In my previous post I discussed, or rather attempted to discuss, bodily modification generally and tattooing in particular as art forms. Tattooing as an art form showed itself to be a topic of great philosophical difficulty, and I cannot claim to have done more than to have made a start at clarification and explication. I turn now to textiles as an art form, with a preliminary discussion of the central ideas of the great 19th century art theoretician and practicing architect Gottfried Semper, whose central ideas are a major and hitherto unmentioned inspiration for the account of artistic meaning I’m trying to develop in this book. In light of the prominent role that textiles play in his basic artistic conception, I have delayed until now to introduce his thought. After introducing and summarizing Semper’s views, I’ll turn to the focal topic of textiles as an art form with a presentation of the criminally neglected views of the architect Christopher Alexander on the kinds of artistic meaning distinctive of one of humanity’s great art forms, the Anatolian kilims, the flatwoven rugs of central Turkey spectacularly discussed in Alexander’s book A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art.
Gottfried Semper was a prominent mid-19th century German architect who presented his views first in two major publications of the early 1850s, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ and ‘Science, Industry, and Art’, and then somewhat modified and with massive documentation in the enormous book Style (Der Stil in den teknischen and tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik) in the early 1860s. His views were highly influential in the later 19th century, but seem to have been largely ignored (so it seems to me) in the 20th century after suffering severe criticisms from the art historian Aloïs Riegl and the art critic Lionello Venturi. More recently, the writings of E. H. Gombrich, Michael Podro, Wolfgang Herrmann, and Harry Francis Mallgrave have corrected Riegl’s and Venturi’s plainly inaccurate criticisms. I myself was moved to read Semper after reading Podro’s account in his book The Critical Historians of Art, to which I am heavily indebted for my understanding of Semper and his importance. Semper’s most general thought about the arts is that they presuppose “a certain temper of carnival”, and that “the carnival half-light is the true atmosphere of art” (quoted in Podro, p. 49). He distinguishes the fine arts of painting and sculpture; the industrial or technical arts, ones that use simple techniques (binding, knot-tying, etc.) to transform bits of nature into bits of culture; and the tectonic arts relating to building. In their historical dimension the various arts exhibit something of a Heraclitean flux, wherein formlessness acquires form in historically emergent kinds of art, which in turn decay and perhaps pass away. Underlying the flux are what he calls ‘Urmotiven’ [primordial motifs]. Semper’s terminology is loose: in his first statement ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’, Semper seems to treat the term ‘elements’ as synonymous with ‘urmotiven’; and he also later speaks of ‘Urformen’ conditioned by primordial ideas (Semper (1989), p. 136). Perhaps the clearest example of what Semper means by ‘urmotiven’ is his initial treatment of the four ‘elements’ of architecture: the hearth, the roof, the enclosure, and the mound (p. 102). An element (or urmotif) is a prototypical artifactual, physical form that arises from and gains intelligibility in relation to basic human purposes; the hearth supplies warmth and gathers people, and the roof, enclosure, and mound protect the hearth from natural elements and hostile human beings. The history of an art form is given by (a) the uses of certain kinds of materials, and in particular in light of the material’s basic qualities (e.g. the softness and plasticity of clay) as (b) they arise and/or are adapted to particular natural, historical, and social conditions. The attentive reader will have noted the closeness of Semper’s conception to the accounts I offered of the great resources of artistic meaningfulness earlier in this book draft.
My particular interest here is in Semper’s account of artistic meaningfulness, (again) especially as reconstructed by Podro. Semper writes that “the Urmotiv penetrates [a particular work] as the underlying keynote of its composition”, though not necessarily or even typically through the literal repetition of the motif; not all buildings have, say, hearths, but the motif of the hearth is sustained by its connections with the purposes of the building, and through various substitutions of, say, radiator for hearth. Semper’s frequent and striking example of such substitutional continuity is the architectural wall: he posits that the ‘original’ or primordial wall was a hanging textile, and so that with the future masonry walls stone has substituted for fabric, and he supports this claim by noting continuities of decorative elements from textiles to walls. And on this account the blank wall can be treated as an artifact that not only substitutes stone for fabric and stacking for weaving, but hides its origin in cloth. It does not seem to be Semper’s considered view that this kind of substitution necessarily and automatically occurs, but rather that across a great range of earlier artifacts which involve such substitutions there is a kind of artistic acknowledgement of the relevant Urmotiven, and the putting of such Urmotiven to use in creating artistic meaning in the later work.
Semper’s specific account of textiles as an art form goes something like this: Textiles are the primeval art, for as noted already they are used to form the walls that enclose and protect the hearth. Along with covering, protecting, and enclosing, textiles involve the fundamental artisanal actions of stringing things together and bind things. For Semper there are four basic categories of raw materials, where it is a material’s qualities, not just its sheer physicality, that determines category membership. The four such categories: the pliable (textiles); that which is soft and malleable (ceramics); the stick-shaped (tectonics/carpentry); and the strong, densely aggregated (stereotomy, that is, masonry and stone construction generally).
So far Semper, whose interest, especially in the massive Style book, is in surveying the artistic histories of textiles, ceramics, tectonics, and stone construction. Semper does not offer any extended accounts of particular artworks, and instead gives chronologically ordered descriptions of period styles of the four categories. For a sense of textiles as an art form at full stretch, I turn to Christopher Alexander’s account of Central Anatolian kilims. Alexander’s account arises from his many years of acquiring and thousands of hours of looking at his own collection, which includes items roughly from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. One a simple classification, the major genre of textiles has rugs as a sub-genre, which is in turn sub-divided into piled rugs and unpiled, flatwoven rugs or kilims. Alexander characterizes the art form of rugs as “an art of pure design made of tiny knots” (Alexander, p. 11). He gives an immensely evocative characterization of the highest achievements of the art form of Central Anatolian kilims, although I find it also immensely difficult to summarize; I am uncertain whether the source of the difficulty is the intricacy of the account, or different emphases given in different sections, or perhaps that the account is not wholly consistent: First, a carpet, and so the successful kilim, presents ‘a picture of God’, where ‘God’ means “all seeing everlasting stuff” (p. 21). Alexander stresses that the kilims present a sense of wholeness, but that this wholeness varies from kilim to kilim in that it can be greater or lesser, deeper or more superficial, and more or less radiant. Second, the major artistic elements of the carpet are the intricate geometrical configurations created and the colors used. In an especially successful work the colors become radiant by virtue of the geometries. Third, the key element of the geometry is a ‘center’, a concept to which Alexander devotes the most effort in his explications. A center is “a psychic entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the feeling of a center, in the visual field” (p. 32) Alexander later notes the circularity in trying to characterize centers. One reason for this circularity is that centers are made of other, smaller centers. Alexander does not address the question whether there is a smallest center, a center-primitive not made of others; perhaps the smallest center is just the smallest geometrical bit of order that is or becomes artistic significant in the carpet as a whole. In a carpet there are typically many centers, which interlock (p. 34) in various ways; and in general the greater the density of centers, the greater the carpet (p. 36). Fourth, there is a key countervailing aspect to the geometrical organization by interlocking centers: in the greatest carpets there is no distinction in terms of artistic meaning between positive and negative space (p. 52) or figure and ground (p. 53). In such cases the ‘negative’ space, the empty space around a center, itself has a ‘good shape’ (p. 52) which undermines the tendency to see it as an artistically inert background to the figure. Fifth, in a really good carpet there are multiple levels of scale (p. 58f), and any really good center, that is, one that bears a deep artistic meaningfulness, exists or functions on many levels (p. 62). Sixth and finally, in rare instances the greatest of the carpets achieve the creation of ‘a being’, where the viewer senses “the emergence of a being” (p. 82) and “feels the presence of a being behind the form” (p. 127). This “emerging being, formed by centers, and out of centers, . . . is the goal of every carpet.” (p. 82) Alexander stresses the uniqueness of the being so created, and the rareness and wonderfulness of the carpets that embody such a being (p. 83).
To see how these points are put to work in explicating artistic meaningfulness, consider Alexander’s analysis of what he considers to be among the very greatest of the kilims, the Seljuk prayer carpet from the 13th-14th centuries (pp. 126-29):
Alexander gives the ‘being’ in this carpet as an outline of the major forms:
The basic theme of this carpet, so Alexander asserts, is the ‘split Y-form’ that occurs throughout, at the top of the arches, in various motifs in the middle, and in the space between the posts.
The split Y is also varied throughout, rotated or reversed or transformed, and occurring at various scales from the micro-details to the large structures. So as a creation of geometrical order “the local symmetries of this carpet are arranged to produce an everlasting, syncopated series of half-rotations, half-reflections, which progress from one element to another, change scale, change position—and keep on moving across the carpet.” (p. 129) Alexander’s analysis breaks off there, and the viewer-reader is left with the image of the carpet, and so the evidence of the eyes, to see whether the expected radiance of color, picture of God, and/or created being emerges from this. One might wish for more analysis, but evidently Alexander’s aim is to state the carpets’ poetic, analyze the creation of geometric order, and let the image of the carpet evoke the radiant presences in the eyes and the mind of the viewer.
In any case, such is the richest account known to me of the art form of textiles at full stretch. In my next post I’ll consider ceramics as an art form, and re-view my own account from a few years ago of a ceramic vessel by the Tiwa-Hopi artist Nampeyo.
References and Works Consulted:
Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (1993)
Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (1982)
Gottfried Semper, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ and ‘Science, Industry, and Art’, in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1989)
--Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics (2004)