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Dynamic domesticity: with an emphasis on sewing and handicraft, a recent group show offered a low-tech alternative to consumerist flash
Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Paula Harper
"Hanging by a Thread," a big, lively group show of 29 artists from all over the world, continued the trend in Miami toward ever more cosmopolitan exhibitions, accelerated since 2002 by the impact of the yearly Art Basel fairs in Miami Beach. The work was installed at the Moore Space, a nonprofit arts organization founded by Miami collectors Rosa de la Cruz and Craig Robins. Robins owns the Moore Building in Miami's Design District and makes the large, open second floor available for art exhibitions and programs. The guest curators, Nina Arias and Jose Diaz, responding to "Loose Threads," a 1998 show at London's Serpentine Gallery, chose to focus on the recent absorption of the materials and methods of handicrafts into contemporary art. They selected the individual pieces with a canny appreciation for the relationship of the parts to the whole: the ensemble generated a light-hearted, high-spirited energy.
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The show celebrated the world of homemade things--pillows, bedspreads, tablecloths, doilies, costumes and sets for Halloween and school plays. Much of the two-dimensional work was figurative and incorporated sewing, knitting, quilting and various needlework techniques and stuffs, including yarn and felt, instead of paint and canvas. The sculptures and installations involved fabric, Styrofoam, cotton batting, glitter and cardboard--the sorts of materials available at craft shops. Just as many male as female artists were included, creating a cross-gender synergy as well as a populistelitist hybrid. The work, as a rule, did not seem ironic or even vaguely condescending to popular taste. Instead, the artists were affectionate toward and appreciative of the quirky, individualistic visions of handicrafters and eager to experiment with their methods, turned to the uses of art.
The show made it delightfully clear that these domestic materials, when combined with artistic conceptions, can produce subversive effects. Tracey Emin's applique blanket, I Think It's in My
Head, is lettered with the artist's night musings. Ghada Amer showed one of her embroidery drawings that delicately reveal and veil women nuzzling each other, enjoying their own erotic potential. Orly Cogan hand-stitches erotic line drawings on old tablecloths and linens printed with faded flowers and ribbons. In Allegory, an orgy of pale colors on soft fabric, several naked, frolicking females outlined in yarn overlie and overwhelm the one supine nude guy.
Mark Newport's Sweaterman III, a full bodysuit with head covering and eye-holes suggests--in today's political atmosphere--a terrorist's disguise or a biohazard outfit. But the fact that it was knit from teddy-bear-colored yarn renders it harmless, transforming a costume that might have conveyed a sense of danger into one that could function as a snuggly snowsuit.
In a flat, frontal portrait, Michael Raedecker depicts a middle-aged man by using thickets of thread for his eyebrows and hair and thin parallel lines of thread, like hatching, for shadows. Thread also defines the facial wrinkles, those above and below the lips and in his drooping neck. The thread is covered with strokes of pasty, putty-colored acrylic, which accentuates the wrinkles in the way that thick pancake makeup does. These materials undermine the man's confident, businesslike image, making him pitiable and somehow repulsive.
Jon Pylypchuk draws cartoonish little creatures composed of wavery pen-and-ink lines plus bits of fuzz, fur, cloth, glitter and thread. Strange statements inscribed in tiny letters issue from their mouths (or muzzles): for example, "Lest ye be exposed a fraud." Fragile and comical, the characters offer entry into a loopy, ephemeral world where Krazy Kat would be at home.
Misaki Kawai's tepee-shaped installation Himalaya Space Station did not resemble the gleaming structures of The Matrix, the Apollo moon shots or computer simulations. Instead, it was a playful, blinking and beeping work she glued together using cardboard, silver tape, glitter and cotton batting. Like a grade-school project, the result was flimsy and endearing.
Frankie Martin's digital video projection Esto es que tu quieres? (Is this what you want?) invades the territory of unfettered female sexuality explored by Madonna, adds in the crude dance moves of Britney Spears et al. and lampoons the whole genre with innocent glee. Three girls, scantily clad in hot pants, venture beyond vulgar into the sheer joy of flaunting. They sing, shake their booties in our faces, grab their crotches and simulate sex, backed by hot colored, frenetically morphing, hand-drawn decorations. Digital camcorders and Photoshop options are now widely available: Martin uses these tools to produce a personal, homemade commentary on a slick commercial form.
With its emphasis on the modest and domestic, "Hanging by a Thread" struck a blow against the Sublime. It provided a comforting alternative to the metallic, mass-produced, high-tech objects of current consumption and the "shock and awe" universe of militaristic mindsets.
