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by Sara Hatla Krogsgaard
What has a young, contemporary, female visual artist in
common with a writer of fiction from the beginning of the
last century? Not very much, you might think. But if you
study the works of Virginia Woolf, the themes she deals
with point very much in the direction of issues of gender
and identity which are still relevant today, and which are
highly central in the oeuvre of Mette Winckelmann.
In her social feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929),
Virginia Woolf argued for a woman’s right to have a room
for her own selfexpression; a place where she could close
the door behind her, and thereby distance herself from the
prevalent norms and predetermined concepts of the femi
nine and the man as the eternal counterpart or partner. For
Woolf, the room is thereby both a physical space and the
concrete working environment of a woman, but also, in a
more metaphorical sense, the spiritual space in which a
woman can be free of conventional expectations towards
femininity. At the same time, Woolf stubbornly opposed
the idea of polarising the genders and isolating the feminine
from the masculine. She found works that were “unrelen
tingly masculine” or exclusively feminine in their approach
to be rather uninteresting, and wrote of the artistic process
of creation:
“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one
must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. It is fatal
for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance;
to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to
speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of
speech; for anything written with that conscious bias
is doomed to death. (...) Some marriage of opposites
has to be consummated.”
It is precisely in this field, the marriage of opposites, that
Winckelmann’s works find their expression. Her abstract,
hardedged paintings are a long way from the “feminine”
in the usual sense, but neither do they represent a “mascu
line” abstract tradition. On the contrary, Winckelmann con
sistently allows the two spheres to coexist, or else by
turns to oppose and destroy one another. She consciously
takes her startingpoint in the modernist tradition, where
nonfigurative painting is often associated with that which
is masculinely coded. At the same time, she continually
breaks down the signs of masculine art by contrasting them
with the stylistic approach associated with the traditionally
feminine. She may for example do this by adding coloured
fields to the paintings which call forth associations with a
feminine and sometimes almost housewifely universe of
lemonyellow, powder or delicate mint green in the style
of 1950s kitchen interiors, or by implementing a thoroughly
stringent and hard geometrical painting in shades of pink.
Similarly, she utilises fabrics as an ‘intermediate area’ in
which, by dividing a fabric object into sharp geometrical
shapes, she brings a masculine style to the soft and tra
ditionally femininelycharged material. Examples are the
works Reading about it and Abstract Composition (Reading
about it), both from 2007. The two works are respectively
an acrylic painting and a fabric collage, but utilise the same
patchworklike motif. By applying the paint very thinly, so
that the underlying colour partly shines through, Winckel
mann gives the painting the worn or slightly shabby look
that often characterises a patchwork quilt. Coloured fields
are placed on top of other painted fields, creating a three
dimensional effect and a sort of crackling in the painting
which could be mistaken for stitching or the interstices
of the patchwork. Conversely, with its clear colours and
cutout panels, the fabric work seems almost more graphic
and flat than the painting. Viewing the two works at a
distance, one could almost begin to doubt which is the pain
ting and which the fabric. The works mimic each other’s
forms and relate explicitly to one another. The fabric work
is surrounded by a powerful frame, and thereby appears
to stubbornly insist on its status as a work of art. From an
art historical point of view this insistence becomes slightly
controversial, inasmuch as textiles and crafts have tradi
tionally been associated with the feminine domain, and in
the course of time have become excluded or ignored as
nonart, in contrast to (masculine) abstract painting. The
title Reading about it refers precisely to the way in which
Winckelmann, as a female artist, is by definition excluded
from the modernist abstract tradition.
At bottom, it is also this patriarchal foundation that Virginia
Woolf takes to task. Woolf sees language as expressing a
male view of the world, in which woman and the feminine
is predefined as everything that lies outside the masculine
order. As a consequence, women and female artists are
tied to a preexisting patriarchal language which is the
prerequisite for artistic creation. It is this language, the
abstract painting’s premise of being masculine by defini
tion, of which Winckelmann is conscious. But by combi
ning masculine art history with that of women, she creates
– in Virginia Woolf’s terminology – a room of one’s own
within art: a place where a new language can arise across
the boundaries of the traditional opposition between male
(painting) and feminine (textile) art production.
Patchwork: a system or a non-system
In line with the abstraction, Winckelmann utilises patch
work as a tool with which to dissolve and open up fixed
and defined categories, and thereby create new combina
tions and new possibilities. This applies both to the con
crete compositions, in which entirely different traditions
and materials are treated as equivalent, but also on the
symbolic level, understood as the possibility of breaking
with fixed social norms and sociocultural concepts.
In the patchwork tradition, fabric patches are combined
in various systems or nonsystems, according to vari
ous methods. Crazy quilt is the name given to a particular
type of patchwork which is not sewn according to specific
rules, but is composed of all kinds of different odd pieces of
fabric in many different shapes and colours. In the painting
Bedcover for Sonia Delaunay, Winckelmann utilises a spe
cific crazy quilt as a model, namely a patchwork bedspread
made by the female artist Sonia Delaunay in 1911 for her
son Charles. In the brightlycoloured bedspread, Delaunay
combines a wide range of different materials such as chif
fon, fur and cotton. Various shades of yellow, violet, red,
green and blue contrast in the composition, which seems
to be simultaneously disciplined and entirely random. The
painted version of the bedspread is far from being a faithful
copy of the original; instead, Winckelmann has recycled
particular colours and atmospheres, while at the same
time giving the work its own form language.
It is no coincidence that Winckelmann chooses to quote
from Sonia Delaunay; Delaunay managed to create room for
a simultaneously creative and feminine identity in the midst
of maledominated modernism. Moreover, Delaunay insist
ed on widening the definition of art to encompass, not only
paintings, but also everyday items such as clothes, book
covers and rugs. Common to both Delaunay and Virginia
Woolf is a firm anchor in reality; that which is aesthetic
is not something remote and sublime, but rather part and
parcel of life and the daily routine, and reflects such socio
cultural phenomena as politics, economics and social hi
story. Woolf takes a similar view of art when she writes:
“Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like
a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is
like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners (...) [and
is] attached to grossly material things, like health and
money and the houses we live in.“
The work as dialogue
This rootedness in reality and in the concrete surroundings
is also characteristic of Winckelmann. Her works are never
merely works in themselves, but always enter into a dia
logue with other works or with the surrounding space. This
is particularly obvious in her large fabric installations, in
which fabric banners in various geometrical shapes are
sewn together to create enormous twodimensional struc
tures. The fabric banners are often hung up in the middle of
the room where they partly block the view, while at other
times they are arranged on the walls, in front of the win
dows or even spread out on the floor. As the fabric banners
are often installed across the exhibition room, the observer
is forced to move along the banner and around it in order to
view the other works, just as the fabric spread on the floor
encourages particular patterns of movement. With the help
of these installational effects, the works establish a bodily,
mutual relationship with the observer.
The fabric works often relate specifically to their surroun
dings, for example by echoing the shape and size of ele
ments in the room, such as windows and doors. By trans
forming the actual physical environment, Winckelmann
challenges the observer’s understanding of the room as a
fixed object. In the same way, she questions the idea of the
autonomy of the work by retaining open cracks and large
gaps in the sewntogether fabric banners, through which
the surrounding space can be seen and become part of the
works. The work is in other words “unfinished” and de
pendent on the observer as a cocreator of its meaning.
In her works, Winckelmann has managed to create an in
dependent standpoint within the abstract tradition; a plat
form from which she can work with abstract painting on
her own terms, while at the same time calling into question
and challenging the aspects that she finds problematic in
the abstract tradition. By combining pairs of opposites such
as the feminine and the masculine, the body and the mind,
art and craftwork, she breaks with the value hierarchy that
has traditionally characterised abstract (modernist) pain
ting, and creates room for a selfdefined identity. And that
brings us back to Virginia Woolf, who, like Winckelmann,
insists on the right of a woman to her own identity, but at
the same time emphasises that this must not be confused
with the idea of a particular kind of womanliness or femi
ninity. On the contrary, she consistently opposes all rigid
patterns of thought, especially within the genders. As she
writes: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and
I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.“
Winckelmann does not lock herself in. The attempt to cre
ate a room of one’s own does not spill over into the ultra
feminine with girlish romanticism, perfumed flowers and
diary pages. Instead of confirming stereotyped notions of
the feminine, she liberates painting from the rigid concepts
of gender that seem to continually influence our approach
to it.
References: Wettre, Åsa (ed.), Lapptäcken, en kulturskatt, Spånga Tryckeri,
Stockholm, 1993. Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, Hogarth Press, 1929
by Sanne Kofod Olsen
According to both the modernist and postmodern way of thinking, the
artist's way of preparing his/her work is presented as a kind of enjoyment
for the artist. Not the enjoyment found in drinking a glass of cold
lemonade on a hot summer day, but enjoyment as a satisfaction of a desire,
which in this respect is not meant to be understood literally as sexual
desire.
And yet. In 1973 the French literary theorist Roland Barthes penned the
book entitled Le plaisir du texte, within which he attributed an erotic
dimension to the written text. Barthes made use of the text as an example
of a product of artistic output. Following in his wake, other people have
inserted other kinds of artistic production in the text's place. In
semiology, which is often employed in visual theory, the work of art (such
as a painting, a sculpture or an installation) frequently supervenes in the
text's place in the form of articles which, notwithstanding their emphasis
on visuality, can be read as a kind of text.
Very often throughout the course of modernism's history, it is precisely
desire that constitutes the center of rotation in the tale about the
masculine creator who is represented as somebody who is driven by his
desire out into the artistic process. This is all part and parcel of the
tale about the artist and the conception of the painting, for example, as a
kind of inseminated soil (here lies the erotic dimension), which is
characteristic of our customary notion of the work of art as something
special.
It is this very story - the story of modernism - to which Mette Winckelmann
addresses herself in her fascination with abstract painting. However, with
all the awareness about gender issues that a woman in the 21st century
possesses, she is asking herself how she can convey and simultaneously
rupture abstract painting, since she wants to work in this area even
though, as a woman, she stands outside of abstract painting's history,
which has been dominated to a great extent by men.
Should she try to imitate others' desires or should she display these
gender-specific desires as fiction by inscribing her own desire into this
praxis?
The American artist Sherrie Levine, who has been working with appropriation
(the copied image) since the end of the 1970s, has been examining the same
range of problems. She regarded the history of modern art as a
chronological succession of Oedipal conflicts between father and son
(Oedipus desires his mother and murders his father in order to possess her,
ignorant of the fact that they are his parents), outside of which the woman
obviously stood as a passive observer, even though she was the object of
this markedly heterosexual desire. Accordingly, Levine viewed modernism's
dialectical developmental history through psychoanalytic spectacles and
regarded herself as standing outside of this history: as a woman.
Standing outside of history - or perhaps it would be more appropriate to
say, standing in oblique extension of history - is that which is put into
play in Winckelmann's explorations of abstract painting and abstract form.
She formulates this radically in her works and in the way she builds up her
exhibitions, which implicate different materials, architectonic elements
and displacements, formal and compositional approaches in paintings and
textile pictures and in all of these elements' reciprocally discursive
relationship to each other.
The architectonic element plays a special role in relation to Winckelmann's
works. She allows a certain architectonic motive inside the room, such as a
door or a window frame, to prescribe the format of the paintings or the
textile objects and allows this or these form(s) to recur in several works
("Splitting Image"). She displaces the form out into the space, vertically
as well as horizontally, in such a way that the room is split up by its own
form and accordingly creates new spatialities inside the otherwise given
gallery space - the white cube. For instance, one textile object might
intersect with the work at a diagonal angle while another textile object,
possessing the same form as the painting hanging alongside it, lies flat on
the floor. What we have before us, then, is certainly not a hanging in the
manner we are accustomed to seeing, but rather an installational
intervention, where the art works function in themselves but also in
relation to each other and at the same time in this field, generate surplus
meanings which reflect the meaning that dwells inside the work itself.
In the actual paintings, Winckelmann is working with colors and forms and
with a layer-upon-layer effect, which every now and then causes the
paintings to look like paper that has been torn off. This effect
underscores the painting as object and imparts to it an almost
three-dimensional effect when viewed at some distance. If you move closer,
you discover that the layers themselves are painted. What comes into view
are a whole lot of tiny cracks and openings leading in toward an
undefinable background - or is this a foreground - which always
concentrates itself around the surface. This discreet optical illusion
plays a part in sharpening the sensation of something non-constant, of a
visual instability: a visual displacement, which also recurs in the
paintings' slanting lines, which can elicit the effect of making it look
like the painting is hanging crookedly on the wall (even though it is not).
The slanting lines turn up again in the textile objects, which either
divide the room or hang on the walls. The textile objects, in themselves,
constitute a displacement of the actual paintings. They compliment the
paintings, but at the same time, they expand the painting's conception, on
which they offer a commentary on many levels, right then and there. A
painting is in itself a painted textile object, since it is indeed painted
on canvas, but the textile object is sewed, either as colorful forms sewed
on to white cloth or as something stitched together by different pieces of
cloth.
In spite of the compositional affinity, the results of the two formal
adaptations are widely diverse in character. The textile object seems
simultaneously to undermine and reinforce the painting's authority, since
it simultaneously points toward painting's correctness and its own
maladjustment as a work of art. In a few spots, this maladjustment is
actually underscored, inasmuch as the textile object is mounted inside a
monumental glass and frame, which almost commits offence to the delicate
textile object in its patent manifestation of the fact that this is a work
of art.
In itself, the situational constellation of textile object versus painting
reflects a historical controversy between painting and textile. Textile, or
artistic handicraft, has traditionally been the woman's domain and in the
large field of historical narrative, a female rather than a male product is
associated with it. Whereas the men carved in stone and painted with oils,
the women (most often) sewed, knitted and wove their artistic provisions.
Throughout the entire course of Western cultural history, women's artistic
practice in the field of textiles has been relegated to the status of being
a non-art form. The use of textiles as the artwork's form harks back to the
1960s and even more especially to the feminist art of the 1970s, when
textile and traditional artistic handicraft were used in a squaring of
accounts with the dominant tradition and as a political point, insofar as
the materials referred to women's own art history.
The presence of cloth as art object in Winckelmann's oeuvre can accordingly
be regarded historically as a controversial declaration, in any event, if
one correlates this with traditional abstract painting, which is indeed the
point of departure. By this means, what also supervenes here is a
displacement between painting and textile object, which in their character
as works play their part in imparting a supplemental meaning to each other.
Winckelmann is working primarily with the form and with the painterly
aspect, which constitutes the point of departure for a more complex
content, a complexity of meaning. The meaning arises in the installation of
the works and in the manner of joining them together and also in the
discreet motives that exist within the individual work. Both within and
outside of the work, Winckelmann is working with openings as a recurrent
motive. The windows' openings, which are transposed into the paintings,
where the paradox of glass, which is simultaneously permeable and
hindering, is rendered thematic in some of the works' partial transparency.
In the paintings, the openings or cracks exist in a different form, insofar
as the paintings are actually built up with cracks as a crucial element.
In the cracks and openings, there are discreet reminiscences of the 1970s
American phenomenon known as "central core imagery", which was a theory
formulated by the female artists Judith Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. The
"Central Core Imagery" theory embodies the idea that female artists
subconsciously turned toward painting crevices and openings, which
reflected and perhaps even symbolized the female sexual organ. It was a
formal, essentialist view, which suggested that the artwork was
gender-defined.
Winckelmann's works are not gender-defined. What we have here is rather the
case that she interchanges and deconstructs the standards prescribing what
is male and what is female in the textile objects and the paintings, with
the result that these norms no longer make any sense. Sexuality exists more
as a quotation than as a genuine meaning. Winckelmann is playing with the
colors' and the forms' trivially apparent meaning, which is bound up with
certain conventions dictating what is masculine and what is feminine. The
use of pink in the painting entitled Flesh Out and in other paintings can
be regarded as an example of the representation of certain sexual
stereotypes that are associated with color. In this way, she gets the
historical opposition between masculine and feminine art production
(painting versus textile) to merge into the works' form.
The spatial meaning construction is a central part of the works' reading.
In the particular way that the works are installed, the viewer is guided
around the exhibition. The viewer is cut off from an overview or any
pathway by the intersecting textile objects, which steer her from one room
to the next. The viewer is gradually coaxed inside one room or is compelled
to see one picture through another, or is brought to a stop by a textile
object lying on the floor. This is a classic installational gesture, where
the viewer becomes attentive to his own presence. This is interesting in
relation to the work with painting, where traditionally speaking, it is the
gaze and not the body that pilots the experience. Painting and gaze belong
together in modernism's history (and long before that). Painting makes its
appeal through the eyes to the sensory but unbodily perception, whereas
sculpture, on the other hand, is more prone to call attention to the body.
The specific sculpture (for example, minimalism) and, later on, the
installation, on the contrary, situate the body inside the scene and make
the viewer aware that she possesses a body. This is also what happens with
Winckelmann's work. Once again, a rupture or a displacement in relation to
tradition turns up: this is a painting, indeed, but you are compelled to
experience it with the body and not only with the gaze.
In her works, Winckelmann is referring to two art histories: the men's and
the women's. She is combining them into a new story. The works do not
comply with the customary rules for abstract painting. No, they fracture
them constantly in the installational flow, in the choice of materials and
colors, in the discussion of the painting, the painterly tradition, the
historical masculine-defined imperative in relation to abstract painting.
Her effort ventures, in a daring way, to juxtapose certain locked up
contrary terms that have characterized modernism: male/female,
body/intellect, art/handicraft and it doesn't shrink from working with
formal stereotypes (textile, pink). The works dare to be what a modernist
work is not: namely, anti-autonomous, insofar as it refers to something
outside itself; anti-authoritarian, because it does not postulate a
constant but is rather fluid and subject-oriented in its manner of
establishing meaning; and anti-universal, because it does not postulate any
truth, but rather engenders doubt, process and an openness.
In the exhibition's complexity, Winckelmann settles her own account with
the modern tradition and discovers her own enjoyment in relation to the
work. Perhaps.
translated by DAN A. MARMORSTEIN
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