Lisa Anne Auerbach Lisa Anne Auerbach Lisa Anne Auerbach is a Los Angeles-based artist and Assistant Professor of Art at Pomona College. Her photographs, publications, and knitted work have been exhibited at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and Printed Matter, New York, among other venues. Julia Bryan-Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine and Director of its Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California Press, 2009). Her scholarly writing and criticism has appeared in numerous publications, including the Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, and Frieze. Jacob Proctor is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and founding curator of UMMA Projects. Cover: No on 8, 2009 Endpapers: If Nothing Changes, It Changes Nothing, 2009 university of michigan museum of art Lisa Anne Auerbach 2 / July 11–October 11, 2009 2 3 Installation view, UMMA Projects: Lisa Anne Auerbach, University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 11–October 11, 2009 Lisa Anne Auerbach’s Canny Domesticity Julia Bryan-Wilson In 2006, Bolivian president Evo Morales wore a sweater while on an international diplomatic tour, igniting a burst of interest in his distinctive sartorial choice. The striped pullover’s horizontal bands of alternating red, white, blue, and gray were identifiably indigenous. Morales’s sweater became something of a signature look, and the newly inaugurated leader was repeatedly photographed greeting various world leaders while sporting it. Immediately termed the “Evo” sweater, its native Bolivian design was seen as perfectly in keeping with Morales’s Aymara heritage and his larger populist message. The garment spoke volumes without the president saying a word. The sweater, a type traditionally made by hand of local alpaca wool, became a symbol of Morales’s investment in domestic production and his resistance to global trade and exploitative labor policies.1 Ironically, inexpensive mass-produced copies of the Evo sweater were quickly churned out to sell in street markets and online, a reminder that ideological affinities are signaled through style, and that such solidarities are constantly complicated, marketed, and transformed. As Morales’s example demonstrates, wearing a sweater can be both a fashion statement and a political one. It is precisely this intersection that Los Angeles–based artist Lisa Anne Auerbach explores. In addition, she probes the possibilities of craft and advocates for a leftist reclamation of homemaking. In her ongoing series of knitted items, Auerbach integrates texts and images—such as historical quotations, forceful polemics, witty catchphrases, and sly references—on sweaters, skirts, banners, caps, ponchos, and flags. One sweater declares “Keep Abortion Legal,” and a pair of mittens details the body count of U. S. soldiers killed in Iraq. By inserting text into her clothes, Auerbach turns the implicit politics of Morales’s sweater up a notch, for to put on one of her outfits is, as the artist has stated, to use the “body as a billboard.”2 But Auerbach’s work is also geared toward provoking local, face-to-face interactions. The sweaters do not simply declare an opinion or state 4 5 Thank God I’m an Atheist (Ghost), 2009 a viewpoint—though they do that, too—since their tactile, handmade nature also elicits more intimate exchanges. Auerbach asserts a canny sense of domesticity, and by this I mean that her employment of conventionally female “homemaking” is knowing, self-aware, and even a bit devious in the era of Homeland Security. Much of Auerbach’s practice has been calibrated to the specificity of its current moment. Her Warm Sweaters for the New Cold War, an ongoing series begun in 2004, explicitly references the war in Iraq and the overheated rhetoric of the Bush administration. In the summer of 2006, she conducted an informal poll in which she asked the question, “What’s your favorite thing about the War on Terror?” Using the answers she received from friends, she knit five versions of the sweater that posited the question on the front and a variation of the answer on the back. Some of the answers were irreverent; others practical. “Gives me an excuse not to go to the Frieze art fair,” states the back of one iteration, with a graphic of bomber-like planes fitted head-to-tail under the text. Another confesses: “Getting patted down by women in public in the airport. I like that it’s OK to be touched by another woman in public. That and I’ve become a foot exhibitionist.” This answer turns a climate of heightened fear into a moment of illicit and unexpected queer pleasure. Auerbach’s sweaters consistently weave together timely political references with teasing tongue-in-cheek comments to generate conversations about serious topics. The knitted pieces fit into Auerbach’s wider practice, in which she utilizes photography, text-based collaborative projects, and installation. Though trained primarily as a photographer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Auerbach has long been engaged with the so-called women’s work of domestic crafts. She founded a ’zine, American Homebody, an eclectic publication in print between 1998 and 2001, aimed at fostering support for a dispersed network of radical hermits. Stemming from her investments in feminism and community building, American Homebody sought to provide alternative visions of homemaking and domestic arts that were not limited to the walls of one’s own house, but extended out to the street and the community. The ’zine included everything from recipes to gardening tips to an “American Homebody Covergirl”—Auerbach as a campy or outlandish fetishized stereotype of the sexy housewife gracing the cover of each issue. Working with other photographers such as Sharon Lockhart, Daniel Marlos, and Charlie White—much of Auerbach’s practice is collaborative—she produced a covergirl calendar, featuring men in drag and the artist-as-sex-doll, impersonating “perfect” housewives. 6 Auerbach’s desire to provide an outlet for feedback among activist, grassroots homebodies is an extension of feminist reevaluations about what Pat Mainardi called, in 1969, “the politics of housework.”3 Scholars like Alice Kessler-Harris have demonstrated that the realm of the “home” bleeds into the public sphere, as the entire capitalist economy rests upon women’s unpaid domestic labor.4 Auerbach’s addressing of the feminization of labor builds on pioneer Faith Wilding’s understanding that “contemporary artists who seek to address gendered work and the domestic. . .need to take into account recent economic, cultural, and sociological developments, as well as considering how technological innovations are profoundly altering both public and private work and life globally.”5 It is feminism, of course, that furnishes the most potent method for thinking through the relation between the personal and the political. In the industrial West, knitting sweaters was once a chore of necessity, but as mass-produced methods of production took hold, undertaking such a task became a hobby, or a labor marked by leisure and enjoyment. In addition to their basis in domestic crafts, Auerbach’s sweaters draw on the legacy of text-based conceptual art. Her cunning use of words—as in the sweater series Everything I Touch Turns to $old—harks back to the slogans of Barbara Kruger that likewise critique commodity culture. What is more, because they are meant to be worn in public, and this wearing constitutes a sort of performance, they are in dialogue with 1970s feminist body art like that of Linda Montano and Adrian Piper, whose performances often revolved around special clothing choices—think of Montano in her “chicken dance” outfit, or Piper walking the streets in a shirt dripping with wet paint. Auerbach’s debts to feminism are multiple, for it was also the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that rekindled interest in crafts such as quilting, crocheting, weaving, and knitting as legitimate modes of artistic production.6 In feminist works such as Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, the Feminist Art Project’s Womanhouse (1971–72), and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79), the divisions between functional craft, decorative objects, and fine art were eradicated, opening up new channels for utilizing conventionally overlooked—or denigrated as “low” and female—methods of handmaking within artistic work.7 Along with feminist concerns, other sweaters in Auerbach’s series take on the issue of public memory and the incessant use, and abuse, of September 11, 2001 as an overdetermined reference. On the front of one sweater, a series of cartoon 7 voice-bubbles spell out the following exchange: “Knock-knock.” “Who’s there?” “9–11.” “9–11 who?” The back completes the joke: “9–11 WHO?? I thought you said you’d NEVER FORGET.” Rendered in a font that looks like a digitized hand-drawn scrawl, the use of the speech bubbles puts the joke at a distance, as if it is articulated by disembodied voices and is not necessarily the expression of the wearer herself. (Auerbach uses a stylus and drawing tablet attached to her computerized knitting machine in order to convert her own handwriting into a pixilated version that is legible when rendered in yarn.) Winkingly patriotic red, white, and blue trim around the wrists and lower edge of the sweater add color to its palette of light and dark grey. Auerbach has paired this, as she often does, with a short, flared knit skirt—creating an aesthetically unified outfit allows her room to expand the visual range of the sweater—and embedded in its wide patterned hem is an abstract, yet unmistakable, image of planes flying in the direction of two blocky towers. The 9–11 sweater and skirt walk a knife’s edge between humor, offensiveness, and outrage. Marx’s well-known adage about history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce yields here to a different dynamic: the joke draws its dynamism from the fact that in the years after 2001, any admission of collective exhaustion with mention of the attacks on the World Trade Center was hysterically countered by the Bush administration’s unceasing recourse to it, in order to justify its wartime policies. Originally inspired by the wordy pullovers worn by Rick Nielsen, lead guitarist of the 1970s rock band Cheap Trick,8 Auerbach’s sweaters, in both form and content, at times flirt with the notion of “bad taste.” In this, she acknowledges how sweaters have a dense public life within American popular culture with regards to taste, class, and social identity. They are caricatured as squarely occupying the realm of the tacky: holiday themed sweaters featuring snowflakes or reindeer are used as condescending shorthand for middlebrow fashion. To cite a well-known example, critical race theorists have argued that the multicolored, chunkily textured sweaters that Bill Cosby wore on The Cosby Show (1984–92) served to visually emphasize that his character was a non-threatening black man. The notion that white viewers responded positively to the class codes on offer on The Cosby Show, including those represented by clothing, has become a standard reading.9 With his body blanketed in a comforting, “safe” wardrobe, Cliff Huxtable was firmly secured as respectably upper-middle-class. However, many of Cosby’s sweaters were not mass-produced department store purchases, but, in fact, custom-made by Dutch designer Koos van den Akker—and thus more aspirational than is often acknowledged.10 8 As somewhat mobile signifiers, sweaters have also come to connote economy and sacrifice. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter urged Americans to conserve energy by turning down their thermostats and donning sweaters. Auerbach picks up on these multiple meanings—from a rocker’s brash self-promotion to canonic sitcom attire to an environmentalist’s good deed—but her Warm Sweaters for the New Cold War also activates the idea of a sweater as a kind of armor, worn as a shield in the midst of hostile political climate. She writes: A sweater comes in handy whenever you feel that chill in the air. Sometimes the chill is due to the winds, a sudden gust, a draft, or a blizzard. Other times, the room goes cold when you speak your mind, and suddenly everyone else is clutching their drink a little tighter, clenching their teeth a bit more strongly, and reaching quickly for sweaters and shawls. Continue the conversation with a sweater that talks back.11 In particular, Auerbach approaches the paradoxes of Homeland Security by injecting her own feminist brand of domestic homemaking to make knitwear that functions as an alternative security blanket, one that counters the official regime. A commemorative sweater and skirt set produced on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war stated the number U. S. casualties—3,992 dead and 29,295 wounded as of March 19, 2008. These stark numbers (not widely publicized) are set next to a variety of images, including a spurting oil well and machine guns. A childlike line of men and women holding hands rings the bottom of the army-green colored sweater. An orange inset at the shoulder and along the skirt’s hemline that cites the Bush war strategy of “shock and awe” completes the design. Far from stereotypes of sweaters as everyday or banal, this is a “sweater that talks back” about that which is most horrifying in the service of publicizing and memorializing. Over the past five years, her knits have evolved, transitioning from straightforward campaign logos rendered on squares that are sewn together to produce simple skirts and boxy sweaters, to more aesthetically complex responses to issues like reproductive rights and the politics of bicycling. The first hand-knit, text–based garment Auerbach made was a cardigan with a large Star of David emblazoned on the back, created in 1996 after a trip to Germany. When visiting sites of Holocaust tourism, the artist was prompted to consider what it meant to mark one’s body through clothing. Historically there have been ramifications in making 9 identity visible, either by force or by choice, and for Auerbach, wearing the Star of David was an act of reclamation. Made from vibrant Dodger–blue yarn, and with the Los Angeles Dodger logo on its front (the logo echoes the artist’s own initials), the cardigan was also a tribute to Sandy Koufax, the Jewish baseball player who refused to pitch on the Sabbath. Though there are many precedents for broadcasting political views through clothing, Auerbach’s handcrafted sweaters, ponchos, and mittens arguably function in a slightly different manner than mass-produced T-shirts or buttons. For one thing, they are less disposable than a button or campaign shirt; sweaters and other knit items are more durable and made to last. Furthermore, a recent resurgence of popular and critical interest in the do-it-yourself movement asserts that there is something inherently political about a handcrafted object in our era of sweatshop labor.12 According to these arguments, a handknit sweater—even one without slogans—is an object that registers as a kind of protest against the brutal conditions of labor employed to manufacture most of the goods we use.13 Even if claims for the subversive or revolutionary nature of what has been termed “craftivism” have been overstated, there remains a tangible distinction between an Auerbach-knit woolen sweater and a thin cotton T-shirt, not least because of the endurance of their knitted material and the sturdiness of the construction. Sweaters are also unlikely locations for inflammatory messages; in a time when passengers wearing political T-shirts are being forced off of airplanes, Auerbach has breezed through security even when wearing a sweater that reads, “When There’s Nothing Left to Burn/You Have to Set Yourself on Fire,” and depicts a row of dynamite circling around her midsection. Long before Tom Wolfe coined the dismissive phrase “radical chic,” clothing had been understood as a form of self-fashioning, a performance that invokes complex status (and gender) norms.14 To return to the body-based nature of Auerbach’s works, it is crucial that she designs them to be worn, which demands that she takes into consideration how they look in motion. A somewhat crude poncho stating “Kerry/Edwards 04” was the first garment she made on the knitting machine, and it inaugurated further experiments. (Though many knitting machines are completely hand-operated, Auerbach uses a low-tech, computer-controlled device that translates the binary notation of knitting patterns into panels of fabric that are then joined together by hand.) Some of these experiments were admitted failures, 10 leading her to refine her process and carefully consider questions of placement, legibility, and intention. For instance, in 2004 Auerbach made a knit hat that read “Ban Bush,” laying out the phrase so that each word sits on either side of the head. Because only one word at a time was visible, she realized that, depending on which direction the wearer was facing, the hat could be read as an endorsement of Bush rather than a condemnation. Now Auerbach strives to make statements that are coherent regardless of partial viewing. She crafts her work intentionally to provoke the viewer into trying to see both sides, to glimpse front and back of a sweater or hat, or both right and left mitten (a metaphor, perhaps, for political dualities). She considers both the body of the viewer and the body of the wearer as they negotiate shared space. When Auerbach’s sweaters are displayed within art contexts, they raise questions about the institutionalization of fashion and the displacement of “functional” crafts into fine art spaces. Other contemporary artists whose work traffics between everyday design and art-world exhibition include Los Angeles–based Andrea Zittel, whose pared-down uniforms investigate the aesthetic and social possibilities of daily living through sustainable design. Auerbach’s insistently two-sided garments raise challenges when displayed; like sculpture they must be seen in the round. But since they are designed primarily for her own body, putting them on “standard issue” dress forms distorts their shapes. For exhibition purposes, Auerbach worked with a California mannequin company to make a mannequin torso that reflects her own proportions. The headless and legless dress forms are suspended from the ceiling, and the sweaters and skirts hover eerily in the gallery like a disembodied crowd ready to be mobilized. Auerbach’s outfits interrogate what happens when a person broadcasts sometimes provocative or personal political views (such as “Smash Monogamy,” one of a trio of sweaters ambiguously based on the proclamations of the radical Weather Underground group), or states information that is not always widely addressed (such as war casualty statistics). Her clothing is often created in response to immediate political circumstances, to be worn—by herself or others—when attending specific rallies or meetings. The sweaters activate a different sense of security, here denoting a kind of indestructibility, as well as a cloak or shield of protection. One of her earliest articles of clothing, a skirt stating “Bush is a Turkey” on one side and “Knitters for Kerry” on the other, was made for a friend going to the Republican 11 National Convention in 2004. Multiple levels of meaning are woven together in Auerbach’s sweaters, as she integrates evocative patterns and motifs that subtly reinforce her message and refer to the stated text. For instance, this skirt utilizes a visual pun on the word “turkey,” as it features a graphic motif that resembled weeds growing up from the hem of the skirt that she took from a book of Turkish sock patterns. Her hand-knit Body Count Mittens, a series begun in 2005, uses the act of knitting as a private way to mark time, as well as a method of visibly registering the growing number of U. S. casualties in the war in Iraq. As she begins each mitten, she inscribes it with the official body count on that day. During that time it takes her to finish one hand, the number of dead inevitably increases, and so she notes the new body count as she moves on to the other hand. Auerbach has posted the pattern for the mittens on her website, and she encourages hand knitters to use the pattern to make them in public in hopes of advertising the grim statistic, as well as spawning questions and debate. There are shades of Freudian repetition-compulsion in her constant return to chronicling the war dead, as if she is reworking the trauma, and indeed it is a cliché that the act of handknitting can be therapeutic, a way to harness and redirect obsessive tendencies. There are other reasons Auerbach has turned to knitting during a time of war. As chronicled in Anna MacDonald’s book No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting, knitting has historically been encouraged during times of national conflict as a way for women to keep themselves busy and create necessary items for the troops such as socks, gloves, and hats.15 Because it is transportable “lapwork,” knitting can also be done in groups; as such, it forges a social space, and in previous wars this social aspect was also valued. Women whose husbands were on the front lines were urged to come together and channel their grief and worry into the wartime activity of group handmaking. Numerous recent art and activism projects have looked back to this historical connection between female labor, knitting, and war economies, including the British craft advocacy group Cast-Off’s “Knit for Peace” demonstrations on the London Underground (2004); Cat Mazza’s Stitch For Senate balaclava–making undertaking, in which volunteers knit helmet liners and sent them to their senators as an antiwar gesture (2007); and Sabrina Gschwandtner’s War-Time Knitting Circle, an interactive installation at the Museum of Art & Design’s exhibition Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting (2007). In War-Time Knitting Circle, the artist set up round tables 12 and provided yarn, knitting needles, and patterns for various projects (including Auerbach’s Body Count Mittens) that members of the public could knit while talking about the war. Gschwandtner’s space was demarcated by large machineknit banners—“photo blankets”—featuring images of previous wartime knitting activities. Liz Collins’s public knitting project Knitting Nation, part of Allison Smith’s public art project The Muster, from 2005, involved a squadron of female knitters on hand-cranked knitting machines turning out a giant abstracted U. S. flag that unspooled impudently onto the ground.16 Nina Rosenberg solicits participants through her website, redsweaters.org, to knit action-figure–scaled, blood-red sweaters, each one representing a U. S. soldier killed in Iraq, which are then strung together and hung in trees. If these diverse projects attest to the potency and resonance of knitting during wartime for feminist artists today, Auerbach’s mittens and sweaters—made for herself and for friends as an assertion of both personal style and political conviction—are among the most individualized responses. Auerbach’s focus on the individual and the local is in response to an economy subtended by outsourcing, inequality, consumerism, and gender imbalance. In her photography, she documents that which is eccentric, neglected, and overlooked within the increasingly homogenized commercial landscape. In her ongoing Small Business series, for instance, she chronicles endangered businesses like florists and BBQ restaurants that exist in shacks, garages, and other seemingly too-small spaces, encountered during her travels through the country. Much of her photographic work focuses on mobility and location—she is especially committed to bicycling and has created a series of “portraits” of unicycles. As this work illustrates, she is also interested in the absurd. In collaboration with Alexandra Mir, she journeyed to Naples to “repair” plaster casts of broken Roman statuary with marzipan, fusing the idea of reparation and mending with a surrealist transformation of objects using an unlikely material (Marzamara, 2008). In 2008, on being commissioned by the V-Day organization to create a “vagina,” Auerbach constructed a large (10 feet in diameter) pink and red yurt, entitled V-Day Yurt, that viewers were invited to crawl into. This installation, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of V-Day, was reminiscent of Wilding’s seminal Womb Room (Crocheted Environment), created for Womanhouse. Yet unlike Womb Room, Auerbach’s environment was openly textual, with euphemistic phrases (contributed by Eve Ensler), such as “Welcome to the wetlands,” inscribed on the knitted exterior of the structure. Such a work underscores how Auerbach is drawn to making new kinds of environments and “homes,” however defamiliarized. 13 While the term canniness most usually refers to cleverness, it can also mean frugal or thrifty. In addition, a “canny space” connotes a snug or cozy environment. Thus canny domesticity could sound like a redundant formulation—a homelike home—but it is just this friction that propels Auerbach’s work. In a well-known essay, Freud defines the uncanny as that which is “secretly familiar. . .which has undergone repression and returned from it,” and discusses the intimate relationship between the heimisch (homelike) and the umheimlich (uncanny).17 (Think back to the vaginal yurt—for Freud, female genitals are the ultimate uncanny: the homey place that is also made strange.) From sculptures made whole with marzipan to bleak war statistics juxtaposed onto handmade sweaters that hang like ghosts in the gallery, Auerbach’s crafty conjoinings are sometimes surprising, sometimes uncomfortable, and always canny. 14 1. Some accounts claim that Morales’s famous sweater was made from cheap acrylic rather than wool. Nevertheless, it was certainly Bolivian-produced. In 2007, Morales enacted several policies that attempt to preserve and foster the Bolivian textiles industries, including a ban on the sale of used clothing from the United States, as these secondhand cast-offs flood the market and undercut more expensive local goods. See “Morales to Ban Used Clothing in Bolivia,” USA Today, July 17, 2007. 2. Lisa Anne Auerbach, Charted Patterns for Sweaters that Talk Back (New York: Printed Matter, 2008), p. 34. 3. Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” first published in Redstockings (Fall 1969); reprinted in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 255–56. 4. Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: An Historical Overview (New York: Feminist Press, 1981). 5. Faith Wilding, “Monstrous Domesticity,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G 18 (November 1995), pp. 3–16. 6. There is a wealth of significant literature on the historical gendering of craft, and on the importance of traditionally domestic handmaking in feminist art. For a few influential examples, see Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts,” in Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (New York: Pandora, 1981), pp. 50–81; Lydia Yee, Division of Labor: “Women’s Work” in Contemporary Art (New York: Bronx Museum, 1995); and Amelia Jones, ed., Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 7. Glenn Adamson offers an incisive take on the importance of handmaking within a broad range of contemporary art in his Thinking Through Craft (London: Berg, 2007). 8. Interview with Lisa-Anne Auerbach, January 18, 2009. 9. See Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). 10. Television historian Victoria E. Johnson has pointed out to me that Cosby alternated sweaters with college sweatshirts—many of which promoted historically black colleges and universities—as an extension of the upward mobility explicitly thematized in the show. 11. Auerbach 2008, p. 34. 12. For more on the rise of current crafting in relationship to politics, see Faythe Levein and Cortney Heimerl, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); Betsy Greer, Knitting for Good!: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, and Political Change Stitch by Stitch (New York: Trumpeter, 2008); and Betty Christiansen, Knitting for Peace: Making the World a Better Place One Stitch at a Time (New York: STC Craft, 2006). 13. Sabrina Gschwandtner has written a cogent argument that troubles the sweeping assertions about crafting as inherently radical; Gschwandtner, “Let ‘em Eat Cake,” American Craft 68, 4 (August/September 2008), p. 62. 14. Wolfe’s phrase does not refer specifically to clothing, but to the trendy adoption of political causes; Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) (New York: Picador, 2009). One important examination into earlier links between art, craft, and fashion is found in Nancy J. Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 15. Anna MacDonald, No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting (New York: Ballantine, 1990). 16. For more on Collins’s Knitting Nation and Smith’s event, see Anne Wehr, ed., Allison Smith: The Muster (New York: Public Art Fund, 2005). 17. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919), trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003). 15 Language Arts Lisa Anne Auerbach in conversation with Jacob Proctor Jacob Proctor: I’m interested in the ways that your work reads differently depending on the context in which it is encountered. Your knitted work has attracted a lot of attention lately, and often ends up being discussed in the context of a “post-” or “neo-” feminist return to craft. In the process, I sometimes feel that the importance of language can be overlooked or downplayed. Do you see your knitwork more as part of a continuum with other language-based projects you’ve undertaken (the Tract House, Saddlesore, etc.), or do you see something especially significant about the material form of knitted wool? Lisa Ann Auerbach: The sweaters definitely come out of my work with text, language, narrative, and self-publishing. I’m interested in provoking conversation, spreading the word, and exploring a medium not traditionally associated with declaration or speech. I first became interested in sweaters in the early 1990s when I began looking at those worn by Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielson. He was able to cultivate his own nerdy persona by wearing these custom sweaters. It’s more traditional to have band logos and mottos on T-shirts; sweaters send a different message. Sweaters convey a sense of permanence. They’re time consuming to produce and expensive to buy, so if there’s a message on one, it’s something a wearer has to be really invested in. I position this stance in opposition to that of a wearer’s relationship with a T-shirt, which I see as something that exists in a faster wardrobe cycle. I don’t think it’s uncommon to buy a T-shirt as a joke, wear it once, then let it sit at the bottom of a drawer before it gets thrown out or given away. They’re more transient. They’re also more widely read, because it’s a form that’s well-known as a vehicle for language. By contrast, I don’t think people generally expect declarative or provocative, or even cheerful, text on a sweater. I’m always 17 Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammunition, 2005 (detail) reading newspaper articles and blog accounts of people getting thrown off of planes or out of events due to the text on their T-shirts, and it makes me wonder whether or not the same message knitted into the fabric of a sweater would have the same effect. I fly a lot and I’ve never been thrown off a plane for inflammatory statements rendered in wool. Perhaps they’re not inflammatory enough. So yes, there is definitely something significant about the material form of knitted wool, and this significance comes from both the fact that the text is part of the structure of the fabric and from the cultural baggage that gets associated with any kind of object or cultural production that’s been around for a long time. Of course, I’m aware of this and I hope to use it to my advantage in my work, but I’m not explicitly concerned with a neo-feminist return to craft per se. Obviously it’s not difficult to read that into the work, but it’s not my primary concern. JP: Many people instinctively associate knitting with ideas of handicraft and traditional forms of so-called women’s work. It seems to me that your use of a computer-controlled knitting machine to make much of your work complicates this reading. Is there a less essentializing way that we can talk about the relationship between “domestic” and artistic labor in a cultural context that can be described as both post-industrial and (on the artistic front) post-studio? LAA: I was interested in sweaters as a vehicle, and in order for them to exist in the world, I had to make them. That’s the simple reality. I had to get a knitting machine because otherwise I would have been still making my first Obama sweater six months after he took office. Hand-knitting is time consuming and not necessary when there is the technology that can knit a custom sweater. Sometimes people are disappointed that the sweaters are made on a machine; they act like it’s a copout or something. But the point is that the sweaters exist, not how they come to exist. JP: Would it be fair, then, to make the analogy that your knitted work is to a “traditional” hand-knit garment as a xeroxed and desktop-published ’zine is to a traditional manuscript? Or is emphasizing the handmade a bit of a red herring? If so, perhaps a more fruitful analogy could be that your knitted work is to an industrially manufactured garment as a xeroxed ’zine is to a mass-produced magazine? Do you see your work more in dialogue with one pole or the other? 18 LAA: The latter makes more sense to me. I live in a world of mass-produced magazines and sweatshop produced garments, so that’s a more familiar point of reference. The work takes those modes of production as a jumping off point. Of course there is a homemade quality about the work, but that’s just left over from the process of making it. I don’t see it as being particularly precious. JP: I’m interested in this question of preciousness. If not in terms of the handmade, then at least in terms of singularity. By and large, your sweaters are unique, and that’s part of their specificity, part of what makes them what they are. Can you talk a little bit about your election project in Aspen last fall and how that relates to some of these issues? In that case, you made multiples of each sweater, and had them fabricated by a professional garment-maker. How did those factors affect the equation? LAA: There were a few considerations that went into that decision. For the most part, my sweaters are made in my size. They are emblazoned with words relating to things I’m concerned with, or interested in, and my body becomes a vehicle for these ideas. So it would be a bit weird to make sweaters in various sizes that are really fundamentally personal statements. For the exhibition at Aspen Art Museum, the curator’s idea was to do something that would encourage people to talk about political issues during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. The goal was to make sweaters that, as a group, didn’t reflect a particular viewpoint, that were purposefully non-partisan. So they were no longer necessarily about subjects I was invested in, or, in some cases, even interested in. The text was from historical American presidential campaigns. Each sweater was tied to a specific year, so one side would have the Democratic party slogan and the Republican slogan would be on the other. Sometimes there would be a third party slogan; other times I could only find language from one party. I strove for language that still resonated today, themes that had been recycled countless times by candidates on both sides of the fence. I wanted different people to be able to wear them around town, so they needed to be constructed in various sizes. The were a total of thirty-five sweaters. There was no way I could make that many sweaters in the time I had, and I wasn’t confident in my ability to make them in various sizes. It’s easy to make them for me; I know 19 how long my arms are. But when I’ve made sweaters in other sizes in the past, I’m never exactly sure how big to make them. So I found someone with an industrial knitting machine to make them for me. The sweaters were shown in shop windows throughout town and were available for borrowing from the museum. I think it made sense to have them manufactured, given this context. They didn’t have the “funk factor” that’s usually present in my work, so perhaps people felt more comfortable wearing them. Sometimes the ones I make at home might be a little wonky. I often leave strings hanging out, and people are paranoid that the whole sweater might unravel if those strings were pulled. They won’t, of course. But it does give people less anxiety to wear something that’s perfect, as opposed to a “one of a kind” art object that they imagine might fall apart. JP: We’re also exhibiting photographs from your Small Business series. There seems to be a sympathetic relationship between these small businesses and your own practice as an artist. In some cases—I’m thinking of the bike shops in the series—this sympathy is relatively explicit, but I wonder if the same sentiment extends to the other businesses as well (even to those—BBQ joints, for example—that you would not personally patronize)? Or is the association more structural? LAA: I started making these photographs after I began riding my bicycle around Los Angeles. In a car, I’d never noticed so many of these modest establishments before, but at a more leisurely pace, I suddenly started seeing them on familiar streets. The small businesses had been there all along; it’s just that I’d never been going slowly enough to notice. As a cyclist on a road filled with SUVs and cars, I felt an affinity with small buildings that shared the landscape with chain fast food joints, big box stores, and multinational corporate franchises. I saw them as declarative and confident, bastions of idiosyncratic individualism in a world that was quickly getting more and more homogenized. As far as businesses that I would or would not patronize, it’s not an issue. I don’t eat BBQ, but I also don’t frequent psychics or flower shops. If I were only making photographs of the places I patronized, it wouldn’t be possible to make these photographs. JP: For the Small Businesses, you made a conscious decision to use a largeformat camera at an historical moment when analogue photography itself seems increasingly imperiled. What kinds of considerations went into that decision? 20 LAA: There were a few reasons I went with a large-format camera. At the time I started the series, in 2003, the 4” x 5” was my camera of choice. I was taking all sorts of pictures with it. I’d recently started teaching photography and had gained access to a color darkroom for the first time in years. Without a color darkroom, it was difficult for me to produce photographs and I’d found other ways of using photography in my work. I had a digital camera I used for websites, and I made photographs with a medium-format camera, outsourcing the printing. When I got back into the darkroom, I liked the control of the process, and I wanted to reinvent the practice for myself. I was interested in putting the intentionality back into photography, and to make an image using a 4” x 5” camera does just that. To make a photograph with a large-format camera is an involved process that requires a certain commitment. It’s slower and heavier. Each step of the process requires a decision. Nothing is automatic or done for you, and this necessitates an attention that I wanted to exercise. To jump into this way of making pictures made me excited about photography. The other reason I used a 4” x 5” camera for the small business photographs is that it’s the format traditionally associated with architectural photography. So I was able to use the swings and tilts of the camera to make the buildings “correct” in terms of perspective. I also liked the idea of “small buildings in large format,” sort of linguistically absurd. As much as we might be ready for the funeral, large-format photography isn’t yet obsolete. Photographs made on film, even when printed digitally, look different than those made with a digital camera in terms of the detail, grain, and the perspectival corrections. Film hasn’t yet faded into the realm of nostalgia. JP: It seems to me that with this series you are also clearly positioning yourself within a photographic tradition that dates back to the earliest years of the medium. In addition to the broad tradition of street photography, there is the more specific engagement with architecture, in particular a thoroughly vernacular form of commercial architecture. I’m thinking of Ed Ruscha’s use of photography in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s architectural typologies of obsolete—or nearly obsolete—industrial structures. . . LAA: Definitely those are artists who have informed my practice, and I’d also add the “New Topographics” work, especially Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, to the list. I saw that work when I was first studying photography, and I remember being kind 21 of puzzled at first. All those electrical poles and intersections and expansive fields of concrete. The shades of gray were unnervingly lovely. Everything was so formally perfect in that work, and it’s true that I’m a closet formalist. I’m also drawn to Walker Evans’s work, especially the images of signage and shops, to the wandering of Atget, and to Robert Smithson’s essay “Monuments of the Passaic.” I’ve always loved those modest books Ed Ruscha made, especially the pictures that show Ruscha’s shadow as he was making the photographs. I did a project a few years back where I found all of the vacant lots Ed Ruscha had photographed for his book Real Estate Opportunities, and re-photographed them. This was in the midst of the recent real estate bubble here in Los Angeles and one couldn’t attend an art opening without finding oneself in a conversation about real estate. It was tiresome. But also a good time to see what had happened to those lots he’d photographed. I did the best I could in locating them, which wasn’t always straightforward. Most of the opportunities were no longer opportunities. His photographs were documentary snapshots, but my remakes were made in color with a large format camera, completely different than his. JP: Where does your Unicycle rental shop fit into all this? LAA: From my perspective, the impetus to renovate a shack and hang up a shingle wasn’t so far removed from my own practice of starting publications, making things, and being out in the world. This read, of course, glosses over the difficult realities of starting up a small business, but I’m thinking in a very idealized way. It’s a fantasy, a daydream, and a reality that I want to create by living it, by making these photographs. There is a utopian streak in my work, certainly. After a few years of documenting the small business, it was time to start my own. I wanted to make the most ridiculous kind of business I could. The Unicycle Shop functioned as a real unicycle rental shop for one weekend. Unicycles were available for 10 cents an hour. I told an old friend who’s now a venture capitalist about my project. He asked if I’d ever figured out how many hours I’d have to rent unicycles in order to break even. Doing the math hadn’t even crossed my mind. —August 2009 22 Orange 20 Bikes, Los Angeles, CA (Small Business Series), 2008, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 24 Thelma’s, Los Angeles, CA (Small Business Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 25 Sharp-All Keys, Pacoima, CA (Small Business Series), 2006, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 26 What’s Your Hobby, St. Augustine, FL (Along the Dixie Highway Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 27 Troy’s Bar-Be-Que, Boynton Beach, FL (Along the Dixie Highway Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 28 Insurance, Montebello, CA (Small Business Series), 2005, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 29 Rhonda’s Thrift Store, New & Uzed, Avon Park, FL (Along the Dixie Highway Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 30 Know Your Future, Los Angeles, CA (Small Business Series), 2003, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 31 Ochopee Post Office, Ochopee, FL (Along the Dixie Highway Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 32 Bikes to Go, Miami, FL (Along the Dixie Highway Series), 2007, C-print, 30 x 40 in. 33 34 35 No on 8 (ghost), 2009 I Used to be Part of the Solution. . ., 2009 36 37 When There’s Nothing Left to Burn, 2009 38 39 40 41 Sharrow Sweater, 2009 Never Neverland, 2009 42 43 If Nothing Changes, It Changes Nothing, 2007 44 45 Where There’s Drink There’s Always Danger, 2009 46 47 Lisa Anne, Lisa Anne (Cheap Trick), 2007 48 49 My Jewish Grandma is Voting for Obama/Chosen People Choose Obama, 2008 If Nothing Changes, It Changes Nothing, 2007 50 51 Sharrow Sweater, 2009 52 53 Everything I Touch Turns to $old, 2006/2009 Everything I Touch Turns to Mold, 2009 Sell Art, Buy Shoes, 2007 54 55 Never Forget (Knock Knock), 2007 Five Years in Iraq, 2008 The Thing I Like Most About the War on Terror is the Language, 2006 56 57 Installation view, UMMA Projects: Lisa Anne Auerbach, University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 11–October 11, 2009 Lisa Anne Auerbach 2004 b. 1967, Ann Arbor, MI Education 1994, MFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA 1990, BFA, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY Selected Solo Exhibitions 2009 Take This Knitting Machine and Shove It, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK The Tract House, Threewalls Project Room, Chicago 2008 Election Sweater Project, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen Printed Matter, New York 2007 David Patton Los Angeles, Los Angeles Gavlak, Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach 2006 Gavlak, West Palm Beach Right On, Weatherman, CPK Kunsthal, Copenhagen 1995 Self-Titled Debut, Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Los Angeles Selected Group Exhibitions 2009 Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Prescriptions, Acme Gallery, Los Angeles Craftwerk 2.0, Jönköpings Läns Museum, Jönköping, Sweden 2008 The Station, Miami Cottage Industry, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore The Way That We Rhyme, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Fare una Scenata/Making a Scene, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples 2018: Fate, Fortune, Coming Times, Less Than Three Gallery, Long Island City, NY Gestures of Resistance: Craft, Performance, and the Politics of Slowness, Gray Matters, Dallas Vested Interest, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI 2007 Read Me, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA Words Fail Me, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI High Desert Test Sites 07, Joshua Tree, CA Common Threads, Confederation Centre for the Arts, Prince Edward Island, and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art & Design, Canada Pass It On: Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture, A&D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago 2006 Open Walls 2, White Columns, New York Street Signs and Solar Ovens: Socialcraft in Los Angeles, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles Locale, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles Miss America (with Aleksandra Mir), Rental Gallery, Los Angeles Interstate, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY High Desert Test Sites 5, Joshua Tree, CA 2005 Interlopers Hiking Club (with Andrea Zittel), Frieze Projects, London Political Textile Show/Knitknit Release, Threewalls, Chicago 2002 1997 1996 1995 1994 Publish and Be Damned, Cubitt, London Groundhog Day, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane, Australia High Desert Test Sites 1, 2, Joshua Tree, CA Her Eyes are A Blue Million Miles (Version), Three Day Weekend, London Wunderbar, Kunstverein, Hamburg 246, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and Mark Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles Skin Deep, Thomas Soloman’s Garage, Los Angeles P.L.A.N.: Photography Los Angeles Now, LACMA, Los Angeles Smells Like Vinyl, Roger Meriens, New York Thanks; Dave’s Not Here; Red Rover, Red Rover, Three Day Weekend, Los Angeles Gorgeous Politics: 8th Annuale, LACE, Los Angeles Selected Publication Projects 2008 Charted Patterns for Sweaters That Talk Back (New York: Printed Matter) 2007 Unicycle Shop (Paris: Onestar Press) 2006 Road Bike Road Notes (for Interstate) (New York: Socrates Sculpture Park) 2005 Everyday Hiking (with the Interlopers Hiking Club) American Stuccolow (with Louis Marchesano) Last Week in The Project Space 2004 Saddlesore 2003 High Desert Test Sites Publication 1, 2, 3, 5 1998 American Homebody Selected Bibliography 2009 Patricia Maloney,“500 Words,” Artforum.com (September) Chris Wiley, “The Office,” Abitare (June) Jacquie Byron, “Knit ... With Grit: Politics and the Knitting Needle,” Get Creative (May) 2008 Daniel Fuller, “Comics of Salvation,” Art On Paper (November/December) Andrew Berardini, “Lisa Anne Auerbach: Auerbachtoberfest,” Art Review 18 (January) Erin Polgreen, “Art Space: Body Count Mittens Project” In These Times (April) 2007 Leigh Witchel, “Extreme Knitting,” Knit.1 Magazine (Spring) Kerry Wills, The Close-Knit Circle: American Knitters Today (Westport, CT: Praeger) Sabrina Gschwandtner, KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang) Amy Spencer, The Crafter Culture Handbook (London: Marion Boyars) Nicole Antebi, Colin Dickey, and Robby Herbst, Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices (Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest) 2006 Jonathan T.D. Neil, “Interstate: The American Road Trip,” Art Review 2 (August) Sabrina Gschwandtner, “USA Knitting Today,” Rowan Magazine (Spring/Summer) Shana Dambrot, “Lisa Anne Auerbach: Fear No Sweater,” Fiber Arts (January/February) Irene Tatsos, Fair Exchange (Pomona: Millard Sheets Gallery) This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition UMMA Projects: Lisa Anne Auerbach at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 11–October 11, 2009 It is made possible in part by the University of Michigan Office of the President, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and UMMA’s New Visions Venture Fund. The artist and curator would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to this project: Eugenia Bell, Katie Derosier, Sarah Gavlak, Karen Goldbaum, Nelson Hallonquist, Tish Holbrook, John Hummel, Nikolai Jacobs, Courtney Lacy, Louis Marchesano, Stephanie Miller, Lori Mott, and Ruth Slavin. Image credits: pp 2-3: Randal Stegmeyer; cover, pp. 4, 16, 34-35, 37, 43-44, 50-51, 54-57: Lisa Anne Auerbach; p. 39: Sharon Lockhart; pp. 40-41: Brian Pescador; p. 47: Louis Marchesano; pp. 48-49, 52-53: Jacob Proctor All artworks © 2009 Lisa Anne Auerbach, courtesy of the artist and Gavlak, West Palm Beach, FL Publication © 2009 The Regents of the University of Michigan Julia Donovan Darlow, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bingham Farms Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Olivia P. Maynard, Goodrich Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park S. Martin Taylor, Grosse Pointe Farms Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio University of Michigan Museum of Art 525 South State Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1354 www.umma.umich.edu Curator and Series Editor: Jacob Proctor Editor: Eugenia Bell Designer: Tish Holbrook Printed in the United States by Phoenix Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan ISBN: 1930561121 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009938324