Weaving Anni Albers through Édouard Glissant: The Opacity of Embodied and Material Knowledge

When Anni Albers and her students at Black Mountain College, such as Lore Kadden Lindenfeld, Else Regensteiner, Mimi French, and Don Page, looked at weaving, their trained eyes could see through its surface to deconstruct its structure.^[1] They learned how to see not only the type of fiber used but also how to track the skeleton structure of thread, as if all the woolen or flaxen texture were removed.

At its most bare, Albers described weaving in her 1965 book On Weaving as, “the interlacing of two distinct groups of threads at right angles,” the vertical warp and horizontal weft, or filling. ^[2] While weaving, the vertical warp threads are held in tension by the loom, separated into up and down positions depending on the weaving pattern. The weaver passes the weft through the space between the up and down warp, only passing over the warp threads in the down position. Then the warp moves, the down threads swap with those in the up position, and the weaver passes the weft back across the warp.^[3]

There are many different structures possible, depending on which warp threads are raised and lowered. The simplest is the plain weave, which appears as an over-under pattern. A viewer can recognize this basic weave from the grid structure appearing as alternating bumps of weft and warp. When weaving, the warp would be set up with every other thread in the up position and the alternating threads in the down position. Other structures, such as the balanced twill weave, for example denim, would have a warp set alternating between two warp threads up, then two down, then two up, repeating.

Albers and her students could see through the weave to the bare structure primarily because of their experiential practice with weaving itself, relationships with experienced weavers, and ability to read weaving diagrams. These exposures trained their eyes to see distinct threads, whereas the untrained eye might see only the surface effect. In other words, and as Albers well knew, the structure of the weave is transparent to those who are in social relationships with other weavers and the practice of weaving: a condition that is ripe for theoretical elaboration.

Like my own introduction here, Albers began On Weaving with the fundamentals orienting the reader to the loom, draft notation, and the simplest of weaving structures: plain, twill, and satin weave. Published in 1965, well after leaving Black Mountain College in 1949, and right before her turn away from weaving and toward printing, Albers’s book mediated between history, construction, design, and the physical realm of embodied making.^[4] Her ten chapters and a hundred plates were not intended to serve as an instruction manual but instead taught the reader how to think through the process of weaving. Through writing, she wrestled with the history and structure of weaving to articulate what made an ideal construction and design. Though she also acted this out in her weaves, her writing enunciated and expanded on what may only have been visible to Albers’s trained eye. Writing-craft and making-craft were connected acts in her inter-medial routine of writing, weaving, and printing, but the mediation of writing solidified her diffuse embodied connections between material, movement, and texture into the conceptual—and at times simplified—form of text. ^[5]

The Poet

Next, we turn to another theorist of weaving. When Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Glissant looked at a weaving, in a text written twenty-five years after Albers’s, he saw the interlacing threads as a metaphor for the self.^[6] He saw the thread as a fibril: a single line with each end frayed, at once a split thread and biological filament found in nearly all living organisms. Glissant scaled the fibril up to represent the connections between diasporic movements of people. In the first footnote of the first chapter of his book Poetics of Relation, Glissant reproduced his own drawing of a fibril. He wrote, “it might be drawn like this: [fibril image] African countries to the East; the lands of America to the West.”^[7]

Rooted in the particulars of the Caribbean, Glissant’s geographic specificity grounded his work in the material world, building on referents like weaving or the geology of the archipelago to support his concepts. In 1965, when Albers published On Weaving, Glissant had just returned from France to Martinique, where an anticolonial independence movement had recently formed. At the time, he wrote poetry and novels about Caribbean language, identity, and history. In 1990, he published Poetics of Relation, his book of aesthetic and political theory, organized in five associative sections. Glissant’s term Relation referred to shared knowledge, while relationality evoked a practice of sensitivity to this shared knowledge. In his definition, the world was made up of the relations between all things and every object was related. The transformation of individual and systemic imaginaries developed the sense of relationality, a process based in navigating differences in material and non-material relationships.^[8]

Though Glissant was not a weaver, he turned to woven cloth to describe relationality. It was an apt metaphor because weaving is already a practice of fluidity and the resulting cloth an inseparable field of fabric. In the chapter “For Opacity,” he wrote, “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”^[9] In this chapter, he argued for a right to opacity, or the irreducible singularity of both the self and the other, as opposed to transparency, where the differences of the other are judged according to Western thought in pursuit of so-called understanding. He gathered woven fabric as a metaphor for how these opacities intersect to form the boundaryless continuity of the fabric of Relation.

Both Glissant and Albers wrote through their ideas grounded in the materiality of weaving. While Glissant’s primary aim was to use the material aspects of weaving to imagine a politically liberatory social network, Albers vacillated in her writing, striving for simplicity while gesturing at the embodied and social relational process of learning to weave. I unfold Albers’s On Weaving through Glissant’s use of weaving as a metaphor for interlaced social relations. Reading Albers through Glissant highlights her effort to overcome errant unknowns for clarity, and tugs out the glimmers of uncertainty, mystery, and opacity that were nonetheless at play in her writing.

Transparency

Glissant introduced his term transparency to denote a reductive and false sense of clarity. He wrote, “if we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand, and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”^[10] Western “understanding” simplifies what one is trying to understand, reducing it to its bare components. Albers’s formal abstraction and writing relied on this very simplification. In her attempt to articulate the process of weaving, she condensed it to its most essential components, describing weaving as a process of control, “a work of clarification, of controlled formation.”^[11] Therefore, she was implicated in the same Western understanding that Glissant described. She subscribed to a modernist logic of transparency, which systematizes and orders, imposing structure even where there is ambiguity.^[12]

Glenn Adamson argues in The Invention of Craft that what we think of as craft was not firmly rooted in pre-modern artisanal traditions, which were socially relayed person to person, but in modernity itself, especially as marked by the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Even while craft was positioned by its supporters, such as William Morris, as an “antidote to modernity,” that opposition was reductive, marking craft out as a distinctive category in ways that only reinscribed the modernist values of progress, efficiency, and technological development—if only by contrast. In this same way, the anti-modern values ascribed to craft were also ideological tools for colonization efforts. While textiles in India were described by authors like James Mill as authentic and traditional, that static connection to the past was a foil for comparison with the supposed progress of British textile production.^[13]

In the context of craft, transparency means making knowledge available to non-practitioners, outsiders to the relationship between the weaver, loom, and thread. In Victorian manuals, explicit descriptions of manufacturing replaced artisanal mastery and mystery. Later, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and certainly the Bauhaus, removed ornamentation, which covered up traces of the hand, instead favoring undisguised construction techniques that left specialized knowledge visible via marks of the hand and unconcealed structure.^[14]

Though the values that accompany handmade craft seem to directly challenge modernist industrial reasoning, the same desire for progress, control, and clarity that guided industrialists arguably also directed Albers’s taste for structure as visual content. She valued weaving that visually (on the surface) and structurally (internally) made visible the architecture, technique, materials, and signs of making for the viewer. In her recent book, Bauhaus Weaving Theory, the art historian T’ai Smith describes a complicated relationship between the ideals of high modernism and the writings of women who worked in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, including Albers. These weaver-writers simultaneously upheld modernist values, such as medium specificity, while also holding those ideals at a distance. Albers, for instance, in a 1924 essay “Bauhaus Weaving,” condemned the mechanization of production and modern methods of textile design. Yet, in the same essay, she outlined how direct experimentation on the loom could be marshalled into productive design innovations for industrial manufacture.^[15] In On Weaving, though published forty years later, Albers again emphasized design and structure to order the process of weaving, especially to clarify its operations for the goals of reliable reproducibility. Instead of “transparent,” she employed terms like “simplified,” “clarity,” and “controlled,” all taken from quotes I engage in greater length in following sections.

Albers’s writing in On Weaving attempted to impose a modern understanding of transparency, by valuing clarity and order, yet weaving as a practice resisted this kind of transparency. Even within the same book, Albers bumped into weaving’s opacity. Across its many sections, she included anecdotes on tactility and the relationship between design and natural forms, which suggested a shared agency between weaver, materials, and tools. Learning how to weave involves entangling oneself with these unknowns.

Even when Albers was seemingly beguiled by the kinds of relational opacity that motivated Glissant’s use of weaving as a social metaphor, she quickly returned to her more analytical, prescriptive mode. For example, she collected ancient weavings from Peru, which she described as an “infinite phantasy within the world of threads, conveying strength or playfulness, mystery or the reality of their surroundings, endlessly varied in presentation and construction.”^[16] Her sense of wonder prompted her to unravel these pieces. To better understand their structure, she dissolved the mystery. Though these textiles contained Peruvian memory, history, and spirituality, Albers was interested primarily in their inventiveness and technological achievement, translating the samples as a structure to be understood and adapted for her own ends, rather than a lifeworld within which to be situated.

Albers’s students’ ability to track warp set-up and the thread’s over-under pattern was a different type of transparency than what Glissant defined, and which I ascribe to Albers’s book. It was not the false sense of clarity characterizing Glissant’s transparency, nor was it the simplifying order from On Weaving. In other words, the students were engaged in a non-modern transparency. Rather than achieving transparency by looking through, the students, and perhaps Albers in her own practice at the loom, entered a social and embodied relationship with a textile. The students could sense the weaving structure because they learned structure from the act of building up the architecture themselves.

Opacity

Both Glissant and Albers opened space for thinking about uncertainty and opacity. Glissant articulated opacity as the singularity of the self. If the self is not fully knowable, the other is just as complex.^[17] The practice of navigating boundaries between two opacities, the opacity of self and other, builds the foundation of social relationality.^[18] In the chapter “For Opacity,” woven cloth was a metaphor for Glissant to gesture at the fabric of interlaced self and other. He envisioned each person’s opacity to “coexist and converge” like warp and weft threads. He attributed the “texture of the weave” to this convergence of threads, or the meeting of differences. The individual threads were akin to opacities, while the whole cloth stood in for Relation. The textured cloth possesses a quality beyond the individual threads. Likewise, textured and boundaryless Relation, as an alternative to Humanity or the Universal, take on characteristics beyond opacities of self. While warp and filler threads can snap, fray, or abrade easily alone, together they create an extremely dense and strong network. Relation and woven cloth have no noticeable demarcations between stops and starts, knots, warp or weft thread. Glissant wrote, “this here is the weave, and it weaves no boundaries.”^[19] Any separation between self and other becomes “obsolete” in the fabric’s cohesion. For Glissant, using weaving as a metaphor engaged with the already inseparable relations formed from weaving. To practice the relation inherent in woven cloth is to transform the social world.

Glissant’s metaphor of weaving forms a right-angle relationship with Albers’s On Weaving, like the meeting between warp and weft—two unique voices, irreducible to one another, put into conversation to make a tight, if pliant, cloth. While the stakes of Glissant’s project relate to vaster Caribbean geographies, deeper colonial and racial histories, and ever-present dynamics of difference that are beyond the scope of the current essay, the aim of my ongoing research is to activate elements of his larger scope in American histories of craft. Here I bring in Glissant to introduce his writing on weaving, to surface complexity in Albers, and to activate art’s wider field, beyond the object, as social practices that incarnate and even extend Glissant’s theories.

For Albers, opacity could describe the unknown in the process of weaving. Instead of the human self and other, there was self and thread, loom, fabric, texture, nature, color, design, technique, and teacher. Underneath the surface of clarity and structure, the network of human and nonhuman relations engendered by the process of weaving peek through in her passages about decision-making. In her text, Albers wrestles between order and unknowability, but materiality—in the sense of relationships with materials, tools, technologies, histories, places, and other weavers—remains somewhat outside her control.

I argue that Glissant’s theory of Relation and opacity illuminate complications in Albers’s practice and her writing on it in On Weaving. Through Glissant, we can become more aware of Albers’s modernist inclinations toward overly simplistic transparency and reductive abstraction, even as his writing also surfaces elements of Albers’s career that are at odds with that tendency. Glissant’s analytic helps reveal the complexity and sometimes unresolved contradiction across Albers’s various modes—an aesthetic inheritance in the middle of American modernism that dramatizes Glissant’s metaphor and its opposite all at once.

The Language of Transparency in On Weaving and With Verticals

Albers’s writing was infused with the language of modern transparency. For example, Albers emphasized the simplicity of weaving, the importance of planning, and the necessity of matching the weave structure with the surface content. In coming to weaving as a designer, someone who manipulates materials to achieve a specific technical effect, rather than to produce emotion, she stripped down weaving into its two main elements, “the character of the fibers used in the thread construction—that is, the building material—and the construction, or weave, itself.”^[20]

Before Albers even sat down at the loom, control started at the design stage, whether she was responding to a brief for a commercial design or planning her own pieces. She wrote, “it is clarity that we seek,” from a process that “is or should be methodical planning.”^[21] She sought to make the two main elements of weaving, fiber characteristics and construction, transparent for the viewer. By preparing a design, a weaver creates “a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature’s secretive and complex working.”^[22] She emphasized a surface that is easily understood by the viewer because of its organization and distinguished her simplified form of weaving from nature, which is less fully knowable.

The clarity Albers sought was in part determined not by her, but by the material properties of the fibers and their corresponding construction methodologies. Albers instructed that the visual considerations of the surface must match the structure of a weave in an almost predetermined way because, as she says, “every weave has, of course, a material that seems best suited to its special features.” She matched wool thread with twill weave because it is more pliable and therefore softens the wool.^[23] Even the type of material and colors were determined by whether their features enhance the structure of the weave. The yarn choice can accentuate or subdue the structure, but she warned that choosing more expensive or textured yarns did not make up for poor construction. Color was third in importance because it can easily overcome the maker with its emotion and take weaving too far into what she called the “painterly province.”^[24] Albers valued the distinctiveness of weaving as a medium of clarity over obfuscating the structure and materials with painterly expressiveness.

Albers’s writing corresponded with her own artistic weavings. For example, her 1946 cotton and linen With Verticals, is a variation of a twill weave [Fig 1]. Alternating sections were woven with the twill slanting different directions, left or right. These horizontal sections form subtle rectangular geometries where the two directions of twill meet to form arrows. The color choice intentionally emphasizes the structure—dark red provides stark contrast with light tan to create diagonal striping. Thin black vertical lines that vary in length break up the horizontal red and tan twill, intersecting to create the effect of an even darker red. Albers played with the familiar twill structure in With Verticals by emphasizing the left and right directional possibilities of twill by having them repeatedly meet and change direction. The precise vertical lines are built from the same twill pattern. By both using and breaking up the horizontal directionality of the twill, they draw attention to the structure

Figure 1. Anni Albers, With Verticals, 1946, cotton and linen, 61 x 46 ½ in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2004.12.1. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. Used by permission.

On Mediation, On Medium

Albers’s writing was both a mediation, a step removed from the actual experience of weaving, and an exploration of the medium specificity of weaving. Throughout her life, from 1924 when her first essay was published to 1982 at her last lecture at the College Art Association, she wrote to understand weaving, but writing and weaving were also distinct mediums.^[25] Writing expresses the world through description while weaving does so with texture. Smith argues in her essay “On Reading, On Weaving,” the book is its own medium that the reader interacts with in a specific way—holding the book, turning the pages, flipping back and forth between text and image plates. The book is a “visual and haptic” network that mediates the readers’ comprehension of weaving. Mediation here refers to the textual descriptions of weaving, the diagrams, and the images of weaving that are between the reader and the experience of weaving itself. The reader knows that reading about weaving is not the same as the process of weaving on a loom, yet using the book entangles the reader into the symbolic system of weaving.^[26] If we recall Glissant, we remember Relation does not collapse differences, even between mediums, but assembles distinct elements into a fabric so that they are stronger together.

In her text, Albers reinforced this medium specificity of weaving by recognizing the boundaries between weaving and media and strengthened those boundaries through her design methodology. This medium specificity was continually enforced through simplicity. By paring down weaving as a medium to what Albers saw as its most basic components, essentializing it, weaving could be even more like weaving, and even less like painting. For example, Albers used the word “simple” repeatedly to describe looms, graphic notation, types of weaving, forms, and construction techniques. Graphic notation for her was a process of simplification. She wrote, “the sequence of weaving operations, can be easily reduced to this simple notation.”^[27] When introducing modified and composite weaves she instructed readers not to overly complicate their structure, “simplicity, rather, which is condensation, is the aim and the goal for which we should be heading.”^[28] By defining simplicity as condensation, or reduction, she praised distilling many ideas into one. She framed this reduction, a form of abstraction, as the designer’s teleology.

Albers intentionally separated weaving from other forms of art making, writing that “the more clearly this original formation is preserved or stressed in the design, the stronger the weaving will be in those characteristics that set it apart from other techniques.”^[29] Her phrases like “original,” “preserved,” and “set apart,” all emphasized a conservation of weaving as separate. In her chapter “Tapestry,” she criticized what she saw as indirect communication between medium and design in many pictorial tapestries. She wrote that “trespassing into another art form, however great that form may be, does not necessarily bring forth great art works. On the contrary, the original concept as well as the transposition suffers by the very fact of indirectness.” Tapestries that attempt to mimic paintings, in her eyes, were not great works, which must be “truly weaverly in their components.” ^[30] In other words, “weaverly components” are an attention to the technical, rather than the pictorial, using the weaver’s language to make inventive interlocking forms. When she wrote that “weaving that exhibits the origin of its rectangular thread-interlacing will be better than one that conceals its structure and tries, for instance, to resemble a painting,” she valued transparent weaving design over a design that obscures.^[31] Albers recognized the boundaries between weaving and other forms of art and actively reinforced those through her designs.

On Weaving’s 1965 publication occurred alongside Albers’s turn to lithography. Like her writing, her prints were ultimately a further, intermedia exploration of her weaving practice.^[32] Enmeshed II depicts a continuous looping of a single thread, sparely suggested by black outlines, that enters the print from the left and exits, unbound on the right [Fig. 2]. Between the edges, the single thread knots around itself, not quite knitting with repetitive loops, not quite weaving with interlacing thread sets, but a way of charting how thread itself moves. One’s eye can follow the thread through the jumble, imagining both a three-dimensional thread and Albers drawing on a metal plate, tracing the entanglement. However, like Albers’s writing, the print is a mediation of, but not equivalent to, the textured and temporal process of weaving.^[33]

Figure 2. Anni Albers, Enmeshed II, 1963, two-color zinc plate and stone lithograph, 17 1/4 x 27 1/4 in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.11.2. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. Used by permission.

Looking at the use of line and space in Enmeshed II, it begins to resemble the diagrams in On Weaving, also made by Albers. Plate sixty-four depicts a diagram for tapestry construction [Fig. 3]. Though the construction is different from the single thread looping in Enmeshed II, the thick black thread outlines and blown-up white space between threads emphasize the structure of the weave by expanding it, in the same way as Enmeshed II. A real weave would have little to no gaps between threads. Albers approached printing as though it were a diagram.

Figure 3. Anni Albers, Diagram showing tapestry construction (slit tapestry or Kelim technique), ca. 1965, Plate 59 from On Weaving, 1965, ink and pencil on paper, 11 15/16 x 8 7/8 in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Anni Albers Papers, box 27, folder 9. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Used by permission.

Diagrams

Draft notation is a way of diagramming a weaving pattern so that the weaver can learn, weave, and design different types of construction. It simplifies the textured three-dimensional weave into a two-dimensional drawing that only depicts where the weft travels over or under the warp. For example, plate ten shows a method of diagramming the simplest kind of weaving, the plain weave [Fig. 4]. On graph paper, a black and white checkboard grid is condensed, like a fabric. Each square on the grid stands in for one thread. On the left of the sheet, that checkerboard is expanded, now with space between the strips, or thread. One can see where the black overlaps the white and where the white moves over the black, representing the path the weaver would follow. Though this reduction may seem to be the ultimate transparency, simplifying the process of weaving down to flat lines, the diagrams are one instance where Albers’s goal of transparency breaks down.

Figure 4. Anni Albers, Diagram showing method of draft notation (plain weave), ca. 1965, Plate 10 from On Weaving, 1965, ink and pencil on gridded paper, 8 1/2 x 10 15/16 in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Anni Albers Papers, box 27, folder 5. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Used by permission.

Albers described draft notations as having “the additional advantage of showing clearly those structural elements that do not appear on the surface and can thus be shown naturalistically only by distortion.”^[34] Diagramming a weave already asks the weaver to go under the surface. Distortion, rather than simplicity, is what makes a diagram useful.

Though draft notation may make movement transparent, the audience for the draft notation is not lay viewers who are unable to discern a basket weave from a jacquard, but experienced weavers. To create and read draft notation, one must already be enmeshed in the social relational world of weaving. Another weaver, in person or through a weaving book or manual, would have to explain how draft notation’s distortion corresponds with the practice of weaving—how to take the diagram and be able to reproduce that structure in thread. The diagram only notates structure and execution, but it says nothing of how to set up the warp, how compactly to weave, what materials to use, or how to move one’s body. Draft notation is imprecise and mute until performed, like musical notation. The same notation can produce wildly different fabrics and dances around the loom.

Plate forty-two, Study Made on a Typewriter, offers a different kind of diagram that is not a representational graphic [Fig 5]. Instead of black and white squares, typewritten blue underlines, forward slashes, and colons on cream paper offer structure. Albers played with the form of the diagram using linguistic symbols. Though the typewriter studies were only a small subset of the non-loom studies Albers made, she refers to them as exercises not meant to replicate the diagram, with its determinative over-under interlacing, but to build “new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language” through the illusion of “tactile-textile.”^[35] Albers was free from the standardization of the draft notation to fully play with the space between text, texture, and textile.

Figure 5. Anni Albers, Studies made on the typewriter, n.d., typewriter printing in blue ink on paper mounted on board, 10 5/8 x 6 5/8 in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 1994.18.4. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. Used by permission.

Texture and Tactility

The chapter “Tactile Sensibility,” in which Albers explains how to become receptive to nature’s textures, is evidence of her lived practice of weaving, attentive to a network of human and nonhuman relations. Like plate forty-two, Albers’s matière studies operate as a kind of diagram. Matière here refers to perceiving the surface qualities of materials through touch.^[36] Where Study Made on a Typewriter diagrams textile orders through staccato text, the matière studies create the visual effect of diagrams, with their linearity, but without instructive capacity, to exclusively explore surface tactility. Intentionally nonfunctional, they sample textures a weaver can emulate in future designs. Albers wrote that these studies must “be approached, just like color, nonanalytically, receptively.”^[37] In contrast to design, which she approaches very analytically, her instructions to make a matière study were intentionally open to the unknowable. She sensitized herself and her students to a relationship with the natural world, its materials, and its textures where they could feel connections between hard corn kernels and weaving.

Albers prescribed the matière studies as a method of acquiring embodied knowledge. She instructs:

We will look around us and pick up bits of moss, this piece of bark or paper, these stems of flowers, or these shavings of wood or metal. We will group them, cut them, curl them, mix them, finally perhaps paste them, to fix a certain order. We will make a smooth piece of paper appear fibrous by scratching its surface, perforating it, tearing it, twisting it, or we will try to achieve the appearance of fluffy wool by using feathery seeds.^[38]

Her call to engage with tactile play to produce from one material a surface that resembles another echoes Glissant on the connections between human making and the world. He wrote that “every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world.”^[39] Rather than explain all these varied textures in text, Albers recognized that tactile knowledge can only be acquired through a sensing body. She and her students touched these stems and wood shavings to understand their surface qualities. They experimented with altering and arranging pieces to explore how stems, for example, created surfaces that imitate fabric. The body, the fabric, and the stems are implicated in one another through sensory exploration and illusion. As Glissant wrote, “each of the parts pattern activity implicated in the activity of every other,” or what Albers described as “an active play of areas of different complexion.”^[40]

Albers used opacity and illusion in her matière studies to suggest the tactility of a textile. Plate thirty-nine, Study Made with Twisted Paper, is one example of a matière study. Knowing how to manipulate one material to emulate another involved sensing the materials and their potential tactile phenomena very close up. She twisted varying lengths of small strips of paper until they acquired a ropy quality, then arranged them in horizontal and vertical groups of five or six twisted strips [Fig. 6]. Imagine just barely brushing one’s hand across the object—the paper would have a fibrous halo, as it was likely cotton or wood pulp to begin with, already fibers. One would feel a slight fuzz, as though the whole object was softly sueded. With slightly more pressure, one’s fingers would follow the twisted groves and ridges where the roped paper meets. Albers not only attended to the structure and texture of weaving, to ensure the illusion of the study, but also listened to the qualities of the paper itself.

Figure 6. Anni Albers, Study made with twisted paper, n.d., photograph by Todd Webb, Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Photo © Todd Webb Archive, Portland, Maine, USA. Used by permission.

The Process of Opacity

Across Albers’s various modes, she was unresolved in her vacillation between rationalized and experiential epistemologies of weaving. Designing and weaving were a simplification of the complexity of experiential epistemologies, rather than a way into those relations. Revisiting her description of design as, “a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature’s secretive and complex working,” it becomes clear how she separated the human and nonhuman workings at the same time as she saw their interconnectedness.^[41] Even in passages where she emphasized order, she underlined the relationship between design and nature, writing that “the organization of forms, their relatedness, their proportions, must have that quality of mystery that we know in nature.” Design too was a series of relationships between material forms.^[42] Though she stripped down weaving to its barest elements (structure and material, which we could also think of as corresponding to modern and non-modern epistemologies), she grasped that a weaving was a result of the “interrelation of the two,” where they play off each other.^[43]

In her narration of the start of any creative project, Albers especially underscored the relationality of the process of weaving. She summarized these beginnings as: “exploration, selection, development, a potent vitality not yet limited, not circumscribed by the tried and traditional. For those of us concerned in our work with the adventure of search, going back to beginnings is seeing ourselves mirrored in others’ work, not in the result but in the process.”^[44] She cast off order as the “tried and traditional” that limited the aliveness of play. By focusing on the process rather than the goal, she let herself practice opacity. Glissant wrote that “the thought of opacity distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be.” Instead, opacity, “relativizes every possibility of every action.”^[45] What Glissant called “absolute truths” are the imposition of order because one thinks oneself to have transparent knowledge. Opacity, like beginning, makes one aware of all possibilities in nature, in texture, in mediums, in pictures, or in classrooms. While in process, anything can be changed, and for Glissant, everything is always in process.

Across its many discussions, On Weaving also created tension between the all-powerful individual artist (one very much in charge of her own work) and the free form energies of her materials (best engaged when the artist eschews her own subjectivity). Albers wrote:

All decisions here are his own, and only he is responsible. But though it is he who is in charge, he feels himself to be only an intermediary who is trying to help the not-yet-existent turn into reality…standing between the actual and that which may be, the conscientious designer, as I see it, seeks to forego his own identity in order to be able more impartially to interpret the potential.^[46]

In the course of this statement, Albers reversed her original phrasing, flipping from a position of complete control to mediating the possibilities of the forms. Her phrases such as the “not-yet-existent” and “that which may be,” refer to the imaginary, a space of opacity. Glissant conceptualized the relationship between aesthetics, the imaginary, opacity (“the infinities of the universe”) and the particular (“the poetics of our world”). He wrote that “we can conceive that aesthetics, by means of which we make our imaginary concrete, with the opposite intention, always brings us back from the infinities of the universe to the definable poetics of our world.”^[47] The aesthetic, for example, the woven object, transforms the weaver’s imaginary into a concrete form, but the imaginary is opaque and beyond the individual—one with the “infinities of the universe.” The aesthetic object is the particular “definable poetics of our world,” which remain connected to the boundlessness of opacity via the imaginary.

Albers’s own objects undermined her goals of transparency at times. For example, With Verticals is a study in both the attempts at transparency and the visual effects of an object exceeding that transparency [Fig. 1]. The photograph does not reproduce the weaving well, due to its scale and compression of the twill pattern, creating an iridescent moiré effect. It is the high contrast striping and twill structure itself, with its visual humming, that resists the transparency of the photograph and design. Because of this, it is hard to look at the photograph to see through the surface. In person, this effect may be less striking, but at the right distance, it may also shimmer. Even though color is tertiary and meant only to bring out the structure for Albers, the color contrast in this weave is what disturbs the transparency.

Figure 1. Anni Albers, With Verticals, 1946, cotton and linen, 61 x 46 ½ in. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2004.12.1. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art. Used by permission.

Conclusion

“Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still, in exploring them, I feel on new ground.” ^[48] – Anni Albers

Craft is embodied knowledge and skill, rendered into a material form and hidden in textiles. Both skill and the agency of materials are opaque forms of knowing that can only be transferred slowly. Adamson in his book Thinking Through Craft writes that, “Skill cannot be owned as such, but neither is it for the taking…craft slows down the movement of knowledge.”^[49] Skill can only be transferred slowly, with care, and with intense effort. Confronting this slowness is to confront a kind of opacity. However, skill does need to be transferred from somewhere, if not text-based manuals, then from people and materials. Weaving is an opaque form of embodied and material knowledge that is only accessed through and produces a network of relations between humans and materials.

The opacity of embodied skill is foundational for a concept of relation that extends Glissant’s project to humans and materials. Weaving is primarily a process, not a noun for an object. During this process, human and more-than-human relations form through the transfer of skill, including watching and listening to other practitioners and interacting with nonhuman materials and tools. The maker, materials, and tools enter a relationship of shared agency, where they literally weave together. To enter this tangle, the practitioner confronts the unknowability of other weavers, woven cloth, fiber, and the loom. Because acquiring skill is lifelong and never ending, skill cannot be reduced to transparent understanding. An elderly weaver still does not truly know the nature of weaving or the fibers with which she works. This is not a reductive exploration, but an expansive one.

This essay deepens our understanding of Albers’s writing in On Weaving to create a more nuanced theory of weaving and a more complex understanding of what happened in the skill and knowledge transfer between Albers and her weaving students at Black Mountain College. Writing and reading versus making and teaching are parts of a process that engage a practitioner in different, yet interlocking, relationships and ways of thinking.

While On Weaving at times serves as an emblematic model of the modernist tradition that mechanizes process through the ideals of medium-specificity and visuality, Albers’s teaching practice was where relationality in the social Glissantian sense shined–and why art pedagogy and its histories remain such rich sites of social theory and transformation. She taught at Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1949, establishing the weaving workshop, and developing her teaching practice to start students at “point zero,” prompting them to imagine there are no industrial machines, supplies, or even looms. Without these tools, students were to use their sense of slow experimentation to guide them through the learning process.^[50] Weaving cannot be learned through the sense of order that existed in Albers’s writing. Instead, students learned to weave through listening to materials. As T’ai Smith reminds us, “the code embedded in weaving is not verbal.”^[51] One of Albers’s students, Delores Dembus Bittleman, who Albers taught in private classes while her partner Josef Albers was teaching at Yale, remembered “we’d talk about threads and textiles and how they behaved. The important lesson I absorbed was that when you’d ‘listen’ quietly, threads would suggest what could be done with them.”^[52] Bittleman pointed not to specific techniques that she learned, but to a method of listening to the threads, building an ongoing relationship with the very material of weaving to let those materials guide her.^[53]

Bittleman also highlighted the social aspect of learning, talking with Albers in her living room, not in the workshop. A photo of four weavers on the porch of the studies building at BMC deepens this idea [Fig. 7]. They lean into their backstrap looms held in tension between their bodies and a railing. The full sun bakes down on them, and they wear halter tops, have thrown off their shoes, sitting barefoot, with the linear shadows of the warp cast on their bare legs. The weaver in the front, possibly Virginia Osborne, looks toward the Marilyn Bauer to her left, while the third weaver up, Jane Slater, tilts her face toward Mimi French, the fourth. Their hands are all in motion, passing the weft across while they chat.

Figure 7. Photograph of Students on porch of Studies Building using backstrap looms, Summer Art Institute 1945, Black Mountain College. Photographer: John Harvey Campbell. Western Regional Archives, PC. 1580 Black Mountain College Miscellaneous Collection, Box 1. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

[2] Anni Albers, On Weaving, New Expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 23.

[3] Albers, 24.

[4] T’ai Smith, “On Reading, On Weaving,” in On Weaving, by Anni Albers, New Expanded Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 234-37.

[5] This article draws on writers who have theorized textiles as plastic and in-between. This includes scholars such as Elissa Auther in String, Felt, Thread and Julia Bryan-Wilson in Fray: Art and Textile Politics, who both discuss counterculture textile projects in the United States from the 1960s to present to locate a politics of textiles in the ambivalent space within the high/low art binary. Catherine Dormor in her book A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory embraces the complexity of textile practice and theory, articulating the continuity between text and textile. She begins with textiles as a way of knowing, where material, concept, and language are fluid. Though Giuliana Bruno’s case studies are not textile in nature, her discussion in her book Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media explores the material relations between the viewer and the surface of the art object. T’ai Smith’s Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design about weaving as not only a manual pursuit but also an intellectual one of course informs my investigation into Albers’s own conceptual writing on weaving.

[6] Though Glissant does not write about his experience literally looking at a weaving, this is what I imagine he sees based on how he uses woven cloth as a metaphor. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 190.

[7] Glissant, 5.

[8] The capitalization of “Relation” follows from the capitalization of the term in Glissant’s writing. I will capitalize the term when I use it in the Glissantian sense and use lowercase when I am using it in a more general sense.

[9] Glissant, 190.

[10] Glissant, 189-190.

[11] Albers, 54.

[12] Western art and art theory since Immanuel Kant has a lineage of privileging the optical over the felt, the used, and the bodily. See The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Krauss and Eyesight Alone by Caroline Jones for longer discussions of the pervasiveness of modernism’s ties to visual ordering.

[13] Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xv-xvii.

[14] Modernism is also full of contradictions. While transparency in the Enlightenment sense meant totally apprehensible knowledge, transparency also served the goal of demystifying industrialization to strike at commodity fetishism and re-suture the worker and user to their products. By making the mode of construction visible, users would know something about how it was produced, connecting them to the worker. This anti-modern modernism, which sought abstraction, honesty, and transparency in forms, materials, and process, was also bound up in critiques of modernity as much as it participated in it. See also Todd Cronan, “Getting Over the Bauhaus,” Los Angeles Review of Books, The Philosophical Salon, January 11, 2021. Adamson, 102.

[15] T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Twin Cities: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xvii, 47-49.

[16] For an example not from Peru but of trans-cultural Native wampum, see “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory” by Angela Haas. Albers, 51

[17] In addition to Glissant’s theory of relationality, my exploration of the human and nonhuman relations entangled in the weaving process is informed by feminist new materialisms, including Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, and the push for the expansion of these paradigms by Black studies and queer theory, such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins in her article “New Materialisms” in Lateral, Huey Copeland’s article “Tending-Toward-Blackness” in October, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “’Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly.

[18] Employing the metaphors of “building up the architecture” and “building the foundation,” I gesture at the potential of the tension between the reductive physical forms and structures of modernism and these forms as playground for textual elaboration and interpretive play.

[19] Glissant, 190.

[20] Albers’s book moves from the basics of weaving and the loom to construction techniques and finally to tactility and visual organization. I start at the end because it is where Albers shifts from a descriptive historical mode to her approach to weaving more directly. The transparent language is also the most obvious in these later chapters. Albers, 41.

[21] Albers, 53.

[22] Albers, 53-4

[23] Albers, 42.

[24] Albers, 57-58.

[25] Smith, “On Reading, On Weaving,” 236-37.

[26] Smith, “On Reading, On Weaving,” 234-235.

[27] Albers, 21.

[28] Albers, 29.

[29] Albers, 24.

[30] Albers, 50-51.

[31] Albers, 24.

[32] Smith, “On Reading, On Weaving,” 237-238.

[33] For a related discussion on mediation see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media on how digital media, such as the computer, remediated mediums, such as painting, by refashioning them into the new context of the digital.

[34] Albers, 21.

[35] Albers, 47.

[36] Matière studies were a frequent practice in Black Mountain College classrooms, both with Anni Albers and her husband, Josef Albers, though their ends were different. Anni was aiming for larger tactile vocabulary that would inform how students select materials for weaving, while Josef was more interested in illusion and how contrast affected one’s perception of colors and material characteristics. Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson, Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students (New Haven: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2023), 27. See also Beggs’s essay “Josef Albers: Photographs of Matières” in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957.

[37] Albers, 45.

[38] Albers, 46.

[39] Glissant, 32.

[40] Glissant, 33; Albers, 46.

[41] Albers, 53.

[42] Albers, 62.

[43] See Bruce Braun’s chapter “Nature and Culture: On the Career of a False Problem” in A Companion to Cultural Geography for an extended discussion of nonmodern ontologies. Albers, 23.

[44] Albers, 34.

[45] Glissant, 192.

[46] Albers, 55.

[47] Glissant, 203.

[48] Albers, xi.

[49] Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 105.

[50] Oral history interview with Anni Albers, 1968 July 5, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

[51] Smith, “On Reading, On Weaving,” 243.

[52] “Anni Albers: Introduction,”  The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, 2022.

[53] Teaching a method rather than content was a core pedagogical principle at Black Mountain College as a whole, according to John Andrew Rice, a founding faculty member. Beggs and Thomson, 11.

O.M. Comstock (they/them) is currently a PhD student in art history at the University of Minnesota specializing in American craft. Their work accounts for the expansive field beyond the object, including social practice, pedagogy, artistic process, and materials. They served as independent curator for Edible at the Northern Clay Center and as co-curator for ¡PRESENTE! 50 Years of Chicano and Latino Studies at Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio. They were also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award in Berlin, Germany where they staged participatory workshops at the Museum FLUXUS+.