In a neomaterialist sense, textile art is a means of returning to and transforming materials; at the same time, from a discursive point of view, it suggests encounters, connection, interweaving, mixing, and bonding. Empowered both by their concrete existence and by their suggestive power, the fabric and its patterns are, to put it simply, metaphorical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We know that metaphors build worlds out of thought, by daring to bring together the concrete and the theoretical; they teach us to see things differently. Figured in textile materials are the skill of assemblage and a means of holding things together. When partnered with the family, as in Collins\u2019s work, the metaphorical approach of textile art can disrupt the norms of this social organization by undermining its nuclear model with a renewed and creative version\u200a\u2014\u200aa queerified version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cast of Characters<\/em> is a work composed of works woven together. They are essentially portraits, such as Cassils\u2019s self-portrait (Advertisement: Homage to Benglis<\/em>, 2011) and Andrea Geyer\u2019s Constellations (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein with Pepe and Basket)<\/em> (2018), from the series with the same title produced as a tribute to the women who fashioned artistic modernity. Some sculptures were also presented, such as Midori\u2019s Object 0.0<\/em> (2018), an assemblage of animal teeth in the form of a vagina.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Beyond the curatorial gesture of this proposition, conceived as an installation rather than an exhibition, what motivates Collins is the creation of a familiar, and familial, space dedicated to relationships, to a sense of belonging. She set up a space inspired by the home environment, by the security, sense of belonging, and form of expression that home implies: \u201cI went to a collector\u2019s house once, someone who\u2019s an important collector and has so much art it kind of hovers around hoarding. It was sick how much art was in that house. It was amazing. Iconic things mixed in with tribal communities. I love that. Like how one person, or a family, or whoever is occupying a space can curate their whole world of these objects.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Svetlana Kitto, \u201cTethered Together: Liz Collins Interviewed by Svetlana Kitto,\u201d BOMB<\/em> (March 9, 2018), accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Collins\u2019s interventions in the bookstore combine to create a unified and coherent environment. For example, Acid Rain Floral<\/em>, the wallpaper pattern drawn by Collins, gives visitors the impression of being in a playful, almost wondrous space, perhaps a child\u2019s room. This backdrop is the fabric that brings together the portraits, books, artists, and community members who frequent the bookstore. Likewise, her Chain Chair Pair<\/em> (2017), a set of two chairs bound together by woven magenta fabric, figures the attachment that helps transform the venue into a meeting space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such connections between textile materials and the semantics of rapprochement have become commonplace in contemporary art in recent years. This may be because the return to handicrafts, in an era that presents an opportune moment for reconsidering things that have been discredited in art history, reveals and repairs a whole series of exclusions: the overwhelming influence of Western culture and its preference for concept over form and materials; the machismo of a social order and system of values that relegate housework to the level of hobby; the violence of neoliberalism, which devalues the handmade, the slow, and sensitivity.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jennifer Harris, \u201cMaterial Strategies: Cloth and Textile Metaphors in Modern and Contemporary Art,\u201d in A Companion to Textile Culture<\/em>, ed. Jennifer Harris (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 317\u200a\u2013\u200a31.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Cast of Characters<\/em>, the metaphorical potential of textile arts goes beyond the mere idea of rapprochement or encounter. It serves to redefine family. With the textile metaphor, the collection of queer works becomes family. On this topic, it must be said that the explicit inspiration for the project is the exhibition The Family of Man<\/em>, curated by Edward Steichen and presented for the first time at the MOMA in 1955. In the wake of the Second World War, the intention was to show human beings in all their dimensions, lifestyles, and cultures, to bring all peoples together in a single \u201cfamily of man.\u201d One immediately sees that the project\u2019s universalist intent, characteristic of the era, generated prejudices and exclusions, in addition to attributing exaggerated importance to the virile man at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagining her work as a queer version of that historic exhibition, Collins borrows its metaphor to offer a critical response that is resolutely feminist and antipatriarchal. The effect produced is entirely different: instead of universalizing the human experience by proposing types, even stereotypes, the idea of family here refers to the need to be together, to create strong connections, to build a social safety net, when conditions of marginality preclude the haven of the traditional family model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cast of Characters<\/em> is far from being the only project to articulate a link between textile arts and the family. The same connection is central to the work of American artist LJ Roberts, who intertwines queer, feminist, and trans issues to highlight what they, and others, call the \u201cchosen family.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - LJ Roberts used this expression in the talk given on April 20, 2016, at The New School Parsons: accessible online.<\/span> The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era<\/em> (2011), for instance, re-creates in textile form the map drawn by Rosza Daniel Lang\/Levitsky locating queer group homes, alternative living spaces created for and by queer individuals in order to reinvent a more inclusive home life, in Brooklyn.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Hung on the wall and spread over the floor, Roberts\u2019s work, made with children\u2019s knitting machines, recalls the counterpoint acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, AIDS Memorial Quilt,<\/em> a collaborative project launched in Washington, DC, in the mid-1980s to commemorate AIDS victims.<\/span> Each of these homes is identified by name\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cMarilyn Mansion,\u201d \u201cDen of sin\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aand is attributed a coat of arms proposed by another participant in Roberts\u2019s project, Buzz Slutzky, thus subverting the iconography associated with nobility in order to highlight the historical importance of these communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Roberts\u2019s counterpoint maps is the radicality of homes constituted informally to meet queer individuals\u2019 need to be in a family, especially when they are rejected by their biological family. The archival work is a tribute to these queer places, sometimes also called \u201cpunk houses,\u201d where the search for security leads to the creation of utopian communities whose members\u2019 self-determination opposes sexual and gender norms. New cooperative lifestyles are invented that combine workshops, theatre, and social and personal life; promote openness, commitment, mutual support, and a sensitivity to power relationships; and reject any form of discrimination.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Olivier Vallerand, \u201cHome Is the Place We All Share: Building Queer Collective Utopias,\u201d Journal of Architectural Education <\/em>67, no. 1 (March 2013): 64\u200a\u2013\u200a75.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAm\u2009DentalDamDamn<\/em> (2014\u200a\u2013\u200a20), a project presented at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among other places, Roberts again turns to handicrafts to underline the importance of non-traditional families. In this case, they assemble bits of knitwear, shoelaces, recycled bicycle-tire tubes, zippers, pieces of black leather, and metal rivets to tell the life story of a lesbian group, the Van Dykes, who took part in American van culture and travelled around North America in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In their theoretical writings on handicrafts, Roberts explains that both queer theory and handicrafts borrow critical disidentification strategies.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - LJ Roberts, \u201cPut Your Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It: Reimagining Craft Identities Using Tactics of Queer Theory,\u201d in Extra\/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art<\/em> ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 243\u200a\u2013\u200a59.<\/span> Using this concept, developed by queer theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, Roberts proposes that both movements subvert the stereotypes associated with their designation: the word \u201cqueer\u201d was employed as an insult before the targeted individuals reappropriated the word to turn it into a positive and liberating designation; handicrafts, tied to traditional values, to women\u2019s solitude and submission to patriarchal domestic life, is now used by feminists to create social spaces, particularly for women from marginalized communities. Both strategies expose the power structures that are responsible for the pejorative connotation of the attributions, while transcending this connotation through shifts in meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This linguistic strategy demonstrates how Collins and Roberts shifted the notion of family. Indeed, why speak metaphorically of \u201cfamily\u201d when one could simply say \u201ccommunity\u201d? It must be admitted that the semantic volatility of the metaphor has something queer about it. It is polysemic, elusive, seductive, nomadic. It makes it possible to insinuate without saying outright, to suggest rather than to affirm. A metaphor never arrests the meaning, but extends it through associations with entities that are not initially tied to it. It attaches common characteristics to things that, at first glance, cannot be seen as equivalent. It requires \u201cthe ability to grasp,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphors<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.<\/span> almost a flirtation: by comparing one thing with another, it imports one discourse into another, such that queer groupings and family acquire new meanings simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Associating family with these alternative ways of coming together, beyond filial ties, with people of one\u2019s choice, with whom a different affective bond and sense of belonging is developed, produces two complementary effects. On the one hand, this proposition weakens the standard definition of family, by calling family that which, from a conservative point of view, can never be one. On the other, it underscores the importance of these communal bonds, their affective intensity, and their necessity for queer individuals. Metaphor, as pointed out by sociologists Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart, influences our comprehension of the world and, by the same token, assists in changing it.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart, Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge<\/em> (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).<\/span> The works tend to put pressure on the family, in the traditional sense, while helping to bring the family into queer vocabulary. The shift between community and family is thus not to be interpreted as a lack of precision, an absence of conscientiousness in the vocabulary used to qualify that which is presented in the installation. Use of the word is a political act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Transformed by metaphor, the social structure is liberated from its exclusion-generating norms and swings toward the imagination. The word choice generates an array of potentialities to be invented, the materialization of the unimagined in relationships, an expansive semantic universe. The strategy is performative, according to philosopher of language J. L. Austin and others following in his footsteps, including theorists Judith Butler and Dorothea von Hantelmann. To say \u201cfamily\u201d is to actualize it; here, it is clearly about doing it differently, stretching its boundaries, disrupting its semantic structure, too often leveraged to justify an exclusive and oppressive social structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Words matter in these projects, and in the realities that they address. Art, in a queer framework, involves a co-creative process in which materials, words, and gestures are woven together. This creative work extends into the gaze, then into language, through the words and notions that every individual uses to construct a world. The use of metaphor is performative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Andrea-Geyer-C-Stein-Toklas\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_Andrea-Geyer_C_SteinToklas.jpg\")
Constellations (Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein with Pepe and Basket)<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Liz-Collins-Cast-of-Characters\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_Liz-CollinsCastofCharacters_06252018-0202.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Liz-Collins-Cast-of-Characters\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_Liz-CollinsCastofCharacters_06252018-9881.jpg\")
Cast of Characters<\/em>, installation views, Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, New York, 2018.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"LJ-Roberts-The-Queer-Houses-of-Brooklyn-2011\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_LJ-Roberts_TheQueerHousesofBrooklyn..._2011.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"LJ-Roberts-The-Queer-Houses-of-Brooklyn-(detail)-2011\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_LJ-Roberts_TheQueerHousesofBrooklyn...detail_2011.jpg\")
The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st<\/sup> Year of the Stonewall Era (based on a 2010 drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang\/Levitsky with 24 illustrations by Buzz Slutzky on printed pin-back buttons)<\/em>, 2011.
Photos: courtesy of the artist & Hales, London & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"LJ-Roberts-VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAmDentalDamDamn-2014-2020\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_LJ-Roberts_VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAmDentalDamDamn_2014-2020.jpg\")
VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAmDentalDamDamn<\/em>, 2014-2020.
Photo: Madhouse Creative, courtesy of the artist &
Hales, London & New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Liz-Collins-Cast-of-Characters\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_DO04_Jodoin_Liz-CollinsCastofCharacters_06252018-9875.jpg\")
Cast of Characters<\/em>, installation view, Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, New York, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n