From Oppression to Expression: Textiles' Ability to Provide a Gateway for a Truly Feminist Art

"Women are without a voice in many societies. Denied the power of the word, they are rendered invisible in their silence" -N'Goné Fall

If all culture, including art, is considered to be a "sublimation of man's sexual instinct" (Hodin 57), and sexual instinct deals with man's thoughts, feelings, and impulses, where do women fit in to art and culture? Since the early flourishing of technology and programming, women have been considered secondary contributors to the modern world. In order to develop themselves as recognizable figures in history, women had to break through expectations and acceptable behaviors despite the patriarchal society that worked to keep them in check. If not, women would remain slaves dwelling in the shadows of the male-defined society. Textiles and fiber art were, and continue to be, one of the most significant channels in connecting women with culture and society. Weaving and craft have been considered primarily women's work since the beginning of cloth making, although the idea of craft stemmed from patriarchal society's acceptable occupations for women. A woman's ability to weave, cut, sew, or create with whatever resources were available were vital to not only her survival, but her remembrance in history as well. Where men are interested in product, women have always been the mechanisms that produced.

Women like Ada Byron Lovelace paved the way for intelligent and creative female minds to follow, by dedicating her life and happiness to making a contribution to science and history far exceeding what her society could comprehend. One could not imagine how different modern culture would function without the birth of computer language in Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Machine. The very foundation of textile production requires the comprehension of numeric, mathematical variation, subjects considered least fit for women to study in Lovelace's time. The complexities of mathematics were said to have damaging results to a woman's health and psyche, yet why then did weaving on a loom come so addictively natural to women, and why was it acceptable behavior although it involved mathematics? Objective scientific technology and mathematics were man's gateway to understanding and controlling nature by way of mechanics and industry (Slipp 46), and the textile industry and weaving were no exception.

For women, craft and fiber art were a means of production that they could operate, manipulate, control, and imagine without the involvement of men. Women were accustomed to performing "the mundane, often the fiddling, detailed, repetitive operations" (Plant 35) that men considered themselves too superior to do. They worked like machines, and then worked like machines at machines. The textile industry exploited and still exploits women and children due to their smaller frames and nimble fingers for little to no pay. Factory conditions were less than satisfactory in the event of a fire, with unsafe buildings poorly constructed of low-grade, fast-melting steel, and no means of escape due to locked factory doors. Workers either burned or jumped to their death from windows that were too high for ladders to reach. Families were awarded very little severance pay (as low as $75) while factories workers collected massive amounts of insurance for each dead worker, turning a large profit even in the death of their employees. Even after unions and better conditions for factory workers occurred in the northern United States, factory businesses merely relocated to the union-free south, leaving thousands of people jobless in its path. Still today the exploitation continues; goods are produced in third world countries, where outsourcing labor and cost of production is cheaper (Sherlock 8-9). Artists and laborers appear to live parallel existences; both produce work that runs the risk of losing marketability, sacrifice their art for money, and in turn the market turns art into a commodity where artists and labors do not profit from secondary sales (Sherlock 17). When machines evolved the skilled female worker or artisan into operators of one small task for a larger whole, workers were even further displaced from their labor, unable to feel connected to the product itself or the work they performed. "We found ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend" (Plant 4).

In the home, the action of weaving or sewing is as repetitive and laborious a process as each occupation represents, yet there is something beyond the oppressive, operative quality that is both potentially sensual and expressive. As Bovenschen points out in the article entitled, 'Is There a Feminine Aesthetic', women's creative impulses were diminished under their daily domestic activities. Handcrafts like weaving and knitting were considered decorative competition rather than functional artwork because of their domestic use. Why couldn't these time consuming, thoughtfully executed crafts be considered something more than utilitarian, more than decorative household product? Why couldn't these women be considered artists? The answer is that men and women looked at craft arts as nothing more than approved by men, and utilitarian-therefore artistic potential in women could not be explored. Bovenschen also begs the question, "what would happen if someday we cleared out this realm and opened it only to ourselves and other women?" (Bovenschen 305). As women began to channel potential for making art that stemmed from these domestic, acceptable behaviors, the art world slowly began to recognize women's work as art.

Although there exists a split between women who wish to embrace craft and reinvent it with new meaning, and the women who cannot separate craft from women's oppression, craft art reached new heights of recognition in the art world in the 1970s. During the 1970s, female artists in the western world experienced the Feminist movement in art. There was no movement previous that was willing to dispute what was considered fine art. Women like Judy Chicago pointed out that the art world was founded on masculine principles and systems deemed appropriate for art-making. She explained that, "the kind of art that is valued is one that is based, not on human struggle, but on what might be called visual specifics" (Chicago, 294). Therefore, if a woman were to create art to fit these so-called visual specifics, then is she creating art representative of female identity? Man fears what he does not understand, and mysteries of femininity are a fear for women as well as men, because women are still searching to understand their position in society. Feminism is not about filling a man's shoes in culture or society, or competing and succeeding in patriarchal society. Feminism involves the connection of females and their experiences through history in order to build a conscious society of just cause and representation. Although Chicago's table representation of international feminist artists in The Dinner Party (1971) was slim, it emphasized aspects of what defines the gender of female as well as representations of women's traditional crafts that attempt to essentially create a female heritage. Chicago and the Canadian artist Joyce Weiland were able to provoke the art world in a powerful way by working with mediums that, in the past, had oppressed women. Weiland in fact acknowledged Canadian craftswomen in her work True Patriot Love (1971), and treated them as professional artists, which was considered unsuitable in the art museum setting at the time. By 1979-80, the art world had already shifted to accept women's craft as art (Rabinovitz 349). Weiland used women's sexual exploitation and oppression in consumer culture to reclaim women's artistic heritage in O Canada by embroidering on the opened singing mouths of women. Another artist of the Feminist movement, Kiki Smith, used natural materials more commonly associated with women's craft and domesticity as political vehicles. Smith took on the idea that knowledge was grounded in nature and comes through bodily experience rather than solely through the mind. Her sense of reality was directly related to the body and its sensory functions (Heartney 194). She used thread/embroidery and textiles in pieces like Nervous Giants to express the vulnerability and fragility of human beings and their biological systems, and had an interest in rehabilitating these discredited aesthetics as well (Heartney 196). Most recently, Ghada Amer uses thread in her paintings to pin something that has always been considered acceptably feminine (in Egyptian, and most other craft tradition) against something culturally taboo due to its radical political and sexual aspects. Turning a craft that is traditionally precise and clinical into something sensual, transient, and sexual, while asserting women's right to pleasure and pornography, enhances the mood or feeling the work is conveying while also promoting consciousness of the female experience (Nochlin 52-3). Other international artists are working for recognition of the female experience in their societies on a much more vital level. In 2001 in Durban, South Africa, the sculptor Andries Botha created Amazwi Abesifazane, or "Voices of Women" to highlight the lives and untold histories of the indigenous women that suffered during the apartheid through narrative embroidery:

Each cloth is a bit of archival information. Each act of telling-in this case, actually making the cloths-brings another story filled with important historical and cultural data into the public arena. In so doing, it links the history of each individual with those of other women in similar circumstances. It brings each woman into a process that is as much about the future as it is about the past. While women do this concentrated work of telling and stitching, they reflect. While they are revealing the individual details of past lives to each other, the shared patterns of poverty and abuse become apparent. (Becker 118)

By creating these memory cloths, and taking control of their lives in a communal setting with shared concerns, social consciousness develops. Women sharing stories about their relationships with men, family and social structures in a male-dominate, patriarchal tribe system reveals the apparent sexual abuse, abandonment and economic exploitation that all of the women experience. It gives these indigenous women hope in the possibility of a just society with an equitable future.

Connecting female to female through fiber art is an experience I have encountered myself. As a textile major and a weaver, I worked daily in a studio surrounded by other motivated women who felt as in touch with the threads of oppression or tradition as they did with sensuality of expression through fiber. I experienced what Ada had described as a "vast mass of useless & irritating power of expression which longs to have full scope in active manifestation such as neither the ordinary active pursuits or duties of life, nor the literary line of expression can give vent to" (Plant 31). The tactility, the organization and planning, the mathematics, the pattern of manipulation, the outcome of chance, and the first-hand experience of digital weaving technology provided me with an incredible range of skill and power as a female. Weaving had the ability to make me the complete engineer and operator of my own creation, an element I consider vital in feminist art.

Works Cited

Barnett, Pennina. Afterthoughts on curating 'The Subversive Stitch'. New Feminist Art Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. p76-84

Becker, Carol. "Amazwi Abesifazne: Voices of Women". The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production. Ed. J. Linvingstone, J. Ploof. Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 2007. 113-130.

Bovenschen, Sylvia. "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" Feminism-Art-Thoery, An Anthology 1968-2000. Ed. H. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 298.

Chicago, Judy. "Woman as Artist." Feminism-Art-Thoery, An Anthology 1968-2000. Ed. H. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 294.

Heartney, Eleanor, et. al. "Kiki Smith: A View from the Inside Out." After the Revolution, Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2007. 188-206.

Hodin, J.P., Modern Art and the Modern Mind. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972. 57

Nochlin, Linda. Global Feminisms. London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2007. 47-70.

Plant, Sadie. Zeroes and Ones. Doubleday: New York, 1997.

Rabinovitz, Lauren. 'Issues of Feminist Aesthetics: Judy Chicago and Joyce Weiland'. Feminism-Art-Thoery: An Anthology 1968-2000. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. P 346-351

Sherlock, Maureen P. "Piecework: Home, Factory, Studio, Exhibit." The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production. Ed. J. Linvingstone, J. Ploof. Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 2007. 1-30.

Slipp, Samuel. The Freudian Mystique: Freud, Women, and Feminism. New York: New York University Press, 1993. 46.