ABSTRACT
This is an experimental work based loosely around my stop-motion animation, “Scare Quotes.” It asks – what is it like to live life as a textile? By imagining the self as a textile in my visual practice and writing, I consider Ornamentalism as an embodied reading and creative practice. I perform constructions of Asian femininity to critique their role in the avant-garde poetry of Gertrude Stein and Susan Howe. By stitching together the work of Lisa Lowe, Anne Cheng, and Mel Chen in this performance, I envision Asian Americanist critique as poetry and as a mode of living and feeling.
Figure 1. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
I noticed that I was living my life as a textile. It happened while reading Susan Howe’s The Midnight, her word squares materializing into a blanket. I climbed out of a well of words and used the blanket to dry myself off. A patchwork blanket, like me, made of texts and feelings. Howe threads bed hangings into word squares, curtains into quote fragments, photographed knots into stuck words. I think honest meanings live in fraying threads and the eyelets between stitches, in roughness, in abruptness. They whisper softly, I want to be unraveled I want you to unravel me I revel in your unraveling. I once built seams too. I moved scraps of paper millimeters at a time. I loved small feelings, not big ideas. I was not a thinking critic but a feeling textile.
I cut paper and cut paper and cut paper; my hands cramp up. It’s dark in the animation studio. I place the pieces on a glass plane, I nudge my textiles softly, I click the camera. It’s hard to refrain from big maneuvers. Like arguments, one broad gesture can obliterate what it aims to move. I’m not thinking straight, I’m thinking in exalted and halted undulations. I’m loosely fastening unwieldy emotions to small movements, wrapping ruptures in red and royal blue fabric. Hours of motion produce a seconds-long sequence of textiles swaying joltingly, as if they’re afraid of moving yet dare to dance anyway. As if they’re caught or cut in violence. It’s resilient weakness. Sentenced to a thousand cuts, dyeing, not dead. Crimson and cobalt bleeding into each other joyously. Weightless, yet still moving with intention.
These memories resurface as I contemplated Howe’s The Midnight. Even as I was repelled by Howe’s suspension of silks and calicos and its dispersal of racial violence, I wanted to tease out “the impious history of sensation” and its enchanting “cobweb gossamer ephemera.”Footnote1 The curtains murmured in my ears, tethered to their billowy existence, and I wanted to speak back. I gathered Howe’s texts in bundles and picked apart their threads to remake them. Their threads spun out into new associations. I thought of my recent readings and viewings – of intimate continents, of buttons that were tender, a bizarre market and its animacies. My research into the works of Susan Howe, Lisa Lowe, Gertrude Stein, Jodie Mack, Mel Chen dissolved into a single dream that I carried with me out of sleep and into life. As I read, words changed shape and color and began dancing before my eyes. I wanted to sustain these rough and transient squares and affix them to a screen. I wanted to be them – a beautiful thing flickering between living and pausing. Like light flares, the texts I read and films I watched shone on The Midnight. My reading of this single text was a bundling of past words, images, movements that stuck to me and became me.
Figure 2. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
I returned to stop-motion animation to flesh out this textilic existence – to understand why I see words as fabric patterns as myself, and how imagining myself as a textile indulges desire while skimming across its surface with a barely visible critical gloss. I move textiles and move with them so I can be them. Being a textile occasions a raveling and unraveling of the self through desire, a reorientation of the senses that pierces through racialized structures of feeling and their residual presence. Being a textile unfolds your body to be used, felt, shaped, and molded. Now unfurled, you loosen the hold of the personal and familial and communal and artistic histories you’re bound in even as you risk re-entanglement. As a textile, you notice that desire lingers in the embrace of complicity. Being a textile means falling into your next move – an embrace, an escape, an unearthing of emergent forms of fabric dwelling. As I began to weave these associations into my philosophy of animation, I became more aware of the seams holding me together, thinking threads that bind me to my living reading of Howe. These four stitch-theories enchant me as I become a word square. In rows, they keep me composed and give shape to my overflowing form.
Stitch 1, draping, after Lisa Lowe
Figure 3. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
It begins with a dress form – a still, canvas body, bare as it (I) reveals and conceals. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe unwinds the gossamer spine of Orientalism upon which Victorian fantasies of romance rest. This spine runs through the window curtains, bed silks, and lavish organza fabrics in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. As Lowe describes, “The bed curtain, the ‘chintz of a rich and fantastic Indian pattern, and doublé with calico of a tender rose colour,’ both reveals and conceals” intertwined histories of colonial production.Footnote2 This Orientalist spine also sutures Victorian literature to modernism.
In new time, Gertrude Stein reanimates the room. She reveals that everything is concealed, breaking apart language and its obscurity. “Plates and a dinner set of colored china.”Footnote3 The enclosure of the feminized domestic space amplifies colonial murmurs: the ceramic “china” of Stein’s button-filled domicile objectifies and reduces “china” to decorative commodity objects. The incomplete language of the nation transforms into the incomplete language of ceramic breakages.
There can be breakages in Japanese
No cup is broken in more places and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is JapaneseFootnote4
Stein’s ceramic menagerie breaks apart one continent into its Orientalist literary fragments. “China” is a euphemism for the shiny, decorative surface. The broken plate haphazardly and imprecisely evokes the Japanese process of kintsugi – mending broken pottery with golden lacquer – as a euphemism for the fragility of re-crafting something, perhaps with language. Josephine Park reads this reductive invocation of a regional craft as an imagined relic of “Old Japan” and its “rapidly disappearing world of charming antiquity.”Footnote5 Orientalist nostalgia is the beautiful face diverting attention from the imperial interests and anxieties of the text – economic investments in both China and Japan as well as fear for the white Western subject.Footnote6 These broken ceramics function as symbols of a fragmented and apparitional Asia. But amongst these shards, can I find a version of myself? I use textiles to transform these alienating reductions – the interchangeability Stein constructs between “china,” Japan, ceramic object – into a more ambivalent permeability.
Passing between calicos and silks and linens, strobing film sequences animate the intimacies that Lowe maps out between the production of one continent and the limited desire of another. While holding and curating cute objects may exhilarate the feminized white speaker, the figure of the Yellow WomanFootnote7 hardens into that held, cute object. She falls to pieces, held together, gold lines between her sensationalized shape. Yet I love this writing, I identify with these abject objects. As word slippages unfold through imperialist word play, I become the abject object to break apart myself to break apart this “china.” Stein manufactures a quotidian lusciousness of Indian rugs, china plates, and other racialized commodities that echoes the realist imaginary of Thackeray’s idyllic Victorian households. Tender Buttons has been read as a celebration of the taste for desire and difference.Footnote8 Stein’s intimate buffet of shattered grammar and sumptuous food includes and decenters racialized objects, lets them ripen and rot. As an animator, I move (with) origami paper and fabrics. My textiles resurrect the objects of The Midnight and Tender Buttons, their decorative energy escaping the supposed purposelessness of pretty. I lean closer, needling my desire to caress buttons and drapings despite their gossamer spine. With caution, Lowe embraces fabrics and observes as they “reveal and conceal” history.Footnote9 I touch and brush up against these fabrics. I enact historical quillwork through the sway of my silky body. Wrapping myself in gauzy archives and shattering alongside dazzling plates, I “reveal and conceal” history. My fabrics melt into words that repeat archaic patterns, sometimes mockingly and at times in yearning.
Stitch 2, transmogrification, after Jodie Mack
Figure 4. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
A stitch that attaches denim to velvet. A stitch that attaches text to textile. I observe the kinship between Howe’s The Midnight and the fluttering visuals of the animators whose work I draw upon – Len Lye’s shuddering, fluttering dots and wiggling lines; Norman McClaren’s moving paintings and dancing dimples.Footnote10 They paint rambunctious patterns on celluloid and spark them to life. I see the trace in Jodie Mack’s films as they flip through still images of fabric to the effect of a plush light strobe. The frenetic quality of her work mimics the violent resurrections of early avant-garde animation. But Stein remains. The feminized materiality in her use of language spreads to Mack’s visual art practice. Abstraction comes back down to a playful reality as Mack enfolds a literary critique of fabricated femininity into her visual art practice. She replaces Lye’s and McClaren’s fleeting dots with staying textiles. Mack plays with the fluid femininity of fabric. In her work, reams, swatches, and quilts undertake an unbound aggressiveness similar to the cute, curt, sharp little words in Stein’s Tender Buttons and insidious drapings in Howe’s The Midnight. In Grand Bizarre, Mack’s market of fabric, soft arrays form a strobe effect alternating between maps and textiles, alphabets and fabric patterns. This effect unfolds the difference between text and textile, like Howe’s word squares.Footnote11 The textiles saunter and strobe, creating time colors. Embroidered flowers flicker from written signs to tattoos on the body to woven cotton to shimmering silk. These apparitions sing to each other, letting their light auras linger and overlap, and they cut each other off, obliterating their afterimage glow. I turn light into sound, a cotton frame into a silk frame, soft fabric into halted motion.
Stitch 3, surface spectacle, after Anne Cheng
Figure 5. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
Being a textile is being a material girl – a girl fashioned out of materials. It is feeling objectified and making something of it. Self-styling as animation. Anne Cheng elaborates a theory of Ornamentalism where excess decoration renders the flesh invisible and threatens to merge with it, shielding against violence while creating new, muted versions. For Cheng, Ornamentalism is neither complicit nor subversive. By letting textiles speak on my behalf, or rather, by shapeshifting into a speaking textile, I sink into my invisibility and the touch of terror-joy. A textile finds its own purpose in being used. I find joy in being used (sometimes I use myself, I myself am implicated). This stop-motion film animates and reformulates the themes and formal techniques that Howe uses to stage the dialogue between text and textile. Words appear as ghostly impressions upon colorful fabrics. Patterned squares weave in and out of Howe’s word squares. I arrange cutouts as Howe “arranges snippets.”Footnote12
Perhaps the avant-garde recuperates cuteness and the feminine. But while inanimate objects become animate, their whispers remain stifled. Still, they trouble the hard surface of cute. Whispering objects encourage the reader to double back, search for synonyms, locate missing parts of speech. But what if I told you I was a tender button? And also a tender textile? I know what it feels like to be stared at, gaped at, moved, and severed. I identify with these texts – not with the speaker inhabiting a more-than-real domestic space with timid furniture and small recipes, but with the things in the narrative, the little pieces of texts as textiles and textiles in texts. Feeling held by these texts in cruel ways, I refuse to linger on the meaning of words or even the meaning of their sounds. Instead, I hear a swatch of fabric, its neatly woven colors intimate in their almost inscrutable audibility. I feel the fabric whisper upon my skin and I whisper back a refrain, our hushed voices melting into a soft, shiny surface.
Stitch 4, animating animacies, after Mel Chen
Figure 6. Still from “Scare Quotes” (2022) by Clara Chin.
Animating animacies’ proximity to objects, living as an object, being moved and moving, racial abjection. Mel Chen finds slippage between the human and the inhuman in their theory of animacy. They suggest that hierarchies of animacy maintain white male supremacy by placing minoritarian subjects in close proximity to animals, things, and concepts. The dominating structures that prescribe the meanings of personhood rely upon hierarchies between life and the non-living. As Chen writes, beings at the top of animate hierarchies are those most capable of affecting, while vegetality describes a “failure of lifelines, of ability to act upon others.”Footnote13 But why should I, or you, avoid being acted upon? Chen argues that, while marginalized, the state of non-living can be recuperated as a mode of being that transmutes the scary intimacies of intersubjectivity, of connecting to humanized objects and objectified humans. I seek to animate a textile of desire to reanimate myself. The joy of being moved. The terror of racial abjection. Simultaneously fluid and arresting, animation gives emotion a life beyond me. What can we enact through paper? Meaning is raveled and wound up again, stitched together and taken apart, a constitution of words and textiles rearranged simultaneously. Joy and terror puncture me, threading in and out of my inside self, through things, people, forming our attachments.
Using each of these four stitches, I animate myself as a collection of textiles and bring myself to life as a textile. Art practice merges abject objecthood as a state of being and desire as an act of doing. I channel the voice of a textile to contemplate my art practice, my scholarship, the scholarship that moves me and, simply, is me, and the desire that threads these mundane life practices together. I animate desire as a method of reading that leaves strands open, unhemmed, that invites you to spin the way you want, to allow myself – yourself—to become, instead, a living textile. This art practice and method of being a textile is a way of understanding the self as imbricated in deep and traumatic histories, the effects these histories have on stereotypes and archetypes, and most importantly, the urge to create and find ecstatic moments. Art enables an interplay between stasis and motion, being and doing, unliveliness and liveliness, labor and love. Being a textile is a mode of creating, understanding historical violence and the violence of the everyday, a way of living on without forgetting. Being a textile is being cut and torn apart, unraveled, but knowing how to sew oneself back together, perhaps roughly. Being a textile is to be open to attachment, detachment, movement, standing still only to come to life again. Being a textile is getting wrapped up in things until you must tear them apart until you must get knotty until you must separate seams. The difference is spreading. The difference is spreading. The difference is spreading.Footnote14
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Clara Chin
Clara Chin is a second year PhD student and stop-motion animator in the English Department at UCSB. Her research focuses on superficiality as a framework to critique racialized constructions of femininity and material/emotional excess. She is especially interested in textual and embodied performances of narcissism and self-indulgence.
Notes
1. Susan Howe, The Midnight (New York: New Directions, 2003), 28, 93.
2. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 88.
3. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 7.
4. Ibid., 3, 11.
5. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, “The Orients of Gertrude Stein,” College Literature 36, no. 3 (2009): 28.
6. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
7. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
8. Charles Bernstein, “Disfiguring Abstraction,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2013): 486–97, https://doi.org/10.1086/670042; Maayan Dauber, “Gertrude Stein’s Passivity: War and the Limits of Modern Subjectivity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58, no. 2 (2016): 129–43, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26155320; Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Marjorie Perloff, “What’s in a Box,” William Carlos Williams Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 50–7, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24565090.
9. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 88.
10. 1935–1937 Len Lye – “Kaleidoscope” + “A Colour Box” + “Colour Flight” (Highlights Mix), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DksmbDMDUU (accessed April 24, 2023); Norman McLaren – Dots (1940), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-vsKwQ0Cg (accessed April 24, 2023).
11. The Grand Bizarre, directed by Jodie Mack (2018).
12. Howe, The Midnight, 76.
13. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 41.
14. Stein, Tender Buttons, 3.