Dry Time
Anni Albers Weaving the Threads of the Past

When the Bauhaus was formed in the aftermath of World War I and the Spartacist Revolution, it was meant to be the reversed image of contemporary history and society. If the outside world was a field where opposing forces, in the form of class and national struggles, raged, the Bauhaus aimed to extricate itself from these conflicts in order to establish an alternative primordial community. In this community, the Gestaltung of men counted as much as that of things, the two being strictly interdependent. Within the exercises dictated by Johannes Itten to his students, the material and historical conflicts of the outside world were thus sublimated into balanced contrasts of forms and colors.^[1] Rather than seize the impure contradictory world—as Dada did at the same time, according to its homeopathic logic of curing evil with evil—the Bauhaus invested in the illusion of immaculate origins, unscathed by history and its conflicts.^[2] This approach only seems paradoxical: its fundamentally anti-materialist stance, namely the escape from conflictual reality, relied largely on matter—more specifically on the sensitive appropriation of the scarce matter that was still available and the subsequent rediscovery of its promised tactility. Thus, matter was not considered as a synecdoche of a net of relationships and means of production, but rather as the synecdoche of a timeless relationship between the subject and the world.

Several years later, in the wake of even more profound historical crises, Anni Albers would immigrate to the United States, and the Bauhaus itself became a thing of the past—an altogether personal, collective, and national past. At that time, she would often comment on the chaotic and disorienting character of life in Germany in the years after the First World War. “Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes,”^[3] she said. But if the outside reality was a “tangle,” that is a mess of conflictual and opaque experiences, the Bauhaus promised to unravel its heterogeneous threads in order to weave them anew, according to a pattern and a meaning. The metaphor, therefore, worked both ways: the chaos of history found a privileged metaphor in the intermingling of threads and the coherent weaving practiced at the School could be in turn a symbolic model for the society to come. Metaphors do not only to describe history, but also produce it.

Of course, Albers immediately added that “inside, at the Bauhaus, after some two years of its existence, there was confusion too, but certainly no hopelessness or lovelessness, rather exuberance with its own kind of confusion.” Thus, listening to Gropius present the Bauhaus project in 1923 (the year of the school’s famous turn towards industrial rationalization), Albers was undergoing “the experience of a gradual condensation, of our hoping and musing into a focal point, into a meaning, into some distant, stable objective.”^[4] In other words, the “tangle” of outer reality was interpreted as an “end” experience, whereas the “confusion” of the Bauhaus was an experience of a beginning. This ambivalent temporal identity—a single moment that is experienced both as an end and a beginning—is a salient feature of the historicity of modernity, understood as a regime of “crisis” and as a “situation of breach,” for better or for worse.^[5] “What had existed, proved to be wrong,” Albers added in 1938. Anyone seeking to find a point of certainty amidst the confusion of upset beliefs and hoping to lay a foundation for a work which was oriented towards the future, had to start at the very beginning.”^[6] Reified traditions, transformed into dry formulas, were of no help to life and the Bauhaus wanted to revive the corpse by experimenting with materials close at hand, materials that were at the same time substitutes for the missing experience and a means for re-establishing it.

In this essay, I would like to comment on what seems to me to be Anni Albers’s problematic relationship to the past in general and to history in particular. Anni Albers is not a unique case though, but rather a case study, which despite its particularities, can be considered as analogical to the Bauhaus in general. Yet, I’ll limit myself to two aspects of this relationship, namely to a certain kind of primitivism and its evolution, in the 1930s, into the conception of the historical regime of the “longue durée.”

The primitivism of the first Bauhaus was different from the aesthetic and conceptual modernist use of the masks and other wood artifacts before the First World War. Although the Bauhaus inherited this kind of aesthetic affiliation, its members were much more interested in a re-foundation of history and society and thus reactivated some of the most important ideas that—since the exploration and the colonization of the “New World” and all through the conjectural history of Enlightenment—had constituted the “first” steps of human societies. It was this conjectural “beginning,” reactivated by a devastated industrial society, that was deeply anti-materialist and anti-historical, since it aimed to sublimate a “poor” historical situation with an “elementary” beginning. “Poor” is used here in the sense given to modern “experience” by Walter Benjamin, an Armseligkeit interpreted as a fundamental rupture between the past and the present, a rupture due to the “tremendous development of technology,” to which society was not adapted and thus corresponded to a “new kind of barbarism.”^[7] For Benjamin, it was urgent to relinquish what he considered to be bourgeois culture’s most harmful function: its transformation into a contemplative sphere that guaranteed an autonomous subject and an autonomous class the privilege of purity in a dirty world. Benjamin opposed the ideal of the Bildung of a “new man,” hysterically prevalent in Germany in those years, with the metaphor of a man who “lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.”^[8] The Bauhaus eliminated all materialistic determination from the poverty of the present, making it essentially a moral value, according to the logic of a profoundly Christian reversal: “the last will be first.”^[9]

There are at least four aspects of this reversal that were necessary to the ideological foundation of the Bauhaus. First, and as Gropius asserted in plenty of texts, the material poverty of Germany after a four-year war and its subsequent defeat was meant to be converted into a spiritual wealth, something like a plus-value of interiority, which was supposed to make the humiliated nation a model in the struggle against universal materialism. Intoxicated by their supposed victory, Germany’s adversaries were unable to take over this task.^[10] Second, the acknowledged devaluation of artistic tradition in modernity was considered to be the very condition for its future flowering. Anni Albers would thus write that the weaving workshop was “fortunate not to have had the traditional training in the craft. It’s no easy task to throw useless conventions overboard.”^[11] Third, the scarcity of materials in an impoverished country ultimately brought about the rediscovery of what was immediately available and “natural”: the Sommerfeld House, built from wood, was presented by Gropius as an incredible opportunity. Finally, the very lack of concrete tasks for the first Bauhaus allowed its members to undertake the “re-foundation” of the arts through playful activity, which Friedrich Schiller once referred to as the field of freedom because it was opposed to blind necessity.^[12] In Albers’s words: “Unburdened by any considerations of practical applications, this uninhibited play of materials resulted in amazing objects […] of often barbaric beauty.”^[13] Now, if for Benjamin the new, positive concept of barbarism meant “to begin with a little and build up further” in an “arbitrary, constructed” language, with no organicity left in it, it was because of these new barbarians that Brecht or Klee for instance, weren’t “yearning for new experience,” but were longing “to free themselves from it.” Benjamin elaborated further: “They long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty—their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty—that it will lead to something respectable.”^[14]

Primitivist discourse is of course antithetical to this line of thought. While it depends deeply on this ideology of deprivation, lack, and scarcity, primitivist ideology is seldom neutral. Far more often, it is either positively inclined, as in the case of the “noble savage,” or negatively inclined, as it is the case in its familiar racist discourses. The topos of primitive “lack” is very important and as such has countless and varied examples. However, I would like to revisit one of the first, that of the Jesuit missionary Joseph François Lafitau, who discovered the Iroquois of North America.^[15] In his comparative study Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps [Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times], published in 1724, he was describing the Iroquois as “men deprived of everything, without letters, without sciences, without apparent laws, without a Temple for the most part, without a regulated Worship,” adding that they seemed as if they were “just coming out of the mud of the earth.”^[16] The “comparison” is based on the “without,” the zero degree of institutional and cultural history, the white page ready for the writing of European History on the new land and its people. By contrast, in Germany, the “without” came after an overwritten history, which had not only lost its meaning, but was also felt to be all the more negative. Considered as the consciousness and the use of the past, history was still equivalent to the historicism that Nietzsche had criticized so harshly; considered as a process of events taking place in the present, it was, as stated above, confusing, conflictual, and hugely disappointing. The primitivistic “without” could thus resonate with the deprivation of national pride, economic misery, and, most importantly, the loss of a valid common experience. All those specific “withouts” were to be converted into primordial values. Such was the case in the weaving workshop.

Virginia Gardner Troy and other scholars have already carried out the fascinating and valuable work of identifying the precise ethnological patterns that inspired the artists in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus.^[17] For my part, I will attempt to articulate three concepts that carry and operate the ethnologization of weaving, and that I consider to be complementary to its de-historicization: namely tactility, barbarism, and what I will call the quest for “constraint.” These three concepts seem to converge perfectly in the practice of weaving, which can be interpreted as a paradigmatic medium in and of the Bauhaus school, despite the fact that it was marginalized within the institution along gendered lines.

First, it is useful to recall that the preference for tactility, understood as the first sense used by the species and the individual to grasp the world and oneself, is a habitual schema of modern anti-intellectualism. Its first seeds can be found in Herder (Die Plastik, 1778), who formulated the hypothesis that the evolution from touch to sight repeated the evolution of humanity for each individual: “The eyes of children see as their hands touch,” he wrote. “Nature proceeds with each individual as it has done with all species, from touch to sight, from plastic to pictorial.” He thus condemned the pictoriality and what he called the “shadows” of the Moderns in order to praise the touch favored by the Ancients: “To what extent we are inferior to them, will be judged by a time to come.”^[18] And that time did come and judge, for instance in the person of Johannes Itten, who, under the influence of a major art historical and pedagogical turn, made tactility the basis of his teaching.^[19]

As for the figure of the “barbarian,” its modern emergence is more or less contemporary to Herder’s reevaluation of tactility. Benjamin’s “new barbarian” is its distorted echo. As Eric Michaud recently argued, the German Romantics had de-barbarized the “barbarian” and cleared it of the negative association brought about by serving as a contrast to “classical cultures,” thus making it one of the foundational collective subjects of modern history in general and art history in particular.^[20] Even if the “barbarians” constituted the essential primitivistic turn of modernity along with other figures, such as indigenous and prehistoric peoples, they nevertheless maintained a particular identity: that of a Volk full of vitality, which was able to live and determine its own history independently of normative cultures, even though—and this was its main advantage—it had not yet achieved a refined form of culture. Because it was seen as a specific stage of civilization—savage, barbaric, civilized^[21]—the idea of the “barbarian” was understood as distinct from tribal cultures in Africa and Oceania, which in the western imaginary remained outside of history, prisoners of the enchanted circle of nature and myth. The “barbaric beauty” evoked by Albers meant precisely this early stage of culture: neither savage, nor over-civilized.

However, it would be wrong to understand the Bauhaus’s “primitivism” solely as the quest for freedom from the historicist past and the desire to assert the eruption of the new in a reified world. It also promised a form of constraint that would put an end to the excesses of freedom, in the form of liberalism, of atomization and, more generally, of the individualist dissolution of modernity.^[22] Much emphasis has been placed on modernity as a process of autonomization vis-à-vis God, nature, and society. And faithful to this approach, any rejections of these processes were considered reactionary, which of course they very often were. However, there are also many cases that invalidate dualism—the division between the modern and the anti-modern, the revolutionaries and the reactionaries, etc.—and they do so even more powerfully because they are intrinsically, structurally ambivalent. As such, they demonstrate well the electric tension that is inherent in modernity. For me, interest in the Bauhaus lies in its fraught relationship with history, technology, and collectivity. If the rules of archaic societies were understood to restrict individual freedom, and if the serial cultures of indigenous and other archaic societies minimized the importance of rupture and novelty in creation, the modern subject, left to herself, aspired to invent her own constraints. Lacking in the collectively shared reality, these constraints were instead inherent to the medium itself. It was the medium, entirely human-made and yet transcendental, which provided the necessary exteriority to determine its conditions and yet to be tamed. As Albers would say in “Material as Metaphor” an aptly titled text: “It was threads that caught me, really against my will. To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. I learn to listen to them and speak their language.”^[23] The restrictive laws that were missing in culture as a totality could be thus found in a tiny piece of fabric.

What was remarkable about weaving was that it was less submissive than any other medium to the differentiating power of history. By differentiation, I mean here the specificity and the non-iteration of historical events, as well as the act of deferring, of delaying time, as analyzed in the first “grammatological” writings of Jacques Derrida.^[24] According to Albers, weaving was at the same time the most “primitive” and the most “self-reflexive” medium, that is to say also the most “modern.” Between the direct expressivity of the “primitive” and the thoughtful critical gaze of the “modern,” not much has changed through time and space. Even though this belief does imply Albers’s anti-evolutionist thinking, in that she was ready to recognize a high complexity in the presumed “beginnings,” it does not imply any less the idea that the textile, despite its utter material fragility, was more likely than other mediums to escape the corrosive action of time. In textiles, time was dry for many reasons.

The first reason was the primary structure of the textile, “the intricate interlocking of two sets of threads at right angles,” which was inscribed in the structure of its tool—the “loom”: “During the 4,500 years or, in some estimates, even 8,000 years that we believe mankind had been weaving, the process itself had been unaffected by the various devices that contributed to greater speed of execution. We still deal in weaving, as at the time of its beginning, with a rigid set of parallel threads in tension and mobile one that transverses it at right angles.”^[25] This material resistance, this constraint, channeled the form into typological series that were not inexhaustible, but were slightly variable and limited in number. To use here the logic of the art historian George Kubler, who became a source of inspiration for Albers when she was in the United States, the intricate interlocking of two sets of threads was a “primal object” that occurred across countries and centuries in the form of series with little variation.^[26] Albers wrote: “During 8,000 years, the speed is not the issue, but the contrast, the rigid set of parallel threads and the mobile one that are transverse at right angles. [...]. If we follow the various inventions through the ages, we will not be led on historical detours, interesting per se, but we will arrive at the underlying ideas in the mechanism of today’s operation.”^[27] In other words, the “constraint” of weaving was anthropological, while history, that is the changing and differentiating element in the formation of a culture that Albers called the “detours,” was consolidated, crystallized and contained in the historical forms of the “longue durée.” When history became too random, too contradictory, too arbitrary, too nightmarish, too dissolutive as well, the constraint of the “loom” provided the desired constancy.

As several scholars have pointed out, the discovery of the New World was particularly crucial for Josef and Anni Albers as they fled National Socialism. There Europeans could still glimpse humanity’s universal past in indigenous peoples, and in archeology’s reflexive approach. “Weaving” was not just one of the oldest arts by way of analogy and conjecture, as even Gottfried Semper understood it, but one could touch it in the present, such as it was extracted from the dry sediments of Peru. In this latitude, historical and meteorological time was “dry.” As such, it was static and inalterable, with no event capable of splitting its mass. Rather, the events were dissolving like “scum,” to use the famous metaphor coined by the primary theorist of the “longue durée,” the Annales historian Fernand Braudel.^[28]

Anni Albers thought about the historical evolution of weaving along these lines. In her now classic “On Weaving,” she wrote: “Works of art, to my mind, are the ancient Peruvian pieces, preserved in an arid climate and excavated after hundreds of years.”^[29] In this arid environment, where the rain does never exert its erosive effect, the objects of the past are preserved in a remarkable way, providing evidence of what a textile is—as much in the deepest past as today.^[30] During the same years that Anni and Joseph Albers were discovering dry Pre-Colombian cultures, the French art historian Henri Focillon was authoring an important preface to a collective international publication on folklore.^[31] In this text, he made a distinction between the different temporalities of two kinds of cultures: urban-modern and rural. He argued: “Urban environments have an accelerated, extremely mobile notion of time, capable of an artificial reversibility (archaism) and of artificial anticipations. Multiplicity of labor divides it into several short, but numerous intervals which push each other and bring to action, in ordinary life, its jerky, feverish character. It imposes on everyone the urgency to go beyond the limits of time and constantly renew the matter of existence. It is in this way that the notion of the modern is born in art, determined by an acute need of synchronism and by the fear of being surpassed.” And he added that: “To this accelerated time is opposed a slow and even motionless time, where the past is the contemporary of the present, where the slightest idea of ​​the future escapes intelligence. In these steppes of time, in this vast monotony of days, much can be done, but nothing happens. Facts are accumulating, without ever giving birth to an event. The cultures of slowed time are naturally characterized by survivals, beliefs, folklore, popular arts. Invention, in the full sense of the word, is banned.”

In Peru or in Mexico, the Albers forgot the exhausting modern “synchronism,” the effort to always be in step with acceleration, while obeying an equally strong need to invent, but out of oneself, the reversibility of time.^[32] As for the reversibility and other dialectics of time—Albers spoke of “detours” as among the harmful privileges of modernity: not there anymore, and yet still buried somewhere, be it the unconscious, the prehistoric, the barbaric or the folkloric. Being in Peru or in Mexico, the Albers no longer needed to forget what was culturally close in order to discover what was culturally distant—such as the language of abstraction: “Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art,” exclaimed Josef Albers in front of the repetitive schematization of the pyramids.^[33] Finding themselves for the first time in a “steppe of time,” like those described by Focillon, the Albers no longer simply visited museums to make the acquaintance of isolated objects, but were synchronous, in flesh and bones, with “dry” cultures. It was probably the first time that the past was not cut off from the present. Clearly, if the two artists were completely opposed to this vulgar evolutionism, which disturbed the simplicity of the so-called primitives and the complexity of the moderns, they didn’t really escape the idea that archaic cultures knew no evolution, no change, no history.^[34]

Speaking many years later of the one thousand “small pieces” in their collection of Pre-Columbian art, Anni Albers recounted that they “came from prehistoric sites from little boys offering them to us through the car window, just as turkeys and goats were also held for sale […] century-old Pre-Colombian pieces found by peasants when plowing their fields.” “Yes, here was a country whose earth still yielded such art,” so much so that a woman, holding a little sculpture, told to them: “Es natural.”^[35] “Es natural”: farmers cultivated the earth and instead of plants sprouted tiny prehistoric sculptures that were still wrapped in clay when the Albers brought them home to wash them and discover their Gestalt. This “eternal present” was diametrically opposed to what the historian François Hartog called “presentism,” the regime of historicity of an eternal transition, in which experiences dissolve like sand. Anni Albers would thus often refer to the “devastating multiplicity” of her time, such as the communication techniques that “stress the moment, the temporary” and “accelerate the rise and fall of ideas,” the “waste paper” that was the “yesterday’s paper,” in sum: “All these objects that distract us” and against which her tight weaving had to fight.

However, it would be simplistic and partial to claim that the encounter between Anni Albers and archaic cultures is entirely intelligible through this mythologization of the eternally present “other.” The conflictual ambivalence that seems to be at the heart of modernity comes through clearly in Anni Albers’s writing: “Present is obscured by its own familiarity.”^[36] In modernity, this “familiarity,” which was inherent to all present, was not only disrupted by the brutality of the technique, the shock of accelerating cadences, successive technical inventions or the unsettling sensitive and conceptual codes of the avant-gardes, but also by a distant and often ignored past, full of astonishing revelations. Albers often praised the “direct” and “expressive” character of pre-Columbian textiles, which she often explained by the absence of writing in these cultures: “Along with cave paintings,” she wrote, “threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning. In Peru, where no written language in the generally understood sense had developed even by the time of the Conquest in the sixteenth century we find—to my mind not in spite of it but because of it—one of the most refined textile cultures we have come to know. Other periods in other parts of the world have achieved highly developed textiles, perhaps even technically more intricate ones, but none has preserved the expressive directness through its own history by this specific means.”^[37] In other words, writing (l’écriture), this detour of experience through arbitrary, linear codes, diminished the “direct presence” of textiles, in the same way that it reduced the impact of the spoken word to communicate and in the same way that both the discourse and the discipline of history—by definition writing and the written medium—delayed and even distorted the relationship between the past and the present. Writing as the platonic pharmakon was not unknown to Albers and history, after all, was also conceived as a negative interval, a difference, a delay, forbidding the direct experience of the past and aggravating the alienating dissolution of the present. As dry and tangible documents of the past, good textiles were supposed to serve as both the erasers of history and as survivors of a past that remains present.

And yet, it’s also true that this live, tactile past did not have a clear message to deliver. Its narrative was suspended, its meaning was opaque. On the one hand, Albers was looking for a coherently woven world, in which each element had its place. On the other, she insisted that this meaning was unintelligible, escaping her grasp, much like the eternal (or the deep past, as exemplified by the cave paintings). One of the advantages of the deep past was its very unintelligibility. Albers, therefore, ultimately made the following analogy between the past and the present: just as “some of the earliest weavings unearthed after thousands of years have the magic of things not yet found useful,” the contemplative works she increasingly aimed for in her pictorial weavings had to be self-contained, self-absorbed, and mute, keeping their meanings within themselves: “To let threads be articulate again and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at, is the raison d’être of my pictorial weavings.”^[38] Utility was at the service of the familiar present: through its clear and unequivocal meaning, it should, therefore, fade, much like writing or history, leaving the opacity of form alone to disrupt, if only for a while, the automatism of the present.