Solveigh Goett (2005/2009)

 

Memory Work: snapshots, clothes and washing lines

 

 

Comments, Thoughts and References

 

 

Contents

 

 

Introduction                                                                                                     2

 

 

Beyond the image: the materiality of photographs                                           3

 

Common ground: photographs and textiles                                                     4

 

Women’s work: the care of material memories                                               6

 

Matter and metaphor: the texture of text                                                          8

 

The album as container and communicator: the flow of memory                    9

 

Tales from the washing line: presence, absence, transitions                            11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

“Memory is the  seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither'. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

Virginia Woolf (1977: 49), Orlando: a biography

 

Memory Work  is a collection of photographic, textile and text objects presented in the format of an album. Focusing on the role of ‘everyday’ textiles in the narration of the self, visual, textual and tactual propositions provide a starting point for a material exploration into autobiographical memory.

 

The image of the washing line is used as a connective device, a metaphoric as well as ‘real’ line stringing together reminiscences and ruminations in a flow of imaginative investigation. ‘Everyday textiles’ are here defined as those that can be commonly found on a washing line.

 

This collection aims to initiate thought, feeling and discussion about the

relationship between family photographs and textiles as carriers of memory.

Memory Work engages the senses as instruments of research and means of communication in an attempt to make abstract processes of remembering visible and tactile.

 

Many issues are touched upon and opened up for consideration and further examination in related contexts and collections. The following themes are commented on below as a framework of thoughts and concepts that have informed the making of the piece.

 

• Common ground: links between photographs and textiles
• Women’s work: the care of material memories
• Matter and metaphor: the texture of text
• The album as container and communicator: the flow of memory
• Beyond the image: the materiality of photographs
• Tales from the washing line: presence, absence and transitions

 

The way these themes are entangled and interwoven is as much part of their appeal as the

challenge they present to the attempt to separate strands and discover patterns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the image: the materiality of photographs

 

Photography outlets, I wrote in 2005, offer their customers a service to turn digital images into “real photos”. With digital technology it has become possible to separate the photographic image from the photographic object to an extent never experienced before. The quality, convenience and flexibility of virtual imagery however has not diminished the demand for the ‘real thing’ - an object that can be handled, framed, touched, displayed, carried, given and received as a gift.

 

As I re-read this four years later, these photography outlets, rewarding patience with their range of differently priced services, and encouraging distribution with the irresistible lure of the extra set for 99 pence do not exist anymore. The more photographs are taken, the fewer are given the chance to become  “real” photographs; the time lapse between capture and contemplation has collapsed into instant viewing and editing, the photograph less of a moment reliably frozen and kept in time, the image more vulnerable the more it is detached from the object.

 

modern: photos, durability, steel, concrete

postmodern: videotape, commitment avoidance, bio-degradable plastic, (Baumann 1996:18)

 

 

Lynne Brindley, head of the British Library, is concerned about  “a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21^st century” opening up with increasing reliance on digital storage of memory. We suffer, she writes, from “personal digital disorder”, a tragic condition that will “leave our grandchildren bereft” (Brindley 2009) of photographs to remember us and their own younger selves. Thousands of digital images lie hidden in computers and will perish with them, rarely stored and even less likely to be given material form.

 

The digital photograph in its dependence on technology not just for the taking and processing, but crucially in the viewing, is at best an additional step removed from the experience it captures, at worst leaves no tangible trace. Lost are the sensory delights of rummaging through the shoebox of snapshots or browsing old family albums with their peculiar smells, disturbing gaps and evocative textures, the tactile appropriation (Benjamin 1999c) of visual memories. Having forgotten the orange tint that coloured a decade of memory - as embarrassing as the clothes we wore then - we show faith in progress again, seduced by convenience and the power new technologies have given us to use (and abuse) images, not mindful enough, perhaps, to matters of vulnerability and obsolescence as we let our memories slide into the ephemeral.

 

 

 

Virtual but not yet actualized in a philosophical sense, the liquidity of the image was already imagined by Paul Valery in 1928 (Benjamin 1999d: 213). “Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to minimal effort,” he predicted, “so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand.” Has tactile appropriation been reduced to the click of a mouse?

 

The ‘real’ tangible photograph still exist, and is now either old or specially selected from hundreds of images hovering in a digital limbo of uncertain future, to mark the occasion in a wedding album, to celebrate stages and achievements in displays of school photos in their cardboard mounts, to enhance the home with elegantly framed memory-scapes of travels in space or in time, to pay homage to history in the sepia tints of ancestor portraits, discreetly digitally enhanced.

 

As the gap between production and reproduction of photographic images contracts and expands on all sides I wonder about the fate of the aura; re-reading Benjamin’s reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1999c) I ponder the implications of digital reproduction, the intangible, immaterial and illusionary qualities of images, as they float, purely visual phenomena,  in an invisible web of  connections.

 

Elizabeth Edwards (1999: 228), examining how the object qualities of the photograph

extend the sense of vision through materiality, states that “the photograph has always existed, not merely as an image but in relation to the human body, tactile in experienced time, objects functioning within everyday practice” – up to now, we might add.

 

The materiality of the photograph is emphasized by the material contexts of its viewing and handling and the space it occupies in a domestic or personal setting: kept in a box, hidden in a locket, tucked into a wallet, presented in an album, framed for display or giving. The material context adds weight and meaning to the image, as “form and image merge to create function, a satisfaction with the object in terms of its cultural role.”(Edwards 1999: 232)

 

 

Common ground:  photographs and textiles

 

The cover of Memory Work features a layered, stitched and felted collage of colour photographs. During the making of this piece, the photographs have been through boiling water, rolled and rubbed with detergents, spin-dried and ironed followed by some printing, tearing, patching, stitching, cutting, embellishing and covering. In short, they have been treated like textiles.

 

While the images have been fragmented, the photographic object has not yielded: its strong presence and stiffness can be clearly felt. The toughness and resilience of the photograph should not come as a surprise: water and chemicals are used in photographic processing, the developed and fixed pictures then hung up to dry just like the washing on the line - a familiar image from old detective films and thrillers such as Blow-up (Antonioni 1966) suggesting secrets, mysteries and revelations.

 

Pre-digital photographs are difficult to destroy, as images and objects. They leave traces, they are forensic evidence. Both persist and survive, are traditional memory media – albeit one from an ancient and the other a modern tradition – of maintaining links with the past. We were taught to treat them gently with care and respect.  Woven into our memory, they become memory, then re-emerge as metaphors of the process and become part of how “we picture ourselves” (Haverty Rugg 1997) in autobiographical reminiscences.

 

Through their proximity to the body, visually and physically, photographs and textiles are closely linked to the perception of the self through the senses, in actuality as well as memory.

 

Christian Boltanski uses photographs and everyday textiles such as garments and household linen in his installations,[1] often in combination. He comments on the similarity of feelings evoked by photographs and second-hand clothes, both used in his work to convey notions of absence, both related to reality, to something that existed once, a sort of truth, both bearing the trace of past presence.

 

“I always see a relationship between a second-hand garment, a dead body, and a photography of a person. In all three cases, there is an object that recalls an absent subject. There is no flesh. We can stamp on a photo or tear it up, it is an object we can happily torture. And like a worn garment, there is the smell of a person, and the lack of a person. There is always the idea of a missing person in a photo. In my work, whether I use a photo or a garment, there is no difference, one thing is not more important than the other. What is most important is the effect of reality.” (Boltanski 1997: 105).

 

 

Family photographs can be placed in time and cultural circumstance through the textiles they feature: garments, interior textiles, linen. Male shirts on the washing line indicate the presence of a man in the household at the time the image was taken. It is not the groom’s suit or the bride’s dress – bought, made or borrowed? – but the washing line in the background of the wedding photograph that betrays the bride’s working class background.

 

Walter Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer - who would later succeed in the flight from persecution that defied his companion - wrote on the significance of textiles in what were old photographs in 1927 when his essay was first published. In the old family photograph of the grandmother, he writes, ”It is the fashion details that hold the gaze tight. Photography is bound to time in precisely the same way as fashion. Since the latter has no significance other than as current human garb, it is translucent when modern and abandoned when old. The tightly corseted dress in the photograph protrudes into our time like a mansion from earlier days.” (Kracauer 1995: 55)

 

Yet to be perceived as beautiful rather than comical, the dress in the photograph must  be very old, it is “a dress that has lost all contact with the present, that can attain the beauty of the ruin. The effect of an outfit that was still worn recently is comical. The grandchildren are amused by the grandmotherly crinoline of 1864, which provokes the thought that it might hide the legs of a modern girl. The recent past which claims to be alive is more outdated than the past that existed long ago and whose meaning has changed. The comic quality of the crinoline results from the powerlessness of its claim. In the photograph, the grandmother’s costume is recognized as a cast-off remnant that wants to continue to hold its ground. It dissolves into the sum of its details, like a corpse, yet stands tall as if full of life. Even the landscape and all other concrete objects become costume in an old photograph.” (Kracauer 1995: 55)

 

Photographs and textiles share a sense of occasion: special celebrations may be marked and memorized by the use of special table linen appearing in and evoking the captured image. The shrine-like quality of photographic displays is often enhanced by special cloth, a family heirloom, lace, silk or embroidery.

  

 

Women’s work: the care of material memories

 

“There’s one thing that’s odd,” said Höglund.’ This house is full of souvenirs from a long life with lots of travel and countless meetings with people. But there are no family photographs.”

They were back in the living room. Wallander looked around and saw that she was right. It bothered him that he hadn’t thought of it himself.

“Maybe he didn’t want to be reminded that he was old,” Wallander said without conviction.

“A woman would never be able to live without pictures of her family,” she said. “That’s probably why I thought of it.”

Henning Mankell, Sidetracked

 

 

Photographs and textiles share a sense of occasion: special celebrations may be marked and memorized by the use of special table linen appearing in and evoking the captured image, family photographs displayed in special locations, chosen, framed and arranged as

shrines to memory, often combined with flowers, textiles, or other objects of personal significance.

 

In Victorian times mementos and memorial displays often combined photographs with textile fragments; a piece of the bride’s veil and the groom’s rosette adding memory weight to the wedding picture,” tangible reminders of the bodies now joined in marriage” in a “homemade reliquary [that] speaks of, almost embodies, the marital experience, more than what can be seen in images or described in words.”(Batchen 2004; 39)

 

Photographs were printed onto everyday textiles long before the advent of the slogan T-shirt. Women in the beginning of the twentieth century had family photographs printed on cloth to be made into pillowcases or quilts (Batchen 2004: 29). These images, Batchen (2004:30) comments on a pillowcase made from outdoor family holiday scenes, evoke family memories, but the object is “also a reminder within the home of the outside world it depicts, a daily reference to a picturesque elsewhere […] So the apparent ordinariness of an object like this cyanotype pillowcase belies the deeper social and cultural complexities embodied in its making.”

 

There is no interface in such objects between image and fabric, body and image as they become one surface. “The physicality of this fabric. “ Batchen (2004: 31) writes, “its straight seams and crumpled edges, enhances the object’s capacity to provoke remembrance, for it gives these photographs substance and texture, making them touchable and warm, and allowing past and present to cohabit in everyday domestic life. (What would it mean to rest your head on such a pillow?)”

 

 

According to Edwards (1999: 233, 234), “the selection and care of these living-room shrines are gendered. The ‘family archivist’, controlling the overlap of history and fantasy, and the domestic spaces dedicated to the articulation of this function, is usually female.”

 

Describing these memory sites as ‘shrines’ underlines their spiritual quality: their location and presentation may place them within an almost universal tradition of sacred places in the home.

 

For Kay Turner  (1999) women’s home altars are a "beautiful necessity",  visual testimony of women's urge to create links between people, objects and realms that also finds expression through needlework:

 

“The home altar is the prototype of all women's domestic arts - quilting and applique for example […] women's artistic process of collecting and joining seemingly disparate elements into a functional whole.” (1999: 98)

 

Turner links the making of home altars to the making of images such as the 'femmages' developed by Miriam Schapiro in the 1970s. Schapiro coined the term 'femmage' to describe a particular type of collage specific to textile and women's work,

“a word invented by us to include all of the above activities (i.e. collage, assemblage,

découpage, photomontage) as they were practiced by women using traditional women's

techniques to achieve their art - sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like - activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.” (Schapiro, quoted in Chadwick 1996: 364)

 

 

Being the keeper of the archive of memory is a task to be cherished and valued. But while the ‘poetics’ of  Bachelard’s (1994) domestic space  may engage women’s creative spirit, the housework still needs to be done. The largest proportion of housework is related to textiles - from choice and purchase to care and repair, from pillowcase to bandage, duster to mop - the handling of textiles is still predominantly in the hands of women.

 

While new devices and products alongside changes in labour patterns have long promised change, women are still left to do the bulk of the dirty washing alongside embroidering  the truth, ironing out  creases, mending  tears.  A woman’s work, as the saying goes, is never done, “a kind of infinitive incompletion […] all the work, both temporal and spiritual, in this world and in preparation for the next, will never be over” (Carter 1984: 95).

 

In Margareta Kern’s work Clothes for Death (2008) temporality and spirituality, photography and textiles, life and after-life, presence and the transition to anticipated absence come together to powerful effect in her images of  women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina preparing their clothes to be buried in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matter and metaphor: the texture of text

 

 

As the images, so the texts in Memory Work are treated as objects.  Some are magazine, newspaper or catalogue cut-outs, ‘originals’ with their own particular feel and smell. Some texts are presented as surface design in stitch or print on fabric. Others, on tracing paper, hover above and partly veil images and objects. The text has been dissociated from its natural carrier, the page. The text has yielded its usual authority and become a team player contributing new lines of thought and expanding lateral thinking to benefit the Memory Work.

 

Metaphors link the text to the theme and the other objects in the collection. We live by and think in metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, 2003). “Because of a metaphor's greater proximity to perceived experience and consequently its greater vividness,” Andrew Ortony (2001: 17) argues, “the emotional as well as the sensory and cognitive aspects are more available for they have been left intact in the transferred chunk. Metaphors are closer to emotional reality for the same reason that they are closer to perceptual experience.”

 

In the debate among historians about the relationship between collective and individual memory, collective memory is often described as the script or template for individual remembering (Green 2004). A fabric metaphor might be worth considering as more appropriate because wider in scope of expression: richer in dimensions, layers, patterns and weaves, richer also in associations, and more inclusive, coming from personal and domestic experience rather than the intellectual and academic domain. 

 

Virginia Woolf’s (1977: 49) double textile memory metaphor of seamstress and washing line is - both parts separately or together - much quoted. It is vivid, aesthetically pleasing and intimate.

 

The image of the washing fluttering in the wind, fragments of people, environments and circumstances exposed to the elements of nature, only partly under the control of human agency is evocative and familiar. On the line, the washing assumes its own life, separate while still linked to its human inhabitant, an image of intimacy and animation as evoked by Penelope Fitzgerald in the opening of her novel The Blue Flower (1996: 1):

 

“The underwear of children and young persons, as well as the larger sizes, fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.”[2]

 

 

The image of the washing line implies connection rather than necessarily linearity. Any linearity is only temporary. Just like memories, so the washing comes and goes, reappearing again and again in different combinations, with some items missing, others added.

 

The line provides structure and support, a connective device to string memories together just like words are strung together in a sentence.

 

As Robert Frost (1964) wrote in a letter to J.T Bartlett, “a sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. You may string words together without a sentence sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeve and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but - it is bad for the clothes.”

 

 

 

 

 

The album as container and communicator: the flow of memory

 

Presenting Memory Work as an album calls into question the appropriateness of using a sequential structure to express remembering. Generically, an album is a book and subject to preconceptions of what a book is: starting at the beginning with the first page, continuing through the middle and concluding at the end with the last page – conventions that persist though already challenged in the eighteenth century by Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

 

Do albums differ from books in the way they are composed and viewed? Martha Langford (2001) suggests that the key to understanding narratives in photographic albums are the specifics of orality rather than the conventions of literacy.

 

Repeated patterns characterize the flow of memory in photographic albums. Repetitions of themes, settings, people and poses serve to reinforce narratives.  Objects such as tickets, leaves or postcards can provide context through verification, be evidence or add mystery; written comments, dates or marks can be explanatory, but also cryptic or baffling.  There are encounters with empty spaces, figures cut out of pictures, lose photographs or notes between pages. The layout of the page, the size and arrangement of the images suggest additional layers, subtexts supporting, contradicting or adding narratives.

 

The album can be consulted with a purpose in mind, to confirm or dispute contested memories, it can be browsed in reminiscence, be shown to tell. The album and its content, arranged whimsically or strictly ordered, fragmented or pristinely preserved, with clusters of meanings and repeating patterns, more than an archive or chronicle, are means of communication,  between people and selves with scope for  narratives not only to be traced but also to be imagined, in harmony or conflict with the intentionality of the album’s composer.

 

Through communication, meaning is created. So an image of an unknown couple in old-fashioned clothes becomes the photograph of one’s great grandparents, drawn from collective family memory into personal memory. Likewise an ordinary tablecloth or pillowcase can become special in the way it is used and handled, when family memory imbues it with an appealing tale.

 

Thus ‘postmemory’ is created as defined by Marianne Hirsch (2002: 22):

 

“I propose the term ‘postmemory’ with some hesitation, conscious the prefix ‘post’ could imply that we are beyond memory and therefore perhaps […] purely in history. In my reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”

 

Meaning is also communicated through the materiality of the album. The condition of the album could be read as an indicator to how memories are handled and preserved, ambience and atmosphere for viewing are set through tactility, smell and sound, the size and weight experienced in the handling, the “heavy tactile surface and material form’ of an album can be “suggestive of the weight of visual meaning contained within it.” (Edwards 1999: 229, 230)

 

The Memory Work album is large, soft, heavy, bulky; the front a layered, stitched and felted collage of colour photographs that gives weight and support to the cover fabric, packaging felt, a waste product made from shredded clothes matted together, a non-woven fabric is normally used for padding and wrapping large and heavy electrical items for protection during transport.

 

Considering its humble origins, the rough treatment it has undergone and its unglamorous destination, this fabric is surprisingly soft, fragile and delicate: map-like intricate patterns of threads cut and torn and curled together, each thread with its own history. It is made for protection, yet needs support. Two ribbons are sewn to the cover with no obvious purpose or destination - loose ends for the time being.

 

The back cover is stiffened and the padding covered in linen. On the inside there is a pocket with three textile memory items: a 1950s Perlon vest of my mother, worn thin almost to translucency and frequently mended, a 1970s Italian baby nappy, ‘ciripa’, of soft ribbed cotton and ribbons,  a doily found and felted, old lace trapped inside wool.

 

The pages rest uneasily on the bulk of these objects, giving the album a lop-sided feel.

 

 

 

 

Tales from the washing line

 

“And there you’ll be, in your cotton housecoat,

holding a wooden peg

between your teeth, as the washing flaps

on the clothesline you once briefly considered

hanging yourself with –“

 

Margaret Atwood (2006), Bring back Mom: an Invocation

 

The image of the washing line in advertising has changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the presence of the housewife in apron with washing basket provided human context. Advertising in the 2000s has detached the washing line from human labour: shirts spin around on their own on ‘rotary airers’, lines full of washing bouncing happily straight out of the washing machine onto flowering meadows in soap powder adverts.

 

The world of the washing line in advertising is a happy one of blue skies, smiles and sunshine, the mundanity of daily life transformed into a cheerful dance of bunting, idyllic images of domesticity in an idealized outdoor setting brought back into the home on posters and Cath Kidson cushions.

 

But just outside the frame there are passing birds soiling clean sheets, sudden gales of wind sending underwear flying across the fence, jumpers caught and snagged in the rosebush, socks lost among the weeds, soaked and dripping towels forgotten in the rain, a stiff frozen shirt left overnight on a winter’s day, the snapping of the washing line leaving the clean washing trailing on the ground. Thus the washing line is also a site of surprises, of hide and seeks, tucks and pulls, small accidents, funny incidents and entanglements.

 

Outside the world of advertising, the appearance of washing lines in film and literature often sets the scene for a humble, working class environment.[3] Maybe this association between the washing line and a low social status played a role in the refusal by the Australian governor in 1958 to accept the offer of a leading Australian manufacturer to supply Buckingham Palace and Clarence house with rotary clothes lines (O’Riordan 2005).

 

The power of the washing line as an image lies in its potential to convey opposite and changing states of being. Presence, absence and transition link in shifting ways and are equally defined by point of view and perception as by material evidence.

 

A friend gave me a traditional Italian nappy, a ciripà, remembering the 1970s when all her three children were wearing them.  “A ciripà,” she explains, “was a strip of ribbed cotton about a metre long and 20 cm wide with side ribbons. You folded it in half lengthwise on the table, placed the baby on the wider end and passed the double strip through the baby’s legs, then tied the ribbons round the baby’s tummy, like a parcel. It was, in my opinion, very impractical as they leaked straight away. I learned to pad them out with torn towels.”  Yet entangled with the inconvenience best forgotten but still remembered – “at one point all three kids were in nappies!” – are other memories making her “feel nostalgic and remember those times as a vibrant existence which almost belonged to another person.” As she writes she can still  “feel the soft spread of the ribbing and smooth baby skin” and see how “on the washing line they fluttered like banners.” But it is because of their usefulness rather than sentimental value that this particular ciripà has survived. “When that was over I kept them and there are still some in the village house under the stairs which are used as dusters.”

 

Another woman tells of her habit to walk along her washing line, holding the occasional  garment against her cheek to check whether it is dry while breathing in the fresh clean smell. One day, absentmindedly, holding her daughter’s cot sheet to her face, she suddenly feels “overwhelmed by a charge of emotions, […] a mix of excitement, apprehension but most of all a sense of being intensely alive.”  In the smell of the rubber sheet, she realizes, is captured the memory of the gas & air mask she used during her daughter’s delivery; the feelings evoked are those she experienced in labour (BBC 2005).

 

The washing on the line indicates a human presence while simultaneous portraying absence. The linen and garments are empty skins, separated like the soul from the body in death.

 

The ambiguity of simultaneous presence and absence creates a feeling of mystery and the uncanny, of being left in a limbo of uncertainties. Richard Wentworth’s photograph of garments on the washing line in Prinzregentenstrasse  (Wentworth 1994) conveys that unease and ambiguity.

 

Alison Marchant‘s installation and photograph Kingsland Road, London - East (Rugg 1987) records many absences: the loss of the mother whose petticoat is hanging alone on a washing line in the backyard of a derelict house, the loss of a neighbourhood and community to urban redevelopment, the loss of an identity.

 

This is a play with multiple absences and thus particularly powerful in creating an emotional response of melancholy and sadness: the garment of someone who is no longer, a site that has since been demolished, an installation that is over. The only trace of what has happened is the photograph, a medium itself associated with the notion of absence. In the gallery space, it is the photograph rather than the petticoat that is hanging on the washing line. What, I wonder, became of the petticoat?

 

On Christian Boltanski’s washing lines in his installation work Les Temps Ordinaires (1996), large white sheets are hanging in rows across a darkened room that could be the cellar of an institution – a sense of imprisonment reinforces the feeling of absence.

 

The washing line works equally well in establishing a presence.

 

In Sheila Hicks’ 1978 installation Street Environments in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, thousands of white shirts were hanging on ropes strung up in rows of repeating patterns along the façades of the street. Hicks wanted to make her work about and accessible to everybody in the neighbourhood: here the image of the washing line has grown into a powerful presence of a community of private individuals in a public space.( Constantine & Reuter 1997: 167, 169)

 

 

Frida Kahlo used the washing line image and the interplay of presence and absence in her painting  My Dress Hangs There (1933) to make a political statement. A traditional indigenous Mexican dress hangs on a line above the skyline of New York. While the painting mocks the city, portraying it as corrupt and obsessed with triviality, the beautiful dress hangs proudly high above like a flag, while the body of the wearer is absent.

 

 

The versatility and simplicity of the washing line as image and metaphor originates in the materiality of the washing line itself, the way it carries, supports and connects, the way it uses, links and divides space. It is, in its many variations, locations and applications, a simple solution to a practical problem.

 

As such rather than for conceptual reasons, the washing line found a way into American artist Lois Johnson’s work. When she was commissioned to create an installation piece for the 1980 Olympic Winter Games  Audience Frieze was meant to be a frozen tribute to the spectators’ plight, one hundred life size frozen fabric figures bearing screen-printed  photographic images of friends’ faces.

 

“She made the figures matching sets of silk-screened mittens, cowboy boots, and mufflers. Then she sewed all the parts onto identical cotton bodies. The bodies were to be soaked in water and allowed to freeze as freestanding figures. However, there was an unseasonable thaw at the Olympics that January and the figures were hung by clothespins on a line. A year later she repeated the piece in North Dakota in February.  Again the weather turned warm. Johnson good-humouredly renamed Audience Frieze; it became Friends on a Clothesline.” (Constantine & Reuter1997: 119, 120)

 

 

Concepts of presence, absence and transition as well as the practicality of the clothesline as a device for display combine in the Clothesline Project, a powerful testimony of domestic violence against women.

 

The project was started in the USA in 1990 by a coalition of women’s groups. A clothes line with 31 T-shirts was set up on a public green, each garment telling the story of a woman’s experience of violence in her own words and artwork. Just like the AIDS quilt, this project expanded rapidly – in 2003 it had reached over 500 communities in more than six countries and an estimated 50 000 to 60 000 garments had been displayed. [4]

 

Inside the Five Sense Sensorium Marshall McLuhan (2005:43) writes, “we all have noticed how linearity has faded from the current scene. The chorus line, the stag line, the assembly line have all gone the way of the clothes line. Even the seam has faded in whispers of nylon, and the party line is also in trouble.” Yet the washing line, I suggest, might in more ecologically conscious times ahead prove more resilient than the electric dryer, and beyond and in addition to material qualities its power to line up and move, evoke and conceptualize as memories and matter, concepts and feelings are strung together hints at a different, perhaps more comprehensive understanding of linearity, the line “still perceived as one of movement and growth” (Ingold 2008:2) in a world of things where “every thing is a parliament of lines.” (ibid:5).