Shawls, so ugly, yet so compelling

New Shawl  

Did you know that part of the Berlin Wall (above) is in New York? Who knew? It’s hidden away in Midtown, near the Museum of Modern Art. Anyhow, I have a total dearth of exciting knit-blogging fodder, or exciting life-blogging fodder. (Not that my normal posts are SO exciting, but anyway.)

I’m knitting another shawl, out of variegated yarn. I realize that these are weird and possibly ugly, and the fact that I spend the majority of my free time and disposable income on crazy colored yarns to knit potentially ugly accessories, is, perhaps, a bad direction for my life. This could, if my life was a novel, or some kind of art project, be kind of tragic, and a metaphor for modern American life or something.

By the way, in my boring life, I’ve recently went to this year’s Whitney Biennial, and it was so crappy. (Beyond the low quality of the art, there was a really low level of craftsmanship to the work.) Plus, a whole bunch of the explanations seemed, um, bullshitty. So maybe I will try to justify my craft projects with similar explanations: “New York Minknit’s work posits the question of how chance and gender interact in modern life. By using variegated yarn, the artist is showing the randomness of choice, and interprets the concept for the fiber arts. Shawls have traditionally been worn by older women, many of whom have been forgotten by modern society, and by crafting shawls using traditional needle-work, she reinvents the definition of third-wave feminism.”

Or maybe I just love ugly shawls. 

Posted in Shawls, travelingproject, Uncategorized at May 11th, 2008. Trackback URI: trackback

6 Responses to “Shawls, so ugly, yet so compelling”

  1. May 12th, 2008 at 9:14 am #Grace

    I read a few reviews of the Biennial and I have been incredibly skeptical… hearing your opinion confirms that I’ll likely be incredibly pissed off if I decide to see it.

    I actually have BFA in Studio Art and I had professors who ate BS for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If I had known then that the art world wasn’t going to get any more respectable I would have changed my major to political science.

  2. May 12th, 2008 at 2:37 pm #Adam

    All you have to do to make something a bullshitty art explanation is to use the word “posit.” Somebody told me that. 😉

  3. May 12th, 2008 at 11:20 pm #Art Moderne

    But are your shawls transgressive? You’ll never get anywhere without that. You need to posit some transgressivity, that’s what you need to do.

  4. May 13th, 2008 at 9:31 am #lekkercraft

    AGREED on the Whitney Biennial. I took a day off from work to treat myself to a museum and lunch and it wasn’t worth it. Well, lunch was.

  5. May 13th, 2008 at 2:11 pm #Adam

    Hahaha, Grace. As if politics have gotten more respectable since then! 😉

  6. May 22nd, 2008 at 11:14 am #michele

    that’s actually quite good you know. variegated yarn and the randomness of choice and the tie in back to third wave feminism. and there are far more tragic choices women can make in life than knitting shawls. like … oh maybe i don’t need to list them.