Bari Ziperstein, “Good Textile Workers”, 2017, stoneware, underglaze, glaze, 16 x 12 x 13 1/2 inches

November 5- 30, 2018

Bari Ziperstein’s “Good Textile Workers” is the result of one mode of inquiry slipping into another, the entire process one of synthesis. Beginning with a deep dive into an archive of soviet agit prop printed matter from the 1980’s, Ziperstein draws the cold media of the printed page into the dynamic formal conversation of sculpture vis-a-vis ceramic form. The through-line in “Good Textile Workers” is a concern about labor, specifically labor’s relationship to its concurrent politic, and the work captures a multifaceted perspective on the evolution of this idea.

The basic shape of Ziperstein’s stoneware sculpture can be roughly interpreted as an upside-down factory. What we might describe as smokestacks reminiscent of industrial architecture serve as a tripodal base in the piece, three piers supporting the central mass. The form is also reminiscent of a curvaceous private pool, a wedged public plaza, a section of a brutalist building. Described in two dimensions or
in plan-view, the central shape of “Good Textile Workers” is a pinched and warped rectangular motif resembling a curled piece of paper or poster, relating to the posters mined by Ziperstein. The drawings and details of the work are etched into and applied flatly to the surface.

Considered in-the-round, the form becomes the worksurface across which the field of patterned textile is being attended to by the female workers who appear on the front of the work. Their blue factory attire and bright red hair kerchiefs complement the bolts of orange and green fabric that swathe the otherwise industrial grey background. Their right arms are outstretched in unison as they work together to pull
the fabric that is wrapped around the perimeter, draped at the sides, taught at the corners. The workers face the same direction which is in the opposite direction of their work at hand and this contrapposto dynamic evokes the push and pull of repetitive choreographed movement of factory labor.

There are strong diagonals throughout the work- the figures’ arms, the tails of the head scarves, the pattern key of the textiles, the posture of overall form. Avant garde artist and theorist Kasimir Malevich’s seminal “suprematist” compositions of the 1920s, which continue to dominate Russian visual culture, often imply movement beyond the edges of the picture plane, elicit kinesthetic empathy, and notably reinforce the strength of the diagonal line as a primary compositional device. For the constructivists, the figure of the diagonal line was energetic, revolutionary, and retrospectively can be tied to the collective image of Vladimir Lenin speaking publicly, such as in the iconic photograph of the then-new government leader addressing a crowd of soldiers in May 1920, his body leaning diagonally up and out from the podium. The photograph, like suprematist paintings, industrial interventions, and design work following the 1917 revolution, variably recalibrated the gestalt for a new, pliant public.

The workers in Ziperstein’s sculpture could be fabricating textiles used for a number of purposes, though the simple geometric patterns reference an evolution of the design work of influential female artists Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova. Under the umbrella of constructivism, superlative notions of fashion as a way of articulating class stratification were supplanted with pragmatic concerns. “Russian constructivists saw the human body as a mobile vessel, which required practical, simple, hygienic clothing to increase, rather than obstruct, the work and life efficiency of the wearer. Going away from the symmetry, luxury and convenience of the pre-revolution attire, constructivists favoured simple geometric shapes and complementing, albeit bright, colours in their avant-garde designs.”1 Stepanova and Popova were central to efforts to express the new political ideology via textiles and perhaps can

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be thought of as innovating in the factory on which “Good Textile Workers” is based. The production of the most visionary schemes, such as Stepanova’s prodezodezhda (production/working), sportodezhda (sports costumes), and spetsodezhda, (clothing specialized for a specific occupation), were never scaled to the masses, but nonetheless conveyed the aspirational image of the energetic populous of the future. Stepanova and Popova both worked at Tsindel, designing fabrics and patterns for dresses for publication in the LEF journal (“Left Front of The Arts”). From 1871-1932 the Tsindel textile factory in Ivano was the largest center in Russia for the industrial production of printed cotton textiles, a product that was reliably inexpensive and accessible.

The simple duotone textile patterns on Ziperstein’s ceramic sculpture mimic the printed cotton fabrics and design of the 80’s with circles and triangles on the bias and the flatness of their rendering illustrates printed as opposed to woven textiles. The juxtaposition of graphic cloth on a ceramic structure
blends the production of the craft arts. Additionally, casting the two figures two-dimensionally differs from traditional hand-built ceramic busts and further pushes the graphic qualities of the piece and underscores the graphic emphasis of Ziperstein’s research material.

Graphic design was a prolific category of political agit prop following the Russian Revolution due in large part to the adaptable matrix of printed matter and its ease of mass production and distribution. The relationship of agit prop to other industrialized modes such as textiles and ceramics were much more complicated and efforts to revolutionize these zones of production were often challenged in light of immediate and ongoing resource shortages. Industrial ceramics proved to be less elastic in its capacity to adapt to the radically recalibrated consumer good/consumer relationship of communism.

Factories such as the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg fulfilled an endless demand for high end wares for the Russian court in the pre-revolution era. Porcelain in particular was “definitively Imperial
in origin and Imperial in destination, its wares reserved exclusively for the Romanovs and the Russian court.”2 Revolutionary intervention in ceramics was typically illustrative and pictorial, essentially putting propaganda on plates. The strongest evidence of constructivist dynamics at play in industrially produced Russian ceramics can be seen in designs such as Kasimir Malevich’s bisected teacups and sculptural teapot, however examples such as this are anomalies and were still ultimately limited in distribution and accessibility.

Among the prolific introduction of comedic sitcoms in the 1980’s, “Laverne and Shirley” comes to mind in thinking through the two female figures presented on Ziperstein’s “Good Textile Workers.” While the series itself ran from 1976-1983, the show is set in the 1950s and 1960s and so watching the show today is doubly retro. The trailer is riveting in the Fordist work/leisure dynamic it outlines of two friends living together, working side by side as bottle cappers in a beer factory, going out on the town after work, and generally engaging in comedic opportunity wherever the shows’ writers could find it. In a twist,

the pair move to Burbank, California in 1965 to start over after losing their factory jobs as a result of an automatic bottle capper, a Post-Fordist actuality and an indicator of an inevitable wholesale outsourcing of American labor overseas in the 1980’s. What stands out in looking back at “Laverne and Shirley” (who are “making our dreams come true, doing it our way”, a cooperative and feminist way of being) is the way it precursed a politicization of the personal that built momentum particularly in the mid 1980s. Nancy Reagan’s “War on Drugs”, trickle-down economics, post-industrial urban poverty, and a vivid collective paranoia regarding nuclear war with the USSR became integral to the American conscience. Laverne and Shirley, like the ”Good Textile Workers”, look sharply into the past and into the future.

1. Dorofeeva, Evgenia, “Constructivism in Russia in the 1920s”, russianfashionblog.com, June 2013
2. Crichton-Miller, Emma, “The tale of Russia’s revolutionary ceramics”, royalacademy.org.uk, March 2017