And a side dish of needlework to go

This week’s wander around the web led me to Sotheby’s.  I’d drop into reputation-making art venues if I lived near any.  Instead, I rely on virtual visits to keep me  abreast of how the material world is changing as I age in it.

Sotheby’s didn’t disappoint.  A rummage through their catalog for “needlework” unearthed the 2013 sales results for 18^th and 19^th century embroidery.  They performed well,  with pieces raking in between ₤250 and ₤35,000.  I’ve made a mental note to handle my embroideries more carefully.  In the future they might yet hold some value for a yet-to-be-born  great-great-grandchild, struggling to pay university fees.

An auction at Sotheby's

My hunt for embroidery also dredged up a work, which comes under the hammer at Sotheby’s later this month, by Iranian artist Farhad Ahrarnia. It’s an inconvenience, I know, but you’ll have to click through to see it.

BEAUTY IS THE SILENCE OF RUINS V doesn’t claim to be embroidery.  Ahrarnia  printed a digital photograph on fabric and added needles and stitching. The work is really a collage, or that is what my college art lecturer would have called it.  A contemporary gallery might label it a multi-media piece; a digi-kid would call it a “mash up.”   To me it’s a mishmash: photo cum Malevich cum thread. I don’t know what to make of it.

A bit more surfing lands me at the Rose Issa Gallery in London, where I read  an artistic statement for Farhad Ahrarnia:

Through the act of appropriation and needlework, Ahrarnia explores the various tensions that arise when contemporary Iranians attempt to negotiate and reconcile deep-rooted traditions with the force and consequences of modernity. His practice exists at the cusp of craft and informal architecture, whereby he applies the core principles of architecture as a means to probe the semiotics of culture and power in society. 

As an embroiderer I find the phrase “act of appropriation” interesting.  The artist wants me to understand the “semiotics of culture” i.e. the signs of culture and power.  That’s pretty heavy stuff. But then with contemporary art, I find, it’s often the stuff in the catalog that makes the work “interesting”   or even more important, comprehensible.  

I chuckle to myself. Just weeks ago, I blogged about  embroidery being co-opted by advertising to convey subliminal messages. I'm on to something. 

Is Ahrarnia’s co-opting technique ground-breaking in the art world?  Not really.  A few years back, I stumbled across a photographer in my hometown that did something similar.  

 

Photo and embroidery by Annette van Waaijen

 Annette van Waaijen embroidered underwear on her tasteful photographs of (previously) naked women sitting around a swimming pool or dressing.They sold out.

Photo with embroidery by Annette van Waaijen

By “appropriating” embroidery, these two artist-photographers use thread as a “shocking” material.  One doesn't expect a traditional medium, in the context of digital modernity. I’ll grant you Ahrarinia’s message, once it’s been explained,  is ”deep”, while van Waaijen’s is breezy. I leave you to decide if either would co-opt your wall space or wallet.

And then, there is Michael Raedecker, a Dutch painter working in London, who combines embroidery with acrylic. 

Hydrengeas by Michael Raedecker

His uses embroidery more subtley. Thread works with the paint, giving texture, much as as impasto might. Based on an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague a few years ago, I suspect Raedecker is probably not bad as an embroiderer either. 

Taken together, these three artists bring home to embroiderers, once again,  a very hard reality. To be crass, much contemporary embroidery, on its own, doesn’t garner the artistic acclaim or cold cash that these combo works have achieved.  

Boetti’s canvases and antique samplers aside, in today’s multi-billion-dollar art market, needlework is more of a condiment or a side-dish. It is not a staple for an artist's existence.  To be sure,  interesting exceptions crop up, but that’s something for another blog.

Boetti Bonanza

As the world’s sportsmen (and women) vied for Olympic medals in Sochi earlier this month, needlework was also going for gold in London.  Christie’s, the  auction house, organized “Eyes Wide Open”, an exhibition, then sale, of  works by 14 Italian artists from the Arte Povera (“Poor Art”) movement  from the 1960/70s. The “poor”, in Arte Povera, alludes to the mundane materials that the artists adopted: plastic, ballpoint pens, blankets, and needle and thread. 

Among the 38 items Christie’s auctioned were three embroidered panels attributed to Alighiero Boetti, but stitched by Afghangan women in the 1970s.  Sorry no pictures available, but you can click through to see them.

  

•      Addition   realized £1,706,500 or $2.8 M

•      Subtraction  realized £1,538,500 or $1.8 

•     Mappa   realized  £866500 or $1.4M

As amazing as these prices are, they did not set a world record for a Boetti’s embroidery. Another in his series of maps, or Mappa, sold in June 2010, for £1,833,250. Incidentally, the prices do not include the auction house commission and the royalty due the Boetti foundation. How much?  Think in terms of another 20-30%, perhaps, plus value added tax. That is mind boggling.

Beyond aesthetic and technique, what draws me to Boetti’s (1940-1994) embroideries is their ability to elevate the craft of stitching into an art form which is recognized in our life time.  

Boetti’s works offer an insight into the contemporary relationship between artist – the person with the idea-- and the artisan –the fabricator. These are two separate talents that come together in a single piece. Neither can do without the other to the same effect.

In Boetti’s case, concept is not synonymous with “design”.  Ultimately, he had hundreds of embroiderers working on his commissions. Sometimes, he did not offer them precise instructions. One instance of Mappa appears on a pink sea, because the Afghan embroiderers had a large supply of rose colored wool.  Boetti seems to have liked the effect. Over time, he left gaps in his drawings on linen to give the embroiderers the opportunity to incorporate their own ideas. They obliged him with verses in Arabic script. Boetti could not predict the ultimate outcome of his pieces, but his concept, i.e. unpredictability, remained intact. So “perfect” stitching is not the same as “interesting” embroidery, or even art embroidery.  I must remember that!

I am not sure that I comprehend why Boetti’s works command such high prices, four times what the experts estimated.  This is the mystic of the art world. Many are called, few are chosen. But that contemporary works in thread are right up there in value with those painted on canvases has to be good for promoting embroidery among a wider public, who follows trendsetters.  Put another way, perhaps it is more appropriate to say, that the clamor for the Boetti embroideries subverts the notion that needlework is valuable (or worthy) only if it is a couple of centuries old.   Hooray for that.  

I am irked by embroidery’s designation as “textile art”. This smacks of separatism, as if embroidery, as a means of expression, doesn’t belong among art’s mainstream techniques. That it, somehow, can’t cut it. While researching Boetti, I was delighted to discover that the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which owns a number of Boetti embroideries, has cataloged them as paintings.  Now that’s an achievement worth a couple of million pounds/dollars, don’t you think?