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LINDA HUTCHINS: REITERATIONS
by Pamela ScheinmanAmerican Craft, August-September, 2004
Formal elegance plays off against Hutchins's choice of "message," accentuating catchwords and homilies that are the fabric of ordinary life.
In 1977 the sculptor Louise Bourgeois covered a sheet of grid paper with "I love you, I love you, I love you." Her text resembled concrete poetry. The three words, handwritten in red ink and arranged in neat columns like an account book entry or penmanship lesson, read more as an indictment than a declaration, with the viewer as witness. The mechanical repetition seemed both to dull the emotional sting and to expose the artist's raw, obsessive need. The "I" became ambiguous. Was the phrase spoken or heard? By parent, lover, child? Such contradictions gave the piece force by multiplying its meanings.
Reiterations, 2003, a series by Linda Hutchins, a Portland, Oregon, artist, is equally subversive and layered. The four multi-panel works, shown at the Art Gym, Marylhurst University, Oregon, early this year, invert our definition of craft.* The same word or phrase is typed over and over on both sides of translucent paper to create weave-like drawings. Lines of characters and spaces merge into precise patterns with specific associations—textile structures, lace drafts or moirés. This formal elegance plays off against her choice of "message," accentuating catchwords and homilies that are the fabric of ordinary life.
These pieces can be contemplated and understood with different senses. Metal striking paper leaves a tactile impression on smooth tracing vellum or a rag paper surface, while the inked cotton ribbon stamps each letter with slight variation, at least when compared to the uniformity achieved by laser printers. As we scan the words, there is the implied, rhythmic staccato of typing. Even the series' title suggests percussion, industry and speed. Time registers, too. Hutchins reckons each eight-foot panel at four hours per side, eked out in hour-long sessions, alternating with other activities to avoid possible injury to wrists or tendons. And beauty rests in the visual complexity of patterning arrived at by trial and error.
The patterning relies on mistyping and odd breaks in text at the end and beginning of lines to generate variety. Hutchins discovered that two mistakes per line proved optimum to avoid trickiness. Each piece evolves from extensive sampling. Her experience in computer engineering (she holds a B.S.E. in the subject from the University of Michigan and a B.F.A. in drawing from Pacific Northwest College of Art) and writing systems software for Intel helped ingrain her basic method. As she explained, "The initial program always fails; you have to go back in and painstakingly debug and tweak the coding before it works." One thinks of the adage "Practice makes perfect," only in this case, "perfection" is the cultural norm or expectation she sets out to explode.
Typing in silence is like a form of meditation. Words materialize as Hutchins's fingers fly over the keyboard of her Smith Corona electric, and her hand hits the manual carriage return. She pauses to jot them in a notebook, then culls what she wants from long lists by calculating their length, lift and shape. Her first typed piece, Untitled (sorrow), consists of nine scrolls, each eight feet high, hung vertically, side-by-side, with a single word repeated across the surface. To title it would have been redundant. Lingering on sorrow, a word the artist Pat Boas described in her catalog essay for the Marylhurst exhibit as "less pointed than grief, more lasting than anguish," deliberately acknowledges a feeling that today's goal-oriented society often suppresses or ignores.
Initially, Hutchins planned two companion pieces, one using doubt, the other longing. Instead, her next multi-panel sequence, Reiteration, a word Webster's defines as a thing said or done "over again or repeatedly, sometimes to wearying effect," deals with parental admonitions. The words caution and danger had recurred in a previous series of installations by Hutchins, woven from black-lettered yellow or red plastic barricade tape, the kind used to stake out construction sites or crime scenes, but in Reiteration, Hutchins focuses "on the little warnings and prods that hold us back": Hurry up! Don't cry! Pay attention! Be careful! etc. Such utterances escape with almost automatic regularity, generating a pattern of fixed responses—often unspoken fears.
Similarly, Trousseau presents 20 qualities desirable in a bride, a sort of mantra for a happy marriage. Lines of typing crisscross horizontally and vertically on whisper-thin Japanese mending tissue, each with a word repeated: generosity, devotion, innocence, faith, humility, gratitude, etc. These patterned squares suggest the silken hankies and linens a girl might once have embroidered for her hope chest. Pinned in a grid slightly away from the wall, the display identifies them as artifacts of a bygone age, reminiscent both of 1970s Minimalist art and the reaction against it by early feminists. Instead of celebrating anonymous needlework, as the painter Miriam Schapiro did in the unabashedly decorative hanky, doily and apron pieces she called "femmage," Hutchins critiques the values we assimilate from generation to generation, which she presents as pristinely preserved and codified—not, perhaps, with the blatancy of Barbara Kruger's "I shop therefore I am" or Lou Cabeen's woven text panels, but with potent effect.
At the outset Hutchins discovered that all typing exercises were not of "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" variety. Like the mottoes stitched on samplers by 18th- and 19th-century schoolgirls, the adages she found in the fourth edition of 20th Century Typewriting (1942) aimed at socializing young secretaries into efficient office workers. There she found the first phrase she attempted to type. But technical problems caused her to set the piece aside while she counteracted the tendency of thin paper to curl up by typing on both sides and also experimented with different surfaces and typewriters. You do not miss the water... [until the well runs dry], the final work in the series, was typed on opaque lengths of Rives 100 percent rag paper on one side only. Each panel displays a different meandering pattern, like water rippling and trickling, or the geologic striations through which a well is dug. Irony undercuts the perfect simplicity and Zen-like harmony of the image.
Is repetitive typing a form of penance? Ultimately Hutchins masks a modest act of feminist subversion in an aesthetic concept. Her meticulous technical execution and deliberate reliance on verbal cliché hold emotion in check, despite the rich allusions to historic textiles and a faint nostalgia for outdated technology. The Reiterations pieces combine two strong tendencies in contemporary fiber art: a subtle Japanese formalism and a search for poetic meaning through the use of text. Ultimately, what make Linda Hutchins's typewriter drawings compelling is their look of freshly starched organdy curtains and their use of humble American idioms.
* A 10-page catalog is available for $5 from the art department, Marylhurst University, 503-699-6242.
Pamela Scheinman is an artist, scholar and curator who writes on fiber, popular art and photography.