Eva Lagnert, PLEATS ON WOOL, ISS11 workshop
Legacies
This book [The Dyer’s Art] is dedicated to the dyers, those anonymous artists and artisans of many cultures who have, throughout the centuries, built up and then relayed the great tradition of designing for dye and to the scholars, whose recognition of this tradition has contributed so importantly to the collections and records preserved for us today.
–Jack Lenor Larsen, The Dyer’s Art, 1976
The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Dyer’s Art by Jack Lenor Larsen with Alfred Buhler, Bronwen and Garrett Solyom brings our 12 ISS to Basel.
Larsen recognized the richness and craftsmanship in what he called the “sometimes neglected” collective traditions of resist-dyed cloths as “our legacy.” To shine light on the resist-dye traditions, processes, and artistic expressions, he prepared an anthology of the great fabric traditions of India, Japan, Indonesia, Central Asia, and West Africa in The Dyer’s Art, published in 1976. The book presented the art and varied techniques of simultaneously coloring and ornamenting cloth through resist dyeing. Until then, textile artistry had been focused on the woven cloth, largely a European influence.
“The cloth on which resist dyeing is executed is as important as canvas is to a painter,” Larsen said. In different cultures, resist-dyed fabrics could express deep symbolic meaning, for instance, marking royalty or the ritual of life’s important events: birth, initiation, marriage, and death. “Often, if not always, these ritual cloths… are of the highest artistic order.”
Larsen credits the essays of Dr. Alfred Buhler (1900-1981), a former director of Museum Der Kulturen Basel, for inspiring his work and book. Dr. Buhler studied the historic role of resist cloths through research and collecting, and ultimately collaborated with Larsen to contribute his expertise on resist-dyed cloth to Larsen’s book.
Two notable collections of resist-dyed textiles are housed in the expansive collection of Museum Der Kulturen. The first is 250 shibori pieces from Arimatsu, Japan, collected by Dr. Buhler in 1964. Some shibori items in this collection have become “extinct” even in Japan. The second collection is the largest and rarest collection of resist-dyed mats from Vanuatu, a South Pacific Ocean nation, collected by another former Museum director, Dr. Felix Spiser.
These beautiful and intriguing collections of traditional resist-dyed materials ground the 12 ISS, while allowing for exploration of how resist-dyeing, now collectively described as shibori, can inspire the patterning and dyeing processes for contemporary fashion, design, and production. The use of the word, shibori, to comprehensively describe the world’s ubiquitous resist-dyeing craft heritage traditions can be attributed to Yoshiko I. Wada, founder of World Shibori Network Foundation.
Alfred Bühler, undated
14. Jan 1900 – 29. July 1981
Photo: Claire Roessiger, Basel
Dr. Alfred Buhler (1900-1981), anthropologist and former director of Museum Der Kulturen Basel (dates), through research and collecting noted that the simple idea and observation of dye resist evolved into various, complex, and interesting surface design techniques developed by people in multiple and diverse cultures around the world.
5. Aug 1927-22. Dec 2020
Photo: Shonna Valeska
Jack Lenor Larsen, recognized Buhler’s significant findings and by writing The Dyer’s Art expands the world view on textile surface design to be inclusive of the dye-resist surface design craft developed by people all over the world. The Dyer’s Art made it clear that the weaving traditions of Western Europe did not tell the full story of pattern and design on cloth. There is a whole other story to be told.
Crucial to this enduring legacy is Larsen’s 1976 book, The Dyer’s Art, which served as the first major publication to elevate traditinal resist-dyeing from a regional craft to a recognized global art form, effectively establishijng a modern vocabulary for textile artists worldwide. ISS continues the legacy to tell the full story of surface design and to carry on the discussions of where the story will go in the near and distant future.
Swiss anthropologist Felix Speiser conducted vital, extensive fieldwork in Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides under French and British rule) from 1910 to 1912, collecting thousands of ethnographic objects and glass plate photographs that recorded the region’s material culture. He later built upon this monumental research legacy at home, serving as the dedicated director of the Museum der Kulturen Basel from 1942 until his passing in 1949,
Ethnology of Vanuatu book cover
Felix Speiser
1923
Felix Speiser’s seminal book, Ethnography of Vanuatu, serves as an indispensable inventory of the material culture and ritual objects he documented during his monumental 1910-1912 field expedition. The text offers an incredibly descriptive catalog of every facet of early 20th-century life across the archipelago, detailing traditional architecture, complex agricultural systems, pottery fabrication, weaving, weapons, and sacred ritual paraphernalia.
Shigeki Fukumoto is a renowned contemporary Japanese dye artist and researcher who evolved his family’s traditional Kyoto yuzen and rozome (wax-resist) dyeing roots into groundbreaking contemporary art. He is globally celebrated for inventing meticulous, innovative techniques such as nuno-zagan (cloth inlay), which transforms shredded fragments of hand-dyed fabrics into monumental, multi-dimensional mosaic panels.
An American anthropologist and pioneering scholar of global folk symbolism, Carl Schuster spent his life tracing an ancient, cross-cultural system of genealogical motifs and tribal designs. His monumental research legacy is preserved at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, which houses his massive archive of roughly 250,000 photographic prints, tens of thousands of negatives, and voluminous correspondence documenting matching artistic patterns across distant continents.
An influential American visual anthropologist and media theorist, Edmund S. Carpenter, pioneered early communication theories alongside Marshall McLuhan while conducting extensive fieldwork among the Avilik Inuit and in Papua New Guinea. Between 1973 and 1981, he worked at the Museum of Ethnology Basel, where he painstakingly edited the massive research archives of Carl Schuster to publish the twelve-volume study, Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art.
by Carl Schuster edited and distilled by Edmund Carpenter, 1996
Patterns That Connect is a highly visual volume that explores a radical theory of unified global human history, positing that recurring prehistoric geometric motifs on artifacts were actually cross-cultural records of family genealogy and kinship. The book represents a collaboration between art historian Carl Schuster, who spent three decades assembling the global research data before his death, and visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, who painstakingly distilled the massive 12-volume archival legacy into this single accessible text.