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Maine-a Beacon

Breakfast, Maine, Summer 2009. Warren Seelig poaches a square egg. He slides his spoon under the quivering white, lifts the fluted edges as they congeal, folds them in flaps over the yolk. The finished egg is translucent with a yellow centered circle.

Warren and Sherrie Gibson live in a two-story cabin they built with sweeping views of Alford Lake, near Rockland. The complex feels remote. Through the trees I can see nearby Beaver Lodge and hear the bugle summon campers across the lake. Living happens mostly on the second floor in the big room with its expanse of windows fronting the lake. At one end is a kitchen, well-equipped but compact. Somehow Warren and Sherrie manage to cook without bumping into each other. On warm nights we eat on the screened porch. On cool rainy nights everyone gathers around a long table in the big room near the kitchen. The sideboard is as long as the table, its front surface a rippling continuum of hollowed-out half moons. Once I learn that Warren made the sideboard, as well as several other pieces of furniture, it becomes clear that its symmetrically routed curves resemble the works in his series Fans, Accordions, Cinctures.

Warren today looks much as he did in a 1983 photograph printed on the announcement for an exhibition of his Ribbon Folds: Sitting at his loom, he peers over cones of shiny cotton. His bright-striped warp lies exactly at eye level. Perhaps only weavers notice the density and precision of the tightly aligned threads. The photograph conveys the eager assuredness of a boy at the science fair. Only the gray in his sandy hair marks his age. He dresses like the engineer he started out to be in the late sixties-boots, shorts, and shirt-tail out, sleeves rolled, three pens in the pocket.

By the early eighties, when this photograph was taken, Seelig had strayed far afield from engineering. He was exhibiting widely. His first solo exhibition at Hadler/Rodriguez in New York in 1975 received significant notice, and showing at that gallery in this period opened doors. By 1981, the publication of Jack Lenor Larsen and Mildred Constantine's The Art Fabric Mainstream would place Seelig among the who's who in contemporary textiles.

Despite these early art-world successes, Seelig was carving a career trajectory that would bring him to this house overlooking a lake in Maine. Instead of taking a job with Larsen that would have put him in New York in the mid-seventies, he accepted a position at Colorado State University and began a long career in teaching. In summer 1977 he taught at Haystack School of Crafts. That was the August Elvis died, Fran Merritt's last summer as director. M. C. Richards was in residence; Merritt and Richards often talked about their time at Black Mountain College. Their ideas, the electric, intimate nature of exchange, the aura of the place: all this was exciting to Warren. Since that visit he has returned many times in several roles, to teach, to share ideas with scholars like Frank Wilson and Ellen Dissanayake, and to serve on the board of directors. That first summer anchored him to the institution and to the Maine landscape.

After Haystack, Warren was ready for a change. He returned to Colorado for his third and last year. Sherrie and Warren had met in Colorado. Sherrie was close to completing her architect's degree at the University of Utah when, desirous of pursuing her own projects in a hands-on way, she took courses in fibers and a weaving workshop with Cynthia Schira at Snow Bird. Schira, who noted that they shared a common architectural aesthetic, suggested the two should meet.

From the beginning Sherrie and Warren worked together on projects and helped each other with their individual work. Warren points out Sherrie's expertise in lighting design, her ability to read architectural plans, and her communication skill. She is, he says, the major partner in their collaborative design work. Their greatest collaborations may well be the several residences they've built and commercial buildings they've adapted and renovated over nearly 30 years, as well as their large interior commissions for corporate headquarters and cruise ships. The first was a spoke-and-axle wall suspension for the world headquarters of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California. The next year, IBM commissioned a work, titled Gelato, for its research and development center in San José. In 1992 they installed a large contingent of spoke-and-wheel sculptures in the Philadelphia Airport. The largest and most intricately engineered of their collaborations are several works built for the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line beginning in 2000. Currently, they are working on a project for the University of Kentucky.

They left Colorado for Maine in 1978. They stayed only one year, a hard, cold, poor year, and were glad to go to Philadelphia when Philadelphia College of Arts (PCA-now University of the Arts) offered Warren a faculty position in fibers. Sherrie taught dye classes at PCA. Right away they took a chance on an 1895 school building in Elkins Park for $25,000. Their daughters, Ashley and Sabrina, were born in the first years they lived in the schoolhouse. The family eventually occupied three-quarters of its 12,000 square feet. Experienced carpenters, Sherrie and Warren did just about everything but the drywall. Friends came, moved in, lent a hand. Joan Livingstone lived in one wing for a semester. She spent a good bit of it on a fifteen-foot scaffold patching an expansive ceiling.
All these years Maine remained a respite for Warren, Sherrie, and their girls. In the early nineties they found a house on the coast just south of Rockland, beginning an annual migration from Philadelphia.

When a huge, defunct hardware emporium in Rockland, presented itself, the sturdy vernacular commercial building offered vast work and living space and plenty of space to carve out offices to rent. The windowless, low-ceilinged labyrinthine basement Warren made into his studio. Uncluttered but full, it's easy to get lost in its passageways between wood- and metal-working machines. At one end, long walls provide a viewing space for projects accreting unit by unit. Sherrie converted a third floor room plus attic space into the sewing studio for her children's clothing business. The first floor houses two large retail stores, Sherrie's Black Parrot, which sells clothing for women and children and designer home items, and a coffee shop-book store.

Beginnings

Transforming promise into reality is an apt phrase for Seelig. From his youth he has trained himself to be a craftsman and educated himself to be an artist. He defines his making as rooted in a textile sensibility based on material scrutiny. Equally important is critical inquiry.

Here is the story of Warren Seelig reduced to three iotas:

"I first read Anni Albers's On Designing in the Mediterranean on board the Air Craft Carrier John F. Kennedy serving in the Naval Reserves."¹

This was 1969, the summer astronauts walked on the moon and thousands his age tramped in the mud at Woodstock.

Second, that same fall, he began his art/design degree at Philadelphia College of Textiles. "Seeing cloth form mesmerized me. The first time I worked at the loom I saw the cloth as beads of threads, boundless, endless. It was like looking at cell structure through a microscope or into space or opening eyes underwater." The loom offered Warren a world view built on the grid of intersecting warp and weft threads.

The third iota is not an incident, a memory looked back on that influenced future decisions. Rather it is a lifetime of observing light and shadow, seeking to make this instable physical phenomenon the subject of his work. From the beginning he continually presents the idea that shadows have a life of their own. They are as important as the objects that create them. In conversation Warren brings the presence of the shadow to life not only as a physical phenomenon but also as part of human experience. The line between light and shadow is the spirit of his work.

Seelig's fascination with shadow is the tension between predictability and unpredictability. Textiles are force fields where light and shadow contribute significantly to the material field where form is made. In Seelig's world, how the artist finds form is everything. "I believe we select materials for the way they offer clues about form yet to visualized."²

At the core of his making is materiality. He values this approach in the work of others as well. His thinking, writing, and response to students depend on this order: meaning follows form, as he explains:

It is possible that materials and their consequent transformation may be the first stage in the search for idea. Materials suggest ideas because of their inherent physical properties and, more important, because of the way they seem to contain or absorb unique information.³

Whatever that unique information is, it makes possible the spiritual and unveils spirit in material. Others see material rooted in physical substance linked to cultural reference, with choice and transformation of material revealing itself in showing who we are, where we've been, that is, a narrative trail. For Seelig, material is pursued through personal invention with no given form or ideal as goal. His approach resembles that of Arte Povera, but absorbing and transmitting the rawness of material is not a part Seelig's inquiry. Never the alchemist waiting for reactions from combinations, he finds meaning in a process stemming from neutral observation. Introspection is central. In "constructing form in which each element is unique and completely unpredictable" it is possible to learn about light and shadow. Weaving pointed the way.⁴

He grew up in world of textile manufacturing and often accompanied his father, Oliver Newton Seelig, to the Narrow Fabric Company where he was head of research & development. A graduate of the merchant marines, not engineering school, Oliver Seelig was blessed with brilliant mechanical understanding. Warren liked going to work with his father, learning the how and why of machines. He'd watch a knitting machine produce seamless typewriter ribbon, perhaps his first experience with the allure of double cloth-seamless connections arising from perfectly meshed junctures. Equally inspiring was the hair curler machine fusing multiple parts, turning out bristly, spring-loaded tubes that peppered the heads of women in the fifties. The atmosphere in the workplace is palpable as Warren Seelig describes moisture sprayed into the air to dampen the warps so the threads would not break.

He went to Kutztown University, enrolling as a pre-engineering major. He chose the familiar, but knew that he wanted something else, something he couldn't yet define. He bounced around from sociology to psychology to art history and, in the familiar liberal arts tradition, strung together enough courses to graduate with a major but no direction. While still in school he saw Objects: USA, an exhibition that opened media and making pathways for the generation of craftsmen that followed WWII-veterans and Bauhaus-trained artist-craftsmen. Many believed in integrating the language of craft with art.

By the time Seelig arrived at Philadelphia College of Textiles (PCT-now Philadelphia University), he knew where he wanted to go if not how to get there. Learning to weave provided direction, as did his design teacher, John Vorlicek. A man of few words, Vorcilek influenced Seelig through paper-scoring and folding exercises. These simple routines became his base for Seelig's studies of light and shadow.
Technical learning was central at PCT and Seelig excelled at it. He followed this up by learning to operate and maintain small power looms. Years later, in the Elkins Park studio he would return to this interest in power looms and even considered opening production-weaving studio. From the beginning, however, he never wanted to join industry or sign on to a megalithic design firm.
For Seelig what was essentially missing at PCT was critical inquiry, so, after graduating from PCT in two years, he went straight to Cranbrook Academy of Art. He puts it, "I was right for that place."

In 1972 fiber was exploding as a discipline, particularly in California, in art and craft academic programs and local community centers, such as Fiberworks. Many traditions and approaches blended. At UC, Berkeley, Ed Rossbach taught and made baskets (mainly) using contemporary vernacular materials to reiterate traditional textile methods from cultures worldwide. Trude Guermonprez, Dominic di Mare, and Kay Sekimachi developed unique responses to textile processes and traditions much as Rossbach did, but their ideas and results evolved along different lines. For Guermonprez the principles of woven structure were central, and Seelig followed her work closely. Dominic di Mare's fastidious, eclectic constructions seem quite distant from Seelig's vision yet Seelig found much to admire in di Mare's approach to materials and his disciplined way of working. Sekimachi's airy, abstract triple-weave suspensions naturally appealed to Seelig's aesthetic. In southern California, in Long Beach and Los Angeles, Neda al-Hilali and Barbara Shawcroft manipulated paper, rope, a large array of linear materials in their installation work. In this decade of fervent invention there was constant exchange and discussion among fiber artists as they exhibited in the same galleries, read the same journals, attended the same conferences and knew each other from graduate schools. The loom was still essential and weaving central to making for many.

Cranbrook's program was very different from the west coast fiber world. The Saarinens tempered their utilitarian production through material exploration in light of Bauhaus values. Exposure to new artists and non-stop dialogue is the engine of graduate school and Cranbrook was a hotbed of discourse. Seelig thrived on it. He was the boy wonder with bright ideas and mechanical acumen. Abstraction held firm, bolstered through his discovery of George Rickey's Constructivism. Gerhardt Knodel, fibers artist in residence, suggested that Seelig offer a fabric structure course to interested peers. Students in fibers and other areas signed on to understand woven structures in a fabric-based approach to structure.

Weaving a Unique Visual Language

Seelig did not favor bundling self-expression, process, content. In his graduate studio he continued with double weave. He constructed monochromatic, tightly woven cloth formed into planes along precise lines where the layers exchanged. After the fabric came off the loom, he inserted mylar in the interlocking planes creating a hinge, cleverly creating a seamless skeleton/skin and unified structure producing erect forms, rightfully described as totemic-clearly cloth, yet performing like metal. Warren remembers Joan Livingstone saying, "You've found it!" It was his hallelujah moment in grad school, tumbling onto something big.

Structural integrity is the backbone of Seelig's making, tension and compression his means. His progress was straightforward but slow. Weaving is that. Warren fretted that he was not building a body of work, but he was. Buoyed by theories of abstraction, what he cared most about in the work was getting the light right. If the light was right on each plane, shadows fall on adjacent planes.
The first body of work, much of it completed at Cranbrook, was the Vertical Reliefs. One of the best, Vertical Relief #5, is pictured in The Art Fabric Mainstream. The weave is log cabin; black and white threads realign at each intersection of planes. Log cabin's appearance happens through color exchange in pattern. It looks complicated, but the structure is simple, plain weave.

During the Colorado years he continued with the Reliefs, always after new ways to catch light and shadow's intersection. The work moved in two directions. Each produced a large stream of related pieces: one, Vertical Shields, and the other, Fans, Accordions, Cinctures.

The Shields began with the Box Reliefs. Vertical Box Relief # 1 is built of boxes, open and closed. Photographs demonstrate what lighting can do. The edges of the folded triangular planes create dramatic shadows. The shadows inside the open triangular planes meld into the background. The complete form is obscure, the effect dazzling. Dimensionally vivid, it hovers in space. In Vertical Shield # 2, Seelig achieved what he'd been striving for-the play of light on planes. In his words: "the planes alternately catch and shed light, accentuating and contrasting highlight and shadow. Light emphasizes the hinged juncture between the planes relaying a strong line, the appearance of a graphic outline."⁵

The other series, Fans, Accordion, Cinctures, also concentrates on line, plane, and fold, but color is as crucial as light and shadow. The boldness of color calls up Constructivism-a red or black stripe running through the folds (Double Gesture). In other works the black is faint, similar to suiting gray, achieved through alternating black and white in the warp. Especially when the stripe is outlined in red (Accordion Gesture) the cloth looks like a pencil drawing, an effect quite different than the bold, solid fans. Folding reveals the play of light and shadow and the cloth's interiority; the constructed surface is "the visual and psychological field or atmosphere which is physical, tangible and sensational."⁶

In the Ribbon Folds, color is no longer an element but linchpin. It locks shape, plane, and textile reference into the cloth. This flat warp-faced fabric is not difficult to weave, but like Seelig's earlier work, it requires a high degree of discipline. The first ribbons, such as Rhomboid Fold # 1, are warp-faced three-ply cotton, dense but not fine cloth. In the Grosgrain Folds and Ribbon Folds the mercerized sewing thread at 180 ends per inch makes lustrous cloth. That the fabric is identical on both sides is revealed through installation. It is wrapped diagonally between two steel rods. The line of V's advances and recedes, hints at what ribbons do: twist and turn, stick out, turn tail, hold up in a breeze. So they are ribbons, yet here they are not performing as ribbons might, but are held to the flat plane. Scale and installation establish the idea of ribbon as important as the image itself.

Now he has put everything into the cloth-system, abstraction, image. There is nowhere else to go on the loom.

What I liked in the Ribbon Folds was that color was embedded in structure, that is, color was reflexive because it was internal. Finding meaning in the literal process of weaving was always central to my making. The Ribbon Folds were a culmination. I found no next way to center meaning in making fabric.

Culminations are glorious and shortly thereafter awful. A new direction was imperative.

"Abandoning the Loom"

Teaching was not an agenda item for Seelig when he entered grad school, but the TA experience proved he was good at it. In accepting the position at Colorado, he embarked on the dual course, teaching and making, shaping his life as it has the lives of many of his students. Brash, opinionated, well read, Seelig never hesitates to say what he thinks. I ask him who he looked at and learned from besides the usual names he recites. What about Sol LeWitt, I wonder. "Everybody loves Sol LeWitt," he said. After a short pause, "I always thought he was a closet textile artist." And this was all he said on the subject.

I call Michael Howell, now gallery director at Albright College for a student's perspective on Seelig as a young teacher. Howell was a pre-med major when he signed up for weaving, looking for relaxation from his rigorous science course load. He envisioned rugs, blankets, and placemats. Enter Seelig, smoking, black leather jacket, starched white shirt-now a far cry from an engineer-and declared: "Fiber is an art form. That's what we will study, the structure and language of weaving. There will be no rugs, blankets or placemats."⁷ Soon Howell changed his major to art. Thirty years later, Howell's vocabulary and approach ring with Seeligisms-Rickey's Constructivism, effect of color on form, technical knowledge opens unexplored territory, three-dimensional forms occupy space to work with and resist gravity.

Seelig makes no reference to Sol LeWitt's work or writings in his own writings. But there is similarity in the way both work. Serialism and minimalism infused the seventies. Howell recalls Seelig mentioning LeWitt on the importance of choosing anything and then following it logically and sequentially. Seelig's material journey through thread, wood, metal pursues a serialist approach in recording and questioning light and shadow.

Soon after Seelig arrived at Philadelphia College of the Arts (PCA), Sarah Bodine and Michael Dunas introduced him to Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy. "The urge to abstract" became a key phrase in Seelig's reflections on materiality. His writings established him as a spokesperson for craft and he began to participate in dialogs on craft. His public persona became as visible as his work.

Add to this curating. In 1982 he conceived Textile Paradigm, an exhibition of works of seven contemporary Dutch textile artists that was shown at PCA in 1984 and traveled to Washington State University. the work of Desirée and Herman Scholten, Margot Rolf, and other contemporary Dutch artists, with roots in De Stijl, parallel principles of abstraction and constructivism that Seelig admired. Familiar to North American audiences from Lausanne Biennials and The Art Fabric Mainstream, Seelig saw these artists as underrated. In the catalog, he wrote, "The present exhibition offers a variety of Dutch work that is...stripped to the bone, reduced but not inhuman and imbued with a spirit of free invention like the abstraction inherent in music, where form is the product of freely invented systems of notes....For those artists committed to the textile, the right-angle geometry of loom-woven cloth is the fundamental abstract language...For those artists represented in The Textile Paradigm, including those who have abandoned the loom, the spirit of that abstract language remains intact."⁸

Right-angle geometry, non-objective, abstract language coincides with Seelig's philosophy. Another repeated phrase is "those who have abandoned the loom." It appeared in this initial commentary and again in his discussion of Loes van der Horst and Harry Boom. Ten years later in American Craft, writing on Lenore Tawney's retrospective, he says, "Although Tawney abandoned the loom in 1976, the deep insight gained from her understanding of textile language continues to permeate her art."⁹ As far as I have found, this is his only way of saying an artist has stopped weaving. "To abandon" suggests loss, something more than a change in direction heard in "to stop" or "to quit."

A move away from the loom became common by the mid-eighties. Richard Landis is perhaps the sole artist-weaver who continues systematic weave explorations of color reflectively and reflexively. Hadler/Rodriguez showed Landis's work early on; his work was established before most textile artists in Seelig's generation emerged. Anne Wilson, Jane Lackey, Joan Livingstone moved from weaving to other processes still using textile-associated materials. Lia Cook and Cynthia Schira have remained weavers. Sandra Brownlee also continues to weave. Her tapestries and notebooks construct a litany of highly charged abstract imagery. Brownlee now lives in Nova Scotia but she lived and worked in Philadelphia when Seelig lived there. Friends for many years, their ongoing critical dialogue informs both of their work.

After Ribbon Folds, Seelig turned to other ways of constructing wall-based sculpture. The first was a sharp shift in material. In Drape (1985) he assembled painted pine lath aligned in stripes, a broad green stripe composed of several lath followed by narrow stripes in pink, blue and purple lath. Rectangles and triangles construct a form resembling cloth folded at an angle. The vibrant color and the fold are familiar from the Ribbon Folds, but allusion rests in material difference rather than similarity. Seelig writes, "I am certainly not abandoning the textile but rather believe it may be possible to communicate textile as image in a more persuasive way without constructing the real length of cloth."¹⁰ Drape is alluring. The properties of wood accentuate that it is something other than what it was made of. Ultimately, to lean on material as image does not sit comfortably in Seelig's desire for understanding through material investigation. Shortly thereafter he moved to other ways of working.

Another direction produced Checkerboard Awning, an outcome of a residency at The Fabric Workshop in 1981. Printing black and white squares on geometrically shaped fabric, he achieved forced perspective found in paintings conveying architectural expanse. The printed cloth alludes to architecture but keeps its fabric value of awning. Seelig built a steel structure of spokes with movable weights and axles to turn the checkerboard into awning. He liked the symbiotic balance between the clearly displayed structure and the cloth. The printed textile was not a gateway; it was the structure that sparked him.

Carapace (1985), Florida (1987), and Suspended Column (1990), project planes of fabric from the wall or suspend them from the ceiling. Light moves along a fluted edge with shadows occurring as they do in the double weave wall works. The spoke and axle mechanism he engineered for suspending cloth in space was unique to his work, but suspended fabric was a familiar form. Many artists had deployed fabric planes in space.

Slice (1989), the first wheel configuration, entered new and exciting visual territory. Making minute adjustments in aligning the steel parts, he learned how best to support the fabric plane "using counterweights to achieve balance, bring it into equilibrium." In Seelig's book, figuring measurements, adjusting loose or tight warps to balance the tension is the most exciting part in weaving. Using spoke and axle, tension and compression in aligning the cloth with the structure, fiddling to make it work in space equals the weaving experience.

In Slice and works that follow, such as Blue Oval and Iris, the spokes, axles, counterweights complement the arcing tightly stretched synthetic fabric planes. Motion everywhere and nothing moving. They are not kinetic and have no need to be. Light and shadow on the sculpture isolate and define a moment at the same time compressing it into potentially explosive force.

Expandable Confines of Textile Sensibility

In 1994 Philip Beesley, an architect/sculptor in Toronto on the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Textiles, discovered Seelig's work. He was especially interested in the Suspended Constructions where "instead of completed forms, partial gestures prevail."¹¹ He suggested that he curate a Warren Seelig exhibition at the Museum. The two began a conversation that resulted in Machina Textrina, opening in March 1997, and Textile Writ Large, a Beesley and Seelig collaboration with students on a landscape installation at Haystack in June 1997.

American Craft published excerpts from their conversation in the August/September 1997 issue, snippets revealing their similar takes on form, space, and architecture. Beesley had photographed Seelig's work at the Elkins Park studio in 1994. The photographic compilation inspired "a collective [based on] layered and overlapping images floating at various levels in space, an atmosphere of chaotic energy." Most exciting for Seelig was "Beesley's challenge to me to build a textile not out of cloth on the wall but on a fulcrum point where you can change the shadow a number of ways." Composite Field is a fungible textile plane, a plaster shell over the wall. The surface resembled spongy ground of the old forest floor where each step is tenuous. Seelig achieved this sensation through the seeming instability of the surface and shifting shadows cast by groups of metal elements-circles spiraling from the wall, projecting metal lines, squiggly at times, sometimes ending in spheres.

The project began in an interdisciplinary exploratory session at Haystack investigating ideas for an architecturally scaled work. Director Stuart Kestenbaum invited Beesley and Seelig to return the following summer for a workshop to build an installation in the landscape. Collaborating with nine students, they conceived and executed Textile Writ Large. The material had to come from the site and would return to it. Alder twigs proved the most abundant source. The group decided on a simple, small unit to be repeated capaciously over hillocks and valleys. The repeated units needed to be linked easily and harmoniously. Seelig found the "Twister," a means of securing the tripod junctures, in an industrial tools catalog.

Blanketing the ground, the profile of the linked tripods was crucial. In the following fall and winter Seelig visited Textile Writ Large several times, noting the decay and resulting erosion of the twig blanket. Seeing this was a pleasure almost as great as building it. After three years, he and others dismantled it. I asked him about the Twisters and he replied, "they were the only reason why after three years, we decided to remove what was left of the several thousand tripods. There was a burning at the Haystack Spring cleanup with twisters left in the aftermath. Next time, a biodegradable connection needs to be made so that the ‘net' cast over the landscape would dissolve leaving only a beautiful trace of its existence."¹²

That Seelig uses the term "net" is no surprise; he continues to cast himself within the expandable confines of textile sensibility. The largest and most recent work in Textile Per Se is Shadow Drawing/White. The triangular stainless wire units recall the tripods in Textile Writ Large. The wire is light, both in color and weight, and uniform. Varying the density in grouping the units, Shadow Drawing/White is sometimes as thick as cumulus clouds and elsewhere attenuated as vapor trails. The shadows may be more evident than the structure itself. Throughout there is ambiguity between the object (reality) and the shadow which may be more real than reality. As in Plato's Cave, one must ask, what is real: what we see or our ability to express this in language?

Size matters as well. Textile Writ Large encompasses the viewer. Composite Field, Thickets, and Shadow Drawing/White are not installations on that scale, but they do tamper with boundaries. These works are large enough to draw the viewer into the confusion of light and shadow. The ongoing Shadow Fields raise the question, but their discrete existence limits the experience. Being lost in the field is essential. To experience only light and shadow, there must be nothing else. The installations achieve the level of material questioning that Seelig strives for.

 

The Persistence of Making

The word "formal" often comes up in discussing work rooted in abstraction. Seelig mentioned it as something to be avoided. "I don't know what formal means so I tend to avoid the word." He does "not know" in the sense that form or essence is not dictated by preconceived idea. This is important not only in his work but in his view of the role of Craft¹³ today. Seelig sees material investigation leading to new forms as the best evidence of Craft's role. There are repeated references to one Arthur Danto statement: "art is no longer a narrative exclusive to only a few media or evolving succession of developments...everything is possible, no forms are forbidden to us with no limit on the idea of freedom."¹⁴

Material being the driving force that it is for Seelig, he examines its multivalence for craft. The Danto quote appears in Seelig's talk "Meaning and Materiality" given May 2009 in the Netherlands for the opening of Mapping Dutch Conceptual Crafts, a version of a talk he delivered in Halifax in 2008. Artists may be craft-based, but lines, distinctions have evaporated.

Perhaps his most obdurate yet refreshing examination of this idea is in "Constructed Surface." In this article for Surface Design Journal he chose artists to fit his model instead of his more frequent mode of writing or speaking specifically through the lens of craft. In "Constructed Surface" he dwells on laborious making (hallmark of media-based disciplines) connecting it with work that exemplifies "spirit incarnate in material." He relates this to a need to build organically through accumulation. Often but not categorically, the artists he discusses build continuous surface by mechanically connecting repeated elements. There is a system at work based on the grid that "creates a visual space where there is the loss of a singular vantage point and a loss of sense of control of visual space."¹⁵ Seelig chooses makers of objects or sculpture discussed primarily in art publications, such as, Mona Hartoum, Jim Hodges, or makers discussed primarily in craft publications, such as, John Garrett, John McQueen.

Science, rather than art, is frequently where he grounds his discussion. Emphasizing connections "between body, material and the psyche where there is need to employ our hands in the activity of making," Frank Wilson's The Hand affirms the well-trained hand as source for "endow[ing] the work with a powerful emotional charge." Dependence on technology is problematic in that it separates humans from the physical and the sensual present in material. In David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous, materiality is essential for more than its inherent properties: "More importantly, because of the way material seems to contain or to have absorbed unique information meaningful to whoever makes contact with it."¹⁶

This keeps the subject in the realm of mysticism, spiritual. It is the same allegiance he felt in the seventies, when Seelig expressed his objections to content-driven work. The authentic does not arrive through recapitulation of the historical record or narrative, because the search for form would not be an open question. The blurred subject inherent in abstraction is the bond that keeps this connection working for Seelig. It drives out the purposeful use of content. The work that stems from Composite Field, Thickets and the recent textile field, Shadow Drawing/White is not rational.
Sol LeWitt's first four and seventh "Sentences on Conceptual Art" are of interest here: "Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. Illogical judgments lead to new experience. Formal Art is essentially rational. The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may be only ego."¹⁷

Sentence 34 in "Sentences on Conceptual Art": "When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art"¹⁸ covers different territory, but is also important when considering Seelig's trajectory. "Abandoning the loom" was a considered decision. Seelig sought new materials and means of making only when he found he knew that particular craft too well.

Seelig's version of materiality broadly accepts hybridity. However, materiality remains grounded in the ideal of the studio craftsman. An ideal, perhaps once a cult, that is now more and more adrift in the ascendency of the differing but equally empowered engines of DIY and the fabrication lab. To do one's work unassisted either by elves or the internet is the old folks' way. Whatever the current lingo and debate on craft turns over, what perseveres is that some talented individuals simply prefer to work with their hands, shaping and forming materials into human-scaled objects.

The first day we talked, we sat on the deck of the guesthouse overlooking the lake. The second we were in his basement studio in Rockland. The studio is very quiet and seems completely removed from human activity. Directly above is the thriving bookstore-coffee shop-busy, busy all day long. I suppose after a few months, the temptation would ease and I'd not need to climb the stairs every couple of hours for a hot cup and a view of what's going on in town. Landlords Seelig and Gibson pay for the coffee shop's trash collection. In return they run a tab until coffee tops trash. So we were up and down the stairs several times that day.

Our talk is ending; I put away my pen and notebook. A pause and then Warren says, "since Sabrina's death I have felt cleansed." His words hang in the air between us. Everything that transpires in his life and Sherrie's is framed by the death of their 22-year old daughter two years ago. Composite Field and Thickets, work that he made beginning twelve years ago, relates to today. This work, as well as Textile Writ Large, is his pact with the irrational, a different path than rational progression of geometric abstraction and the possibility of predictability. In these ephemeral projects he gives up the surety of the object. To forgo the bounded physical object the artist accepts that the only historical record may be the photograph or nothing. This is an about turn for a maker where all making stemmed from investigating material to shape a textile, shape into form. It is encompassing, uncertain-the textile field. All fields are ephemeral, one part depends on another, an element decays, the next is in jeopardy. Shadow Drawing/White is the only example present in this exhibition. It is, as much as any work can be, a window into life after it has changed utterly. I think about the Textile Writ Large and all it says about unpredictability, how when it appeared in 1997 it prepared a new way of thinking and making for Warren. It's startling, that word "cleansed," an emptying out that will never be filled. It seals our silence with as much openness as finality.

October 13, 2009

Margo Mensing is a writer, artist, and retired professor of art at Skidmore College. Each year she constructs a "material biography" focusing on a renowned individual who died at Mensing's current age. This year's installment of the ongoing project spotlights poet Elizabeth Bishop.

NOTES

Unless otherwise noted, all Warren Seelig quotes are from an interview with the author, July 20, 2009.
2 Warren Seelig, Craft and the Impulse to Abstract (Deer Isle, Maine: Haystack Mountain Institute 1992), 12.
3 Warren Seelig, "Ritzi Jacobi: the supremacy of form over narrative,"American Craft, vol. 54, no. 3 (June-July 1994): 33. This article is an excerpt from Seelig's catalog essay for The Impulse to Abstract: Recent Work by Ritzi Jacobi, organized by Philadelphia college of Art and Design.
4 Warren Seelig, interview with the author, July 20, 2009.
5 Blair Tate, The Warp: A Weaving Reference (Asheville, N.C.: Lark Books, 1987), 66.
6 Warren Seelig, "Constructed Surface," Surface Design Journal (Winter 2000): 22.
7 Michael Howell, interview with the author, September 11, 2009.
8 Warren Seelig, "Essay," Textile Paradigm: Contemporary Art Fabric of the Netherlands (Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Art, 1984), 8.
9 Warren Seelig, "Meditative Image: the Art of Lenore Tawney," American Craft, (August/September 1990, ): 42.
10 Warren Seelig, statement published in the exhibition announcement for Vivid Form: New Inventions (Kansas City Art Institute, 1985).
11 Philip Beesley, "Machina Textrina,", Surface Design Journal, (Summer 1997, ): 17.
12 Warren Seelig, correspondence with the author, September 4, 2009.
3 Seelig capitalizes Craft when referring to the medium that makers associate themselves with, fiber, clay, metal, wood, glass. He also capitalizes Craft meaning a methodology and enterprise that historically differs from art (which he does not capitalize). Third, he uses a capital C when discussing organizations that promote it as an entity, such as American Craft Council.
14 Arthur Danto, "The End of Art," The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven, 1984).
15 Warren Seelig, "Constructed Surface," Surface Design Journal (Winter 2000): 22-23.
16 Warren Seelig, "Thinking Aloud: Contemporary Fiber, Material Meaning," American Craft (August/September 2005): 45.
17 Sol LeWitt," Sentences on Conceptual Art," Art-Language 1, No. 1, (May 1969): 11--13.
18 Sol LeWitt," Sentences on Conceptual Art,", Art-Language 1, No. 1, (May 1969): 13.

• Light and Shadow: Warp and Weft