The tapestry company: Gino Saccone, Margo Wolowiec and Pieter Coecke van Aelst

 

Not long ago we proposed a reflexion on the opulence in the arts in connection to the tapestry fabricator Pieter Coecke van Aelst and a recent show of his works at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. With its great cost of production due to the rare skillful craftsmanship of their makers along with the artistic take of those designing the images, tapestry symbolized the wealth of powerful characters for hundreds years of history.

 

After the industrial revolution, wealth became capital and in economical terms, theoreticians also had to formulate the concept of human capital to define and quantify the intervention of personal attributes in the industrial production and value system.

 

In the case of British artist Gino Saccone, we would like to look at the concept of human capital from the perspective of the author and therefore transform it into an individual capital, with which we want to refer to the abilities and techniques embodied in the author persona and finalized in the artwork.

 

Coming from a sculptural past, Gino Saccone has recently shifted his attention on to tapestry and created a personal and complex process to fabricate it: he initially sculpts objects and paints watercolors in his studio, elements which he later imports into a computer with the use of a flat and 3D scanner. The digitized images of the watercolors are then used to wrap the computer models of the 3D objects and once these are fully covered and flatten again, they become a new 2D image which the artist then uses to fabricate the tapestry. When all these moments are taken into account, Saccone’s pieces appear to represent the plethora of the artist’s skills and the predominance of such individual capital on the technological medium that serves it.

 

With completely divergent intentions, the practice of  Margo Wolowiec twists the aforementioned hierarchy between the practical and technological moments of creation. The focus of Wolowiec’s tapestry is instead on how its imagery is made of visual glitches taken from digital spaces, loss of information during transfers from one technological platform to another and distorted cyber-spaces. Saccone’s attention to the ‘reality’ of the 3D world and the making of physical objects is completely missing in Wolowiec’s take on how experiences are already filtered by technology.

 

In other words, the represented individual capital softly disappears in Wolowiec’s work since it is subdued by the technological agency which serves as the content. The lavishness of ancient tapestry in this case doesn’t disappear in the individual force of an author’s practice and making process but instead becomes pure representation of the technological agency that pervades our lives and powerfully shapes according to its own mechanisms.

 

November 25, 2014