, is a horizontal one, which keeps “sliding.” Jacobson uses the example in literature of Realism as the metonymic paradigm. But the idea that a body … is it foreground, background? How do we, with our bodies, place a body, and in relation to, as you just said in your beautiful description of Matisse, a woven surface? It’s as if it’s all woven!

LC: Yes, yes it is – and we make a world.

RB: Yes, we make a world, a woven world. Can you explain your concept, or better, thesis, of the third thread?

LC: In orthodox art historical narratives, until recently, there were two origin points for abstraction, loosely speaking. Very simply put, there are two pathways to non-referential geometric abstraction in the early twentieth century. One goes via Mondrian and Malevich: that is, by way of artists who are inspired by metaphysical ideas and spiritual beliefs. The other way involves a constant paring back of representation until virtually all the signifiers are voided in an abstract formal composition. But when you look at Sophie Tauber-Arp’s early practice you see that she's making cross-stitch works using a standard kind of support, a loose open weave fabric that allows her to make the cross-stitch lines in a very precise grid. That technology prioritizes geometries as a design form. She ends up making abstract designs that are considered art works in themselves while also transposing the method into watercolors which she also frames and presents as art works. However, sometimes, the result is a cushion: the sewing integrated with its support becomes the material for what is designed to be a utilitarian artefact, an example of applied art. Soon, she moves back and forth across this tripartite set of procedures, and in so doing makes artworks either in wool and thread or in watercolor that are conceived as abstract art that goes on the wall, as well as functional artefacts.

RB: But it didn't start as art making, per se, but via the body, with furnishings, textiles, clothing, etc.?

LC: Yes, in her case, she moved back and forth from applied to fine art, recognizing no hierarchical distinction. With the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop, the fusion of design and art in service to the greater end of a transformative social vision means that weavers sometimes design textiles that will be manufactured as furnishing-fabrics. However, with the same warps and slight modifications in the weaving process, a similar design could be made that, when woven, becomes a wall hanging. Basically, there’s a shared abstract vocabulary. A textured, fiber-based wall hanging was considered appropriate to an architectural style of rigorous rectilinear forms often realized in quite hard, even “cold” materials, like steel and glass, as was the case with post-war Modernist architecture. In the 1960s, textiles for furnishings are expressly designed to soften and warm up these environments. Around that time, there’s a turn to fiber art, large volumetric wall hangings –– statement pieces of the kind that we think of in relation to, say, Magdalena Abakanowicz. They’re often commissioned as alternatives to drapes and rugs, but their function is very similar.

RB: It derives from functionality yet is not exclusive to it. It’s mercurial. One tries to identify it as this, well, it’s not just that… It moves in effective ways. I come back again to the idea of how in sync those practices were with the times –– qua the means –– of their production.

LC: Yes, absolutely.

RB: The third thread. I am struck by its pliability. Each of the women artists we’ve talked about, by way of their individual circumstances, accommodated or adapted to the political, technological, economic conditions of the time. It reminds me of something Louise Bourgeois said regarding her spider imagery, which you quote, “The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs.” She weaves and repairs, each one subjectively, but then consequently art historically, as you have so deftly braided it. To explain: Psychoanalysis investigates a particular type of knowledge, an unconscious one, a practical one – a know how. The symptom is a kind of weave, something that knots the three subjective registers, imaginary, symbolic, and real. Lacan studied and reworked topology and knot theory to reformulate this, and developed a clinical paradigm to account for it, which he designated as sinthome, an archaic French spelling of symptom. As the fourth ring that holds together the three registers, or rings, this fourth one involves the know how to do with, a savior faire. For psychoanalysis, the fourth knot. For art, the third thread?

LC: That’s fascinating. Definitely something to think more about.

RB: Where do you see your work in the world?

LC: Oh!

RB: I refer to the exhibitions you're working on, your writing and curatorial practice –– all of it.

LC: I'm interested in things that have been pushed aside or consigned to the margins, or are ec-centric in the literal sense –– out of the center. It's not that I go out to look for them but, rather, I often find that something that seems amazing to me —

RB: They find you.

LC: Exactly, they find me! I'm certainly not the only one pursuing this course. I can think of many colleagues and peers for whom the things that they regard as of value are not seen as integral to the authoritative narratives of whatever discourse or discipline they are in, and who are consequently provoked to question their premises and assumptions. What’s at stake is not simply a matter of inserting the disregarded or dismissed back into the fold, like stretching the goalposts a bit. What is required is some kind of structural rethinking, a more foundational revision that would question the very premises that led to those exclusions.

RB: You have revised the authoritative narrative of “woman’s work”, which creatively, theoretically, art historically, is so rich.

LC: I’m interested in your idea of situating it in relation to Caillois and camouflage, and metonymy –– and questions of horizontality and the kind of accretion on a plane.

RB: You’ve mapped it! One has a hunch or intuition of something artistically but your work has confirmed and substantiated it. And with it, the logical time in which these works and practices can be located as such, which otherwise wouldn’t have had the same force to modify the structure –– as you described your own work in the world. Indeed, you didn’t stretch a goalpost, you altered the structure of the field.

LC: Well, if it does some of that, that would be nice.

RB: One last question, what about the QR Code? Are there contemporary works you can cite that employ or allude to this digital warp and weft, so to speak?

LC: Yes, works by Guillermo Bert and his collaborators, Mapuche women weavers; or, more obliquely, a series of paintings by Jack Whitten with the E-Stamp.

RB: One reason I wanted to speak with you further is that I recognize in your work something of my own practice and 21st Century psychoanalysis –– knots, metonymy, not-all, sinthome. And consequently, why the discourse of psychoanalysis has something vital to offer the discourse of art today. Thank you, Lynne.

LC: Thank you.

Dr. Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. From 2012-2014 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Prior to that she served as chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid from 2008 to 2012 and as curator at Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2008. In 1991, Cooke co-curated the Carnegie International, and has helmed numerous major shows since, including the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996), Rosemarie Trockel: Cosmos (2012) and Outliers and American Vanguard Art, 2018. Her latest curatorial project, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, explores intersections, alignments and affiliations between abstract artists and textile makers and designers over the past century. 

Robert Buck © 2022

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