Needle in a Haystack

A simple sewing needle made big news in Europe this week. Besides hitting the papers, this needle featured in prime time, international TV broadcasts too. What made an ordinary stitching implement so special?  Location, location, location, my friend.   The needle was on show, so to speak, at the Palais de Tokyo , Paris’ Museum of Contemporary Art. It was hidden in a not-so-proverbial haystack.  Italian performance artists Sven Sachsalber had just 48 hours to find it. 

 

Irish Haystacks by Johnathan Wilkins (c) Creative Commons

What’s the point of this needle? The Museum’s director Jean de Loisy explained the exhibit this way: ''It is a symbol of the search we are all doing for something.''   Honest, he really said that.

I’m gob smacked.  Here is a museum director who understands a needle’s role the process of discovering ourselves. He sees the artist’s search and experience very important.   Hooray for that. But the embroiderer in me is incensed. The director breezes over embroidery. It’s the process of discovery that is so important to him. 

 A needle is indispensable to those of us who explore the creative process – and discover ourselves--through the needle arts.   But hang on; needles shouldn’t have any thread in them.  That would leave a trace of the effort that many of us have expended during our quest of discovery. The quest and product would be embroidery and definitely not comme il faut. 

 I am delighted that the museum director gets that needles are associated with doing something time consuming (thus life consuming), but hay—oops hey-- this is ridiculous.  

A search for something concrete, like a needle in a haystack, is art when it is performed by a young handsome man devoting two days of his life to it in front of on lookers.  (Let’s hope that his time is paid for.)  The private process of embroidery, or even its concrete product, is not worth the time of the art establishment despite the thought and technical skill that embroiderers put into them.  Why?  You tell me.

Palais de Tokyo in Paris by Strobilomyces

  And the questions keep coming. Why haven’t hundreds of thousands of embroiderers worldwide produced artistic superstars worth shows in the galleries of the art establishment? Statistically there must be fantastic contemporary embroiderers out there. Surely finding them must be worth the effort of finding a needle in a haystack.  And much more interesting, I would say.

One adjudicator of modern taste the MOMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York, has an ongoing workshop exploring modern gas masks and embroidery. It’s performance based, vanishing at the end of the day. A search of the Palais de Tokyo website –not the haystack--unearthed a previous exhibition featuring embroidery as fashion embellishment.  Embroidery is clearly not the main event. And New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art did a show on textile history. That’s about as good as it gets fans. The Museum of Craft and Design has a collection of modern embroideries but you can’t search their site! 

After years of pondering these questions as I stitch away trying to understand  the world, the answer appearing out of the mist seems to be that much embroidery—not all—is made by women.  And that’s the rub, impediment, explanation, whatever you want to call it.  Amanda Vickery explored the lot of female painters through the centuries in a brilliant BBC series.  The programs got a wonderful review in the Guardian.  A quick look at the comments from enthusiastic female readers shows there is a broader understanding of sexism and feminism a foot.  So if you see embroidery as that subset of art primarily practiced by women, often older women, how can the lack societal interest be anything else than it is:  Benign neglect. 

Because embroiderers understand this condition doesn’t imply we accept it. There are many more urgent existential problems facing women that deserve society’s attention and resources. We don’t make a fuss. Still that doesn’t mean that embroiderers shouldn’t call attention to sexism and ageism. Nor should we shrink from the opportunity to needle the art establishment or to prick their consciences. It just might set someone of them searching the haystacks of their souls.