Louisa Elderton and Rebecca Morrill, eds, Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art

A hardback volume, Vitamin T is an encyclopaedic, global survey of more than 100 artists, chosen by art world professionals — critics, curators and museum directors — for their work with threads, stitching and textiles. Though an expensive purchase, it has a seductive cover, lavish colour illustrations, a very accessibly written introduction by Jenelle Porter and is filled with concise biographical information. For textile historians, the texts and biographical inserts may prove frustratingly limited in scope, but it is a useful catalogue for investors. The book is overseen by editors Louisa Elderton and Rebecca Morrill who get tangled up, in the Preface (p. 9), in a dilemma that haunts many writers and theorists in the textile arts field. On the one hand, many of the works included in Vitamin T do not fit any predetermined classification of material, technique or medium-specific discipline. They fall somewhere between painting, sculpture and installation. Indeed, many of the artists utilise various practices of weaving, knotting, embroidery and knitting, and an expanded range of materials not normally associated with the making of textiles — burlap, plastic, wood, rubber — and so avoid being pigeonholed. Given this, as the editors admit, the book’s subtitle, Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art, actually suggests a scope far narrower than its contents. In fact, by attempting to be pluralistic in choice, Vitamin T paradoxically offers no more than a fast-moving snapshot of a new hierarchy of acceptable entries into a very particular art world market. It is worth reading Jenelle Porter’s introduction to Vitamin T. Previously senior curator at ICA Boston, USA, Porter was responsible for curating the 2014 survey show, Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present. This traced, in Porter’s view, a revolution in fibre art that happened during the 1960s, a decade that attempted to blur the lines between art and craft. The term ‘fibre art’ came into use by mostly American curators and art historians to describe the work of the artist-craftsperson following the Second World War, which saw a sharp increase in the design and production of ‘art fabric’. In the 1950s, as the contributions of craft artists became more recognised — not just in fibre but also in clay and other media — an increasing number of weavers began binding fibres into non-functional forms as works of art. As outlined by Porter in both Vitamin T and Fiber, the art world has long held a bias against fibre-based artists and their work. Often historically gendered feminine, carrying connotations of intimacy and domesticity, fibre compositions were relegated to the realm of craft, far from the ranks of fine art. Porter staked a claim for positioning fibre more firmly proximate to the explorations that have propelled abstract forms of art since the 1960s, and the Boston catalogue profiled a significant number of the field’s most influential artists, most of whom were white American or European women operating outside New York. Some, like Olga de Amaral and Anne Wilson, are also included in Vitamin T, though the latter includes a number of Black British and American practitioners, which is to be welcomed. One notable example is Sanford Biggers, based in Harlem, who has long been fascinated with cloth, especially ‘African’ cloth from Ghana, and whose work connects to Europe’s first-ever published treatise on African art. The fibre art movement may have lacked the critical analysis that attended mainstream movements: art in fibre was covered by Craft magazine in England but not Artforum in the USA, such was Book Reviews