080016 PS Case Study II/III: Fiber Art (2020S)

What does it mean to speak of “fiber art”? Consider, to start, two lists of techniques. First: painting, drawing, sculpting, casting, printing, etching. Second: weaving, twisting, braiding, knitting, knotting, sewing. The former group has significantly shaped the history of “art,” while the latter techniques were long relegated to another related arena, namely that of “craft.” The differences have been boiled down to “liberal” versus “mechanical” arts, creative originality versus amateur utility, even freedom versus necessity. Importantly, the latter group of techniques has also typically been associated throughout modernity with the domestic handiwork of women. “Fiber art” stages the fraying of these historical divisions. It foregrounds materiality, tactility, and an “eccentric” form of abstraction (to borrow a term from Lucy Lippard) in a manner that troubles not only art history’s canon, but also our critical vocabularies.

This course examines the entanglement of fiber arts with feminist movements, from Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s to contemporary “Craftivism,” as well as with performance and body art. We will look at a number of artists, many of them women, whose work decenters the relationship of art and everyday life and reconceives of the political potential of artistic practice. Students will be introduced to work by artists including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Olga de Amaral, Neda Al-Hilali, Harmony Hammond, Sheila Hicks, Ritzi and Peter Jacobi, Kay Sekimachi, Lenore Tawney, Cecilia Vicuña, Ingrid Wiener, and Claire Zeisler, as well as to figures along the periphery of the “fiber art” movement, such as Eva Hesse, Judy Chicago, Joseph Beuys, Mike Kelley, Franz Erhard Walther, and Hélio Oiticica.

Please note that this course is designed for BA students actively enrolled in the art history program of the University of Vienna. Exchange students and Erasmus students are asked to contact the course instructor before enrolling.

This writing and discussion intensive course will foreground critical thinking. Students will develop skills in close-looking and close-reading, analytic and critical argumentation, as well as the facility for written expression in a manner that will be helpful to students at university and beyond.

N.B. This course is conducted in English.