Essay by art historian Åsmund Thorkildsen.
Catalog text for solo exhibition, ”Weavings”, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway, 1995. Published with the permission by the author.
One of the most interesting, and at the same time most difficult, questions in art history is how and why art looks as it does. The attempt to answer this question involves examining the existing general art historical situation surrounding the new expression being created, as well as attempting to place this background in contact with deeper, personal reasons the artists have for working. In the case of Astrid Løvaas (b. 1957) and Kirsten Wagle (b. 1956), it may seem difficult to determine clear art historical precedents. They work with no particular interest in current aesthetic debates taking place in books and art periodicals. Their work is introspective and their deepest concentration is directed primarily towards materials and tools.
The first time I became aware of this unusually matched artist pair, it was the originally new that made an impression. This was a transfigured and new way of working with textiles; I had never seen anything similar before - at least, not in this country. This works that first captured my interest were three-dimensional objects made of folded, unbleached canvas. Not only did these beautiful objects seem fresh to me, they also seemed blessedly unencumbered of all associations with woven rugs and tapestries; this was visual art - short and simple. - However, after having examined their work more closely, I realized that not even artists as gifted as Løvaas & Wagle could work without precedents, and although it is difficult to speak in terms of conscious models, one can at least discuss the conditions for their artistic activity.
In their earlier works, while still at the National College of Art and Design, Oslo, traces of different kind of visual art were quite apparent. One can see the impact of a rather common formal division used by artists working with textiles at this time; the accentuation of vertical and horizontal fields - with an infatuation for the verticals -and strong symmetry of such axes. However, even before completing their degrees in 1982, they had worked out the technique that later became one of their trademarks, namely the fold structure.1
The characteristic fold structure was the result of a long and investigative work with folding and overlapping. And it is in some of these early attempts that one finds correlation with the general art history of the1960's and 70's. I am thinking specifically of post-minimalist art as it appeared in the works of German-American Eva Hesse and French Claude Viallat. Their art - as well as a renewed interest in textile's formal and sculptural qualities, and an increasing feminist tendency - belongs to those tendencies which were particularly prevalent when Løvaas & Wagle began their devolopment as artists.
The end of the 60's is easily described with painting's crisis. It was a time when painters could throw away the stretcher bars and instead hang pliant, dyed canvases from the ceiling (e.g. Sam Gilliam); this was a time when the concept of sculpture was being redefined, and would come to encompass everything from sprays of lead (Richard Serra) and amorphous, synthetic foam substances (Lynda Benglis), to hanging sheets of felt (Robert Morris), stretched paper (Richard Tuttle) and rubber-coated fabric (Eva Hesse). Common to such artists was the adherence to the formal structures of minimalism (especially the repetition of identical modules and an honesty towards the physical qualities of the material), while they at the same time wished to move away from minimalism's lack of symbolic content and cultivation of industrial materials and production processes. Craft and individual content again made their appearance in visual art with post-minimalism. This occurred not only in America but in France as well, as seen in the work of the group "Support - Surface", and its preoccupation with the fundamental elements in the production of visual art. In relation to Løvaas' & Wagle's work as students, Claude Viallat's roughly fabric network from the middle of the 70's, and Eva Hesse's serial grid reliefs from 1968, are of particular importance.2
There is a suprising correlation between the above-mentioned international conditions and a graduate work by Løvaas and Wagle in terms of production process and artistic expression. Question of art historical precedents and general orientation in the immediately foregoing period are of interest not only in connection with the investigation of possible influences for the artists. They also have to do with the not-always-conscious premises for making art, and equally important, with the interpretation of a work of art. The understanding of a work of art changes over time and is a function of art historical investigations and critique, among other things. Consequently, although the new feminist tendencies in art of the 1960's and 70's may not have been consciously present in the thoughts of Løvaas & Wagle, I don't believe that we should disregard the new experiences during this time that were important in the creation and understanding of art when we propose a context for the understanding of Løvaas' & Wagle's works.
I am thinking of the human experiences that have especially been a part of women's lives. Artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Mary Kelly introduced a new sensitivity to the body. The best way to describe this is perhaps quite simply to call a spade a spade - if not to say, a tampon a tampon. Of course, I don't mean that it was tampons, bra straps, running blood, nutritious milk and warm skin, diapers and other textiles that absorb moist fluids, corset strings and ribbings, muscle cramps and body openings which were depicted in the new art. No, here it was more of an abstracted and sublimated art that only related metaphorically to the reality I have just sketched out. What is important in this context, however, is that this was somthing other than The Heroic, The Specific, The Sublime, The Beautiful, etc., which in earlier times had constituted the content itself of, and the goal for, art. -This new sensitivity creates a distant resonance for me in the experience of Løvaas' & Wagle's works.
The fold structure entered into the early works at the National College of Art and Design as well. One saw it primarily as links in a chain of experiments with different pattern structures in two-dimensional wallmounted works. Various regular patterns - stripe, check and cross patterns - were made by folding and pressing.3
There were also wall-mounted works with a centrally placed vertical flanked by two symmetrical side-members, and it was the fold structures in these that created the structural change which made it possible to consider them as having a central axis with two sides.
The interest for variation in pattern diminished upon completing their studies. What had been relatively flat wall-mounted works were now constructed to become compact wall panels. These works were uniform in apperance, without any particular emphasis placed upon inner, formal relations. The surface approached uniformity and the panels had the same thickness throughout. It was this thickness that enabled Løvaas & Wagle to make three-dimensional, free-standing works. In a number of the three-dimensional works, there is a sobriety in the use of material and a consistency in execution that can recall the Japanese object culture. A stillness settles over yellow-white wedges, bowls and blocks, a stillness that invites reflection upon the nature and expression of the objects.
Expression is often bound up with character in the three-dimensional works of Løvaas & Wagle. By folding thin canvas material so that the folded pieces measure as high as 15 cm., the artists manage to transform clothing fabric into material. This is a material we are not familiar with. It has weight and a resistance that does not quite resemble anything one might be tempted to compare it with. It is thick like a mattress, but more pliable and living. It is pliant like foam rubber, but has a heavier suppleness and gives greater resistance. It has a sluggishness that is greater than the volume would indicate; it is dump without being mute, and it tenses without being elastic. These simple, three-dimensional shapes have a form that can seem to have been applied from the outside,whittled or carved, but in reality is an outer form that had grown from within. Their borders are determined not by the sculptor's knife, but by where the fabric folds end. This new experience is only partly dependent upon what the eye can see. In order to comprehend such things, one must draw upon one's own personal experience as well. And the qualities we experience can be expanded to symbolically include terms for the softening of blows and noise, and the isolating against heat and cold. - The three-dimensional works are both padding and that which is padded; formal structure and expression, style and content are closely related. Not only are they expressions for moderation and concentration, they slow life's tempo and relay the message that one should proceed cautiously.4
It is natural to speak of sculpture when discussing the three-dimensional works. Not necessarily textile sculpture, for these works stand on their own, just like wood, clay or bronze sculpture. However, being considered as sculptors is not experienced as any kind of triumph for Løvaas & Wagle.They began at the National College of Art and Design working with the printed textile, and it was textile artists they wanted to be. During this time, when sculpture was not a goal itself, they discovered the square weave tradition from the west part of Norway. The sobriety and concentration that had distinguished their work throughout had been based on a love for textile, for the thin, pliable, flat textiles that are commonly called weavings. (See translator's note.)
The reconquest of the weaving was distinguished by an enthusiasm and an artistic abandon that had previously been well concealed. Square-patterned tapestry hangings became models, buy they were not copied. In the same way that the blue and white lines of the Siena Cathedral had appeared as rhombus-formed squares in Løvaas' & Wagle's earlier works, the strict, formal square of tapestry hangings from western Norway appeared in the guise of large, simple, geometric forms in their weavings from the late 80's. The first attempt at a large weaving - "zzz" - weaving (1988) - was almost insolent in its combinding old woolen, patterned blankets and a sleeping forest of "z"s made of inserts of heavy woolen socks that formed a dreamy sky over a small, bright horizon. In the works that have followed, they have utilized used clothing as material in the wellknown fold structure, such as discarded army blankets, old underwear, tweed suits and felt. In works such as "Weaving, weaving" (1988) there is a simple form that is repeated in the horizontally divided whole. It is an inserted, lying "H", which is also carefully sprayed a brown colour. The effect is that of an abstract repetitive pattern, where each element in the design is relatively small. "Weaving, weaving" also has a somewhat insolent streak in the form of a quite unique and poisonous green colour.
A sober and contained formal control can be seen once again in the large "Untitled" (1988) and the enormous work "Red and Green Tapestry" (1989), purchased by The National Museum of Contemporary Art at The Annual Fall Exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in 1990, as well as in "Traces in Soil" from 1990. These are large, monumental works. The use of povre materials, combined with simple, geometric forms, creates works of art with a visual authority that affirms them being 100% textile, as well as asserts their natural place within the new international interest for monumental abstraction.
In the period of time prior to this large exhibition at Kunsnernes Hus, Løvaas & Wagle have executed a number of commissions for monumental works. Their use of povre and unpretentious materials, as well the never-failing ability to transform them into a new form, is well-suited to architecture in which the building structure is exposed, and where a direct and varied use of materials is allowed to appear without too much treatment.
A characteristic of the most interesting contemporary artists is that they often have one good idea. By a good idea, I mean a productive idea, a perspective that may be used for a long period in continually new variations and transformations. A prototype for this kind of productive idea is Cindy Sheman's use of herself as a model for staged photographs, or Richard Artschwager's use of imitation materials within painting and sculpture. While the list of such artists is not particularly long, it does contain the names Løvaas & Wagle. Actually, they have not only one, but two, such ideas. The first was, of course, the fold structure; the second is the use of nylon stockings. Nylon stockings are quite important in their works from recent years, and they seem to be the discarded clothing articles most likely to appear in the most surprising and insightful versions. There is nothing wrong with woolen socks, used Army blankets, knitted hats and suit fabric, but it was the nylon stockings that launched an idea that almost perfectly suits Løvaas' & Wagle's way of working and thinking.
Since the insistence of the artists upon being textile artists has been woven like a red thread (metaphor intended) throughout this essay, even while one can see that their work touches other areas of contemporary art, the nylon stocking becomes clearly understandable both as a material that can be used to weave and sew with - like gigantic threads - and as the rhetorical elements that link the works to the most topical discussions within painting. The point of departure for Løvaas & Wagle in their use of nylon stockings is , after all, the history of textiles. They can, for example, use the system for warp and weft called "rosebragd" to make an entire weaving. The "rosebragd" becomes, in other words, the pattern that creates the image in the weaving. It becomes both structure and image. Since the nylon stockings are the size that they are ("grown women"), they become quite apparent, as do the threads in the weaving, approximately the same size as a rhetorical brushstroke in the tradition following Abstract Expressionism.
The art internal context - the weavings are presented in an art gallery as contemporary art - makes it remarkably easy to understand a work such as "Bragd" in light of the type of self-conscious painting that seeks to make a painterly pattern ("picture") which mimics the weave of the canvas that the painting is painted on. This was seen clearly in paintings by Venezuelan Meyer Vaisman's pictures from the end of the 1980's, where a photographically enlarged burlap weave was transferred to the canvas to satisfy the code for "flat painting". Neither can one escape the idea that anything square that is hung on the wall of a gallery or museum, and which has a network of horizontal and vertical lines, continues to be understood as "flat" modernist painting, constructed as minimalist "grids" or grating. In the weavings where Løvaas & Wagle allow the nylon stockings (plus an occasional silk stocking) to draw a large-paned grid pattern, a parallel with Günther Förg's multi-colored paper paintings comes to mind. There is something about the size of the stockings, and the manner in which they are pulled, that recalls the rhetorical brushstroke, with heavy paint in the beginning of the pastose stroke and again in the slightly twisted close. The stockings/strokes seem shrunken, as when too much paint dries; and they occasionally recall American painting in the 70's as well, when gauze and other textile fibers were mixed into the paint in order to build out the strokes into shallow reliefs. In a version more colorful and laden with sweetness, one sees such characteristics in Joe Sucker's painting as well.
However, as always with Løvaas & Wagle, the formal and rhetorical aspects are only a means. Of course, they are incorporated as a contemporary art vocabulary, but are used to lead into layer upon layer of associations. This is also something Løvaas & Wagle share with those of their colleagues who just as brilliantly use artistic codes in order to give new meaning: Janine Antoni makes a minimalist cube in chocolate, gnaws it and then links it with appetite/hunger, nausea and eating disturbances, Rona Pondick connects process art's rag piles heaped in a corner to a discourse surrounding psychoanalysis' "objet petit a", while the postminimalist "scatter" art of Sue Williams, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and John Miller becomes reinterpreted into everything from vomit (synthetic) to large candy beds and simulated excrement. With these postmodern jugglers of codes, one senses some of the confusion the legendary Rip Van Winkle felt, when he awoke in the wilderness after sleeping for 20 years and returned to his village that he both knew and didn't know at the same time.
The world of assosciations is something else for Løvaas & Wagle, and as Norwegian artists they are not as apparently a part of a 20-25 year cycle of repetition/ change as are their American and continental contemporaries. (However, these are indications of a meta-consciousness when Løvaas & Wagle repeat the word "Pattern" twice in the title of the weaving "Pattern, pattern", as seen earlier in "Weaving, weaving".) One sees the art codes in their work, even the language structure, linked to histories such as stocking mending, decorative moldings, trefoil and multi-foil, wooden gates from the Middle Ages with decorative, protective iron grating, border designs for paper and emblems that float romantically in the picture plane/field. All of these associations - which build partly on the history of architecture and partly on familiar everyday experiences - have an approach to color and a reserve that reminds one less of punk than of Norwegian post-war tristesse.
Both the emblems floating in deep gray and black tones (with an occasional muted blue), and the brownish-beige and gray post-war tristesse, relate to certain common aspects to painting and drawing in contemporary Norwegian art. Melancholia, often seen by young women through a faded photo album, are depicted in the paintings of Hilde Svalheim and Anne Ingeborg Biringvad, among others. The floating circles, trefoil and multi-foil, as well as turned balusters, can resemble individual works by Geir Yttervik, who in turn has probably looked closely at paintings by Ross Bleckner.
These things are - as we say - a part of the times. It is a large and perhaps insurmountable problem to explain in detail those forces which guide these developments. I would not call it a Zeitgeist, because the spirit that resides here is rather the one that needed to hide in the rag pile. The fact that Løvaas' & Wagle's weavings are seen as art and are in contact with other art, has a more pragmatic explanation, in that new ideas must consist of appropriating and processing/transgressing older ideas.
As in all transformation and transgression there must be a base, a prehistory for transgression to work from. Transgression is said to be that which brings joy, and transgressions demand considerable energy. To be able to avoid mainstream's mimicry as a more or less successful epigon, transgression demands something quite unique from artists, and this uniqueness is precision. It is not always the precision of the knife or the scissors, it may just as well be the precision of softness, as in wide streams that are gathered and given direction, a direction that gives a change in tempo and spreads out anew. This is the precision of formulation, where good poetry, thinking and visual art meet.
The artists Astrid Løvaas and Kirsten Wagle are examples of something that should be an old truth; the one who seeks the modest can become a part of what must be considered as the great. In contrast to those who would like to be international and up-to-date, they steadfastly hold onto a Norwegian tradition, and the textile art they began to study nearly twenty years ago. And by steadfastly holding on to these things, and not by way of purpose, they become interesting in an international and contemporary context.
1. The fold structure made by fabric that is first folded and sewn. The fabric is wetted and folded into compact yet pliable blocks of fabric. Finally, the entire structure is sewn or bolted together across the direction of the folds.
2. It is quite typical Løvaas' & Wagle's lack of interest in international trends that they, when asked to describe possible influences for their interest in serial forms, mentioned the blue and white stripe interior from the Cathedral in Siena or the square weave tradition from western part of Norway!
3. This flattening of certain parts of the textile structures is something that has followed Løvaas & Wagle over into their three-dimensional works, where one often sees kind of drawing appear through the play of light and shadow in depressions of the striped fold structure.
4. One would think works described in this way as unsuitable for public spaces, but the fact is that Løvaas and Wagle have had several commissions for their three-dimensional fold structures, which can partly be attributed to the objects' solidity and nuanced surface structures.
In the context of this article, the term "weaving" is used to describe textile art that is typically wall-mounted, in the manner of tapestry hangings, and which may or may not actually be woven.
Translation: Palmyre Pierroux