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Errant Abstraction – Staging – Esse
Stina Baudin, Data Studies 2.1: We shall thank you to carefully examine and fit, 2023. Photo : permission de l’artiste
Stina BaudinData Studies 2.1: We shall thank you to carefully examine and fit, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Errant Abstraction

Adam Lauder
114 – Abstractions Feature Ella Gonzales Shaheer Zazai Stina Baudin
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Contemporary artists are unravelling the threads that connect abstraction to computation and textiles. Recently on view at the National Gallery of Canada, the travelling exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction proposes an ambitious counter-history of abstraction rooted “in the everyday world” of fibre media and self-fashioning.1 1 - Lynne Cooke, “Modernist Histories: Braided, Interlaced, and Aligned,” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2023), 3. Long neglected by art historians as the product of “women’s work,” the warp and weft of textiles are finally gaining recognition as a decisive point of origin for that enduring symbol of abstraction, the grid.

In her catalogue essay accompanying Woven Histories, the media art historian Michelle Kuo excavates the relationship between the grid structure of woven cloth and the evolving role of computation in textile manufacturing — from the binary punch cards that powered nineteenth-century Jacquard looms to the global circuits of contemporary fast fashion.2 2 - See Michelle Kuo, “Textility and Technology,” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke(Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2023), 225–43. Well beyond the roster of Woven Histories, contemporary artists are pursuing parallel explorations of abstraction’s kinship with textiles and adjacent algorithmic practices.

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Image de la couverture du numéro Esse 114 Abstractions.
This article also appears in the issue 114 - Abstractions
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