Essay by art historian Vibeke Waallann Hansen.
Catalog text for retrospective exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway, 2008. Published with the permission by the author.
In 2008, the National Museum mounted a retrospective exhibition of work by the artist duo Løvaas & Wagle. It was a year in which the two artists were much in the news, for it was in 2008 that Oslo’s new Opera House opened, and Løvaas & Wagle were responsible for one of the building’s most prominent visual features, namely the decorative metal panels that cover much of its façade. I was curator of the National Museum’s exhibition, and it is with this background that I have been invited to participate here today.
The work of Løvaas & Wagle does not pursue an explicitly feminist agenda by giving direct expression to feminism as a political movement. The feminist aspect in their work is more apparent in their adoption of strategies that highlight and enhance materials and techniques traditionally associated with women, and which have not always been accepted as belonging to the sphere of art. There are three particular aspects of their work that I want to elaborate on here today:
– The strategy of combining craft techniques traditionally associated with women with familiar concerns from the field of visual art; in this case, issues relating to the textile medium.
– The dialogue between the concepts of design/composition and motif/pattern in their work.
– And, more generally, the dialogue between the traditions of textiles and of 20th century abstract painting.
All three strategies contribute to the same thing: the creation of an interesting dialogue between textile history and art, in which distances are reduced and similarities highlighted.
Astrid Løvaas and Kirsten Wagle began their collaboration in 1981 while students at the National College of Art and Design in Oslo, where both studied textiles from 1978 to 1982. They also joined forces for their graduation project, since when their entire artistic production has been a joint endeavour. This means that they share in the creation of all their works, from the conceptual stage through to execution, with both putting their names to the results.
Over the years, the duo have participated in numerous group exhibitions and completed many public art commissions in Norway. Their largest commission so far has been the decoration for the façade of the Opera House.
Other major public art commissions that deserve mention are:
– The stage curtain for Trøndelag Theatre (Stålull (Steel Wool)), 1997 (150 sq m, 400 kg)
– Geometrisk teppe (Geometric Tapestry), 1995 (in the auditorium of the Norwegian government building)
-For The Bank of Norway, Tavle I–IV (Panels I–IV), 1986
Here we should also mention their superb solo exhibition, “Tepper” (Tapestries), which took place in the upper floor galleries at Kunstnernes Hus in 1995.
The foundation of Løvaas & Wagle’s art is textiles, both in the concrete sense that they work with textile materials, but also in the theoretical respect that their work always involves some implicit reference to the history of textiles or is concerned with some issue relating to the field of textiles. Throughout their production, they have actively explored textile history and in interviews have often mentioned textiles as a significant source of inspiration. And here it is textiles in the broadest sense that is implied, not simply textile art. For in much of their work their concern is with traditional everyday fabrics, in other words, the history of “low” textiles.
But despite – or perhaps because of – this insistent focus on textiles, they have managed to make themselves hard to categorise in an interesting way. For what they do is exploit the intermediate position of textiles between visual art/fine art/art for art’s sake on the one hand and crafts/folk art/utility products on the other.
The duo often takes the surface as their starting point; texture, colour, effects of light and shade, or pattern. They often draw their inspiration for such features from fabrics, paintings, ornaments or architectural details.
The first challenge that Løvaas & Wagle tackled together was how to fold cotton canvas in a range of ways. Characteristic of their working method is that, having once settled on an idea or found a promising possibility, they pursue it from many different angles before moving on to something new. The folding technique was something they came up with during their student years. And it was the variety of approaches to folding unbleached cotton canvas that formed the basis for their graduation work in 1982.
By means of such folding techniques, they transformed a soft fabric into a firm and sturdy, yet at the same time malleable material. The artists themselves have said of this technique that it offered a means to convert or transform one material into another, making their medium similar to plaster or clay.
The choice of cotton canvas tells us something about their preferences even as students and during the early phase of their artistic collaboration. Cotton canvas can be described as a kind of basic textile “element”. Canvas is the term for the simplest form of fabric weaving mesh. It is an unassuming type of cloth that is technically cheap to produce, yet its range of uses is very broad, meaning it has great utility value. In the art context, it is worth noting that canvas serves as a foundation for both painting and embroidery.
With their four wall hangings Tavle I–IV (a kind of textile relief), they won a competition in 1984 to supply a textile decoration for a new Norges Bank building.
In some of Løvaas & Wagle’s works, the textile references have particularly Norwegian overtones. In the late 1980s they turned to methods that produced results very different from their earlier, minimalist objects in unbleached cotton. Their new source of inspiration was the Norwegian tapestry tradition.
The ruteåkle, a traditional tapestry from western Norway, formed the basis for many of their wall-hangings with geometric designs from the early 1990s. Characteristic of the western Norwegian ruteåkle is its emphasis on geometric abstraction.
In the work Teppe, teppe (Tapestry, Tapestry) from 1988 the reference to the ruteåkle is clear. The visual elements of the grid weave are used in a free manner, and are partly echoed in elements incorporated by hand. Løvaas & Wagle start out from a traditional cruciform shape that one finds in many of the old tapestries. In some tapestries an ornament is repeated across the entire surface, so as to produce an unbroken pattern that plays on the ambiguity between foreground and background, albeit with variations in terms of ornament structure and choice of colours. Characteristic for this type of unbroken pattern is that it hides or subordinates the individual ornaments, assimilating them to the greater whole. Teppe, teppe mixes a repetitive pattern with free composition. In this work the cruciform shape that dominates in the ruteåkle recedes into the background, while the figure that is traditionally in the background – a shape like an H on its side – becomes an ornament in its own right. Each H-figure has been treated individually and stands out from the others. The ornaments are made to “float free” by displacing the rows relative to each other and expanding the height between them.
In the tapestry Vegg I (Wall I) from 1993, the geometric ornament of the ruteåkle has been blown up to produce larger, simpler forms. The effect is to pluck a single ornament from its original context – the pattern – and to give it an independent function. The ornament is no longer just an aesthetic detail in a larger, more inclusive form, but rather asserts itself as an independent motif.
A new element that appeared in their work towards the end of the 1980s was the recycling of old woollen blankets, nylon stockings and other kinds of used textiles.
Few of the textiles that Løvaas & Wagle have chosen to work with over the years could be described as glamourous, but by making use of discarded, worn out and supposedly low prestige materials, they invest these new works with an abundance of potential associations. This use of low prestige materials, such as discarded textiles, situates them in the objet-trouvé tradition of the 1900s.
The works of Løvaas & Wagle have often been greeted as genre-defying textile art. I mentioned at the outset how their work exploits the indeterminate status of textiles as a medium between fine art and crafts.
A review of their exhibition history and reception shows that they have largely been presented in museums and galleries as textile artists. From 1983 to 2006 Løvaas & Wagle contributed to roughly fifty group exhibitions, of which some thirty-odd focused on textiles or crafts, while the remaining twenty were general art exhibitions that did not stipulate technique as a criterion for participation.
But even if their works have been presented as textile art in the exhibition context, critics and experts have tended to review their art as boundary-breaking and hard to categorise.
Up until the 1960s, textile techniques were associated mainly with traditional home crafts and with the arts and crafts movement, while few who worked in the field were regarded as artists. But in the 1960s and 70s this situation changed radically. The reasons for this change were complex, and involved a broad range of factors. One thing we can say for sure is that feminist art played a crucial role. At the same time, this was a period when painting was in crisis, with the question frequently being asked why that medium should serve as gold standard for all art. At the most extreme, some people even proclaimed the death of painting.
In the 1970s and 80s, these factors helped textiles to gain a footing as a new medium in an extended concept of art. In Norway, the Norwegian Textile Artists organisation was founded in 1977 with the aim of promoting textiles as an artistic medium. The goal of this association was to dissociate textiles from arts and crafts. In other words, textile artists wanted their work to be judged on the same level as painting or sculpture, and to be accepted by the same institutions and represented in the same collections.
The 1980s were a decade in which textile art flourished, both in Norway and internationally. This is reflected in the number of exhibitions, the number of practicing artists, how the medium was reviewed in the press, and the amount of coverage it was given. Numerous triennials, biennials and other group and solo exhibitions were organised, both at home and abroad, in which textiles formed the main theme while also serving as the selection criterion for participation.
It is increasingly rare for artists today to define themselves in terms of a particular medium, and attitudes to categorisation on the basis of technique and materials have become more relaxed. In the 1970s and 80s, however, this was a pressing issue, especially for textile artists, but also for photographers, because free textile art and photography were new forms of expression that had to “insist on their right” to a place in the art world.
Løvaas & Wagle began studying at the National College of Art and Design in 1978, at a time when the debate about the relationship between art and craft was high on the agenda in arts circles in both America and Europe.
One strategy that feminist artists adopted from the early 1970s onwards was to incorporate women’s craft traditions in their art. Their aim was to reassess and enhance the status of the decorative arts and crafts, which were regarded as undervalued and overlooked forms of expression. The reason they were undervalued, however, was that they had traditionally been associated with the domain of women’s work.
In the 1970s, it was not just feminist artists who fought for the cause of marginalised forms of visual expression. In New York in the middle of the decade, the Pattern & Decoration movement began to gain ground. This brought together artists, both women and men, who were wrestling with issues similar to those of the feminist art movement (which was active primarily in California), but who were not necessarily associated with feminist art. Pattern & Decoration arose in opposition to the established art world in New York, but the ideas espoused under this heading gradually spread to Europe as well. The motivating desire behind this trend was to reconcile the legacy of modernism in art with motifs from folk art, ethnic art and crafts traditions. In their work, the Pattern & Decoration artists turned to textiles as a way to attack the rhetoric of geometric abstract painting. In 1970s New York, the movement was greeted as a colourful, exuberant rebellion against minimalism.
One key player in both the Pattern & Decoration group in New York and in the feminist movement in the American art scene of the 1970s was Miriam Schapiro. Starting in the late 1960s, Schapiro taught at UC San Diego, where she organised an art training that placed traditional women’s materials and techniques at the top of the agenda.
Schapiro started out as an artist working in the “language” of the day, which was geometric abstract painting. But from the early 1970s onwards, she began to incorporate scraps of textiles into her paintings. In order to describe the resulting works, she invented the term femmage, which combines the words female and image. Schapiro’s femmages consisted of layer upon layer of paint and discarded household textiles, such as tablecloths, aprons, handkerchiefs and lace collars. Her aim was to establish a connection between modernist painting and the legacy of women’s contribution to culture. Concerning her femmages, Schapiro herself has said: “I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown women artists who made quilts, who had done the invisible ‘woman’s work’ of civilization. I wanted to acknowledge them, to honour them.”
Løvaas & Wagle’s art carries an appeal to some of the same theoretical concerns that motivated the Pattern & Decoration artists and Schapiro. Here I am referring to the issue of the relationship between abstraction/decoration, the bringing together of “high” and “low” culture, and the use of elements from folk art.
The works in which Løvaas & Wagle recycle textiles have points in common with Schapiro’s femmages. As they themselves have said about this working method: “It is a form of ethnography, a narrative about our mothers and grandmothers. The tapestries tell a story and create many associations.” Nylon stockings are one feature that prompts associations; woollen blankets and woolly hats are others. It is the nylon stockings and the hats in particular that imbue their tapestries with a gender dimension.
Concerning Rosett from 1994, the artists have said: “The rosette motif is taken from a world most people associate with so-called female values – domestic activities, the home environment, maidenly virtues and industriousness; that kind of thing. – Just think of all the crocheted tablecloths, embroideries, paper doilies, plaster rosettes and the like.”
Schapiro’s primary reference is to the American quilt tradition, and her femmages tend to suggest a maximalism that has no place in Løvaas & Wagle’s visual universe. What gives the work of the latter its highly distinctive expressive quality is the artists’ interest in the Norwegian textile tradition. We have already considered the west Norwegian ruteåkle as one element from this tradition.
Schapiro’s aim to establish a connection between modernist painting and a feminine cultural heritage is interesting in this context. As mentioned, the relationship between textiles and painting is a topic that Løvaas & Wagle have addressed in many of their works. Of particular interest to them is the genre of abstract painting.
In the modernist era, abstract painting was just as dominated by men as the textile field was, and still is, by women. Although many more women than we generally assume are likely to have been active in the field of abstract painting, by and large, it was predominantly male territory.
For many feminists in the 1960s and 70s, the strict formalism that became a characteristic of art around the turn of the 20th century, and which continued to hold sway right up until the 1960s, was a symptom of patriarchy, male authority, male ideas and male-imposed rules. Many women artists, especially in America, regarded this tradition as a dead end, and their response was to break with it. One familiar strategy they adopted in the 1970s was to attack the male-dominated, minimalist aesthetic programme, which they perceived as a rather fruitless visual tradition that sought to rid painting of all content and associations over and above the subject matter of painting itself. Speaking on behalf of the women artists of her own generation, the artist Joan Snyder described this struggle – or revolt – as follows: “Women’s work helped to pump the blood back into what were dry, cold, and minimal years in the art world in the late 1960s.”
In 1976, Village Voice published a review of a Miriam Schapiro exhibition under the alluring title “Decorative is Not a Dirty Word”. It is a heading that has to be seen in conjunction with the feminist concern with the negative connotations that had accumulated around the term decorative in 20th century painting.
One explanation for this that gradually found support was that the negative assessment of the decorative arts constituted a means of keeping abstract painting aloof from the merely decorative. The advocates of abstract painting were negative towards decorative work because critics often referred to their paintings disparagingly as decorative, insofar as they were perceived as lacking in content and deeper meaning.
The American art historian Norma Broude wrote several articles on this subject, including one in Arts Magazine in 1980 with the title: “Reflections on the Conflict Between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art” (about Schapiro’s art).
In 1978, the artists Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon, both members of the Pattern & Decoration group in New York, published an article that revisited a number of modernist texts about visual art to assess how the terms decoration and ornament were actually used. What they found – and this was the article’s principal conclusion – was that decoration was almost always discussed in negative terms. In summary they write: “In the discussion about abstract painting, decoration is generally portrayed as abstraction’s most despised and insignificant relative.”
In the works Vevd (Woven) and Bragd (Feat) the motifs arise from a construction principle for woven fabrics, effectively combining free composition with traditional design. In Vevd, which is not strictly based on a specific binding pattern, Løvaas & Wagle allow nylon stockings to go more or less where they want, both vertically and horizontally, in a way that suggests loose ends and free, expressive brush strokes. The nylon stockings allude at one and the same time to modernist grid painting, free brush strokes, and the characteristic mesh of warp and weft in woven fabrics.
In their latest works, Løvaas & Wagle take a step back from textile materials, although they still incorporate references to textiles through a continued exploration of the principles behind the production of woven fabrics.
The series Akryl på lerret. Hommage à Olle Bærtling (Acrylic on canvas. Hommage à Olle Bærtling) (2008) is based on the paintings of one of Sweden’s most renowned abstract painters of the post-war period, Olle Bærtling. In 2007, the National Museum mounted a retrospective of Bærtling’s work. For their own works, Løvaas & Wagle copied Bærtling’s unique and characteristic paintings onto cotton canvas using acrylic paint. These canvases they then cut into strips, which they wove together to create new forms. It was a process that combined weaving and painting in the most literal sense. It is as if Løvaas & Wagle had gone to work directly on Bærtling’s paintings, cutting them up in order to transform them into new works – or perhaps we should say structures. The results are suggestive of early modernism’s striving for balance, harmony, clear form and the perfect composition. But these “Bærtling compositions” are constructed on the basis of a binding pattern that was predetermined, thus making them structures more than compositions. The artists’ strategy here is one of fearlessly “processing” an older colleague’s pictures.
Even so, these works do not amount to a criticism of Bærtling’s paintings nor of the tradition to which he belongs. First and foremost, they constitute a means of bringing two traditions together. A simple question one wants to ask here is, what if Bærtling himself had woven his compositions?
In their work Løvaas & Wagle create a dialogue between different forms of cultural expression, forging an encounter between folk art and the most advanced avant-garde painting of the 20th century – by internationally well known artists such as Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Nordic artists as Jakob Weidemann and Olle Bærtling, to mention just a few. But what is of interest here is not necessarily the actual work of these artists individually, so much as the general issues that underlie their ideas about and approach to painting, placed in juxtaposition with decoration, textiles and folk art.
Among Løvaas & Wagle’s most recent works we find Felt, Fornebu (Field, Fornebu) from 2008. This was made from strips of card woven together directly on the wall. It was a site-specific work the artists created for their exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008. What the work demonstrates with great clarity is the basic nature of all woven fabric: over, under, over, under, over. Here the artists have returned to the use of a neutral, unassuming material – namely grey card. This choice makes the construction principle itself to the theme of the work. Just as monochrome painting constitutes a logical extreme or an end point to the pursuit of painting in its purest form, this work can be seen as an ultimate consequence of a narrow focus on the design principles of woven textiles. Here both the loom and the fabric have been eliminated, leaving nothing but the actual principle of construction. In Felt, Fornebu it is as if they were saying: a weaving technique is also a compositional principle, and it can produce results that are just as interesting as those arising from the compositional principles of painting.
In conclusion I wish to emphasise one thing in particular. Quite possibly the point has been made clearly enough already, but even so: Løvaas & Wagle’s artistic project is not about dragging elements from the history of textiles over into the realm of painting in order to elevate them from “low” to “high”. What we are dealing with here is not an inferiority complex in relation to the great tradition of painting. As we have seen, Løvaas & Wagle insist that it is textiles they work with and this tradition that forms the bedrock on which they stand. And the result is that they manage to juxtapose these two specialised traditions such that they illuminate each other in unexpected ways.
Translation: Peter Cripps