Superstitions, Admonitions, and Kidney Colds
After reading your posts on the Extreme Embroidery Exhibit, I felt I missed out on a great class. While I was getting my root canal, you guys got to witness some pretty interesting works and your posts compelled me to see them for myself. We went on a Friday afternoon and we were one of four visitors at the museum. We had the entire exhibit to ourselves. It is interesting that this old art is being revived, I guess it goes along with everything else in popular/modern culture, the way fashions, music, and art find themselves repeating over several decades. Some works in particular grabbed my attention. I’ll start with the lower level because there are a few works that I found particularly interesting. I was walking around the exhibit and I as approached a large piece with naked lovers (sorry I forgot the name of the piece and the artist) I heard a conversation about the artist. It turns out that the project manager of the exhibition was providing a private tour for a friend f hers. This large quilt-like piece had a feminist motif. This artist’s feminist views are particularly interesting because she embraces radical feminism in a peaceful and calm way, unlike the stereotypical feminist who seems anti-male and wants desperately to change history to herstory. The piece on the wall adjacent to this quilt was a series of sketches done by a Japanese artist, Shizoko Kimura, in needle and thread. Gestures are very quick drawings of the figure, encompassing the basic movement and structure of the figure, basically outlining the position of the shoulders, hips and overall direction of movement. Not much attention is paid to details such as hands and facial features. These are usually done before a the complete drawing or painting of a figure and take a bit more than several seconds. This artist did these gestures in needle and thread! On a ivory mesh-like sheet stretching from the floor to the ceiling, which was a lot like a large sheet gauze, this artist managed to embroide the figures. There was also a piece by an Italian artist that caught my eye. In Death of a Blinded Philosopher, a skeleton with fangs and claws spewed out rhinestones, ornaments, and flower parts of a bloody-rasberry color.
The piece I found most entertaining was one by Andrea Dezso. Of the embroidered pieces the one at center caught my eye. “My mother claimed that she talked about the vet in Romanian because she did not want to upset her cat who understood Bulgarian.” That totally reminded me of what we do in my home. My cat understands the words for vet and doctor in Russian and so we refrain from talking about either in front of her. When we need to, we use only English, so as to not upset her and make her anxious. After reading this one, I read the rest of them, which were humorous, partly because some of them reminded me about the things my own mother warns me about from time to time. The artist is from Transylvania so I guess thats not too far off from where I’m from, and many ethnicities have similar superstitious beliefs anyways. I like the way she was not afraid to embroider a lot of detail even though the works were fairly small and the detail wasn’t necessary for comprehension of the pieces. This made it a bit cramped but that added to the overall honesty and freshness of the composition. The words, diagrams, and pictures were embroidered on cotton canvas with coton thread. Some of the works were symmetrical and that made them stand out a bit from the rest. The thread used was often shiny and reflective of light.
Since as the caption that introduced a part of the exhibit said about embroidery, it is a “catalyst” for communicating experiences and values, breeding creativity. There were a few pieces that were political. In response to the situation in Israel, Dafna Kaffeman embroidered two pieces, one of them, Arabic is Not Spoken Here. As I passed by it, since the letters were Hebrew, I thought for a second that it said Hebrew, not Arabic. The words for these languages are very similar in Hebrew, when written without the vowels. With the reversals of two letters, one language becomes the other. That just made me realize how the people who think of themselves as polar opposites are really more similar than they/we think.
Okay, and something must be said about Abe’s ‘fro.