It is late 2018. The work I am speaking of is titled Six Prayers, and it is on display in the Anni Albers exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. It was made between 1966 to 1967, upon an invitation by the Jewish Museum in New York to produce a tapestry memorialising the six million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust. Albers (1899–1994) was an influential German-American textile artist, designer, teacher, and writer; she is best known for her ambitious, experimental pictorial weavings that integrated—and expanded upon—the visual language of 20th century abstract modernism.
Despite her important, pioneering work, this exhibition is only her first major retrospective in the UK, held two and a half decades after her passing. I wonder how much this delay is due to her commitment to the ancient practice of weaving, which—unlike drawing or painting or —wasn’t, and still isn’t, considered one of the traditional mediums of fine art. In a 1985 interview, Anni Albers said of her printmaking works: “I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” For the latter, “recognition comes more easily and happily, the longed-for pat on the shoulder.”
By the end of the exhibition’s run, I will have weathered the crowds for three separate visits. I do not do this simply because she worked with fibres as I do; in any case, I work with embroidery, not weaving, and even then it is only one part of my artistic practice. I visit this exhibition again and again because I can experience, viscerally, how the most basic system can generate innumerable exciting permutations over decades of experimentation and study. A weaving, at its core, has a warp and a weft—on a loom, the warp threads are held in place ‘vertically’, while filling threads, or the weft, are woven horizontally through them. As complicated and layered as Albers’ weavings are, there is always this grid, visible and essential; in her preparatory drawings too, and her prints. There is no creativity without system, and no system without creativity. There is something to hold onto, something rooted.
I veer in a different direction now, and draw a strange line. It starts at Six Prayers and leads to another work being shown in the newer extension of Tate Modern, connected to the main building by a bridge across its Turbine Hall. There is a room across this bridge that is bathed in an acidic glow. Again, there are six uniform, rectangular objects here, but they are not the flatter, fibrous panels of before. Instead they are slim, sleek, three-dimensional pillars resting at an angle against the wall. On the surface of each column is not the grid of a weave but a grid of tiny bulbs; the disruption of the grid is not black and white thread but blue light. The bulbs gleam bright and fleeting to form word after word, phrase after phrase, scrolling and pulsing and blinking and demanding attention. The statements, in English, are unambiguous and unabashed: I SAY THE WORD, it shouts, I SAY YOUR NAME, it declares. I COVER YOU – I SHELTER YOU – I RUN FROM YOU – I SLEEP BESIDE YOU – I SMELL YOU ON MY CLOTHES – I KEEP YOUR CLOTHES.
The lights go out briefly; a new set begins, then another. One never knows when the cycle is complete. On the wall, a pink and purple wash cast from the backs of the columns vibrates in the same rhythm—the same text, obscured but present. With these columns lined with tiny bulbs, the person who made these emulates speech rather than script, the vocal rather than the written form. “Because it is so much like the spoken word,” she said. “You can emphasize things; you can roll and pause, which is the kinetic equivalent to inflection in the voice.”
This work is Jenny Holzer’s Blue Purple Tilt, from 2007, forty years after Six Prayers was completed. The statements in the work are straightforward, banal, offered for consumption like news headlines or advertising slogans; unlike Six Prayers, where language is implied rather than inscribed. Yet Holzer’s words remain cryptic in their own right. Ripped as they are from any context, they might be empty vessels for the viewer’s own thoughts, and even then they sometimes rotate too quickly to really be absorbed. Language is laid plain, but somehow as abstract as in Six Prayers. The individual bulbs are, too, pixels forming a pattern, a suggestion of a language that cannot be fully grasped. For both works, the viewer is caught between modes of understanding, forced to reorient, to accept that there is a part that will forever remain concealed, perhaps even to form a meaning that can never be externally affirmed.
Perhaps, given the differences in their chosen mediums, one might not think to compare the works of Anni Albers and Jenny Holzer. But I draw this strange line because I can. Because I see in each of them a system, a language; it matters not that one has the softness of fabric, and the other the harshness of a digital display. Because these works call to me, an artist who works with text, constructed on the grid of the weave of a piece of fabric, which could just as well be the grid of LED lights. I draw this strange line because I am standing on the bridge between them. I speak in words, in thread.
