Bordando el Manto Terrestre by Remedios Varo (1961)
(“Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle,” center of triptych here)
| book we passed around, which I’d “randomly” grabbed from my office: Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. As we’re not reading Pynchon this term, I’ll postpone the anecdote about his mystory in relation to his novels; more evocative today is the painting on Mattessich’s cover — which is (seemingly) a minor & early reference in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In the narrative, the heroine (Oedipa) identifies in a moment of great sadness — Punctum? — with the seamstresses trapped in the tower, who are sewing the material that comprises the land & seas , the “tapestry” of the earth… |  |
- Relay: we parallel “structural role” of Oedipa, in her engaging with art — feeling as though “I’m charged with making something…?” (rather than “I’ll buy/wear that knitted product!”) Keep in mind responsibility inherent in our method…
- Analogy: recall/review Ulmer’s discussion and theoretical musings on making felt (pp.35-6), as a new understanding of “text.” ThreadWork (embroidering / knitting / quilting) works in this same “category” of our experiment — especially to remind us about our recent examinations of
process, material objects (materiality), and Family dimension
- (I’ve added this last part from my popcycle — as my mom has knit a few items after being taught by her grandmother — with the hypothesis that folks’ ancestors might have made quilts in the 19th century. Although this could also shift into the Historical/Disciplinary or Cultural/Myth dimensions for another project.)
- Contrast: Narrative “threads” are rarely “sewn up” neatly or nicely in life experiences, unlike the dominant conventions of popular culture (Victorian novel → Hollywood Screenplay → TV dramas → ?).
Consequently, we will not try to “smooth out” the seams (seems, or semes); nor will we disregard the “needle” (analogy = instrument for composition?) and time/stages. (more on this later)
More important, we’ll want to recognize the many threads “running” (?) throughout our entire popcycle, if not within every dimension — attentive (“attuned”) to which emerge prominent or secondary/complementary, whether continuous or fragmentary…
- Theory: This book and image provoked my thinking about sewing with a connection to Deleuze & Guattari — rather than painted triptychs (another mini-lecture postponed, Deleuze & painting).
- Ulmer references these theorists in the “felt-making” discussion (which I’d forgotten until reviewing now!); he poses a crucial question for the method and project: “is felt homogeneous or not?” (p.36).
This issue directly concerns, with great import, the concept of “choral category” in chapter 4 — whether one mood/voice can emerge prominent (yes, Stimmung), without our disregarding all of the associations (as Literate Mode would insist).
— crucial lesson: “A choral category gathers and holds heterogeneous information in place by means of a shared mood or atmosphere. The widesite is our personal chora, showing the winnowing system of our identity that sorts the world of our experience into a pattern of coherence” (Ulmer, 101).
- Deleuze (sometimes with Guattari) is the premier philosopher of heterogeneity and experience; in the same discussion of felt and fabric that Ulmer quotes, they theorize patchwork against the territorial space (structure/domination) of embroidery — as in Varo’s painting.
- “Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery.
But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way: there is no center; its basic motif (“block”) is composed of a single element; the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in “crazy” patchwork, which fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the texture of the fabrics).- “She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture, trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out of them without using her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fingers.” [— William Faulkner, Sartoris (1956); quoted in Deleuze & Guattari.]
An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a Riemannian space, or vice versa.” (476, A Thousand Plateaus)- “The smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that “smooth” does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal space prefiguring op[tical] art.” (477)
- lesson for praxis (project composition): assemblage is comprised of heterogeneous elements, with an emergent mood-tone (tune) of Stimmung — potentially, resonance among/between the elements, understood (produced?) through my emblem (discovered by mapping the popcycle).
More about resonance and assemblage later in the experiment;
but now, we see the vital role of chora for discovery/invention.
more threadwork, from Derrida this time:
“sheaf seems to mark more appropriately that the assemblage to be proposed has the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning—or of force—to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others.” (Différance 1968)