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Abstract
This dissertation demonstrates how textile objects and practices played an important but unacknowledged role in art and literature of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic during the second half of the twentieth century. Positioned against established narratives of the fiber arts revolution in the United States and Great Britain, this project articulates an alternative evolution of textile art in Germany. With a diverse corpus of artists and authors including multimedia artists Annegret Soltau, Gabriele Stötzer, Heike Stephan, and Ellen Thiemann as well as Christa Wolf and concrete poet/mail artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, I analyze how the development of textile art in East and West Germany navigated the tensions of societies reformulating themselves after World War II. I use unpublished archival material and personal interviews with artists to create a capacious definition of textile art, one that includes both objects made from fiber as well as works that are formed through textile and textile-informed processes, allowing for a textile poetics and woven communities. While German studio textile art is not as radically experimental as that of U.S., U.K., or Polish artists, I use this broader understanding to argue that textile art developed in realms outside established artists’ studios formally innovative and experimental ways. Hence, I argue that textiles were central to the development of art that is radically egalitarian: egalitarian, as it employed techniques and processes which were familiar to individuals in the 1970s and -80s, and radical for its ability to grant an artistic voice to individuals otherwise excluded from professional artistic spheres in East Germany. Through this inclusivity, textile and textile practices demonstrate their potential as an organizing tool for communities and collectives, as I demonstrate with the Erfurter Künstlerinnengruppe (Erfurt Women Artists Group, 1984 – 1994). I also demonstrate the coercive, anti-utopian side of this organizing with Ellen Thiemann and the Kunstgewerbekommando (Arts and Crafts Detail) at Hoheneck Prison. Furthermore, within this egalitarian framework and textiles’ association with domestic spaces and craft, I argue that their migration to literature in Christa Wolf’s poetics of weaving is in part a way of claiming a connection between literary work and the laboring class, thereby obscuring her own privileged position. Along with their ability to facilitate and mediate relationships between individuals, I turn to Soltau’s stitched photographs and Soltau’s photography to argue that textiles act as a surrogate for the body and thereby a means of defining individuals within a society that foregrounds the collective. Ultimately, textile art in Germany both mediates and navigates the spectrum between the binaries of individual and community, artist and amateur, working class and intelligentsia, and craft and art.