Jackie Winsor, #1 Rope, 1976, wood and hemp, 40-1/4 x 40 x 40″ (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”#1 Rope,”]
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re at SFMOMA, and we’re looking at a Jackie Winsor sculpture. This is called “#1 Rope.” It dates to 1976. It’s made out of square wood rods.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:16] There are seven in each row.
Dr. Zucker: [0:18] So seven by seven.
Dr. Harris: [0:19] Seven squared.
Dr. Zucker: [0:20] They’re vertical, and they’re holding three balls of hemp, which are roughly wound into tight spheres.
Dr. Harris: [0:26] I found myself wondering while we looked at this what was holding it together, because each stick seems very separate and yet clearly they’re linked in some way, also by horizontal bars that we can’t see.
Dr. Zucker: [0:41] Or you can barely see.
Dr. Harris: [0:42] Barely see.
Dr. Zucker: [0:42] I think in fact you…perhaps you’re not even supposed to see.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] It has a kind of mysteriousness to its being able to stand up.
Dr. Zucker: [0:49] At the same time, they almost seem to have a kind of gravity that holds them together.
Dr. Harris: [0:53] It’s so interesting that she’s using these found materials and transforming them. I found myself immediately imagining the gesture of the winding. I knit, so I often make skeins of yarn. It takes a really long time to wind this much.
Dr. Zucker: [1:10] So there’s real labor involved here.
Dr. Harris: [1:12] It feels that way. Also the movement of the hand to make the skeins.
Dr. Zucker: [1:17] One wonders what purpose these skeins, in a sense, hold, because it almost feels like there’s an industrial purpose, as if they are going to go onto a loom of some sort. It’s so interesting because we’re thinking about the mechanized. There is something mechanized here.
Dr. Harris: [1:29] In the grid.
Dr. Zucker: [1:30] But on the other hand, there’s something that’s so tactile and handmade.
Dr. Harris: [1:33] It’s looking back at a kind of tradition of woman’s work, perhaps. We also notice the rough texture and the way that the hemp is coming apart a little bit, compared with the pieces of wood that seem so solid.
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] Then, of course, there’s a square hole in the center.
Dr. Harris: [1:51] There is.
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] There’s this absence.
Dr. Harris: [1:52] It takes a minute to notice it.
Dr. Zucker: [1:53] Yeah, but there’s darkness there. It draws our eye in. Then you want to rise up on your toes and look in a little bit. There’s something a little mysterious. How is that shaped? Does the square go all the way down? Does it expand out in that middle layer, perhaps? There’s something unknown and kind of unknowable about this.
Dr. Harris: [2:11] Yeah, I think there’s a real sense of time because of that element that we were talking about, of how long each…
Dr. Zucker: [2:17] Of the winding.
Dr. Harris: [2:17] Yeah. So that it’s a work that embodies a long duration and work and repetitive work.
Dr. Zucker: [2:24] But they come together in this kind of extraordinary sense of unity. I mean, together, the seven by three, this unit, they feel so solid and so interdependent.
Dr. Harris: [2:34] But each one is different, right?
Dr. Zucker: [2:35] They are totally different, yeah, the windings are completely different.
Dr. Harris: [2:38] You start really noticing how each one is different. The coloration is different. The winding is different.
Dr. Zucker: [2:42] It’s almost like thatch. It’s this beautiful organic material, and of course, it’s gotten dirty over time. It’s not precious at all, and yet it feels solid and strong.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] [The] making of it feels like it involved a lot of energy.
Dr. Zucker: [2:55] And that if one were to ever try to unmake this, it would take an extraordinarily long period of time.
Dr. Harris: [3:00] Exactly.
[3:00] [music]
