Political Needling

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  There it was in black and white for all the world to read on Internet. Jonathan Jones, highly regarded art critic of the UK’s Guardian newspaper. He scrutinizes graffiti and handwork in today’s socio-political context.  According to Jones,

Graffiti is a pretentious subcultural backbeat that is replicated everywhere in much the same style, the same chunky lettering and coded messages. It is boring and expresses a generalised contempt for community, kindness, and the weak. How can leftists like this stuff? After all it is so blatantly hypermasculine, aggressive and destructive of people’s desire for a decent environment. It is in fact proof that men are still in charge of the world. There is far more creativity and craft in, say, crochet but because that is traditionally seen as a “feminine” activity no one bends over backwards to praise it as art. But graffiti, associated as it is with alienated young men, is treated with absurd reverence by people who should know better.

This is a back-handed complement for handwork--needlework in all its forms-- if there ever was one.  While Jones cites crochet, which uses a single hooked-needle, the essence of his argument is there for anyone who thinks about it long enough. About a nano-second should suffice.  Needlework (embroidery, knitting, crocheting) in all its forms = feminine = not art because the establishment so deems it. Jones implies creativity and technical virtuosity (craft) are the essence of art.  

So what’s new here?  Not much, except the acknowledgement by an establishment figure of something that those of  us who practice the needle arts already know:   Sexism skews western society’s perception of value and significance, particularly in art.  But we needle-wielding women (and men)  need all the allies we can get.

Women artists are acknowledged by mainstream institutions, even then parsimoniously, if they paint or sculpt. To put it another way, women must express themselves in a prescribed way to merit wider attention.  (How’s that for fostering originality and promoting creativity!)   

Painting by Grandma Moses on US stamp

Take, for example, Mary Anne Roberts Moses, better known as the naïve painter Grandma Moses. She stitched her whole life. Aged 78, she took up a paintbrush and was discovered as “an artist.”  Her themes, rural Americana, did not change with her medium. In 2006, one of her paintings sold for $1.2 million. In the meantime, her earlier works, quilts and thread pictures, are not widely known, if at all.

Recently discovered embroidery by Grandma Moses

By comparison, the ceramics of Pablo Picasso or the paper cutouts by Henri Matisse receive attention and exhibitions, albeit they command lower prices than their artists’ canvases.  There seems to be a double standard regarding what is “included” in an artist’s oeuvre. Even clay and paper cut outs rate above needle and thread.  Was Mary Anne Moses artistic vision of the world less in thread than in paint?  What is it about needle and thread that appear  to diminish or tarnish a reputation--artistic or otherwise?

Maybe this association of “feminism” and “needlework”  and “weakness/negativity” will never change.  Or do we need  “powerful” women, who succeed at “men’s jobs” to acknowledge they do needlework, in some form?  Would this help "rehabilitate" needle work? There are examples. Denmark’s Queen Margarthe publishes her extensive embroidery and design projects on the royal website. She doesn’t have to worry about her “political image.” She was born to power.   Still, there are other influential women who reportedly do handwork. Brazil’s president, hardly a shrinking violet,  Dilma Rousseff, embroiders--when she is not smoking a cigar. Madeline Albright, America's the first female secretary of state,  describes in her biography  the therapeutic benefits of knitting caps for her grandchildren.  Julia Guillard, Australia’s former prime minister appears to knit, although some see it as a publicity stunt. Maybe it takes a self-confident leader to admit to doing handwork.   Might embroidery or any needle art become a litmus test of true political courage and real self-confidence?  We will just have to wait and see, won’t we.

Needlepainter Jerome Speekman

The email landed in my inbox shortly after I launched my thread painting website. It carried an  address from someone in Australia calling herself “needlepainter.” I dithered. Was this skulduggery, spam or fan mail from a kindred spirit?  Protection software pronounced it safe to open.

I was right about Australia and kindred spirit. But this missive wasn't spam or fan mail either. Nor was it  from a woman.

Jerome Speekman, an Ozzie embroiderer, was announcing a  trip to the Netherlands and offering to teach needlepainting to “my students”.  He enclosed photos of his work. It was astoundingly colorful, vibrant and big!

Jerome Speekman with "No Sunshine"

Sadly, I had no students for Jerome, but intrigued by his embroideries. I suggested we meet for a coffee when he was in Amsterdam. And so we did, in a café near the Stedelijk Museum six months later.

I brought along my latest portrait project, still on its hoop. Jerome brought his Dutch sister and his Australian wife and daughter, as well as his latest piece scrunched up in a calico bag. While the women talked among themselves over cappuccinos, Jerome and I put our heads together to discuss materials, techniques, subject matter, and life.  The conversation flowed as with female embroiderers I have met.

Jerome does not do “pretty” or “dainty” work. He creates bold pieces, often over a metre long. Sometimes he stitches free hand and then tacks a finished work onto painter’s stretcher bars. Other times he embroiders directly onto pre-stretched material. His work is meant to hang on walls, unframed. They can hold their own against paintings or photographs.

Lizard Island

Early Morning

Middle of the day

The lush countryside near his New South Wales home is Jerome’s inspirations. He stitches its native birds, animals and flowers. He depicts majestic the forests that make humans insignificant. He stitches people. Alternatively, he can reach into his fantasy to create blue-skinned woodland spirits playing among gnarled branches of giant trees. Then there are two canvases of suicide bombers. This is a shocking subject to be sure, but there no blood or gore. It is just Jerome’s way of pushing the boundaries of artistic perspective and embroidery convention!  

Explosion

Jerome is an auto-didact with a life story as colorful as his work. Born in Amsterdam in 1950, he tried several schools before becoming a cadet at the Lagere Zeevaartschool, the merchant marine high school.  At 15, he sailed on the Pollux, the school’s triple-mast training ship, to Australia, only to fall out of love with the sea and in love with the country. By 19, he emigrated Down Under on his own.

 “I have had a range of jobs in a variety of fields,” he explained, “from fruit picking to a senior project officer with an unemployment schemes.” For the past 15 years, Jerome has been a partner in a computer shop. He also experiments with recordings, videos and animation. He had done wood carvings too. However, embroidery remains a constant in his life.

“Embroidery is a clean form of art with very little mess that pollutes. I can carry whatever I need in a bag. Some cotton and a needle is all I need.”   And that was so. To my amazement, the needle painting that Jerome pulled from his bag to show me was worked free hand and on aida-cloth in multiple strands of cotton thread. His long-short stitching was not “refined.” Did that matter? The interplay of color, movement, and theme were captivating. Van Gogh did not paint neatly either! And Jerome’s work had Van Gogh rawness about it. Here was an embroiderer that I could learn something from: “Just go for it. It’s the image’s effect not the stitches that matter.”

How did Jerome come to embroidery? “I started in 1980. My [first] wife embroidered now and then. The colors that spilled out of her basked were so beautiful. I had to use the blue—lapis lazuli. My first work was a comet’s tail inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky’s book, which correlated myths and legends with catastrophic celestial events.” 

Jerome stitched his comet onto a jacket, which he often wore. “So many ladies would stop in the street whenever I wore it, exclaiming that my work was amazing and that I was a “master.” It encouraged me so to go from clothing onto wall hangings.” Jerome has had a number of private commissions since.

“Yes, I’ve had some funny reactions to being a male embroiderer,” says Jerome when I asked him if his passion for thread art generates comment. The most memorable involved the police back in the days when his now short white hair was brown and shoulder length. “I was hitch-hiking. Two detectives stopped their patrol car with screech. They wanted to search my bag. They asked, ‘What have you got in the bag, darling.’

‘ Embroidery,’  I said. They both took a step backwards. So I showed them my embroidery from a distance. They liked it and left, never bothering to look further.”  I don’t ask what else they might have found.

999 Pelicans

Since that first meeting, Jerome and I have trade emails discussing projects and techniques. He sends photos of the great Australian outdoors with its forests, beaches at sunset, and big skies. And there are updates on his wife and his two-year-old granddaughter.

Jerome’s latest piece “999 Pelicans” is fascinating. The flock covers the whole canvas becoming an abstraction as the individuals’ bodies merge into patches of orange and white. This piece Jerome has stitched on linen, a material I suggested he might find easier to work on.

 Recently he announced a show of his oeuvre in an Australian gallery in his home town. 

What next? Depends on what takes his fancy. A love of stitching coupled with a vivid imagination propels him into the future. Stitching is his obsession. That and his granddaughter.

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.