Anni Albers: ‘Work with Material’

52-page manuscript book, written out in Chinese ink on Zerkall paper with gouache-painted illustrations on Bodleian paper, red Zerkall endpapers, millboard covered in grey Khadi paper. 187 x 148 mm. Completed February 2019.

I attended the retrospective exhibition of the work of the weaver and artist, Anni Albers, at the Tate Modern in the autumn of 2018 and was struck by the opening sentence of her essay, ‘Work with Material’: ‘Life today is very bewildering. We have no picture of it which is all-inclusive, such as former times may have had . . .’. This was written shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, though the sentiment certainly finds an echo in our own uncertain times.

She goes on to write about the importance in human life of the direct contact with materials: ‘Civilization seems in general to estrange men from materials, that is, from materials in their original form . . . We use materials to satisfy our practical needs and our spiritual ones as well.’

However, she is surprisingly even-handed about the way in which ‘craft’ can slide into mechanized production (and vice versa): ‘Machines reduce the boredom of repetition. On the other hand they permit a play of the imagination only in the preliminary planning of the product.’

As someone formerly involved both in planning for mass production as well as craft work, this struck a particular chord, and especially the apparent dichotomy between ‘workmanship of risk (aka hand work) and ‘workmanship of certainty (aka machine work). I made several mistakes while working on this manuscript and it was interesting to explore what I considered to be acceptable, and what had to be corrected.

In broad terms, spelling errors required re-work, as did bad letter forms, but smudges, shakes and other manifestations of the human hand were considered acceptable. Ultimately, perfection is not achievable, nor even to be sought after, but the ultimate test is whether (in Albers’ words) ‘we can find certitude in the belief that we are taking part in an eternal order’.