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Interweaving Art and Craft
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20666 |
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THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
1,858 Words |
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Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
A gigantic kite lively with flapping clothes soars in Lausanne's ancient town hall and gives the cobblestoned square a Mediterranean touch. Steel baskets woven around iron poles stand in a nearby park. A coil of knotted rope rears up in front of the Musee des Beaux Arts.
For the fifteenth time, Lausanne is hosting the international biennial of what is now called Contemporary Textile Art. No longer tapestry, no longer wall hanging: Textile art has moved away from the wall, stands free as sculpture, and strides confidently into the streets of this Swiss city. The textile art form is alive and inventive, but unexpectedly the question has been raised, "Is it art?" Long ago, in 1919, Walter Gropius seemed to have settled the matter: "The Artistic is a craftsman raised to a higher power."
Inside the museum, a few days before the show, I watch artists set up their works, splitting open long cartons, unwrapping bulky packages labeled "customs clearance on deliver." In blue smocks, museum workmen mill around to give a hand, hand a work, lend hammer or screwdriver, and allot the three available ladders. "I've done this for nineteen years," says one workman tussling with a carpet webbed out of stainless steel and rusted conveyor belts. The men are expert at interpreting a plan or grasping directions given in a foreign tongue.
Gesturing with her hands, Margareta Klingberg, who is Swedish, shows them how to suspend Forestry Work, a pale, lashed construction of birch branches that must barely touch the floor. This she supervises to the millimeter.
Transport has posed problems. In Brazil, tiny Shirley Paes Leme wired together fallen branches found in the eucalyptus forests to create a collection of tepees. Two days before the opening, Leme, spattered with brown paint, is coolly rebuilding her creation, a five-meter-high structure covered with handmade paper: "It symbolizes the encounter of a tree with its end product. The box broke under the weight."
In one high-ceilinged room, Lam de Wolf teeters on a stepladder. Since early this morning, she has nailed up, one by one, 180 cubes of tubing, each closed by a square of soft painted cloth. She has sixty more to hang to achieve the sunset effect she wants from orange to the palest pink. "Color and contradictions are recurring themes in my work," the Dutch artist states in the catalog she presses on me, her mouth too full of nails for her to
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