The word ‘chintz’ originally described a kind of calico made from unbleached and somewhat coarse wood-blocked printed cotton. From the 1600s onwards Europeans favoured these floral prints, however they are not particularly popular today...
moreThe word ‘chintz’ originally described a kind of calico made from unbleached and somewhat coarse wood-blocked printed cotton. From the 1600s onwards Europeans favoured these floral prints, however they are not particularly popular today as they are associated with fussy middle-class over-decoration and particularly with femininity. Today, the word ‘chintzy’ either describes something with a floral pattern or something ‘kitsch’ - badly made, sentimental, flowery or in poor taste. In this paper I trace the development of chintz from its fabric to its ceramic form and explore its significance in the recent work of South African artist Landi Raubenheimer whose recent exhibition, After Landscape (2015-2016), referenced the cross-stitch floral patterns on Queen Anne Royal Winton chintzware china.
These works were exhibited alongside pixelated versions of landscape paintings by canonical South African painter JH Pierneef. Pierneef’s paintings and the Royal Winton commercial ceramics have arguably not received similar critical attention in the past, however, they both have common visual theme: the stylization of nature. Pierneef’s paintings are famous because of his geometric structuring of the landscape which is often associated with the unyielding patriarchal nationalism of his era, while the contrived motif on Queen Anne chintzware is seen as quintessentially ‘feminine’.
Raubenheimer’s cotton-rag paintings are different to traditional paintings on canvas. With an ambiguous mix of media that registers as both fabric and paper, these ‘paintings’ are made using deposits of paints in a plastic grid. This grid method compartmentalises the colours in a manner that resembles either pixels or cross-stitches, referencing digital raster graphics or the needle-working of even-weave fabrics. Raubenheimer’s 2013 exhibition Collecting the Landscape featured cotton-rag paintings and needle-worked scenes of pixelated Johannesburg city skylines that highlighted the similarity between the pixel and the stitch. This exhibition pointed to the historically gendered practices of fine arts, photographic media and crafts in Modern urban and suburban middleclass realms. In Modern western art history, fine art was seen as superior to handcraft; creative practice in the domestic and public realms were not treated with equal regard or status; and certain forms of visual practice were largely perceived as ‘masculine’ pursuits - such as photography - while others were seen as ‘feminine’ - such as handcraft and domestic decoration.
In this paper I contend, firstly, that Raubenheimer’s deliberate misrepresentation of these art-forms both critiques and pays homage to them; secondly, that her combination of seemingly incompatible media and subject matter creates intertextual links between western historical binaries that hierarchialise certain types of creative practices. Thirdly, I argue that, by simultaneously evoking photographic media and needlework, Raubenheimer’s work represents an interesting blurring of the gendered visual and tactile histories of modernity.
