Fabric With Feeling
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday August 3, 1990
THE AUSTRALIAN National Gallery has distinguished itself over the last two or three years by a series of encyclopedic historical surveys of Australian art, such as the monumental drawing and print exhibitions.
The present display of 280 textiles from South-East Asia is on a similarly vast scale, and covers one of the non-Australian areas in which the gallery holds extensive and important collections.
The gallery's founding director, James Mollison, decided to begin the collection in 1979, after seeing the Splendid Symbols exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington.
The original textile committee included Robyn Maxwell, who in 1985 became curator of Asian Textiles. Over this relatively short time, a significant collection has been assembled, and with it has developed considerable expertise; the ANG's textile conservation department, for example, is said to be unrivalled anywhere in the world.
The textile department's technical, historical and anthropological understanding of these materials is represented in the book that accompanies the exhibition: Robyn Maxwell's Textiles of Southeast Asia, expensive but beautifully illustrated, mostly from the works in the national collection, and full of information about the production and use of the different works exhibited.
An understanding of any art-form requires a basic knowledge of its techniques and applications, but this is perhaps particularly true of one as deceptively approachable as these textiles.
Their decorative appeal, subtle or sumptuous, is immediate; and yet even the appreciation of pattern can be far more finely-tuned by at least an approximate knowledge of the way it is made. Most visitors to the gallery would probably have a rough idea how batik is produced, but perhaps far fewer would know that ikat is made by stretching out the warp or weft threads of the fabric, and tie-dying the patterns before weaving the cloth.
An awareness of this technique, and the effects it produces, will allow quite a different appreciation, for example, of the fineness and virtuosity of double ikat, in which both warp and weft are treated in this way and then woven together, in effect overlaying the two patterns.
Even less familiar will be such techniques as supplementary weft weaving, in which patterns, often of extraordinary tightness and complication, are woven into the cloth itself.
As a general principle, the closer a technique is to painting or dying, the more immediately accessible it seems to be to the uninitiated, while the more intrinsically it is involved in weaving itself, the further it is from familiar points of reference.
Beyond technical considerations, however, is the awareness that all these fabrics, in their patterns, their forms and their uses, have an intimate meaning for the communities in which they originate. They are saturated with symbolic or iconographic references, and ritual or ceremonial associations which we can, of course, understand only from the outside. But unless we read about them, we cannot understand them at all.
One thing that we can, however, understand at once is that these textiles, although they may be in most cases garments (but not for everyday wear), are not fashions.
The contrast throws some of their most characteristic qualities into relief: the fashion industry is based on novelty and obsolescence, new looks which are soon superseded and not intended to last. These fabrics, on the contrary, are beautifully made with much time and care, and become family heirlooms.
At a deeper level, fashion is concerned with achieving a certain "look", whose real meaning is not much more than that the individual is wealthy enough to afford the new look (hence the unequalled vapidity of fashion writing).
The textiles in the exhibition may indeed be used for splendour and display, but this very display, and even when it is also a show of wealth, is inseparable from non-pecuniary considerations of social rank and religious significance.
It is also significant that most of the South-East Asian textiles are, or were, traditionally worn as lengths of fabric wrapped around the body, and not as tailored items of clothing.
The tropical climate made such wraps preferable to the enclosing garments of cold countries; but the practice illustrates, too, quite a different attitude to the aesthetic of clothing.
While we have generally considered cloth as, literally, the "material" from which garments are cut (the cutting imposing the aesthetic form), the peoples of South-East Asia have considered the textile as an end in itself.
The intense and very refined ornamentation of their work makes cutting a fabric of the first quality as unthinkable as cutting a fine rug.
Thus maintained in its integrity, the textile preserves its full symbolic charge of meaning: it is primarily a covering and a protection, both literally and figuratively (in such a cultural context, indeed, the idea of the"literal" has not yet emerged); often the patterns woven or dyed into the fabrics are believed to protect the wearer from evil spirits.
Consequently, such textiles not only become an essential part of civil and religious ceremonies (although again the distinction is artificial in this cultural context), but can be used as shrouds for the corpses of rulers lying in state, or wrapped around a sick child.
It is not necessary to be an expert to see that the traditions from which these fabrics have emerged are remarkably complex.
In our own art history, it is comparatively easy to follow the succession of styles, the connecting lines between movements and significant individuals
But these textiles are not the work of "artists" in the same sense: the tradition, instead of looking like a series of lines, crossing or tangled here and there, is like an intricate web or net.
The weavers were countless women spread across a wide area, each working largely within prescribed structures and yet each producing a personal variation; influenced by the work of neighbouring cultures or by Indian or other foreign examples; and dealing with the different but sometimes simultaneous requirements of native and imported religious beliefs.
Today, under the impact of Westernisation, this complex and delicate culture is unhappily breaking down. To us, however, these textiles are a reminder of the beauty of things invested with the work and care of the hand.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald