Scent of a Secret
Dr. Hadara Scheflan-Katzav

My visit to Odelia Elhanani’s exhibition, Scent of a Secret, began with a look at the back of the piece installed in the center of the gallery space. On view was a huge tapestry comprised of 30 squares, completed over several months by the artist working with a group of women from the Bedouin village of Lakiya. In contrast to the front of the tapestry, which seemed at first glance to be in a uniform needlepoint style, the back revealed the different “handwritings” of the various embroiderers. This is the point at which the narrative begins, embodying the tensions in the work between the universal and the particular, between what the women had in common and what was unique to each, between the concealed and the revealed, differences between the image and the body that created it, and, last but not least, between East and West, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The image embroidered on the face of the tapestry depicts three Indian women washing laundry in a river. Underneath is a black basin reflecting a blurred version of the tapestry image. The composition and landscape in the background quote a painting by 19^th century French painter Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857).  The French gleaners transformed into Indian laundresses embroidered by Bedouin women raise the theme of the daily labor performed by the working class by nullifying the historical and cultural context of the original image in favor of a global expression of the status of the woman worker and her fate, wherever she may be. This merger of the creative artist and laboring maidservants from the exotic East, from the local hot Israeli South and the rural West of the 19^th century may hint at some of the internal conflicts reflected in the piece of art.
 
The embroidery technique
Needlework in general and tapestry embroidery in particular has an extra added symbolic meaning in the context of historical “women’s work.” However, we must distinguish between needlework performed by working class women and by middle class women. What they do have in common is their function as one of the basic symbols of a woman’s praiseworthy qualities: engagement in sewing, embroidery, and lace-making.
From the 17^th century onward, the visual arts popularized the image of woman engaged in needlework. In bourgeois Holland, among other influences was the translation into Dutch of Italian author Cesare Ripa’s book of emblems, Iconologia (1603). Ripa’s catalogue of values and virtues presenting concepts as illustrated allegorical figures fixed the image of the “good woman” as one who weaves or embroiders. Based on this symbolization, Dutch painters began to paint realistic scenes of women embroidering, constituting a direct continuation of the moralistic aspect of art while simultaneously depicting the reality of women’s lives of the period. Women from the middle to upper classes learned to weave carpets and embroider in a daily “woman’s practice” embodying repetitive, precise, diligent work, with patience and discipline. The work was domestic and decorative, consisting of quiet, small wrist movements. This mode of keeping the women of the nobility and the bourgeoisie occupied to avoid idleness continued unabated in western Europe through the 18^th and 19^th centuries. In literature, as well, embroidery reflects the ideal of the good bourgeoise mother, as described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762).
Needlework by lower class women as represented by realistic French and English painters during the 19^th century stands in direct contrast to embroidery as a pastime. Sewing is no leisure occupation, but a means of earning one’s meagre daily bread. In this way, Elhanani’s tapestry succeeds in embodying the tension between socioeconomic strata not only through the image she selected, but also through the technique she selected. Needlepoint is the traditional women’s handiwork that has taken on a bourgeois dimension since the 17^th century, here executed by Bedouin women embroiderers from the 21^st century.
Tapestry weaving, which had become widely appreciated during the medieval era through the wall hangings made for cathedrals and castles by men and women craftspeople, now became “women’s work” made by women from different socioeconomic strata. Middle class women now decorated their homes with needlework pieces while laborers working to survive provided the patience needed to fill in the colorful spots predetermined by the industrial designer. Both of the classes therefore made craft and not art.
From the 1970s on, feminist artists began to wish to restore the high position of women’s needlework and make it worthy of being included in the discourse of high art. The Pattern and Decoration Movement in the USA, established in 1975, also introduced the postcolonial discourse into the feminist discourse, and actively worked against the racist and sexist rhetoric of western art. A foundational article by Valerie Jaudon and  Joyce Kozloff, “Art hysterical notions of progress and culture,”[1] sought to expose the power relations in the western art discourse which classified applied and decorative art as “other” (women’s art, Third World art). Among the numerous references they presented was the statement made by Adolph Loos in his 1908 article, “Ornament and Crime”:
We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament. See, the time is nigh, fulfilment awaits us. Soon the streets of the city will glisten like white walls, like Zion, the holy city, the capital of heaven. Then fulfilment will be come.
Many male and female artists from the Pattern and Decoration Movement turned to the Third World. Miriam Schapiro borrowed images from the Far East and Near East, and as early as 1972 exhibited a room installation in which she hung Persian carpets and colorful fabrics with her paintings. In 1975, Kozloff made artworks based on Islamic tile patterns, pre-Columbian design motifs, and woven carpets made by North African tribes. Jane Kaufman created textile pieces in the early ‘80s that included gilded decorations inspired by Eastern motifs.
These artists created their art based on an ideology opposed to the modernist western prejudice against the decorative. They are opposed to the hierarchical perception of a dichotomy between “high” and “low” art, historical and decorative art, individualist and collective art, and the art of the West as compared to the art of the East. Although on the surface Elhanani’s work seems to remain within the framework of the above discourse, we realize that her double quotation from the high art of the past combined with a simple photograph taken from the internet, which underwent Photoshop processing to become a handcrafted embroidered hanging, is an acrobatic shift between historical eras, geographical locations, and art categories. Elhanani’s artistic quotations are linked more to the postmodern discourse among contemporary artists (both men and women), some of whom are skilled in community-based projects, and are as involved in the community as Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei and others.
 
Embroidery and community-based art
Elhanani contacted the Association for the Advancement of the Status of Women, Lakiya, which put her in touch with the group of women from the village interested in working with her. After their initial meeting, for the next approximately six months, Elhanani traveled to Lakiya to work with the Bedouin women on embroidering the work. Of course, she could have chosen a different, easier way, such as working with professional embroiderers from central Israel, but apparently Elhanani’s preference reflects a wish to expand her artistic production to community involvement with people from a disadvantaged village. In this context, we must note one of the most impressive social action projects combining embroidery with community action: Embroidery-Kiryat Gat Project. Initiated by the Achoti-Sister for Women Movement (a Mizrahi feminist movement), the project centers on women from the Ethiopian and other communities in Kiryat Gat and Beer Sheva who are expert in traditional arts, such as embroidery, basket weaving, and the like. The collaboration of Ethiopian women artists from central Israel with the Achoti Movement and with the fashion company Comme Il Faut (mentored by curator Dr. Ketzia Alon and artist Orna Zaken from Achoti) generated the creation of the collection Band’lai (“together” in Amharic), a line of clothing and fashion accessories integrating traditional Ethiopian embroidery with contemporary fashion design. The launch of the collection took place in June 2010 in the Comme Il Faut building at the Jaffa Port; all income from the sale went directly to the women without any commission to the fashion house. The activist feminist project established an alternative to other earlier handicrafts production and sales ventures, such as Maskit, which had begun as a project to provide work to women based on “women’s traditional arts.” However, women working through Maskit worked at home, thus continuing to support the outlook that “a woman’s place is in the home,” an approach which viewed women’s income as a negligible and marginal supplement to the family’s support. Their wages were low, as laborers, in contrast to the salaries paid to Maskit’s directors and designers.[2]

 

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