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Arts & Communication Textile agency in art

fields of meaning. Metatextile has covered the most diverse subjective experiences into intertextual networks, create
themes related to corporeal existence, social relations, performative actions that reinforce the visual narrative,
politics of the living, human and non-human relations, and invite viewer engagement.
challenging prevalent narratives, hierarchies, and value Postmodern thinking has liberated textile art from the
systems. It is also noteworthy that postmodernism’s narrow definition of applied art. Fabric, as a warm, soft,
attention to the textile medium and the textile nature and flexible material that absorbs personal and collective
of life was followed by a material turn focused on the experiences, has inspired the intimate and monumental
2
powers of matter and the materiality of experience. The works of Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago,
movement of new materialism “emphasized the need for Sheila Hicks, Jeanne Claude, Christo and a host of other
recalling the concreteness of existential fields, with regard prominent artists, in which “cloth operates as a conceptual
to both the bodily dimension and to non-binary object- strategy to challenge the hegemony of traditional art
subject relations” . In this perspective, textile becomes not media” . Textile installations and soft art sculptures
[2]
[4]
only a critical device for interrogating the complexity of invite viewers to look through the prism of fabrics at the
contemporary worlds but also a field that promotes material surfaces of identity and memory, body and consciousness,
sensibility and sparks the creation of new ontologies. individual and social life, and the mysteries that lie
The article discusses the textile approach in Žaltauskaitė beyond them. With the new tapestry movement and
Grašienė’s artwork, developing a cross-analysis of her fiber art, textiles have become part of contemporary art,
work. The textile approach is formed through art practice, which, since the end of the last century, has increasingly
encouraging experiments with materials, metaphoric focused on the medium of fabric, the substance of the
concepts, and ideas. The article reveals the conceptual material, and materiality in general . Textile art, free
[5]
metaphors of draperies, folds, and different pleats of matters, from genre restrictions, is both integral and individual
indicated by their connection with textile discourse, which within contemporary art. It is integral because it is a
expands the ontological dimension of textiles. multifaceted practice involving different media and new
It can be observed that the entirety of Žaltė’s work is creative discourses. However, it is also individual because
like a multi-layered textile text. As a universal sign system, it is dominated by a kind of “textile thinking” or “textile
fabric and text (Latin textum means woven fabric, tissue) philosophy” that allows us to penetrate the meaning of
share the same roots. The undulating folds of fabrics, as fabric, expanding our perception. It is on this basis that
portrayed in her artworks, resemble non-linear, and cloth culture has developed into a broad interdisciplinary
3
multi-meaning texts in which the author herself hangs field of creation and research .
like a spider’s thread. Roland Barthes beautifully unfolded The language of textiles has also been updated by
the metaphor of the text as a spider’s web, describing contemporary philosophers who recognize weaving as a
the textility of the contemporary world, its web-like unique form of thinking and knowing. It expresses, in its
pattern, where an irrepressible process of production and own way, lived experience and an ontological relationship
signification of meanings takes place: with the world. Michel Serres saw textiles as a living
“Text means tissue; but whereas hitherto we have metaphor for our times, representing a world knitted
always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made together by networks of communication. However, it
veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning also represents a distinctive sphere of the feminine, the
(truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the intimate, the mundane, the sensuous, and the tactile,
generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a describing primordial proximity to the expressions of
perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue – this texture the world. Moreover, the cloth is always a matter that
– the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving connects intermediate states or positions, signifying a
in the constructive secretions of its web. Were we fond presence between two modes of being. In the words of the
of neologisms, we might define the theory of the text philosopher,
as a hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s “Veil, canvas, tissue, chiffon, fabric, goatskin and
web)” . sheepskin, known as parchment, the flayed hide of a
[3]
Žaltauskaitė Grašienė’s Jacquard-loomed tapestries and calf, known as vellum, paper, supple and fragile, linens
installations open up the sensory forms of life, incorporate and silks, all the forms of planes or twists in space,
bodily envelopes or writing supports, able to flutter
2 On the multifaceted frames of the “material turn,” see
Liedeke Plate, Lászlo Muntean, Airin Farahman (eds.) 3 On the dynamic development of textile studies, see: The
Materials of Culture. Approaches to Materials in Cultural Handbook of Textile Culture, edited by Janis Jefferies, Diana
Studies. Belefeld: Verlag, 2023. Wood Conroy and Hazel Clark. London” Bloomsbury, 2016.

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 2 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1867