Lynda Morris, 'Minimal Womanhood', In: Annotations 1: Mixed Belongings and Unspecified Destinations. Edited by Nikos Papastergiadis. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 64-69
Original version presented by the author first at the 'Imagined Communities' conference held at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton in 1996. The amended text is published in Annotations 1.
Charity shops always have a pile of much washed, frayed and fragile pieces of needlework. The sight of them makes me think of the hours women have spent on them. Women's labours, and the aesthetics of that labour, are little valued. Yet there seems to be some continuity between this work of our foremothers and minimal artists.
We did not have fine linen in my home. There was a lack of patience, a willingness to mend and make do in my background. My maternal great-grandmother worked in the Paisley Cotton mills in the 1880s. My ancestry is industrial and all links with any older tradition are lost. Art has therefore always had class associations for me. I do not think so many of these perfect little pieces of needlework could have been made without the luxury of time bought for women by the spoils of empire.
The Scottish painter Alan Johnston told me that the mother and father of Agnes Martin came from Skye. It seems that her sense of a woman's patience was something that remained in isolated communities in the late 19th century, left over from a time before industry. Harris tweed also made on Skye is a portrait of the weather on the landscape.
It was through friends in Germany that I found out about the work of Agnes Martin. I organised the first exhibitions of her work in Britain at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 1973 and the mixed exhibition Strata the same year at the RCA with Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Cy Twombley and Elsworth Kelly. This gives me some responsibility for encouraging the ideas of minimalism in this country. But my understanding was that these ideas had more to do with individuals recovering from the war in Vietnam by making ethical objects, rather than an escape into an idealised past.
How can something you have made be ethical and authentic? Agnes Martin drew her thoughts of the landscape like a weaver or a knitter, row after row, in all the imperfections of their hand making. Martin's work comes from a strength she found in the 'emotional and intuitive' weakness of women's labour. I think when I sew.
The thoughts that go through a woman's mind when she is making, leave no trace, but they survive through the values our mother's instilled into us. There is a saying in my family that to educate a man is to educate an individual and to educate a women is to educate a family. To be able to make her work, Martin left New York, and her experience of the metropolis, to live in a caravan on the Cuba Road in New Mexico.
"Less is more" was a concept taken by American artists from the toll of Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. I visited Richard Tuttle in a shabby lower East Side tenement, no furniture, just paper and wire and all the bowls, brushed and stool, the utensils for the Japanese Tea Ceremony.
An intuitive sadness is always there in lives shaped by war, even at one remove. Another woman of this generation was a "found" artist, Maria Reiche. Reiche left Germany for Peru in the 1930s where she spent her life studying the Nazca ground drawings. She published a little book in the late 1960s, Mystery in the Desert which Konrad Fischer found in Düsseldorf and gave to Richard Long as a present. I imported lots of copies into Britain when I ran the bookshop at Nigel Greenwood's Gallery. (I remember selling one to Bruce Chatwin. Later when he wrote In Patagonia he describes a visit to Reiche and her austere life, and he mocked the postcard she received for an exhibition by Alan Charlton with Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf.)
It is in the writings of a German Jewish woman, Hannah Arendt that one can find a theoretical structure to deal with some of these contradictions of women, authenticity and privilege. The Origins of Totalitarianism is her wartime thesis on the roots of anti-Semitism in European culture. A central image in the central volume 'Empire' is from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; as the men enter the headquarters of the Belgian Congo Company to join and then leave to set sail for Africa, the women remain in Brussels, in their black clothes with white lace, making their lace, row after row, seeing all but keeping their thoughts to themselves.
The price Europe paid for Empire was a brutalisation of men, increasingly divided from the privileged, gentle world of women and children. It is like living with a lie, for all concerned, for the men and for the women. Hence the hours put into those little pieces of lace. There is a yawning gap of meaning in this work of middleclass women who have been brought up over the centuries to politely keep their thoughts to themselves.