A Stitch In Time
1066 was the year a comet appeared in the sky; boats set sail, horses galloped, arrows fell and blood spilled, radically transforming power structures in Britain and France. We know this because of the survival of the Bayeux Tapestry, this soft and fragile fabric was part of the dialogue between Macron and May during the infamous impasse of EU negotiations, it was agreed it could be exhibited in the UK but this is yet to transpire.
Substantial research into the structural integrity of the tapestry was needed and conservation undertaken. On that thematic or running with threads of materialism and its fault lines or subtexts, not many kilometres from Bayeux is the legendary Château de Cerisy La Salle. For those who know this modest bastion has disseminated the soft and incisive power of French intellectual thought through its illustrious meetings and publications.
Waugh Office as a curatorial agent, disposed to placing things together and in dialogue, imagines an opportunity for artists and theorists to sample small details of these contingent histories and deploy contemporary technologies to animate ideas and address a series of questions including; ‘What is the soft power of art?’
Politicians have adopted this phrase but perhaps its diplomatic idiom needs some unstitching and what better place to start than with arguably the most famous textile artwork in the world The Bayeux Tapestry?
Château de Cerisy-la-Salle hosted: “La Tapisserie de Bayeux : l’art de broder l’Histoire”.
This was an article published in a bilingual text “The Bayeux Tapestry : Embroidering the Facts of History”. The title in English following the pun in French is typical of ruses deployed by the more famous psychoanalysts, philosophers, artists and writers who came to define a cultural dominance in critical circles. However was the tapestry subjected to any plays and rhetorics of deconstruction or were those sessions more about the technical insights of researchers and traditional historians?
Where were trans - border rhetorics - the artistic voices exploring the erotic charge and violences emerging along its margins? Where were the virtualisations of its imagined territory in reference to The Gulf War Did Not Take Place 1995, published in English; a mediation on propaganda and visual effects in the determination of what might or might not constitute a war and its representations?
We have in our research begun to answer the question: “what is soft power?“
This begins again on the roads back to that Chateau and dialogues that occurred there in the post war period. In particular we are thinking for an instant that is both now and forever; held in the possibility of rearing ‘peace’ after a war and the jests and gestures that might be required to understand how Martin Heidegger in 1957 stood next to Jacques Lacan and others and thought you might teach peace through ideas of ‘origin’ and a question “What is that - Philosophy?’” perhaps naively trying to herd an audience back into a world not torn apart at its origins and in fragments.
We leave that instant moment to decay —its own thinking —- as they say of images shared through encrypted messages, a velocity of decay and return that suits the time of France after its Olympics and the UK post Brexit, both nations in concerned by the return of ‘origin’ myths in culture and politics.
horses doing headstands ...
We foreword to a text that has written itself and must occupy this place with an attention to how we can adopt a running stitch that loops in diverse cultures into our leap of faith; a thread caught and made visible like a spiders silk in the summer sun, an unwrapping of the multiplicity in a web of connections and resistance; what is the most gentle resistance or soft power that can be a foreword to history; after Gaza and other atrocities remain very possible? Could the tapestry of Bayeux be such a text?
How could such silence breed so many gentle hours in the threading and stitching of narratives that even through extremes of chaos can raise a smile? How can horses doing headstands and men whose heads are detached from their bodies release elicit sympathies? Threads that solicit us to consider this Coronation prologue, also a pretext, or excuse even for women to come together?
In a general multiplying of hands and eyes to own the moment however finite and in owing it disrupt the control of power, which also defers to war by any means to achieve its ends —- which are always also —-its own destruction; according to Michel Foucault, who is also possibly riding and farting in foldings of this ancient work of ludic escape.
There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo.
It is in their escape that the velocity of arrows and horses would signify the end of the Viking epoch; of axe and shield and announce the turning of the world towards new domains of antagonism and land grabs; Holy Wars and the deterritorialisation of tribal systems under ideologies of a single homogenising witness or truth. This relic then is a border work that draws in the world; in its woad, indigo and madder red.
Under the signs of the astrological and the almighty, fatalism of monarchy ordained by God himself via Rome, this text comes to displace the rural and marginal excellence of the Abbys of Anglo Saxon Britain with their scroll and knot works; those dark age retellings of the gospel; the tapestry unfolds a linear treatise on how to fix history in the image of its authors. But there is the catch, the thread that sticks and breaks, too taught in its presumptive power and not thinking through the issue of the medium.
There was no Marshall McLuhan to warn Bishop Odo that somebody would have to code the work. It is a neoliberal dilemma, CEOs, President’s and various arbiters of power —- will not —- because they cannot —- do the coding or stitching together of a real material moment ; a point in time that can be interacted with, commented upon and conserved using reversible protocols. In the making an aesthetic emerges not as a synthesis in the sense of an artificial rendering of a tank in the Bayeux Tapestry using a freemium version of an AI application (which will not render sexual images unless a subscription is paid) but rather in the slower subconscious pulling of shapes in abstract lines, the close lines and stitches of the embroiderer and the tight lines of intuitive code.
this slippage of code hallucinated their own histories.
It is into this time between coding and becoming that we would want to be with others; those from around the world who have found in the hands and faces of the subjects of Bayeux some slippery signalling of oppressed people and have in this slippage of code hallucinated their own histories and new versions of our history.
The South African Women’s Project’s; ‘The Keiskamma Tapestry' started in 2004 for example found the 1000 year old testimony resonates with the struggles for justice of Black women under Apartheid and the ongoing struggles of people at the margins of a new South Africa. This work is on permanent display where politicians can see it daily and it holds them to account— to deliver the promise of a better life that honours the dead who have paved the way. It is on loan from Standard Bank Corporate Art Collection, South Africa.
Did these embroiders theorise as they stitched and placed a ritualistic energy in their work? Is it ritual and theory which haunts and connects them to that scene in Kent almost a millennia ago? In smoke and failing light those Kentish women worked on the tapestry in the aftermath of 1066 and all that blood and spoiled flesh, marked and humiliated bodies, oppressed to the point of disappearance, dehumanised for speaking the wrong language and erased or so it seemed in the formation of the figures before them.
ideas are stitched like threads and needles.
It seems that women saw the tapestry form as a way of reclaiming history, taking the grand, violent scene or battlefield and transforming it into patterns and fantasy. How can this be possible without it also being a betrayal of the dead? It is pragmatic to treat their inheritance as one would a serious and fatal injury.
A wound like Palestine for example. ‘The Palestinian History Tapestry’ has traveled across the world to share its regional stitches and style with international audiences. In Edinburgh in 2021 it was exhibited and celebrated with little sense of how history can always take a more ferocious and brutal turn. Again as Michel Foucault said, ‘ My ideas are like a thimble and needle to unstick, the neatly embroidered history of annihilation and abuse that is written on the bodies of the losers and the dead. ‘
Of course Michel Foucault did not really say that but instead something about petrol bombs, but we are beyond that style of resistance, or slavery to the origin of a sentiment or theory. We are instead together and sticking to our collective thread of remembrance and turning back to Ariadne and all those Greek myths that Martin Heidegger supposed would grow back over the Third Reich and make Europe great again. We are here not for ethnic show trials but ethical show how’s ... how to break out of the labyrinth.
The Black Gold Tapestry.
We turn lastly in this brief forward step to the work of Canadian artist Sandra Sawatzky, this is an individual work The Black Gold Tapestry but tells a collective story of fossil fuels. it was an epic and obsessive work of hours and hours of stitching week in and week out to achieve. In those hours we like to imagine the artist was also in some invisible dialogue with sisters around the world who were also concerned about the climate crisis and the stitches required to pull the earth out of its catastrophic turn.
The artist has calculated a sixth of a life spent on the task, we do not know how long it took to make the Bayeux Tapestry but we do know that for almost a thousand years those stitches have held our attention and inspired lapses of reason and irresponsible speculation.
A tender time that attracts others to relax and reflect on the transformation of natural dyes over time and the slow exposure of the tapestry that might eventually drain it of all colour; a victim of the powers of our Sun made more intense through global warming. An artwork that then would be best read with the fingertips as a tactile surface, camouflaged to the eyes of history.
