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Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth
Weaving Language examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record keeping, storytelling, and poetry. The second book in a three book series, WLII: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth, is both a mapping of instances that exemplify textile poetics from the beginning of time to the present day, as well as a creative experiment in utilizing textile as code. Capone invites the reader to experience textile as something to be read, along with its tactile and visual functions.
Originally published in an edition of 5 in 2015, Weaving Language is in the collections at the MoMA Library in New York, The John Hay Library of Brown University, and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Originally published in an edition of 5 in 2015, Weaving Language is in the collections at the MoMA Library in New York, The John Hay Library of Brown University, and The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
115 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2018
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January 8, 2022
The second part of this book, which is really cool diagrams and pictures of weavings and how words interplay with them, is really cool. The first part of this book, which is a collection of out-of-context quotes from various texts about the relationship between weaving and language, is garbage. If I have to read another book, article, anything, about the “metaphorics of weaving,” I will…. I will… do something drastic. It’s garbage. All of it. Just because you can make the “analogy” does not mean you should, especially when the entire quote/paper/book states the same thing repeatedly in language that gets ever more floridly academic. Once one gets beyond some neat linguistic comparison of “omg text and textile are, like, the same…” and maybe (maybe) some comparison between weaving various images and the “trodden upon and hitherto unacknowledged hidden voice of women” (even so, I think this is pushing it), one should be “clean cut off” (as Jeremiah so laconically puts it).
Also, and this is not the author’s fault, one of the quotes in the beginning section references the myth of “Arachne and Athena.” There is no such thing, and until anyone can give me solid textual evidence that such a myth existed before that one vague reference in Vergil’s Georgics that then bloomed into that truly stunning passage in Ovid, I will maintain that it is a completely Roman myth and therefore must be referred to as the myth of “Arachne and Minerva.” (I will step off my soapbox now.)
TL;DR: I spent way too much money on this book, but maybe the pretty pictures were worth it?
Also, and this is not the author’s fault, one of the quotes in the beginning section references the myth of “Arachne and Athena.” There is no such thing, and until anyone can give me solid textual evidence that such a myth existed before that one vague reference in Vergil’s Georgics that then bloomed into that truly stunning passage in Ovid, I will maintain that it is a completely Roman myth and therefore must be referred to as the myth of “Arachne and Minerva.” (I will step off my soapbox now.)
TL;DR: I spent way too much money on this book, but maybe the pretty pictures were worth it?
Displaying 1 of 1 review