Take This Knitting Machine And Shove It: Lisa Anne Auerbach at Nottingham Contemporary

Californian artist Lisa Anne Auerbach is in town to talk about her piece Take This Knitting Machine and Shove it. The show, which fills the space previously occupied by Josephine Meckseper’s American Apparel in the window of Nottingham Contemporary (runs from 12 September to 18 October), regales us with a very new take on Robin Hood, Ned Ludd and other radical heroes of this once revolutionary city, figures who we too often forget to remember. 

Lisa Anne’s art takes many forms – including photography, distributing free tracts and unicycling - but in the last few years she has been concentrating on knitting sweaters carrying distinct political and social messages.  She explained to a large audience at New College Nottingham on Thursday 24 September that she feels she may have reached the point when she should move away from machine knitting for a while – the title of the show, while also of course evoking the spirit of the Luddites, could itself be a clue on those lines.  So Take This Knitting Machine carries significance not just because of its subject matter, but because it may be the last of its kind for a while.

Auerbach is an articulate advocate for her own work, who also brings an engaging line in mild self-deprecation to the party. Her talk was a highly entertaining summary of her career to date, starting with a photo of the young Lisa Anne wearing a ‘T’ shirt bearing the legend “Kentucky Fried Buzzard” (just the first of many cynical/ironic clothes-borne messages), a quilt made by her mother showing all the family engaged in their favourite activities in their home city of Chicago, via a cycling art-mag called SaddleSore to a series of photos of small anti-corporatist shops all over America and Europe which Lisa Anne photographed religiously over several years.  In 2007 she decided to open a small retail outlet herself in LA, creating a unicycle store where each cycle became a rideable art work with its own name and character.

The twin themes of cycling and knitting are intertwined in Auerbach’s recent history, possibly explained by a picture showing an 18th century spinning machine looking remarkably like one of the unicycles from the LA store; or possibly not.

Auerbach started knitting in 1994, at a time when she had lost access to her photographic dark room and was looking for a new outlet for ideas.  Inspired by gear worn by Rick Nielsen of Chicago rock band Cheap Trick, she saw sweaters as having an affinity with tattoos – both require an investment of commitment, a kind of permanence that does not apply to other forms of decoration or clothing, or indeed some other art forms.  She returned to knitting in 2004, since when it has been the dominant medium for her work.  Auerbach was asked to produce some sweaters supporting the Kerry campaign in 2004’s presidential election.  Taking a cue from bumper stickers, she hand-produced a series of sweaters saying things like “Bush Is Scary Vote For Kerry” and “Dick Cheney before he Dicks You”.

This was followed by a big learning curve as she taught herself to machine-knit.  She is very clear that this is an artistic process, not fashion design.  As her work is designed on PhotoShop, she compares the knitting machine to the ink-jet printer on a PC.  She is fascinated by the substance of sweaters, their permanence and immutability.  What happens to a sweater when the highly topical message it carries is out of date?  She has consciously faced this issue head-on by creating a series of sweaters bearing timeless messages – including “I Like Ike” (probably the first popular political slogan of the TV era) and the party-politically-neutral “Let America Be America Again”.

Sweaters as Art: in 2006, she created a series of items using greater and lesser quantities of gold metallic thread bearing the legend “Everything I Touch Turns to $old”.  The more gold thread the greater the price, but paradoxically the less wearable the sweater.  Why will people pay more for an item, the further removed it becomes from reality?  Maybe an oblique pre-figuring of Damien Hirst’s money-obsessed “For The Love Of God”?

Another strand of Auerbach’s work involves expropriation of the distribution of free tracts by evangelical Christians.  While abjuring their messages, she found herself attracted by the aesthetics of the free tract movement: the simplicity of their texts (which basically all boil down to “Jesus Is Salvation”) and their use of cheap materials and distinctly non-corporate distribution models.  She invites people to send in their own texts and ideas for texts and the Tract House project offers a space for them to be produced and distributed.

A lot of Auerbach’s work is inspired by external historical sources, which she interrogates in an affectionate way. Her recent knitting pattern book (“Sweaters That Talk Back”) draws on familiar old pattern books where prim but pretty ladies and handsome, strongly-jawed men stand be-sweatered in improbable poses – Auerbach wonders, did they ever ride those bikes they are strategically propping up?  In her case she shows models (frequently including herself) in sweaters, always accompanied by unicycles.  Although the poses are reminiscent of their rather static 1950s forebears, the presence of the unicycles ensures that, in her words, “a little bit of circus is lurking in every image”.

People have asked her what she will do now Bush has gone and Obama is President: where will the motivation for radical slogans come from?  She acknowledges that the need for overtly party-political work is over for now, but there are other battles to be fought.  Recent sweaters say things like “Thank God I’m An Atheist” and “No On 8” – as she explained, a dual message opposing Proposition 8 (on the ballot papers in California on the same day as the Presidential election) which sought to ban gay marriages, and questioning the wisdom of the fertility treatment that led to a Californian woman giving birth to octuplets in 2008.  Also, the self-questioning Front: “I Used To Be Part of the Solution”, Back: “Now I’m Part of the Problem”; Auerbach is having doubts about the processes of her work, including the use of certain non-reusable materials. 

Although not a fan, Michael Jackson’s death (on her doorstep, as she worked at UCLA) touched her deeply, like many people for whom he represented something weirdly and indefinably human and vulnerable.  This led to a series of MJ inspired photos and sweaters.

When invited to create a piece for Nottingham Contemporary, Lisa Anne immediately thought of Robin Hood, who embodied all the virtues she admires the most in a hero: anarchist, robbing the rich to feed the poor, living out in the woods with his band of companions.  Researching the Robin Hood literature and films, she became less convinced about just which side of the fence the man in green occupied – after all, most of the stories show his main motive to be support for the good old king.  Nonetheless, she identified Hood as part of a strong tradition of radicalism, including Nottingham’s knitting-machine-breaker Ned Ludd and set about creating a tableau in the Robin Hood park in LA. 

The Nottingham work contains elements drawing on all the main themes in Auerbach’s career.  She is pictured wearing a set of green sweaters and short skirts each carrying a radical text message.  In each shot she is doing one of her favourite things – riding a unicycle, working on her computer, knitting, reading and so on.  This is a distinctly urban take on the rural idyll - the tree at the centre carries graffiti which has been carefully painted over with trunk-coloured paint, only to be graffitised once more.

The texts are strikingly radical.  Whether or not Robin Hood was as revolutionary as he is cracked up to be, the messages embodied by his 21st-century female alter-ego certainly are: “Strangle The Last King With The Entrails Of The Last Priest”; Front: “We Are All Heroes” Back: “We Are All Terrorists”; and the eponymous “Take This Knitting Machine And Shove It”; amongst others.

For the first and possibly only time, this piece includes images of LAA wearing her sweaters accompanied by the sweaters themselves, set out on mannequins in the window as if in a retail display.  While Auerbach regularly appears in it – she made clear that each sweater is a one-off made in her size – her work does not generally appear to be about her, in a narcissistic sense.  Having said that, the Nottingham montage explicitly features Auerbach in numerous poses, doing all those favourite things, and as such is possibly one of the most personal pieces she has created.

Lisa Anne certainly suggested that this may be the end of the road – for a while at least - of her sweater output.  If so, we are doubly privileged to have the chance of viewing this powerful – and strikingly beautiful – piece of work in the centre of the city where Hood once challenged unbridled authority and the Luddites tried and failed to prevent the growth of unbridled capitalism.

In an interesting Q & A after the talk, someone asked Auerbach how she viewed herself – as an artist or as a “textile artist”?  This in the context of whether “craft” is somehow viewed as an intrinsically inferior form of artistic expression.  A very similar issue arises around the work of Nottingham artist Laura McCafferty (see the interview I did with her in June 2009 for NVA). 

Both artists resent the notion of being categorised primarily as “textile artists”.  Auerbach identifies a conceptual thread running throughout her work in all mediums and is clear that knitting arose originally for her as a way of making the work, not as an end in itself.  If anything, she sees herself much more as a text-artist than a textile-artist.

When asked if she might consider becoming a fashion designer - for mass production - she indicated that she is not quite sure: she is not interested in becoming part of the sweat-shop production process, but she does have hankerings to see her work out there on a larger scale than a purely artistic output allows.

Lisa Anne Auerbach’s residency in Nottingham continues with a knitting workshop at The Art Organisation running from 11am to 5pm on Saturday 26 September.  BLANKET OF IDEAS is a project which Auerbach has initiated to open up debate and discussion alongside the communal creation of a blanket of personal and subversive texts which will be displayed at Nottingham Contemporary on its opening in November.

For more information, contact Nottingham Contemporary on 0115 924 2421 or email rob@nottinghamcontemporary.org