Artists. . . act in the interstices between old and new, in the possibility of spaces that are as yet socially unrealizable. - Lucy R. Lippard

it ain't easy bein' a hypertext post modern woman- i can't write about myself but i am inextricably linked to many many things -Stephanie Block

A beginning must be made here, though in my mind there is not one. Nor in my experience of the things I want to tell you about. It is more like a shifting group of convergences which seem to make better sense arrayed in dimension, yet the intersections can all be reached along their moving connections. The constellation of a lace shawl perhaps, floating in the breeze.

One might say it began with the first time I saw that another writer had added something to my own work in the HiPitched Voices wing of Hypertext Hotel. What she added was something I did not particularly like.I sat staring at it on my computer screen for some time in a total dilemma. It isn't that I did not want someone to write into my work; on the contrary, I have been saying for years that I hope readers of my hypertext fiction will write it themselves, that is, change, remove, or add to what I had done. When people ask me how I would feel if someone actually did what I proposed, I have always said I would love it. But now I sat face to face with a development I had not considered. This addition to my own writing was not very good. I was annoyed, first with the writing which was not very good, and then even more intensely with myself for seeming to betray my own egalitarian, open-access principles. I felt guilty, as if I had caught myself in a racist thought. I finally decided to dismiss all the annoyance, the guilt, put it out of my mind, just forget about it. Predictably, that turned out to be very difficult to do. Not only did the contradiction in my own belief system keep nagging me, but I also kept hearing other people dismiss the writing in Hypertext Hotel, calling it uneven, naming it the rabble, opinions which I resisted furiously, but also seemed to hold myself, somewhere deep in my own personal aesthetic. I was very startled to realize that the old question of Quality had risen as if it had not been thoroughly chewed over, spat out, and pronounced finished, along with the avant-garde, long ago. Apparently, I at least, should have done a bit more digesting, because in my dismay over the "not very good" writing in the MOO, I was imposing cultural values as if they were universal, absolute standards.

The problems here are difficult. The floating shawl is not the right image, because though it moves, it is too contained, and too much of a plane. The real configuration of factors is not as graceful as lace. It is messier and a lot more complicated. That the Internet, and electronic culture generally, is bringing the old questions of Quality & Value into high relief is critical to the growing, insistent need to re-examine cultural assumptions. This may actually be the place – in virtual space – where we find the means to change in the ways required of a truly intercultural society.

For that is really the issue. Until we understand and incorporate – embody – the challenges of multicultural communities, we will only be living more of the past, continually refusing, despite our amazing new technologies, to take up our best future.

Let me begin again. I want to speak more about things that aren't very good. A few years ago, I was trying to dream of the perfect wedding gift for my daughter and the man she was about to marry. In wandering about the small towns along the coast of Lake Michigan, where I was staying at the time, I happened to see in a village variety store, buried deep in an old vitrine and nearly hidden by a clutter of odds and ends, a large stack of faded, stained molas. When I asked the owner of the store about them, he said with a wave of his hand that they were his rag bag. He meant that they were in such bad shape that no one was particularly interested in them. The antique dealers had already picked through them for anything valuable. I gathered as many as I could afford and left thinking I had been blessed by one of my daughter's angels.

At home, I laid out the stack of faded, worn molas on the bed, arranging and rearranging them, and finally began to piece them together for a wedding quilt. I had tried to clean them with various methods before starting to piece them because they were the rag bag after all, and they were musty and rough. Speckled areas of mold had become permanent and part of the fabric. Most of them had large stains which simply would never release. The truth is, not many people I showed the molas to were as enthusiastic about this idea for a wedding gift as I was. Though perfectly clean now, the fabric was faded, torn, discolored, and several of the panels were very badly done to begin with, even antique dealers didn't want them. But I continued because the project was born of an angel. There was something that moved me as I handled the multiple layers of the molas. Stitching them together I kept imagining what the makers' lives had been like. I wondered when each mola had actually been made and worn. I saw brown stains on some of them and thought either blood, or chocolate ice cream. Did they have chocolate ice cream? What were their lives like? How did it feel to step out in the sun the first time a woman wore this particular piece? Or this one, that is barely together with fat, wadded sections and long loose stitches, was it a child's, just learning to sew? And another, with stitches that pick up no more than two threads at a time, so perfectly even and straight in narrow labyrinthine lines of appliqué, did it belong to a matriarch who had spent long years perfecting her skill?

I imagined these stories as I sewed. Then, I couldn't resist making a mola myself. When I did – a small one, only about a quarter the size of one of the Kuna pieces – it was not particularly fine work, but the next one was better, and the one after that better still. I stitched these beginner's pieces into the quilt top, adding new stories to old. Next went in bits of fabric that had come from things belonging to my daughter, yet another story. I embroidered words in the gaps which tried to connect the far times and places of all this different work. For the quilting itself, I decided to use the ravines of the appliqué patterns as guides, with the idea that the back of the quilt would be a different version, or view, of the front, the quilting design a gathering of concentric geometries, a salmagundi of mazes, traced in red thread on blue fabric. This was the first thing I had ever quilted myself by hand. I left in all the learning stitches at the center, the ones which stray nervously out of line, inelegant, but persistent. I kept them for the story of my learning to rock a needle as fine as a hair and too short for my fingers. They are graceless yet full of grace, these stitches, matching many that lumber eagerly across some of the Kuna molas on the front.

This quilt, made of so much awkwardness and lack of skill mixed right in with great experience, is now a beguiling thing to see. And unquestionably, it was not just me who made it so. This was an unconsciously multicultural work. I did not realize until well into it what was happening beneath my fingers. The thing that strikes me most about it now is how much character and strength are contributed by the worst-made molas in the array. The contextual shift has an enlightening effect on my supposedly sophisticated eye. I have to admit that during the initial piecing together I considered leaving out a couple of these which, alone, are fairly sad and dreary things. But some intuition made me go ahead and include them. I think now that it was the same intuition which had me feeling guilty when I was upset by the "not very good" writing in the MOO.


But if a raggedy quilt is not enough to show that electronic culture may elicit our best integrative qualities, I have an even more homely example. One which I hope will begin to point to an extended notion of Culture, and a flexible perspective to take in gathering our way to a multiplicity that works.

Once, long ago, my sister-in-law Shirley gave me a Christmas gift of a set of embroidered kitchen towels. As is typical for the women in that family, she had embroidered them herself. The set was a kit ordered from a needlework crafts catalog, and it featured a kitten doing some silly thing on each towel. Using pre-designed art was not objectionable to my sister-in-law, nor to her midwestern rural family. She knew that lots of people could draw a cat holding a pie better than she could. What she did do herself, however, in the most intuitive way, was choose a color of thread that emphasized the pie instead of the kitten, and then she embroidered the letter K in the center of it. This represented the culture she knew and wanted to name, and so, contextualize and reinforce. The set of towels as a Christmas gift spoke her respect for my position as the wife of her only brother, and the mother of her niece and nephew. In her life's community, this is the woman's position, as mother, wife, and caretaker. But the really subtle and telling detail is that letter K, which is my son's first name initial, as well as his grandfather's (Shirley's father). In this family, pies are made for men. They are gifts from the women, though never called that. A pie is one of life's delights and a woman usually makes one with a man in mind. A son, or husband, or father. . . . As it happens, both K men in the family are famous aficionados of pie.

Even deeper in these layers of familial culture is that my sister-in-law did not choose to name the pie on the towel for my husband which would have been a direct reference to our marital relationship, obviously still a sexual one. The slight tinge of indelicacy was unconsciously sorted out as less favorable than the reference to motherhood and, more indirectly, to daughterhood. Add to this the significant factor of Shirley's widowhood, and we enter the most local of cultures, the individual, the place where culture turns around to become again what it once was – community.

. . . the colored world was not so much a neighborhood as a condition of existence. And though our own world was seemingly self-contained, it impinged upon the white world. . . . in almost every direction. - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Is the difference between what we want to call good work and mediocre work not only a difference of skill, but also always a difference in culture? Could the learner/teacher relationship for instance, even in an all white suburban school, be seen as an example of a sort of cross-cultural process? Not in the colonizing, subsuming sense we are used to, but rather as the best teachers and students intuitively try to make it, a sharing of differences and a new mixing of ideas for each of them.

In a review of a biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe, E.L. Doctorow included an interesting description of the Hartford Seminary for women founded by Stowe's sister Catharine, who while choosing a rigorous curriculum for the school, at the same time "foreswore the giving of awards or other male means of motivating students by competition. Instead [she] installed a system of sisterhood that called upon advanced pupils to teach the less advanced on the principle that whoever knew something should feel privileged to share that knowledge." What really interests me here is not the Hartford Seminary asking the older, more knowledgeable, students to help the younger, less knowledgeable ones. That is a very old method of education, among the most ancient of all perhaps. No, it is the idea of privilege residing in sharing rather than in the owning of knowledge. We almost have to redefine the word "privilege" in order to fathom such a concept because it's very hard to imagine freely sharing as holding power over another person. This is not the same as the so-called Golden Rule, which has us treat others kindly only out of self-interest, or fear of being mistreated. Rather, this privilege of sharing is more akin to the root meaning of responsibility, that is, the ability to respond, the cultivation of a connection that is worthwhile for itself.

I want to take hold of the third person of the present. For me, that is what painting is, the chance to take hold of the third person of the present, the present itself. - Helene Cixous

We utter pronouncements like, "not very good writing/painting/thinking" in comparing works which supposedly partake of the same context, an anthology, a workshop, or a classroom. It may be perfectly valid to recognize that in the same anthology, for instance, some works will be better-written than others. But exactly what establishes a context isn't always easy to determine. The covers of a book, or the walls of a classroom, aren't necessarily enough to keep their "contents" – human minds – perfectly contained. Boundaries are usually more permeable than we think. If we were to attempt to track how contexts continually reconfigure themselves, we would find it impossible to cross-index enough. Might a fiber artist in New York City, for example, legitimately claim that the kit embroidery of a farm woman in Missouri is not as good as her own work? Or might my sister-in-law look at a magazine photograph of an exhibition of fiber sculpture at MoMA and shake her head in bewilderment? Her culture would ask, "what can you do with something like that? why would anyone want it?" Yet both these women, seemingly so alien to one another, are both artists, both fiber artists, and it is conceivable that they could inhabit the same space and appreciate the work the other has done. Where boundaries are most permeable is probably at the intracultural state.


Continue - Part 2 of Fretwork