Essay by art historian Jon-Ove Steihaug.
Catalog text to the solo exhibition, "Hunting Scenes", Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo, Norway, 2000. Published with the permission by the author.
For starters, it's difficult to decide what this is. Not rugs or weavings in usual sense, in that they are mounted on stretchers and have no self-bearing structure. Neither do they look like paintings, although they have some painted elements.
One migth call them material works, but then all art is made of some kind of material or another, so this would be meaningless or superfluous. They may of course be called artworks, thus emphasizing their uniqueness and character of having been made by someone, a higher ranking in the hierarchy of what people do. Textile art?Paintings painted on canvas must then also fall into this category for consistency's sake. The term "textile art" says only that it is made of fabric, and naturally that it is "art"; that textile art is also art. There is no categorical, convincing reason to call this an installation, although there is definitely a specific setting for these works, mounted in Kunstner-forbundet's finest gallery space, the one with skylights and status. Nor do they appear as objects. This term is too closely associated with the readymade aesthetic and dosen't seem natural. They are distinctly handmade and non-industrially produced wares. Yet they are clearly things in one sense or another. Other techniques seems a tempting classification in that it describes a cross of different techniques. But this is also unsatisfactory. What does "other" stand for if not secondary? Not quite weaving not quite painting not quite textile. Perhaps something in the middle. To keep things simple, we'll call them wall pieces, pictures, aggregates - or batteries for that matter - and leave the question unanswered. Løvaas & Wagle infiltrate certain traditions, play with them and turn them upside down. Like children playing with fire. Persons familiar with what still remains of a bona fide weaving tradition will perhaps regard this exhibition with equal parts dismay and a sense of liberation. L & W brazenly paraphrase the art of weaving and its rich traditions.
Hanging woven pleated upholstered
bound braided sewn knitted.
These works initiate something. A game. Make something happen. Laughter, the small shock, the slightly repulsive. Contain experiences that have been jammed together and stored away someplace. In a blind spot. Intimate. Almost uncomfortably close. A woman slipping a stocking on a foot, rolling it up one leg and then the other. Elastic. Why do I begin to think of old ladies and my grandmother, no longer living, when I see brown and skin-colored nylon stockings spread out? Old bodies with swollen ankles. Nylon. Soft. Loose wrinkles from a form that once was. A body's impressions. As though the smell was still there.
Hanging gardens. Stretched out elastic.
Why does it seem like listening to a chorus of anonymous voices and stories when I see these stockings, loosely braided, hooked together? They call to me. When the stockings are red or black or ligth blue, they aquire other voices that are more difficult for me to place. Not as skin-like or intimate. The stories more vague. There is an element of refinement in those with mica or silk. I think of New Year's Eve parties and femme fatale. The old lady effect is also present in the loose and baggy knitted caps hanging like hooks in an entry. Burlesque. A sense of looking back here as well. Several of the hats must be handknitted, but no one sits at home and knits or does handiwork anymore. At least, for some reason it is impossible to imagine that people still sit at home knitting or darning socks? Or the hats begin to sag or look rasta-like, but by now I'm someplace else.
Apparently there is a physical memory someplace, with stored away smells and tastes and touches. Memories of clothes we have worn, blankets we were wrapped in. It is something we carry or perhaps they carry us. Undiscernibly. For me, it is rain pants and hooded jacket, the rubber smell, the thick, slick fabric that made it difficult to move. Woolen mittens, wet from the snow, cold and stiff (before thermal mittens). Newly knitted wool socks from grandmother for Christmas along with the annual edition of Farmers' Almanac. Soft flannel sheets. The grayish wool blanket in nursery school that was mine and which "Miss Lucy" pulled over me where I lay, lined up with the other children on floor mats for our daily nap. Mike Kelly's snotty and worn stuffed animals ("more love hours than can ever be repaid"), knitted throws, pillows and balls of yarn.
Activity hour
An exacting and yet unrestrained approach is apparent in these wall pieces. An abandonment bordering on excess. Crude. With knowledgeable and careful hands folding the entire thing. Hours of work by hands for ear muffs to be knitted and table runners to be embroidered. They are often quite lumpy. Woven fabric gathered until it becomes so twisted it has to be straigthened out. Useless ear muffs. The works or wall pieces seem to contain multiple lives, worlds and experiences. Possibilities, at least. Unoffical worlds: A domestic handiwork tradition that is all but extinct. Embroidery, knittting, weaving, rag rugs. It still exists, but with another meaning. Impressions of a female physicality. A woman's body, from decrepit to fetish (beautiful, glimmering feminine leg). For me, these images hang and float in an atmosphere of gender that is hard to ignore. Had men made them, their sosial significance would have been quite different. Both beholders and artists are at play.
Their structured recycling starts out low in the social hierarchy. Waste. The old, ruined, worn, torn, crumpled. The discarded, all of the mute stories found in these things. A store of remains, cut up, packed together, woven into each other. Nylon stockings rain gear yarn thread woolen socks knitting palette straps paint wool blankets. A confusing and divine mix of what are clearly used goods. They redefine and infiltrate what is considered to be painting. They are stretched, partly painted, at least flecked, but color and strokes are made by means other than paint. Understood as paintings, they accentuate painting's textile properties. The cherished notion of materiality thus assumes new and concrete meaning. Artists often work with layers, which distinguish these works as well. Of what else does Per Kirkeby speak and create myths (the layered as natural history and a process of nature)? Layer is packed on layer, perhaps shining through in places. Layers appear alternately as transparent and opaque, tight and loose. Interestingly, Løvaas & Wagle fleck the fabric in some places, as though to soil them, give them character. This becomes a kind of bridge connecting them with the high status of big brother painting, and dirties them a little at the same time. Painting is man and textile is woman.
Ariadne. Penelope.
These wall pieces might be viewed as abstract paintings if one disregards their social materiality for a moment. Distinctions between the works are striking, as though a number of styles and possibilities have been played out. In "Shimmer," red stockings undulate crosswise, while a flesh colored counterpoint unfolds like a transparent veil over them. A foot or leg of a stocking hangs loose, becoming unpleasantly lifelike. Anatomy class. One sees through to the spring green wool blanket underneath in some places, which contrasts against the red, while elsewhere the weave is completely dense and tight. In the two-colored "Gobelin," countless golden brown stockings create a vertical stream against a perpendicular and twisting movement of gray-brown stockings. The stockings are not stretched, but travel their own paths, squeezed flat, wrinkled and yet woven into a perceptible grid. A meeting between weaving tradition and modernist grid painting.
Camouflage, bandages, networks, roots, braiding.
A deep and impressionistic use of color characterizes "In the Rose Garden." There is no clear grid structure here, but rather a speckled flicker of white and red against a black layer weaving its way in and out, covering the red-white knitting underneath. A chaos pattern, a garden in which to lose oneself. Almost noble. "Hunting Scene," on the contrary, has Baroque connotations and is full of trophies. A European genre piece or a kitsch motif. One can almost hear horns blaring and the screeching and grunting of boars as they are being slaughtered. The picture frame is forceful, where woolen socks have been sewn together to create a thick upholstered armature adorned with hanging ladies' hats as attributes. Of all the pieces, this is one that lets it all hang out. The dramatic theme is emphasized by sweeping strokes and the great depth in the image created by, among other things, underlying elements of blue, red, green and yellow. A forest of dark tree trunks, with the sea glimmering behind. As in one of Munch's paintings. The pastoral aspect of the image is emphasized by the underlying green ground - a sleeping bag.
Formless
The use of yarn is prominent in some of the pictures. They are bound or covered with tangles of yarn. Brice Marden's brush paintings come to mind, inspired by Chinese calligraphy and Pollock, or French post-war painting. "A Starry Night," bound by black thread and sprayed with white paint flecks, is taken directly from lyrical abstraction in the fifties. The ground in the yarn works consists of square grid patterns woven of leather, colored fabric or stockings. The thickness of some of the pictures - the many upholstered elements - becomes a point in itself. The irregular character of some of the works recalls sock darning, while those with a more regular appearance mainly seem full and compact. As though something is waiting to spill out. Comparisons to painting range from Mondrian's grid to abstract expressionism, action painting and impressionism. Refined elements become conspicuous since the opposite, the rustic and homemade, are so prevalent. The light gray rain gear in "Winter. Fornebu" resembles leather. Shimmering effects also lend to a sense of refinement. The black piece titled "Sable" has green-black fabric that shimmers like metallic car paint, and there is a luster of elegance in several of the other black pieces as well.
Etymology: from Greek technè (craft) to Latin textum
(weave, fabric) to text, textile, etc.
It is impossible to completely comprehend or absorb the composite nature of these wall pieces, they move in all directions. Laden with denseness, materiality and remembrance. They are also operations. Cutting, pleating, braiding, sewing. Repetition in itself. Acts of liberation.
Jon-Ove Steihaug is an art historian and Research Fellow at the University of Oslo.
Translation: Palmyre Pierroux