Anni Albers @ Tate Modern — thoughts and reviews and stuff

Bauhaus was a German art school that existed in the early 20th century. It had an immense influence on design in general with clear influence in architecture, interior design, graphic design and typography. The school taught many forms of art but all with a central principle: Gesamtkunstwerk. This translates to something like “total art”, and is intended to highlight the belief that all art may be brought together, and any object irrespective of purpose has the potential to be beautiful and artistic in some form.

Anni Albers, the subject of a current Tate Modern exhibition, was a student at the Bauhaus before it was pressured to close by the newly elected Nazi government. While considered radically egalitarian and modern the Bauhaus was not free from antiquated ideas and its own oppressive tendencies. Albers was pushed towards textiles and weaving as women were not allowed into all the workshops that the school offered. These weaving workshops in turn became know as the women’s workshops.

As Disappointing as it is to learn that the most modern art schools were still lagging in their treatment of women as artists equal to men, the body of work she would come to produce in that field is stunning. From her preliminary designs on paper to the final pieces to the truly amazing research that went into her work, Albers was a truly amazing artist and what this exhibition does well is show that. There is a perfect blend of looking at her own study of the craft and the art that she produced. What was surprising in this was the penultimate room of the exhibition, which lays out a large amount of writing and research that went into her books. It alone works as a brilliant capsule to demonstrate what makes her work important. It displays small pieces of textiles that she collected from around the world and shows how she taught people to create these works. The detail both in this research and the art itself is truly inspiring.

Another important thing this exhibition does is highlight to a wider audience the artistry in the craft of weaving and textiles. Often, as was done at the Bauhaus, weaving is reduced to being a lesser art and often associated with being done by women. It is not taken seriously as either high art or great craft but this exhibition corrects that view. The visible amounts of study going into each work before fabric is even present highlights the deep understanding Albers has for the medium and the resultant works are nothing short of mind boggling. There are of course pieces that, while impressive, one can work out how they were made but there are also some that no amount of time spent gazing will fully let you in to the secrets of their fabrictaion.

The only fault I would make of the exhibition is nothing to do with Albers or her work but of the Tate. The last room contains projections of videos of a person using a loom and showing clearly how it works while the back wall has some bunches of different fibres so you can see what the materials feel like. I truly believe more of this tactile demonstration would have placed this exhibition on another level. I’m glad they crammed it in at the end but a better way to develop an audiences understanding of a craft is to have them touch, feel and see it. The pictures illustrating working with looms and weaving are great to look at but more focus on the difficulty of the craft would entirely change people’s understanding of how impressive her work was. Maybe place more of these materials around the rooms so you can see and feel the raw materials she was working with to create her art. It’s all well and good having it in the final room but now I have to go back round to see where these materials were used!

I honestly can’t recommend this exhibition enough. Between the craft itself, the artistry, the history, and the sheer amount of work the artist put into all aspects of her craft it is truly a display of how one masters a field. It is only marred ever so slightly by the uncreative display and someone thoughtless exhibiting that the Tate has demonstrated.