Abstract
The exploration here serves as an introduction to the special issue on Intertextual Textiles: Parodies and Quotations in Cloth. The author explores ways in which strategies of quotation and parodying – a popular strategy in postmodernism – have extended to artworks including fabric and involving needle and thread. Revealing that works in cloth may be especially amenable to approaches that trouble traditionalist understandings that a work of art might stem from the unique vision of a single author, it is suggested also that textile arts have often been conceived as a nexus for enabling activist and public involvement in artmaking. Sometimes addressing a politics of race, parodies in fabric – that is, in a medium often denigrated as trivial and associated disparagingly with domestic contexts – have also frequently served as a way of coupling a feminist critique of patriarchal norms in society with those underpinning representation itself. The author refers to works by Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, Kate Walker and Elaine Reichek. While making mention of reworkings of the Bayeux Tapestry as examples of quotations in cloth involving collective work, she focuses attention on Magna Carta (An Embroidery) by Cornelia Parker as an example of a recent parody involving many people.
Images that refer self-consciously to other works or to well-known discourses have become increasingly commonplace in art since the late twentieth century. Labelled variously as quoting, borrowing, referencing, pastiche, or parody, amongst other terms, such strategies may be seen as “part of a move away from the tendency, within Romantic ideology, to mask any sources by cunning cannibalization, and towards a frank acknowledgement (by incorporation) that permits ironic commentary,” Linda Hutcheon observed in the mid-1980s. The increased popularity of such strategies, she suggested, might be related to an impetus to trouble ideas about originality and the concept that a work of art might stem from the unique vision of a single author (Hutcheon Citation1985, 8). Focusing specifically on contemporary forms of parody, Hutcheon (Citation1985, 6) saw in these manifestations of this genre something very different from the ridiculing imitation that was its usual definition, terming it instead “a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text.” These observations have sustained their relevance. In a world that has become increasingly connected through social media, and which has seen an explosion in the photographing and sharing of images, the possibilities for what the late Leo Steinberg (Citation1978, 21) called “inter-art traffic” nearly four decades ago have in fact increased exponentially in the new millennium.
Unsurprisingly, strategies such as quotation and parody have also been deployed in numerous works made from textiles or incorporating textile elements. As creative objects in needlework are often associated with group production (that is, via traditions such as the quilting bee and the embroidery guild) or with histories of unnamed makers producing items for domestic contexts, works made in cloth are in fact particularly suited to a genre or strategy that disrupts the idea that creativity stems from the unique visions of individual authors. However, parodies, quotations or intertextual references in textile and cloth have been motivated by various other concerns and interests as well.
Parody has been a feature of numerous works in textile that address issues of gender or race. Kate Walker’s sampler from 1978, bearing the words “Wife is a four-letter word,” is just one example of the ways in which a visual form associated with domestic niceties and female passivity has been parodied. The more recent samplers by Elaine Reichek couple engagements with gender with postcolonial concerns, juxtaposing text and imagery in such a way that they reflect critically and sardonically on colonialist inheritances. Feminist engagements have also involved quoting from well-known works of art. The late Miriam Schapiro’s so-called “Collaboration” series from the mid-1970s—works including textiles that also incorporate references to paintings by Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Frida Kahlo, for example—seemingly suggest continuity and identification between the creativity of women working in painting and those working with “craft” and needlework. Faith Ringgold invoked ironic reference to works by Matisse, Picasso, and others in her “French Collection” from the early 1990s, a series of quilted works that address and comment on not only gendered but also racial biases within modernism.
These orientations may perhaps be seen in light of a point I note in my own article in this issue. In an essay first published in 1983, Craig Owens (Citation2011, 262) observed an intersection between the “feminist critique of patriarchy” and “the postmodernist critique of representation” in the sense that both disrupt values attached to images and discourses that “posit the subject of representation as absolutely centred, unitary, masculine” (Owens Citation2011, 261). Given its association in the West with femininity and female labor, and with embellishment in the home, parodies that are in textile, specifically, are particularly amenable to enabling such an intersection. While the act of quotation troubles ideas about originality and the concept that a work of art might stem from the unique vision of a single gifted author, as noted, the inclusion of sewing and textile elements in a High Art context disturbs a conception of needlework as linked to the trivial (rather than the significant) and the domestic (rather than the public).
Some recent works in textile deploying parody or quotation have been complex initiatives focused on questions of freedom and orchestrated to enable wide involvement. One such project is Cornelia Parker’s Magna Carta (An Embroidery) (see front cover of issue). Produced to coincide with the exhibition of the original Magna Carta texts at the British Library in 2015, the work parodies the Wikipedia entry on the Magna Carta via an embroidery that enlarges the original to almost 13 meters. Amongst the more than 200 people who contributed to its making were prisoners employed by Fine Cell Work, an initiative enabling those incarcerated to develop skills in embroidery, and public figures who were each approached to embroider a word pertinent to their individual histories and experiences. Multi-layered in its potential meanings, the work’s parody of Wikipedia comments on one level about understandings of rights and freedoms being continually in process and redefinition.
Focusing on people having rights and protections before the law, the Magna Carta speaks about resistance against the misuse of power and thus retains relevance in the contemporary world. Another medieval object that been parodied on numerous occasions because it raises issues of ongoing relevance is the Bayeux Tapestry. Reworking its representation of the Norman conquest of England to invoke reference to acts of occupation elsewhere, its reinvention lends itself to exploring the long-term impact of invasion on identities and concepts of nationhood. The more than 30 tapestries which Shirley Ann Brown (Citation2013, 291–298) lists as spinoffs of the Bayeux Tapestry include, for example, the Overlord Tapestry (1974) in the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, which explores the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944, and the Keiskamma Tapestry (2004) in Parliament in South Africa which examines the defeat of the amaXhosa by the British in the nineteenth century. Associating embroidery with events of momentous public importance, parodies of the Bayeux Tapestry—such as Parker’s references to the Magna Carta—also implicitly counter an association of needlework with domestic embellishment.
However, Magna Carta (An Embroidery) also deploys parody or quotation in such a way that the work enables active participation on the part of individuals who would not consider themselves artists or possessing technical skill. While stemming from postmodernist questionings about conceptions of great works of art as stemming from the unique visions of creative individuals, such initiatives may speak additionally of the increased influence of performativity on art production. A term used generically to refer to the causative effects of the art object or to be suggestive of art that prompts relational encounters, the concept of “performativity” originates with a 1962 study where philosopher J.L. Austin drew a distinction between words that are “performative” and those that are “constative”—that is, between instances in which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” and those where it is purely descriptive or a statement of fact (Austin Citation1975, 6). Applied to art, the concept has tended to be used to highlight what Dorothea von Hantelmann (Citation2014) identifies as “a shift from what an artwork depicts and represents to the effects and experiences that it produces—or … from what it ‘says’ to what it ‘does’.” In Magna Carta (An Embroidery) and other works that would seem to be informed by ideas of this type, the artwork is not only conceived as a nexus for public involvements but is also produced through such relational encounters. In operating in this way, works of this type may also (to a greater or lesser extent) forego absolute technical proficiency in the interests of providing opportunities for people without skills in needlework to participate in their construction.
Reflecting on these various examples (and many others), I envisaged that a themed issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture would offer an excellent opportunity to explore how parody, appropriation, quoting, and other intertextual strategies have been deployed in works that are made from textiles, incorporate fabric or needlework elements, or which parody textile designs. The issue, I hoped, would include articles that engage with the ways in which intertextual strategies have enabled artists deploying textiles to explore questions around identity, history, gender, race, and human rights. While there was certainly prior scholarship on individual parodies in textiles, there had not been engagement with a range of very different examples of such works within a single publication, at least to my knowledge, and this themed issue of the journal would therefore address this gap.
As preparation for the “Intertextual Textiles: Parodies and Quotations in Cloth” special issue, I organized a small conference at the University of Johannesburg between November 30 and December 2, 2016. The idea behind the conference was that it would provide a forum for interested participants to test out work on the topic while simultaneously affording me the opportunity to identify those papers with the greatest promise for further development into articles. The conference call was for studies from across the globe but, given its context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many focused on South African art. In turn, this orientation has had an impact on the articles included here. While four have an international focus, concentrating on examples in Australia, Britain, Germany, and the United States, three take as their topics South African art. This weighting, while different from what I had envisaged, has a certain benefit. The trio of offerings on South Africa are complementary rather than repetitive in terms of their areas of focus, and they resonate well with the four articles on parodic work from elsewhere.
Constructing a special issue from a conference provides an excellent opportunity for selecting articles that complement one another. However, the two arenas—the conference and the publication—are also different from one another in an important respect. When wearing my convener’s hat, I may accept offerings that are formative in the interests of enabling development on the part of young scholars with potential. As a guest-editor, however, my responsibility is to ensure quality and thus to include only contributions judged worthy of publication through a “blind” peer-review process. In this instance, these different approaches to the two forums had an unexpected effect. I had hosted a national “master’s day” at the local South African Visual Arts Historians conference earlier in 2016. Probably because of this, the “Intertextual Textiles” conference attracted proposals from a large number of graduate students at various universities in South Africa (which I was happy to accommodate at the conference but which would have been unlikely to be accepted for publication by peer reviewers). At my own university, however, it was understood that this event was very different from the earlier one, and only scholars with good publishing records chose to become involved. The upshot was that, along with academics in Germany, Australia, and Britain, three of the articles considered worthy of publication by peer-reviewers ended up being by colleagues at my own institution.
As with works by artists such as Walker, Reichek, Schapiro, and Ringgold which I have mentioned, gender politics are an underlying concern of almost all the works explored in the articles in this themed issue. However, like the examples by Reichek and Ringgold, many couple a focus on gender with a politics of race or postcolonial concerns. In addition, as with Cornelia Parker’s Magna Carta (An Embroidery), large-scale projects that involved collective participation and that possess a performative dimension are the topic of two articles, and both are in fact authored by individuals who played a role in their initiation and development. While five of the articles focus on works from the last decade, two others are engagements with late twentieth-century instances of parody.
Individual Articles
This special issue begins with Annette Tietenberg’s “Delft Blue as Parody: Sigmar Polke’s Carl Andre in Delft and Rosemary Trockel’s Freude.” Discussing the different ways in which the two artists parodied other artists as well as Delft Blue fabric (which is itself derived from Delft blue ceramics), Tietenberg differentiates between the messages and imperatives in Polke’s parody of Andre (which physically incorporates Delft Blue fabric) from 1968 and Trockel’s parody of the Polke work (which imitates Delft Blue fabric designs via machine knitting) from 1988. Arguing that Carl Andre in Delft served primarily as a critique of Minimalism, Tietenberg suggests that Freude, in contrast, enabled critical commentary on masculinist orientations in art that have involved contempt for handicraft techniques that have historically been the province of women.
Tamara Kostianovsky, like Rosemary Trockel, parodies art from the past in such a way as to prompt questions about gender. In her case, however, her parodic sources are two-dimensional works by canonical artists in the West, such as Manet, Goya, and Botticelli, that she translates into three-dimensional works via repurposed items of clothing. In “Parodies of Female Flesh in the Fabric Sculptures of Tamara Kostianovsky,” Irene Bronner explores how this young artist uses referencing and quotation from art to, as the author expresses it, “metabolize” memories from her past while also engaging critically with visual conventions that have underpinned representations of women. Coupling allusions to meat and vulnerable human flesh, and drawing on traditions of memento mori paintings, these works also include stitches that, Bronner suggests, “makes visible the suturing of identity, the cartography of violence, and the conscious and unconscious scarring that writes bodies into the landscapes that produce them.”
Nicola Ashmore also focuses on the reinterpretation of a canonical work in oil paint, this time Picasso’s well-known Guernica. In “Guernica Remakings: Action, Collaboration and Thread,” Ashmore considers how the Picasso work has lent itself to expressions of opposition to those in power, focusing especially on Remaking of Picasso’s Guernica as a Protest Banner—an initiative emanating from Brighton in the United Kingdom in which she herself was involved. An example of a performative work, this banner has been deployed for public sewing events as well as used in public protests. The author compares this banner with two other examples in textile. Goshka Macuga incorporated a 1955 textile copy of the Picasso painting into an exhibition entitled The Nature of the Beast held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London between 2009 and 2010, while the Keiskamma Guernica, a work completed in mid-2010, engaged with the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa.
Collectivist activism is also the theme of “Textile Art and Feminist Social Activism: The Daily Diminish Project” by Julie Montgarrett. The focus in this instance, however, is not on parodies or quotations of well-known works of art but rather of commonplace language. Initiated by artists Sarah McEwan and Montgarrett herself, The Daily Diminish includes cloths with quotes that the pair have gathered from Australian women about the types of sexist language that has been used to undermine their sense of self-worth. Looking at the intentions behind the project, Montgarrett observes how she and McEwan deliberately sought a visual language that was “disobedient” and refused fine craftsmanship. She also speaks about the reception of the work in the regional city of Dubbo in New South Wales, where there were not only attempts to proscribe access to it but where many of the cloths were also vandalized. Viewing damage to the cloths as suggestive of a causal relationship between verbal sexism and actual physical violence against women, she explains how she and McEwan have chosen to mend the work in such a way that they provide evidence of it being vandalized: thus, as in Kostianovsky’s work, sutures in The Daily Diminish function metaphorically.
An engagement with feminist strategies continues in the first of the three articles on South Africa—my “The Cache Sexe and the Tablier: Two Feminist Artworks from Apartheid South Africa.” Through an exploration of two works, one by Kim Siebert and the other by Penny Siopis” that each incorporate an apron of sorts, I explore how feminist art practices from the 1980s and early 1990s tended to couple commentaries about gender with a postmodernist critique of representation as well as articulations of opposition to racialized oppression under apartheid. I argue that various parodies at play in the two works are aligned with these concerns, albeit in different ways. Siebert creates an analogy between Op Art paintings and the beadwork apron she includes in Reinforced Apron (1982–1984), a conjunction that in turn suggests how the relative value accorded different categories of aesthetic production is informed by gendered and racialized hierarchies. The apron in Siopis’ Exhibit: Ex Africa (1990) parodies modes of display in ethnographic museums, invoking specific reference to the appalling exhibition of casts of the genitalia of “othered” women that the artist had seen in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
In “Parodying the Hysteric as a Form of Empowerment in Mary Sibande’s Exhibition, The Purple Shall Govern” (2013), Leora Farber explores a more recent instance of parodic engagement in South African art. Sibande’s “Sophie Ntombikayise” is a fantastical character whose dress parodies both that of the domestic servant and the Victorian lady, while her gestures are reminiscent of representations of the Victorian hysteric such as in photographs taken by the neurologist, Charcot. Focusing especially on Sibande’s references to hysteria, Farber suggests that this condition “may be regarded as a form of non-verbal, bodily communication for otherwise ‘voiceless’ Victorian women” and thus, in terms of the association here, also as an empowering form of expression for the figure of the silenced black domestic worker in apartheid South Africa.
Karen von Veh, in “Textual Textiles: Gender and Political Parodies in the Work of Lawrence Lemaoana,” considers the critique of hegemonic masculine power in works exhibited in 2008. Representing rugby players (generically associated with machismo in South Africa) via fabrics commonly associated with femininity and women’s work, Lemaoana, a young male artist, has also deployed parody to invoke critical commentary about Jacob Zuma especially. One key example discussed here is Lemaoana’s use of floral printed cloth “cutouts” of a dancing Zuma that refers to a photograph published in a newspaper. Von Veh also explores how meanings invoked through Lemaoana’s ironic parodies of newspaper headlines are amplified through the use of Kanga cloth, a marker of traditionalism, as their substrate. Interpreting these representations as highlighting how Zuma is emblematical of hegemonic masculinity rooted in traditionalism, she makes the point that, while they were made and exhibited before he became president, they are in fact even more important now, in a context where a sense of masculine entitlement “underpins much of the attitude of Zuma and other South African men in positions of power.”
The seven articles included here thus provide an indication of some of the many intriguing and important ways in which those working with textiles have deployed parody or quotation in their works. Involving references to prior works of art or art styles, the works discussed also often quote speech, gestures, official documents, popular prints, museum displays, media images, as well as various types of fabric. Drawing on examples between the late 1960s and 2016, they reveal how intertextual textiles often serve to question traditionalist understandings of art while simultaneously raising crucial issues to do with gender, race, and human rights.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Brenda Schmahmann
Brenda Schmahmann is Professor, and the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg.
References
- Austin, J. L. 1975. How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198245537.001.0001
- Brown, Shirley Ann. 2013. The Bayeux Tapestry- Bayeux, Médiathéque Municipale: MS.1: A Sourcebook. Turnhout: Brepols.
- Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen.
- Owens, Craig. 2011. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” In The Post-Modern Reader, edited by Charles Jencks, 260–278. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. First published in Hal Foster (ed.). 1983. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.
- Steinberg, Leo. 1978. “The Glorious Company.” In Art About Art, edited by Jean Lipman and Richard Marshall, 8–31. New York: Dutton.
- von Hantelmann, Dorothea. 2014. “The Experiential Turn.” Vol. 2 of On Performativity. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, Living Collections Catalogue. http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn/