By Catherine Jones
Last month, in a moment of general self-doubt, I asked my daughter, who's
twenty and knows about fashion trends, what she thought I should do about my appearance.
She tilted her head to one side, reflectively, like a merchant appraising a shipment of
slow-moving goods. "Well," she said at last, "you could buy some new
clothes. Something tighter-fitting, plainer, and more compact."
This was not I'd been hoping to hear. I like scarves and flowing skirts; I like florals, paisleys, plaids, fifties-style abstractions, and roller-printed imitation Javanese batiks. I like prints derived from graffiti, from Aboriginal paintings, from Victorian-era wallpaper or Yoruba adire cloth. I love the crazy mix of styles and plunder of art history that goes by the name of textile design. I've wished I could wear it all at once on my back. In any case, I didn't relish the prospect of becoming plainer and more compact. That sounded too much like becoming the kind of painting that's acceptable because it fits in the blank spot over the sofa and doesn't displace any furniture.
Really I wanted my daughter to fling open the
closet door, yank all my clothes off their hangers, and assemble out of this thrift-shop
jumble of textile history some combination of colors, textures, and patterns that looked
more or less in style. This didn't happen, because it wasn't possible. The raw materials
just weren't there. As my daughter laid out her own observations on fashion I realized
that for years I'd been choosing what I wore mostly on the basis of whether I liked the
cloth. And telling myself that what didn't work out as clothing might eventually get cut
up into patches and reassembled in some more interesting way.
I saw how stubbornly I'd resisted anything that looked high-tech, hard-to-maintain, athletic, or possibly militaristic. No big expanses of solid, bright color that might develop hard-to-remove stains. No sharp creases or pleats that might look funny if other parts of the garment sagged or stretched. No braid, no rip-stop nylon, no metal buttons, and very few zippers, eyelets, or snaps. My wardrobe seemed poised between ornamental excess and some frugal Depression-era gestalt, some view of life in which zippers always jam, knits always snag or run, fabric always develops worn spots that need to be camouflaged, and anything resembling a sailor in dress whites either gets doused with spaghetti sauce or else goes abruptly out of style.
It struck me too that my own middle-aged fashion dilemma was not unrelated either to choices in quilt-design or to the perennial conflict in art between the advocates of classic simplicity and those who prefer "barbaric splendour." I came across this second term in a book by E. H. Gombrich, an art historian who, among other things, has written the most thorough and interesting book I've seen on the subject of decorative art. It's called _The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art_ and apparently originated in a series of lectures given at New York University Institute of Fine Arts sometime in the late seventies.
Gombrich fascinates me for at least two reasons. First, he's too secure personally -- with all his academic credentials -- and too immersed in pre-Modernist art history to belabor the distinction between decorative and other, ostensibly more serious, art. Second, he dredges up and presents for the reader's inspection, startling passages from unexpected sources, many relevant to the recurrent simplicity-versus-excess debate.
Most of us have heard the slogan, "Less is more." (Gombrich
quotes it as "attributed to" the architect Mies Van der Rohe.) And many of us
have marveled at -- and maybe felt both chilled and inspired by -- the austere beauty of
traditional Amish quilts. Their big expanses of densely quilted solid color can look both
dramatic and terribly unforgiving -- unforgiving of dirt and stains, unforgiving of shoddy
workmanship, and unforgiving too of those who fled to the secular world from rigors of
Amish community life. I've wondered about connections between the stark appeal of Amish
quilts and the work of some severely Modern painters (Kline, Mondrian, Motherwell, and so
on). I've also wondered whether the acceptance of quilts as art may entail their passing
through some stage of stern simplicity, some phase of bold design and less-is-more style.
But it didn't occur to me till I started in on Gombrich's book that arguments over simplicity and the pared-down manner go back for millennia in European history. Gombrich quotes Cicero, the Roman politician, on the pros and cons of a plain oratorical style. Cicero was contending with the aesthetics of the Atticists, language purists from Attica who objected to ornate speech, referred to as "Asiatic" oratory.
The xenophobia implicit in that word
"Asiatic" -- the linking of foreigners with a style considered gaudy,
irrational, and unsound -- doesn't end, of course, with the ancient Greeks. Gombrich goes
on to quote from Adolf Loos,
the Austrian architect and pioneer of the Modern functional style. Writing in 1898, in an
article that would now be considered spectacularly racist, Loos argues that "The less
civilized a people is, the more prodigal it will be with ornament and decoration. The Red
Indian covers every object, every boat, every oar, every arrow over and over with
ornament. To regard decoration as an advantage is tantamount to remaining on the level of
a Red Indian." Loos then urges his presumably European audience to overcome "the
Red Indian within us."
However lunatic that advice may sound today, after the revaluation of Native American art, after the demotion of Modernism into one art movement among many, and after two world wars conducted by civilizations that had risen to the "level" of not decorating their weapons, Loos was not quite lone crank he seems. The ideals of functionalism and understatement are still potent and visible in the art world today. A look at the ads in glossy art magazines -- the pictures of track lighting, white walls, and bare hardwood floors, the full-page display ads consisting only of white-on-black text announcing upcoming shows by artists whose names say it all -- should convince anyone that the notion of Attic restraint has not gone out of fashion. What's less clear is just who, right now, has been cast in the role of the "Asiatic." Maybe people who cover up hardwood floors.
Another puzzling question is how a gaudy art like patchwork -- one that combines, at least potentially, hundreds of different patterns and motifs in each finished work -- will fare as it penetrates an art world that's at least intermittently in love with restraint. What will happen as quilt-making attracts more people imbued with the values of that world?
At this point many quilt-makers have taken to dyeing and painting their
own fabric. Or at least to overdyeing printed goods and thus subduing the pattern. Many
have also used Van Dyck and cyanotype processes to add monochrome images to the finished
product. It's hard to say in general whether these manipulations have arisen because
quilt-makers have wanted more control over their raw materials and imagery or because
they've been striving, maybe even unconsciously, toward a less busy, less multi-colored
result. Looking, for example, at Nancy Crow's
recent work (and at the fabrics for quilting issued under her name), I wonder if part of
the quilting world may not be heading for some fashion of simplicity, some equivalent of
the Chicago School in architecture. Maybe that's a necessary rite of passage for quilts if
they're going to escape disparagement as some kind of barbarian curiosity.
On the other hand, not all art gets placed on the classic-versus-barbaric or Neo-Classic-versus-Rococo (or maybe Modern-versus-post-Modern) continuum. Gombrich himself points out that such paired opposite labels have been applied mostly to European art. Certain kinds of African-American quilts, for example, (those with bold irregular piecing and large-scale prints) may manage to defy that classification. The irregularity of the piecing places such quilts outside the classic category; the balance they achieve depends on arrangement of light and dark patches, not on exact measurement. But at the same time these quilts don't look ornate; the scale of some of the prints is just too big for a lot of fussy detail to build up.
I'd like to find a similarly category-jumping
approach to the problem of clothing myself. A fondness for patterned fabric is hard to
manage in a time when, as my daughter pointed out, the sought-after look is plain and
compact. Hoping that she might have overstated the case, I went to the newsstand and
browsed through several fashion magazines. Page after page showed snug-fitting clothes
just waiting to stretch or wrinkle out of shape in solid colors just waiting for someone
to spill the soup. Occasionally I'd come across a print: either a floral in a low-cut
evening dress or else a hard-edged geometric design. Since the clothes looked so fragile,
I imagined them a year from now, damaged beyond further wear and being recycled into a
quilt.
The quilt in my mind's eye looked unexpectedly good -- reflective of current taste and a refreshing break from the all the barbaric splendor accumulated in my closet. Since I couldn't wear the quilt, I went to the Goodwill store and there found a pair of dark gray jeans and a plain black coat. I shortened the coat -- less is more -- and then recycled two old skirts of mine into a pieced neckscarf that went with the coat and looked more subdued than either skirt ever had. I stopped at that point lest I wind up cutting my whole wardrobe into patches. The pursuit of Attic restraint seemed to call for restraint. Besides, I'm waiting for fashions to change.
Catherine Jones lives in Berkeley, California. An artist, quilter, and mathematician, she is a regular contributor to TVQ. She can be reached at cathjone@netcom.com
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