Vittoria Fallanca: 'Threads'

“My early work is the fear of falling. Later on it became the art of falling. How to fall without hurting yourself. Later on it is the art of hanging in there.” 

- Louise Bourgeois 

In Book 6 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes the story of Arachne, a talented weaver whose sassiness so upsets the goddess Pallas Athene that she challenges Arachne to a weaving contest. Arachne wins. Furious at the outcome, Athene turns Arachne into a spider, condemning her to a lifetime of “constant weaving” (in Ted Hughes’s translation). The moral of the story appears to caution against one-upping a god. The tapestry woven by Arachne represented a cycle of images showing Jove’s famous lustful pursuits of earthly women, a way of accusing the arbitrary, self-interested interference of gods in human lives. I get it: if I were Athene I would also be pissed.

But on another reading, Athene is inflicting a different punishment, one with an alternative ethical lesson. In transforming Arachne into an animal that depends on the creation of webs for its existence, she is forcing her to contend with weaving as a life-sustaining activity. We might be reminded of Penelope, whose life quite literally hung on the threads she wove and then carefully disentangled each night in her palace at Ithaca, weary of her suitors’ encroaching advances. What would it mean to rely on thread-making—for it to be not just a skill or pastime but a biological necessity? Threads as life lines, and not just decoration. For a spider, a web is not simply a means of catching prey but is also, for female spiders, their home—the place where they live, eat, sleep and procreate. From a biological standpoint, the production of spider silk is enormously energetically expensive, leaving little resources for other forms of activity that would be less essential to survival. 

One of the lessons of Louise Bourgeois’s aesthetics is the materialisation of the relationship between creation and compulsion, between art as aesthetic creation and art as sustenance. Bourgeois’s engagement with weaving and textiles may well be called a hereditary obsession: Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, was a seamstress. Joséphine is referenced throughout Bourgeois’s work, including in the figure of the spider central to the most instantly recognisable of Bourgeois’s works, the large bronze sculpture of an arachnid entitled ‘Maman’. In the recent retrospective Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, shown at the Hayward Gallery in London and then at the Berliner Festspiele, Bourgeois’s relation to fabric and the arts of weaving, sewing, stitching and unstitching is seen in its full splendour and tenebrosity, its tenderness and its power. The exhibition covers the last twenty years of Bourgeois’s career during which she turned to textiles, probing through different uses of threads and fabrics the dark and cavernous reaches of the psyche, memory, childhood and their interaction with institutions like the family, the hospital, and perhaps also the artworld.

The mixed-media collage piece that lends its name to the exhibition exemplifies Bourgeois’s connection between threads and survival. To the left of the piece is a woven element made of blue, black, and cream pieces of ribbon that trails off, as if mid-sentence, two thirds of the way down the sheet. On the right half is an indigo print of a human figure, legs splayed, with a foetus distended inside its tubular belly. The two elements of the piece (three, if we count Bourgeois’s initials, which are stitched in dark thread at the bottom right of the piece) are not immediately in dialogue. One has to move closer in order to see the tiny blue thread that connects the printed foetus to his mother’s belly, emerging from the two-dimensional surface of the inky baby and plunging again into the hidden depths of the equally flat printed womb. The tapestry on the left which previously appears deliberately half-finished, as though an expression of the power of the artist’s whim, now harbours a more violent undertone, as though not so much abandoned as deliberately unpicked, leaving a messy tangle of lines that struggle to be reconciled with the neat pattern just above. The thread uniting mother and foetus is then revealed to be impossibly fragile, prone to a similar violent fate. Once I noticed this detail I began to see it everywhere—the barely-there black filaments connecting two giant spools in one of the imposing sculptural pieces; the white threads holding fast to translucent gems in a series of small tapestries; a tiny tear in the corner of another piece, the rough fabric puckering and fraying—each tiny strand screaming to be protected, salvaged, maintained, repaired. This is what attachment is like, Bourgeois tells us: like a whisker-thin piece of string that could break, unravel or choke us at any moment, and necessary because of, not despite, its fragility and its possible treachery. 

The Woven Child testifies to Bourgeois’s decades-long engagement with psychoanalysis, something that she described in written notes as a “duty,” a “bore,” a “love affair,” and a “joke.” While the excavation of a psyche and its mythologies can be by turns self indulgent and invasive of the boundaries between self and other, Bourgeois’ treatment remains distant without being cynical. This is a testament to the care and maturity, and underlying hopefulness, that undergird her art. Where we might reasonably expect expressions of anguish or resentment what we often find instead is humour, as with the untitled bulging stitched heads, mouths open and daring the onlooker to peer in, perhaps, or to insert a finger or a hand into the black hole, seeking an answer to the question of what lies within, beyond sight. Even in these more playful elements Bourgeois points to the dark side of intimacy: the unknowingness that accompanies connection, perhaps, or simply the frightening nature of building bridges towards the other, whose inner recesses will never be known to us. In all this, intimacy is a potentially disruptive force that can tear one (one’s sense of self and reality) asunder; its threads can undo us just as they connect us to one another. And yet we have to hang in there. And this, Bourgeois’s work seems to say, is exactly what love (and art) require of us. 

About a month after seeing The Woven Child I was transiting through London on my way back from seeing a friend who had a brief layover at Heathrow. I took myself to The Mosaic Rooms, a space devoted to the promotion of art and culture of the Arabic world, which was hosting a solo exhibition by Iraqi-American artist Hayv Kahraman. Gut Feelings included paintings and mixed media pieces united by a single running thread: intestine like cables that stretch between, over, above and through the black-haired and serious women that inhabit this series of Kahraman’s artworks. Gut Feelings explores dark attachments: trauma, obsession, the alienated belonging of the immigrant. Kahraman is interested in the biological underpinnings of this— how our minds and our stomachs are intertwined, how the operation of our brain might be physically reshaped and moulded to produce different outcomes or perspectives.

Writing might be added to the list of artforms that can give life to the questions raised by both Kahraman and Bourgeois. Weaving has long been associated with writing through the etymological reach of the Latin texere, which entails both the act of creating textiles and that of creating a “plot”. In Italian, a “trama” is both the series of actions that make up a story and the word for a weft: the pattern of criss-crossed threads that become a web. Trama is derived from the Greek trecho, from which we get the English draw and drag. Weaving, plotting, drawing, writing—these activities are united by their ability to give visual, material form to hidden worlds. They are themselves forms of attachment— strings between inner and outer, mental and public. Looking at Kahraman’s canvases, I felt as though the intestinal threads intertwined across them were made up of many invisible words: the language of attachment but also of the many words Kahraman had digested and assimilated to help name, describe and delineate experiences of disjointedness, alienation, and exclusion. But as a form of attachment, writing too comes with a double-edged promise: at times instead of making something less painful it will simply bring the sharpness of the pain more clearly into view. 

Accompanying the exhibition were scraps of paper and index cards in which the artist’s hand had recorded elements of note—books she had read, things she had researched—that had informed her paintings. One card described the phenomenon of “learned helplessness,” alluding to an experiment conducted by Martin Seligman and Steven Meier in the 1960s. The experiment consisted of placing two groups of dogs in two different chambers in which they were given electric shocks. Some dogs were placed in “escape” chambers where they had the opportunity to exit the chamber if they succeeded in pressing their noses to a button, and others in “non-escape” chambers which they could not leave. When dogs in non-escape chambers were later placed in a different “escape” chamber, they did not attempt to leave, having “learned” that there was no means of avoiding the painful shocks. In my favourite piece from the exhibition, a painting entitled ‘Play Dead,’ a woman stands in front of a dog, one hand outstretched, finger pointing downward, the other soft and straight by her side. A hole in her stomach contains the end (or beginning?) of a thick black cord that becomes a tangle of black through which the legs of a dog are visible. Who is keeping whom at bay here? Is the woman exerting some kind of power on the dog, who lies prostrate in front of her? Or does she see herself reflected in its plight, her outstretched hand a gesture of communion, of recognition? Both of these options seemed possible, and plausible, to me—a reminder that power in attachment seldom cuts one way. 

In different ways, Bourgeois and Kahraman remind us that we are all Arachne, whether we recognize it or not: condemned to lives of constant weaving, playing out different versions of a primordial curse—no matter if we call it eros or libido or simply our human need for connection. The question is then how we choose to live out this necessity: do we decide to accept the potential for severance or asphyxiation (in Kahraman’s words, “staying with the trouble”), or spend our lives attempting to evade it, and with it all the potential for beauty and tenderness that constitute our attachments to one another (even if sometimes they seem to depend on a single, precarious thread)?

Vittora Fallanca teaches early modern French literature at Oxford. She is finishing a book about Michel de Montaigne and starting another on anterotic love in Renaissance Europe.