On Weaving
Anni Albers
Ch 8 : Tactile Sensibility
"All progress, so it seems, is coupled with regression elsewhere. We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation - the reading and writing public of today is enormous. But we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense.
No wonder a faculty that is so largely unemployed in our daily plodding and bustling is degenerating. Our materials come to us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread . . . Modern industry saves us endless labor and drudgery; . . . it also bars us from taking part in the forming of material and leaves idle our sense of touch and with it those formative faculties that are stimulated by it.
We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided. We are apt today to overcharge our gray matter with words and pictures, that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, pre-formulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch off our creative impulse . . .
Concrete materials and also colors per se, words, tones, volume, space, motion - these constitute raw material; and here we still have to add that to which our sense of touch responds - the surface quality of matter and its consistency and structure . . .
Surface quality of material, that is, materiere, being mainly a quality of appearance, is an aesthetic quality and therefore a medium of the artist; while quality of inner structure is, above all, a matter of function and therefore the concern of the scientist and the engineer. Sometimes material surface together with material structure are the main components of the work; in textile works, for instance, specifically in weavings or, on another scale, in works of architecture . . ."
Ch 10 : Designing As Visual Organization
"It is safe, I suppose, to assume that today most if not all of us have had the experience of looking down from an airplane onto this earth. What we see is a free flow of forms intersected here and there by straight lines, rectangles, circles, and evenly drawn curves; that is, by shapes of great regularity. Here we have, then, natural and man-made forms in contradistinction. And here before us we can recognize the essence of designing, a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature's secretive and complex working . . .
When the matter of usefulness is involved, we plainly and without qualification use our characteristics : forms that, however far they may deviate in their final development, are intrinsically geometric.
. . . A work of art, we know, can be made of sand or sound, of feathers or flowers, as much as of marble or gold. Any material, any working procedure, and any method of production, manual or industrial, can serve an end that may be art . . ."
Ch 8 : Tactile Sensibility
"All progress, so it seems, is coupled with regression elsewhere. We have advanced in general, for instance, in regard to verbal articulation - the reading and writing public of today is enormous. But we certainly have grown increasingly insensitive in our perception by touch, the tactile sense.
No wonder a faculty that is so largely unemployed in our daily plodding and bustling is degenerating. Our materials come to us already ground and chipped and crushed and powdered and mixed and sliced, so that only the finale in the long sequence of operations from matter to product is left to us: we merely toast the bread . . . Modern industry saves us endless labor and drudgery; . . . it also bars us from taking part in the forming of material and leaves idle our sense of touch and with it those formative faculties that are stimulated by it.
We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental. If we reduce their range, as we do when we reduce the necessity to form things ourselves, we grow lopsided. We are apt today to overcharge our gray matter with words and pictures, that is, with material already transposed into a certain key, pre-formulated material, and to fall short in providing for a stimulus that may touch off our creative impulse . . .
Concrete materials and also colors per se, words, tones, volume, space, motion - these constitute raw material; and here we still have to add that to which our sense of touch responds - the surface quality of matter and its consistency and structure . . .
Surface quality of material, that is, materiere, being mainly a quality of appearance, is an aesthetic quality and therefore a medium of the artist; while quality of inner structure is, above all, a matter of function and therefore the concern of the scientist and the engineer. Sometimes material surface together with material structure are the main components of the work; in textile works, for instance, specifically in weavings or, on another scale, in works of architecture . . ."
Ch 10 : Designing As Visual Organization
"It is safe, I suppose, to assume that today most if not all of us have had the experience of looking down from an airplane onto this earth. What we see is a free flow of forms intersected here and there by straight lines, rectangles, circles, and evenly drawn curves; that is, by shapes of great regularity. Here we have, then, natural and man-made forms in contradistinction. And here before us we can recognize the essence of designing, a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature's secretive and complex working . . .
When the matter of usefulness is involved, we plainly and without qualification use our characteristics : forms that, however far they may deviate in their final development, are intrinsically geometric.
. . . A work of art, we know, can be made of sand or sound, of feathers or flowers, as much as of marble or gold. Any material, any working procedure, and any method of production, manual or industrial, can serve an end that may be art . . ."
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