Warren Seelig: Machina Textrina

Artist Statement

Warren Seelig

My work is textile in three dimensions.

For me, the textile evokes images of connection and connectedness, of crystalline fields, cellular atmospheres and granular surfaces; of radiating and condensing thread lines, which may cluster and form an illusive plane as light passes through. I see a rich translucent and reflective matrix of obsessively repeating parts and particles, expanding or swelling, and then decreasing in subtle increments.

When yielding to its natural geometric form, textile becomes an energy field that increases in power proportionally to its abstraction and simplicity. It is a field that has balance and precision, a field that is less about communication and more about creating an atmosphere, which may induce an attitude of contemplation.

I am interested in creating forms that have an organic unity and an inner life, which makes them as convincing as certain phenomena found in living things.

The textile is a phenomenon that evokes corporeal vision involving deep, fundamental experience with material and with process as a means of transforming. I have a strong urge to invent, to abstract, and to construct by hand. For me, there is an authentic spiritual element tied to the transformation when ordinary materials assume extraordinary form.

I am interested in creating form that inspires, which lifts the spirit and may ultimately speak of the ineffable.
-Warren Seelig

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Opening Textile

By Philip Beesley, 1996

Warren Seelig's work has developed during the past three decades from loom-woven fabrics into increasingly free and expansive sculptural constructions. There are two large groups of new work at The Museum for Textiles. In the first, many independent figures float; taut membranes held by skeletal structures, catching and holding light. The second group is a series of sculptural fragments supported by a broad plaster shell; on that surface is cast a delicate skin of shadows behind floating metalwork. The structure of weaving runs through both groups of work, a play of warp and weft in myriad cycles of tensing and compressing.

Two fields

The work in Machina Textrina represents a juncture between one group of refined figures and another of fragmentary hybrids.

The first group shows a unified vocabulary based on translucent membranes stretching over circular arrays of metal spokes. This work is the result of many years of development, refining and clarifying the elements and approaching an essential purity. Here, radiating spoke-and-axle skeletons are developed with a variety of stiffened frames and counterweight details. Spokes and membrane manipulations render these as independent bodies. The membranes swell in the centre and thin out at the ends, approaching a structurally optimal form in which accumulated stresses, born by elements near the centre, match the width of the supporting web, in contrast with lesser stresses born by the thinner webs toward the outer parts of each arc.

White Wheel (1996) includes a pair of semicircular spoke arrays held by a tapering sled structure. The arrays face each other, nearly touching, nearly making a circle. Along the edges of the spoke set stretches a nylon ribbon; a pure arc except at its centre where tension from main hanging struts makes a dimpled interval. This is effectively a textile monad: a single warp, supported by a weft series, arranged as a simple quantum - zero increasing to full, and returning to zero.

By contrast, the wall-mounted group is fragmentary. There, instead of extending an established language, Seelig seems to be raising questions. Seelig opens the refined vocabulary of the previous work, embracing layered patterns, subtle graduations of reflection, and complex surface treatment approaching the intertwined calligraphy of a middle-eastern Kufic. A provisional set of parts extends across rough-rendered plaster wall thickets of bent rings, counterbalanced weights, and gossamer scrims so thin that their shadows are more visible than actual forms.

Development

The membrane-and-skeleton constructions culminate 30 years of work. This development is progressive, leading from industrial textile engineering to textile approached as an increasingly free discipline. In fact, the development carries the legacy of several family generations: Warren Seelig is the great-grandson of a superintendent in the Pontoosuc Woolen Mill (Massachusetts), the grandson of a textile machinery designer, and the son of an engineer and inventor of textile machinery. Drawing on this heritage, his early training included engineering foundation studies at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, followed by a master's degree in fine art at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1970s, where he was exposed to constructivist art theory and Bauhaus design method.

Seelig acquired an international reputation following his time at Cranbrook. He reached against contemporary work of such peers as Magdalena Abakanowicz, which emphasized primal organic forces and raw emotion, by extending his own work's clean and impersonal qualities. He developed loom-based work featuring technical rigour, pure materials and simple forms. He referred to early modern theory to support his commitment to formal abstraction, in particular to Wilhelm Worringer, whose writing erected elemental simplicity as a refuge against the "trivialized" modern world. Worringer said "Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity".¹ A key strategy for Seelig during this time was the conducting of mechanical operations - folding, gathering and cutting - for the purpose of generating a new kind of substance, free from literary reference and self-indulgent emotion.

Seelig's work after Cranbrook initially confined itself to ordinary black and white cotton string, employing a double-cloth loom technique involving simultaneous construction of two separate weaves within a single fabric. Seelig explored sculptural qualities - swelling, fluted surfaces, arches and radiating folds - within wall-mounted works. At first Seelig made three-dimensional forms in which flat, double-woven and splint-reinforced facets were supported along their back surfaces by a structural network of miniature struts and guys. This external system then shifted, indicating a new integrated approach. Using pockets formed between woven layers, Seelig inserted pliable plastic and Mylar splints during the weaving. These flexible spines were entirely encased, and acted in concert with woven layers, yielding crisp pleats within folded fan-shaped textiles. Expanding them from 90-degree fans to 180-degree curves, and developing framed perimeters of banded and checkered panels, Seelig found striking highlights and shadows in the reliefs. With folded top and bottom edges, in tapered or arched gathers, the textiles became self-enclosed figures - shields and totems.

A hybrid material quality is a defining aspect of the work from this period. The double-cloth fabric skins enveloping and stretching over the internalized plates created a new material based on controlled internal stresses. Seelig said, "I was not attempting to mimic anthropomorphic form, but rather attempting to create a relationship between the skeleton and skin elements, which was as convincing as bone pressed against skin." Also telling is his description of working method: "Sometimes, when selective plates were omitted, the internal stress dynamic of tight and loose cloth created a fluted edge, as in Vertical Shield #2 (1977). The folded and rounded ‘totem' forms, and creased and pleated fan shapes were the result".² This description alludes to Seelig's preoccupation with anonymity. Instead of personal expression, the work was apparently the product of an impersonal process. That process does seem almost mechanical: he performed operations with scrupulous care and determined the final form of his constructions according to the results. However the results, whether swelling totem forms or complex shaped weaves, each contained qualities too compellingly sensual to be entirely explained by an ethos of selfless work. A tension is apparent in which an urge to achieve a rich and dramatic palette of material qualities underlaid Seelig's public aura of impersonality and rigorous industry.

This tension was increasingly pronounced in Seelig's work of the following years. Between 1977 and 1983, he developed a new series titled Ribbon Folds. Eschewing exotic material such as silk, the artist used base cotton. However, by working in grosgrain - a dense, warp-face rib weave with fine mercerized thread yarns at densities up to hundreds of threads per inch - he achieved extraordinary lustre. High-key combinations of striped and checked patterns exuded glistening colour that seemed embedded within the threads. He began using simple armatures to hold wide swaths featuring back and front surfaces of a length of cloth arranged in simple creases and folds. Welded and painted sheet-aluminum hangers shaped the cloth like vestment. One body of work employed a composite of coloured double-cloths accompanied by painted-wood flats and dowels to form abstracted window shades. Another featured assemblies of dyed-wood slats arranged to emulate draped cloth, a disembodied cousin of the earlier striped-ribbon folds.

Matrix

Starting in 1981, Seelig increased attention to the essential structure of weaving and developed a new approach. He produced Checkerboard Awning that year during a residency at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Spokes and ribs introduced as structural elements in that work quickly developed into a new vocabulary. Expanding the approach into a wide spatial complex, he conceived an interplay of hybrid weft and warp elements. Weft elements became an ordering system of props and struts, built as metal skeletons. Warp elements in turn became ribbon-shaped screens and meshes stretching between weft supports and describing pure geometries - a reversal of the traditional hierarchy of dominant warp and subservient weft imposed by loom mechanics. A nylon fabric and stainless-steel wall suspension developed for Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California in 1986, employed a network of spokes radiating from support strut arrays in front of the wall surface. Membranes of translucent nylon stretched between these struts, following the arcing and fluted paths determined by the framework.

In contrast to the concealed members that Seelig previously used to support woven shapes, this structure was exposed. The space of the work changed from closed fabric surface to an open matrix. Where fabric elements were previously constructed by hand loom, they now came from special industrial sources. Seelig used meshes of almost microscopically fine warp-knit plastic fibre and Tyvek, a heat-pressed translucent membrane. Amplifying the expansive spaces projected in the work, transparency and lightness marked the material palette of the emerging work.

It is tempting here to think of Seelig keeping company with minimalist artists. Like the ethereal white square, which floats on Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Painting No.1 (1918), the discipline of these open textile matrices invokes a universal state. Seelig's current statement: "When yielding to its natural geometric form textile becomes an energy field which increases in power proportionally to its abstraction and simplicity"³, seems cousin to Malevich's: "I have transformed myself in the zero of form".⁴

Turn

Yet with the new figures in this exhibition, Seelig's long-standing wish to achieve an essential purity seems to have turned. While Plato's absolute geometry still plays in some arcing and circle figures, the purity of earlier taxis has changed into a tracery of higher mathematics: accelerating trajectories and planetary ellipses. Instead of completed forms, partial gestures prevail. These inflected bodies are sensitive - their skeletal frames cast shadows on nearby walls; their fragile skins filter views of neighbouring forms.

Here, Seelig is approaching a reflexive mode in which the physical forms respond to the presence of the viewer. The play of shadows and filtered views is so pervasive in the space of the gallery that these usually secondary effects shift to centre stage. Instead of emphasizing their separate identities, Seelig chose to assemble the constructions into a general field using angles and overlaps to ensure that individual works will always be seen together with adjacent pieces. This arrangement challenges the identity of the work: is the space in the gallery really one large textile?

The wall-based work presented in the gallery confirms this possibility. A work in progress, this wall is a collection of samples and experiments developed within Seelig's studio during this past year. This newest generation of work rests on a broad, curved plaster surface. Repeating many small elements, each balancing on pivoting wall-mounts, the fragments compose a hybrid brocade. The specific arrangements and groups of parts seem deliberately circumstantial. Instead of proscribed figures and frames, the viewer is anchored there by phenomena of light and hovering balance.

Kuba includes a spread of numerous turned rings with projecting arms. The arms are detailed with drilled and forged ends. Needles balance on these arms, each holding a silver-soldered arabesque of stainless-steel wire. They stand informally, turning slightly according to air currents or the touch of the viewer, catching chromatic highlights from gallery lights and casting a dense scrawl of shadows behind. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the elements occupy individual territories of open space and lock together into a hovering surface. None of the parts touch, but as a whole they construct a tangible surface resembling a Kufic.

Composite Field is a collage of different parts. A large chalk-lined grid is lightly incised into the plaster wall. A staccato of support rings similar to those in Kuba works in counterpoint to the grid. Upon these rests families of elements. One group is made of serrated rings, alternately brass and stainless steel. Another is a jostling bundle of vertical counterweights made of angled-wire stalks and polished brass-ball ends. A third is virtually all shadow: a transparent veil of "noseeum" fabric, embedded with horizontal seams, each containing wire filament stiffeners, which floats, barely visible except for its cast pattern on the plaster surface beneath.

What emerges? The resulting complex makes a hovering surface. The surface seems woven from personal industry: touch, gesture, craft and machinings. This new work seems free of the ideological weight of early modernist work: empathy no longer seems antithetical to abstraction. The work no longer stands in reaction to raw primitivism: Seelig's subjects are no longer stripped and purified. Nor is he reacting against dominating forms, opening and rendering them transparent. Instead, space seems already free, unconstrained.

By making his forms reflexive and his surfaces circumstantial, Seelig seems to have moved beyond his early strategy of minimalist discipline. Purity has been achieved, and a different project now seems possible - a substance rooted in phenomena and developed through poetic economy. A new constructive play emerges, a refreshed complex of structure and light. Textile - writ large.

Notes:

1. Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraction and Empathy, a contribution to the Psychology of Style (1906), trans., Michael Bullock, London and New York, 1953.
2. Warren Seelig personal correspondence, 1997.
3. From introductory statement, Warren Seelig Machina Textrina, 1996.
4. Kasimir Malevich. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism:the New Realism in Painting (1916), trans., Anderson, Copenhagen, 1969.

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada

Warren Seelig: Machina Textrina

By Sarah Bodine and Michael Dunas, 1996

Take parachutes and chain link fences, or buildings wrapped by the artist Christo - all result from the fact that "textile" is inherently dichotomous: a constructed plane both pliable and sturdy. Even the composite members of a textile embody this idea of both support and skin. It is hard to think of fibrous elements in a raw state being solely identifiable as part of the structure or part of the surface.

Skin-support, surface-structure - through textile techniques, dichotomy becomes a basis for personal material inquiry and the artist comes closer to understanding the physiology of form. It is these mechanics of craft that Warren Seelig engages, the very energy of which is the basis of his investigation. The materialist claims that the rightness of the form results from the abiding interest in how form follows the function and how form follows the necessity of its construction. Seelig's understanding of the conundrum of craft and textile yields a form less determined by necessity - more serendipitous, playful, inventive, vernacular, natural and engaging.

When introduced to the craft, Seelig was absorbed in the making of cloth and weaving; he understood that a structure could be made through a planned pattern of warp and weft, producing a visually provocative plane of colour, texture and tone. But soon he began to realize that the structure of cloth is something hidden within the cloth, conditioning its shape and form but not necessarily determining such features as texture or colour. His current work continues to suggest that structure and membrane are interdependent, dynamically coexistent but visually and materially distinct.

This is easier to see than it is to explain. When Seelig first began his inquiry, he made lengths of double-weave cloth that assumed shape through the insertion of Mylar segments into pockets formed by the two elements of cloth. The Mylar acted like a skeleton allowing the cloth form to fold about an axis like a hinge. When hung upright, the work suggested a window blind or shutter or fan. Again, the image seemed familiar in its mechanics, but the piece retained the visual conundrum as to whether the structure of the Mylar or the double-weave cloth created the intriguing form.

In his current work, Seelig uses another familiar mechanism - similar to that of an umbrella or bicycle wheel where the steel spokes radiate from a central axis. The multiple forces exerted upon the spokes (from the inflection of gravity and the tension of the taut fabric) produce familiar arc-like geometries. But unlike the earlier pieces with double-weave cloth, these are more transparent. The viewer is welcome to explore the way they work and to engage the construction visually. The cloth does not hide the support system as did the Mylar; we can see the details of their relationship - how the steel spokes relate to the Tyvek membrane and how the mechanism itself functions.

One of the striking features of these works, in light of their sophisticated design, is their irregularity: the members are hand-forged, the forms are balanced through trial and error, the Tyvek is not handled like the commercial product it is, and the spokes are not regular in their pattern - not even the shapes themselves are truly arcs or justified curves. In combination, this irregularity is magnified as the fluid lines of multiple arcs seem to intersect just a bit too serendipitously to suggest pre-design control. The craft is in the temporal engineering, in the direct response to material and technique, and in the resolution of forces in a form that is personal, idiosyncratic and empathetic.

Abstraction is now tangible. A constructive process plays out through hands-on manipulation.

In describing these works to a group of civil engineers, Seelig said, "These works are not static, but appear to be buoyant or in some kind of suspended animation or stop action. The softly detectable dynamic internal forces, along with the illusion of energy caused by the radiating spokes help to create this sensation. Although the works are stable, they are closer to the brink of structural stability".¹ The brink occurs when we realize the pressure exerted by the spokes. In the process of construction, it is the moment for Seelig when a form comes into being through its own energy; and for us, it is the moment when we realize the illusion of surface is metaphorically buttressed by a corresponding constructive reality. Seelig speaks of a sense of buoyancy, which is the primary visceral reaction to all his work - the sight of an elastic body floating in space, defying gravity (albeit with a tender stabilizing pressure from beneath). The underlying support is what we feel empathetically to be buoyant - light, cheerful - as with balloons, confetti or party streamers.

A 19th-century animal trap hangs on the wall in Seelig's studio, as well as panoply of wire contraptions, mechanical toys and shop-worn tools. They seem right at home with the circus-like atmosphere of his wall-hung, ceiling-mounted structures hovering about the room. Like trapeze artists, the pieces create bewildering patterns in the air as they defy gravity through balance, tension, timing and strength. An uncannily similar scene is depicted in a 1926 photomontage by constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, Look Before You Leap, in which a group of acrobats is connected spatially by a series of thin diagonal lines; foremost among them is a woman whose body contorts gracefully backwards to fill the space of a large bicycle-type wheel. A multidirectional rhythm emerges from these tautly balanced gymnasts, performing in an indeterminate space, connected only by thin black threads and assuming strength through their intersections.

Experiments with idiosyncratic construction have occupied modern artists, starting with the Constructivists. In his fascinating description of constructivist aesthetics, theorist Charles Biederman (influential in the 1920s with de Stijl artists) talks of a "spatial plane" as the key to constructivist work. By this he meant to distinguish the essence of relief as a form that hovers between the two- and three-dimensional realities of objects. Biederman understood the dynamics of this form as based in "symmetry," the key to non-mimetic art. Relief constructions, he suggests, are suitable means for establishing "multiple centres of symmetry".² The observer moves before the piece in what he calls an "arc of symmetry," creating a situation where the only true "problem of motion" is the spectator. Although Biederman was concerned primarily with an orthogonal form, the dynamics of his analysis have been applied to all varieties of relief.

When an artist creates a flat, rectilinear plane, he or she allows the spectator to take in the whole artwork frontally. In constructing an orthogonal relief on a plane, the artist extends the horizontals and verticals. Further, by keeping the construction symmetrical but multiplying the attenuated forms, the artist gives the spectator space to find his or her coordinates, permitting power over perspective. The result is a common space where the viewer's real life-space and the aesthetic space of the art become one. This search for common social space was the goal of Constructivism. Induced interaction via spatial structure was its new spatial order - a conditioned environment, a modern aesthetic trap.

What is interesting about Seelig's textile approach is that he does not transform space exclusively from the wall outward, as was customary for earlier constructivists such as Vladimir Tatlin in his "Corner Reliefs," or El Lissitzky in his "Proun" rooms. Textile prototype of rugs (floor), tapestry (wall), clothes (body) and canopy (ceiling) have no presumed coordinates. They use functional rather than ideological starting points for relief.

In Seelig's work, the axis of symmetry conscribed by the linear pattern of the metal engineering shifts almost casually about the room, never assuming the necessary coordinates of the wall to buttress the projection of relief. The pieces also never seem to be "in the round," nor do they need a sequential viewing; nevertheless, they maintain a directional force despite their trapeze-like flotation amid wall, floor and ceiling. What kind of space does Seelig's work occupy then, if not the illusionary space of painting or the real space of sculpture? It is best understood as decorative space. Instead of using perspective or anti-perspective techniques, as picture making does, or using the haptic space of volume, mass or weight as sculpture does, his decorative constructions rely on a set of abstract manoeuvres - like framing, grid, field and pattern- to lend a psychological coherence to the environment. It is a space that mitigates our need for fantasy and reality - a space that appears familiar and induces interaction.

Experiments in decorative space appear in early constructivism - the de Stijl group: Piet Mondrian's studio, Theo van Doesburg's interior designs and Gerrit Rietveld's furniture all suggest constant experimentation with visual grids that begin to take over the dynamics of the environment using an amalgam of painting, furniture and architecture. Anni Albers, with her interest in architectural fibre, wall-works and screens, tried to establish the space of textile in relationship to Bauhaus theories of painting and architecture, which strove for a total composite environment. Space was a central issue for modern artists who worked with abstraction, construction and the desire to get closer to the spectator; and decorative ambient space seemed to offer engaging alternatives.

Today, the need to devise a new decorative space seems less pressing than it once did. Painting took over the cause with minimalism's colour field, with pattern's and decoration's repetition all incorporating the idea of decorative space into a revision of painterly language. A middle ground has not been maintained or developed, and has not vibrated with the urgency to find a new space for a new time.

The work in Machina Textrina still maintains the tenuous proposition that a place exists between textiles, reliefs and paintings. It decidedly breaks away from the forms of rug, tapestry, garment and canopy, from the idea of weave as a generative element to form, and from surface as an optical illusion of the structure. It works away from the painterly idea of the grid as implying the limits of colour, from colour as the depiction of flatness, and shadow as the illusion of form. What this struggle suggests is that all of these ideas are in transition as the need for a space closer to the spectator develops, and the energy of artistic effort is transferred to a middle ground of implied behavior - the area of the decorative.

In order to fully appreciate this decorative sensation, it is important to see Warren Seelig's work in concert; in an installation incorporating a number of pieces where the notion of decorative space comes alive. Pieces of floating, coloured fabric actually project out and are buoyed by a metal armature that acts like a reconfigured field energized by many such reliefs, axes and reset coordinates in the visual environment. The spectator seems to float amid shifting tension points - the plumb bobs, geometries of line and angle - seeking to find Biederman's arc of symmetry. An atmosphere of carnival pageantry pervades the space with the unique decorative quality of disorientation and pleasure.

Working this way through the dilemmas of decorative space and visual abstraction is rewarding in its struggle to establish aesthetic space without transgressing upon nature or yielding to it - that is, being comfortable and secure without being alien. We desperately want to be natural on our own terms. By recognizing a middle ground - a space between - we acknowledge these problems. Through abstraction and decoration, artists like Warren Seelig try to extract a common area, if only an incipient ground of relief, where the psyche can move forward and still behave naturally.

Notes:

1. Warren Seelig. "Wall Relief and Three-Dimensional Suspension Sculpture Utilizing Tension and Membrane Structures," Spatial, Lattice and Tension Structures Proceedings, (IASS-ASCE International Symposium, 1994).
2. Biederman, pp.118-119. The relationship of Biederman's theory to Constructivism came to our attention in George Rickey's Constructivism, (New York, 1967).

© 2007 Textile Museum of Canada