Savaria - A Vas Megyei Múzeumok értesítője 9-10. (1975-1976) (Szombathely, 1980)
Művészettörténet - Beke László: Kísérleti textil
the methods of self-examination is an open confrontation whit the neighbouring fields and kindred activities. SIGN AND SIGNIFICATION. When dees textile become a sign? What dees it signify? The relation of the signifying-and-signified within every sign is not identical with the relation of form and meaning. Every phenomenon has form and meaning, while a sign cannot exist but in a signifying process. An article for personal use, like a working dress, is, perhaps, nothing of a sign for the person who uses it ; but it may well signify for others that the person who is wearing it is a worker. The easthetical signifying process is not so simple though. A,decorative curtain in a royal apartment or in a Hilton hotel may just function as a sign of luxury and wealth (as symbol of social rank), but its coulor and patterns may also refer to the person of its proprietor. The sign-structure of the figurative hanging textiles and figurative textile sculptures is the same as that of paintings and sculptures. Experimental textiles possess new qualities in the signifying process, too. Since they are made solely for purposes of research and exposition, they are not decorative —their "message" is often their new technology itself, or the new material. THE TEXTILE AS OBJECT. Every creation in textile (art) is material, thus an object. However they can be various at this point. Textiles for everyday use that we touch every now and then are much more of an object than plain decorative textiles or hanging textile pictures that we only look at. Pictorial character prevails with the latter ones or a certain tension emerges between the "immaterial" picture and the material bearers of it (e.g. in gobelins), which influences the aesthetic experience. The possibilities of experimental textile in this field are : 1. to render this tension even more obvious ; 2. to do away with it by putting the material and the technics as its subject; 3. to create threedimensional objects —either sculptures representing the relationships, of independent fors or figurative "textile sculptures"^or even the representations of already existing objects for everyday use ; 4. just on the contrary to "dematerialize" textile, thus expanding it onto mental —spiritual fields as well. PERCEPTION. We percieve textile with all our senses: we see and touch it, it gives us the sensation of warmth, it gives special sounds while moving, etc. While becoming a decorative object, "value", "work of art", its optical qualities got the more and more important: "all to the eye and nothing to touch". As to its acoustic qualities (sound insulation), they are considered only when planning concert halls, studios or congress rooms. It is again the experimenting artist who ventured to think that textile should regain its sensuous totality. The students of László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus made studies in tactile sense, badly missing from the modern academies of art. In Soto's "penetrables" we can feel the touch of the fibres on the skin. The madifiable textile objects of E. F. Walther offer possibilities for space-altering plays and movements, actions in group. The hung and mobile textile sculptures give a virtual experience of space ;—this is optical perception —where remarkable experiments are carried through with transparent, open-work, photosensitive, opaque textiles, which often raise surprizing material or spatiel illusions. SPACE. The expansion of experimental textile in Hungary started with spatiel textile. Before we hadn't had but hanging pictures and carpets on the inner walls and floors of the buildings —and as soon as the "wall carpet" came off to enter space, we all of a sudden realized that textile had always been around all over, in the form of clothes, tents, flags, ropes, parachutes, etc. Nothing but "artistic" textile had been missing. Now we dare to put it to the ups and downs of wheather as well. Perhaps for the first time since the Bayeux tapestry the attention was now focused onto monumental textile and onto the importance of the size in general. (The "profession" dared to stand even for the seemingly ridiculous genre of "miniature textiles".) Another aspect of spatiality : it has suddenly turned out that textile art has existed up to now almost exclusively as hing up or set against solid supports. Now not only increased attention was payed to the various possible ways of hanging (and their aesthetic consequences), but the textile without any exteriour support has also appeared on the scene : piled up on the floor of the exhibition hall, 327
