replacement of the lost echo
Hjördís Gréta Guðmundsdóttir
There is embroidery on a painting. It is woven through the base, which forms a grid. Before the base warps and bends, the grid has counted the steps of markings that have travelled through time and stopped here in anticipation.
I borrowed the needle from a museum storeroom; it was very sharp but too rusty to embroider with, and I wondered if I could sand it down. The eye of the needle was also rusty. Flettesting, or the braided cross-stitch1 —the projection of arrows going in directions, and, on the back, straight lines across their exposed side—has been my subject matter.
My interest in this embroidery technique was not only sparked by the surface of the stitch, which is characterised by the depth of the braiding, but also by the cultural value and aesthetics of the surviving tapestries. I try to explore certain tensions that I see in them and the story behind the works, specifically in relation to the meaning of the term “cultural heritage” and how its environment can touch on what I understand to be the nurturing of nationalism.
In my master’s exhibition, I use these tapestries in the works, which consist of paintings and a long tapestry. This usage is based on references to patterns and motifs from old tapestries that are accessible in the archives of the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík, together with one piece of embroidery preserved in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s (1889–1943) body of work spans both the fields of handcraft and art, for instance in the form of embroidery and paintings.
The work Embroidery (1918), which is 11.1 x 8.3 cm in size, is composed of several squares of different sizes, sewn together with a cross-stitch. The abstract image lies
within a thick wooden frame covered in gold leaf. The accompanying description of the work states that it is “Wool on canvas in a historical frame.”2 It straddles these two worlds —art and craft; the embroidery is in miniscule form but exalted in a gold frame. Varying shades of pink and red surfaces overlap with black squares in the work. These squares are themes throughout her practice, appearing in both paintings and pictorial embroidery.
There are several ensembles where she made gouache paintings and embroidery based on the same motifs. The works Composition with Rectangular and Angular Arms and Composition with Rectangular Planes, both from 1928, are examples of this. The former is a gouache and drawing on paper while the latter is cross-stitch on canvas.
Through these works, in which she constantly mirrors the images back to each other, I find a connection to my own practice: using a pool of information and motif forms that can repeatedly be revisited and mined. Composition with Bird Motifs, from 1928, is a picture plane in which recurring forms are rearranged and simplified in an embroidered version. Her textile works are characterised by straight lines and rectangles that go hand in hand with the traditional technique of the cross-stitch. The surface is covered with the stitch, which is equally dense over the entire area. On this surface, I connect these embroidery stitches within their frames as one focus point of the grid.
The grid is repetition, imitation, and a trace frame. It is a place of anticipation and temporary transparency, perhaps an evasion of vulnerability. In her book, The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths, Rosalind Krauss addresses the debate on originality in the modernist movement. She suggests that the figure of the grid is the area where the contradiction of modernism takes place. She reflects on how the “self,” a source of originality in modernism, does not correspond to the origin of the grid, which was one of the main themes of the avant-garde movement in visual arts.3
“Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated.” 4
Repetition occurs in Taeuber-Arp’s work and is the basis of the needle stitches in embroidery. The woollen yarn fills up the woven foundational structure, but it does not disappear. It is always a replica of itself and without an author. The grid is in itself a mapping of the surface, an organised metaphor for it, and it progresses by repetition. Krauss points to this continuation, the repetition, which is covering something up. I see it as a departure of vulnerability.
Fífa in Braided Cross Stitch (2019) is an embroidery image that I made based on a photograph of Arctic cotton grass that I took during a hike in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, in the summer of 2017. The flower is characterised by a white woolly bud on a narrow stalk, and I used mohair to stitch the image unevenly but densely over the surface.
While making the image, I had been given access to look at needles in the National Museum’s storage in Reykjavík, which were mostly identical to the needles I used. The only difference was how rusty they were, but some were also too long to embroider with.
I punched a few stitches with one of the needles. It proved very difficult, as the rust snagged on the wool, and I had to force the needle through each point. There was an orange trace of rust in the linen after this effort, and I wondered if I should perhaps have left it alone. I recorded the moment on film and decided to display it along with the embroidery as a QR code on the wall.
The QR code is also a grid, and it refers to the almost pixel-like marks of the crossstitch, stuck to the fabric underneath and within it—its skeletal grid.
When making the image of the cotton grass, I referred to the embroideries that were on display at the National Museum of Iceland, reflecting on why more embroideries and relics from before the Reformation in Iceland have not come to light. A similar story applies to Sweden and Finland.5 The only evidence of earlier embroidery in Iceland is in written sources, and the oldest preserved pieces of embroidery are believed to date to the
second half of the fourteenth century, although the vast majority is dated postReformation (1550).6 7 The question remains unanswered, but I mention it here as an open speculation.
The repetition in the stitch, the endless movement of the arm, concentrated in the elbow, becomes almost an endurance test of independence in my art—chasing the ego. The repetition, the reconstruction, and the replacement are a determination to understand and examine more deeply. To understand the knowledge that the subject holds each time. Thus, these themes have been my tools to understand what their values are and why they exist.
These values can be personal but also predetermined—we endeavour to find reasons that suit us, that are suitable for expressing how we see ourselves and others, how we position ourselves in the world.
I wonder if there is something unsaid in these things, and what mystery their existence holds as such. There is an experiment that I try to bring forward—that thing that was not mentioned for a reason. Through these formations, I try to touch on them, the reasons, the nourishment of independence.
Cecilia Vicuña
I have been enthralled with Vicuña’s quipu works. Her body of work, which is based in poetry, painting, performance, installation, and other media, touches on what she calls the precarious (the moment of emergency)8 —a cultural heritage that lives through the tangible. The works are both cultural heritage and visual art,9 inherited and expressed, temporary and endless. That is how I see them.
Her artistic practice, which begins and ends in poetry, repeatedly deals with the tumultuous history of dictatorship and democracy in Chile and throughout the Americas.10 Her work explores the rise of socialism following Allende’s presidency, Pinochet’s military dictatorship, and Chile’s complex transfor mation after these events.11 Despite the political allusions in Vicuña’s work, that which she calls “the precarious” can still be said to be the common thread in her practice.
“The precarious” is what exposes itself to others.12 It is what confronts the unconscious and the unpredictable. That which dwells near the anarchy of being a vulnerable body in the journey of time. The tapestries I refer to are also in conversation with “the precarious” in connection with these factors, their sensitivity to time, and with regard to the environment of the time they stem from. Vicuña’s quipus address this, among other things.
Quipu is a device/tool used by ancient Peruvians for recording information. Quipu is based on cord, using differently coloured, knotted threads.13 Juliet Lynd has discussed Vicuña’s reference to the relic that is quipu, questioning whether it is an objective way to open up the debate on the colonialism that engulfed the continent.14 The existence of the quipu as a medium of language largely disappeared following the introduction of the European alphabet in the sixteenth century.15
Vicuña’s quipu works, which refer only to their original purpose, do not have a system around which their essence revolved before it was forgotten—or was exterminated. They flow between being poems, unspun lengths of wool, knotted threads like their originals, performances, photographs, and more. Quipus that remember nothing.16
Vicuña describes in an interview how language is the human way of expressing what we experience but cannot explain, that we reach for but cannot say.17 “ words— being multidimensional creatures— are caretakers of the deeper and unknown aspects of our imagination.”18 In fact, Vicuña’s works are a narrative; however, I find that the boundaries between where the stories begin and end are blurred. The remade quipus refer to the history of the tradition behind them; they are a type of echo of what was an established record. The works are directed towards ritual. They deal with the stories and traditions behind them, and Vicuña is not only commemorating something, but redescribing it.
The defunct quipu system is revived through ritual. Are Vicuña’s quipu works like the words she describes? Are they a way to reach out to this thing that cannot be explained? The tapestries I reference in my master’s exhibition were a way of
storytelling, sometimes without words. They are made up of frames, which mark the events of a certain story. In this way, the embroidery images appear as narrative.
In Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,”19 he touches on the attributes of the storyteller that have disappeared following the mass production of the novel, resulting in a divide in the listeners, which is his main concern in this text. I associate my art with storytelling. Not only female narratives and ideas about the “good girl” that are imprinted on us before we are born, but also narratives that address time and are wrapped here in a story behind the braided stitch and the lost echo, which I will get back to at the end of the text.
Benjamin writes, “Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.”20 Here, he is pointing out that remembrance and reminiscence both have origins in memory.
This relationship between remembering and reminiscence manifests differently in the modern novel and the storyteller’s narration. It is the muse that is drawn from the narrator’s memory that makes this difference. The novel remains unchanged and remembers everything—while the storyteller’s narrative is always looking for the muse, mining the memory.
Benjamin describes the tendency of the storyteller to express a narrative of life experiences and travel, a narrative that contains something practical, whether it is overtly expressed or hidden in the feeling of the story. For him, it is knowledge or truth that lies behind the stories, which are then interwoven with the retelling and memory of the listeners. This practical element in the story can appear in three ways, through morals, advice, or proverbs. These are the points that give counsel to the narrative. This is what Benjamin describes as the truth of life experience: knowledge/wisdom.21 He wonders if this knowledge is diminishing, and subsequently the existence of the storyteller as well.
I believe Vicuña’s quipus contain this usefulness to which Benjamin refers. Through her ritual approach, there is a need to celebrate these knot-systems. I am wondering how my
in the aforementioned myths with the aim of referring to the effects of Western technological progress within colonial policies in Southwest Asia and North Africa. Her works touch on the social and political aspects of cultural heritage, connecting it to modern times, for example, through technology.
One of her better-known works is the 3-D-printed sculptural series Material Speculation: ISIS (2015–16). The sculptures are based on historical artefacts and art that the IS organisation destroyed. The series was a protest against the Syrian state, following the presidential election of Bashar al-Assad in 2011.27 Allahyari reconstructed the destroyed relics from the ancient city of Palmyra through 3-D printing, using publicly available data for the reconstructions.
These are aspects that I touch on in my works. Just as I look at the work of TaeuberArp, who draws on both new and old motifs from her own work and the environment, I look at Allahyari’s work while wondering whether the story behind the works and the information is what shapes them. –
In the performance Patriot (2020), I set up a gasoline-powered generator and vacuum cleaner on the road. The performance consisted of vacuuming the gravel on the road until the vacuum-cleaner bag was full. First, the generator was turned on and then the vacuum cleaner was plugged into it. Next, I hoovered until the vacuum-cleaner bag was full of gravel. The performance ended with the bag being taken and placed on the pavement, then the vacuum cleaner and generator were turned off. The vacuum-cleaner bag, which had almost turned to stone, stood up after this endurance test of hoovering up gravel from the road. In this stint of nonsense, I tried to fix the impossible, in complete opposition to all logic. The generator burns fuel to generate electricity for the vacuum cleaner, which fills up with dirt, sand, and rocks, never achieving its goal of cleaning the pavement and gravel road. Whether the gravel is better placed in the vacuum-cleaner bag is unclear, but perhaps the sincere self-centeredness of the ego, the patriot, is nourished.
In her video works, the artist Cinthia Marcelle depicts how the role of machines and ideas on labour are being transformed. In the work Fonte 193 (2009), a fire truck has taken on a new role.28 In the work, the camera angle is directed downwards diagonally, with a circular drawing made of lines in the sand filling the centre of the orange surface. The car is driven in circles, following the same tracks, thus creating the drawing. On top of the car are two firefighters, pumping water from the roof towards the centre of the circle. The description of the work states that the fountain has been turned inside out.29 These are also irrational gestures with a romantic setting. The machine becomes an embodiment of imitation through its capacities and limitations.
In the performance Human and Excavator (2022), I placed a construction excavator in a parking lot, framed within four orange cones. The cones were connected with a striped marker, forming a square. Outside the frame was a box of large chalks and construction tape. On the beak of the excavator, chalk was attached, the tape sticking out and touching the asphalt. The performance took place in such a way that the driver of the excavator drew a picture with the chalk on the parking lot. Lines criss-crossing and overlapping each other formed something that resembled a pattern or a trace. These are the stitches of the braid stitch. The needle has become the arm of the machine and the chalk, the wool. The capacities of the excavator, to shovel and transport, are pushed aside, allowing it to acquire a new role that does not serve the same purpose. It becomes a tool to draw a temporary picture of the course of the braid stitch. It sews clumsily with the chalk, loudly and imprecisely.
Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu’s older paintings are important to me. The works, which are full of marks and gestures, are formed based on different urban landscapes. She uses cartographical images of cities and breaks them up with the vertical forms of the marks.30 The works offer diverse perspectives through symbolic pieces of architecture. Basically, they use a specific grid and load it with drawings and traces.31 I struggle to describe these marks here; in a chapter from the book Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in Post-medium Condition, Mehretu describes
them thus: “The marks are percussive, repetitive motions, marks / that shift with each motion, faster, accelerating / to gain that wicked MASS of marks (being) that devour, / consume, digest, and decimate their place / until they morph it / shift it / fuse into it / splice through. / To find the break, in the linear. / The mark is insistent.”32
The marks take over the surface; they carry weight and movement while they consume the image and their location. Mehretu describes the drawing in the works as an imitation of written language, but not words, and I think that also applies to the gestures (“Mimic writing but not words”).33
What the marks do on top of the grid, or the map, is move its stability. In her works, Mehretu develops the idea that cities and certain architecture within them are simultaneously spaces that contain fragments of collective experience and the gathering of individual perspectives —different individuals.34 These are spaces where individuals position themselves, much like the map, and the viewer’s perspective changes accordingly. For me, the works are an attempt to achieve a holistic perception of a space, place, or city.
In an interview, Mehretu talks about how she collected motifs and information from the environment before starting her Stadia (2004) works. For example, she collected drawings of sports fields, whether they had been built or not, signs or markers, and used the marks to superimpose the drawings on top of the architectural drawings, the grids.35 She describes how the markings and gestures are almost eating up the foundation plan of the sports field and, at the same time, holding it up.36 Her interpretation of her own work is related to her mixed background, being from both Ethiopia and the United States.37 It is based on trying to locate oneself. That is the point from which the works are created and is the method for understanding different cultures. Living in the “Nepantla” space, “in-between.”38
In the work of Mehretu and Allahyari, I see a connection to my own artistic creation in relation to the idea of allegory. The same combinations of signs and shapes that Mehretu takes from the environment and puts together on the canvas lead Allahyari to document
Hjördís Gréta Guðmundsdóttir
artefacts and artworks from the past. The two main characteristics of allegory are the confirmation of the remoteness of the past and the tendency to revive it for the ideas of the present.39 Craig Owens wrote this about the return of allegory in art in the text “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” He describes how allegory has activated the gap between past and present through reinterpretation, which otherwise would keep the past distant and poorly understood.40
Allegory in art appears as a replacement, with the purpose of becoming something else or revealing a new understanding of the subject. Thus, the allegory is a supplement, a supplement that builds on its original image and interprets it.41 Through allegory, the artist appropriates the prototype of the subject and reproduces it with his own vision.
There is melancholy in this distance to the past, and melancholy is expressed in the fragmented. In the fragmentary and its traces, there is space to define, or decide, draw conclusions, and fill in. The core of the allegory touches on this, the temporary life of the fragmentary, the ruins of the past, natural history.42 It is again death that we look to. Fear of the temporary and the inevitable emerges with the genesis of the allegory as an attempt to save the fragmentary ruins.
It is this sense of allegory that I reflect on in my own artistic creation, and these ideas about compensation that I continue to measure against the fragmentary and to fill in the void. I wonder if it is within these voids that I find space to reflect on my own ideas and speculations—whether that is where the braided stitch belongs.
–Embroidery, a technique based on precision and repetition, is a slow medium, and the tangible relics of the braid stitch live there. The knowledge within the relics is what seems intangible. There is something I don’t know. The knowledge comes from a real object that had a different utility or purpose, but that has become a symbol of its time. It is also the symbol of that which we set upon it. The knowledge is there, within the walls of the
1 In Elsa E. Guðjónsson’s Traditional Icelandic Embroidery, the braided cross-stitch (also called “the long-armed crossstitch” or “the long-legged crossstitch”) is described thus: “The old cross-stitch, or braid stitch, is characteristic of Icelandic embroidery after the Reformation, in addition to the fact that this type of stitch was then used as the main and secondary stitch on various other types of clothing, ecclesiastical and secular. Although on a small scale, the type of stitching is already known from the late Middle Ages, as it appears on a few pattern pieces ... The oldest written sources about cross-stitching can be found in Sigurðarregistri from 1550,” Elsa E. Guðjónsson’s Traditional Icelandic Embroidery, 3rd ed. (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2003), 29–31.
2 Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Living Abstraction, ed. Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp with Charlotte Healy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021), 47.
3 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 7.
4 Krauss, Originality of the AvantGarde 9.
5 Harriet Bridgeman and Elizabeth Drury, eds., Needlework: An Illustrated History (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), 231, 251.
6 Guðjónsson, “Icelandic Embroidery” in Needlework, 259.
7 Hanne Frøsig Dalgaard, “Denmark,” in Needlework, 240. One of the oldest pieces of embroidery in Denmark is a wool blouse from the Bronze Age. It was found inside an oak coffin in a graveyard at Skrydstrup in South Jutland. A young woman had this blouse and there is wool buttonhole stitching around the neckline and sleeves. My classmate Rosita Kær shared with me the history of this blouse and its restoration, which her grandmother worked on for the National Museum in Denmark. We had a conversation about the blouse at the beginning of December, which centred on a question about the need to fill in what we called time. There was a big hole in the blouse, which wasn’t restored by the museum, and we wondered if it was mostly in this hole that the time was present.
8 Cecilia Vicuña and Elianna Kan, “Cecilia Vicuña,” Bomb, no. 146 (2018–19): 103, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/26876271.
9 José de Nordenflycht Concha, “Techné, Poeisis, and Ruin: Cecilia Vicuña’s Paideia,” in Red Thread: The Story of the Red Thread, by Cecilia Vicuña (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 130.
10 Juliet Lynd, “Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1590, http://www. jstor.org/stable/25486270.
11 Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1590.
12 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Arts of Noticing,” in What Happens between the Knots: A Series of Open Questions, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022), 26.
13 Dieter Roelstraete, “Cecilia Vicuña,” documenta 14, n.d., https://www.documenta14.de/ en/artists/13557/cecilia-vicuna.
14 Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1590.
15 Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1591.
16 Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1594.
17 Vicuña and Kan, “Cecilia Vicuña,” 104.
18 Vicuña and Kan, “Cecilia Vicuña,” 104.
19 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 154.
20 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 153.
21 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 145.
22 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 150–151.
23 Gísli O. Gíslason (1907–86) became known as the last boondocks farmer in Iceland after Ómar Ragnarsson’s TV documentary about Gísli was aired on Christmas Day in 1984. Gísli Oktavíus Gíslason was a lone farmer who lived off his land in Selárdalur in the Westfjords. A biography was published after his death, and his hat has been put on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Hnjót in Vestfjörður.
24 Morehshin Allahyari, “About She Who Sees the Unknown,” She Who Sees the Unknown, 2021, https://shewhoseestheunknown.com/about/.
25 Allahyari, “About She Who Sees the Unknown.”
26 Allahyari, “About She Who Sees the Unknown.”
27 Erin L. Thompson, “Recreating the Past in Our Own Image: Contemporary Artists’ Reactions to the Digitization of Threatened Cultural Heritage Sites in the Middle East,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 15, no. 1 (2018): 45, https://doi.org/ 10.5749/futuante.15.1.0045.
28 “Fonte 193,” directed by Cinthia Marcelle, Vimeo video,12:07, 31 October 2008, https://vimeo. com/2115662.
29 “Fonte 193,” video description.
30 Kathryn Brown, “The Artist as Urban Geographer: Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu,” American Art 24, no. 3 (2010): 106, https://doi. org/10.1086/658211.
31 “The dynamism of the underlying grid thus mirrors the movement of the restless eye that seeks to take in the broadest possible range of aspects on the space before it.” Brown, “Artist as Urban Geographer,” 108.
32 Julie Mehretu, “Notes on Painting,” in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in Post-medium Condition, ed. Isabelle Graw and Ewa LajerBurcharth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 272.
33 Mehretu, “Notes on Painting,” 273.
34 Brown, “Artist as Urban Geographer,” 110.
35 Lawrence Chua and Julie Mehretu, “Julie Mehretu,” Bomb, no. 91 (2005): 29, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40427192.
36 Chua and Mehretu, “Julie Mehretu,” 29.
37 Chua and Mehretu, “Julie Mehretu,” 29, 31.
38 “‘It’s Very Hard to Understand What Our Reality Is’: Artist Julie Mehretu,” YouTube video, 9:14, posted by Louisiana Channel, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=R71GBWjyjLE&ab_ channel=LouisianaChannel.
Here she is referring to Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory about “Nepantla.” Anzaldúa’s writing and theory about the “in-between” have been important to me since I first read about it. “The unspeakable” is what appears in her poetry and texts, in the issues of those who live on the US-Mexico border, “in between.” Anzaldúa’s theory opened up a discussion about displacement. She created a certain genealogy for the descendants of the in-between place, to experience themselves as neither and both Mexicans and Americans—she calls this a state of “Nepantla (in-between).”
38 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (1980): 68, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/778575.
40 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 68.
41 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 69.
42 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 71.
43 Angela Curran, “Mimesis as Imitation,” in Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics (London: Routledge, 2016), 35.
44 Curran, “Mimesis as Imitation,” 42; Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Classics), 9.1451b29-32.
45 Guðjónsson, Traditional Icelandic Embroidery 31.
46 Guðjónsson, Traditional Icelandic Embroidery 31.
47 Guðjónsson, Traditional Icelandic Embroidery 31.
48 Susan Pearce explains in “Collecting the Other, Within and Without” that we tend to assess museums and history from the perspective of “Our”/Same or “Other”. This means that relics we associate with and understand come from Our perspective, and thus are an accepted part of history. Meanwhile, when we see what we do not understand or is distant, we choose to experience it as distant/exotic, which we then use to shape the ideas we have about our own history/ cultural history. Susan M. Pearce, “Collecting the Other, Within and Without,” in On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995), 302.
49 Nationalmuseet Copenhagen, reference number: CCCLXXI.