It was a weaving pattern composed by Ruth Asawa when she was a student at Black Mountain College in Anni Albers’s weaving studio. It was framed as if it was a drawing, but it was really a complex coded set of instructions for a loom, which described the relative position of thread in three dimensions across its warp and weft. I suppose, because it was coded with ‘X’ and ‘O’s, mathematicians or software engineers would like to see it as a curious set of syntactical relationships. Well, in this regard, Anni was a ‘coder’, a junky of pattern and nearly imperceptible, luxurious detail that can only be felt when the fabric is wrapped around our sad, cold, ailing shoulders. She also wrote, well. German was her language, thread was her vocabulary, the loom was her syntax. Irene, in her concise genius, declared that “there is no obfuscating with text”. I write because, in my achey social anxiety, I want to connect with my own and other’s intellect as much as I want to connect and interpret my own imagination. Anni wrote about art and design while in Germany, in the thick of anti-Semitic rhetoric (a world saturated with malevolent tweets and judgments). She also wrote about the collective weaving genius of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus administration’s hypocrisy subjugated women to weaving but consequently consolidated a team of genius that would code the magic of textiles for modern design. “Art – a Constant. Times of rapid change produce a wish for stability, for permanence and finality, as quiet times ask for adventure and change. Wishes derive from imaginative vision. And it is this visionary reality we need, to complement our experience of the immediate reality.” 8 I suggest that there is little room for hypocrisy in a signed letter. The obligation of writing as a physical, printed, signed act keeps our public selves sincere and disciplined. So yes, I write slowly and with ink. Because I love you, Anni, and everything she valued.
Sincerely yours, Miranda
September 28, 2015
Dear Miranda, Facebook has just informed me that today is #nationalpunctuationday. I got sucked into taking the Which punctuation mark are you? quiz: Results cast me as a full stop/period, ‘.’ – calm, helpful, and distasteful of drama. More interestingly, the quiz describes the punctuation mark itself as non-dramatic, calm and helpful. Personally, I am partial to the semicolon. This discovery reminded me of Chelsea’s comment on writers progressing their ideas at different scales. If Chelsea longs to scale up from semi-clauses to sentences, I am stuck at the scale of punctuation. Punctuation marks are defined as singular characters, which separate sentences and their elements to clarify meaning. But I would argue, they do more; they connect sentences, stitch the elements together. My eyes catch tiny things; I was the one who found the dropped earring back, the invisible pin, the single, minuscule flower in a world of brown, grey and green. Here, my windows stand wide open so gusts of fresh air will force me to look out while I copyedit. Occasionally, I must extend my depth of vision, give my eyes a rest – but they won’t ignore a misplaced comma. Is an obsession with text at this scale connected to the luxurious detail of a textile? I share your fascination with pattern because I think in terms of digits, units, spaces set into an expansive field. My initial idea for the Open Letters covers was to mine the writing for details, which I could weave into an encrypted graphic that would act as an abstracted background. 9 Even as the wallpaper patterns faded, I stuck with details: like a Dawn Redwood’s needles. 10 Until now, I had never thought to consider why I took on the role of design editor. It appears rather obvious: I gravitate toward looser structures and, rather than write to provoke thought, I write to organise it. It’s a bit
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Lara Mehling
7 ‘Anni Albers writes to Ise Gropius’, Open Letters , issue 21, January 30, 2015 8 Albers, Anni. ‘Art – A Constant’ Brenda Danilowittz, editor. Anni Albers Selected Writings on Design . Weselyan University Press, Hanover, NH, 2000. p 10
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