Braiding

    Anni Albers



"  Her art gives pleasure to the eye and to the mind and to the touch, if only one were 

allowed to touch. One wants to feel the braid and nub, to finger the frays and proud

threads, the tightness and looseness and differences between soft and wiry, metallic and plastics in her weavings.   "

                                                       
                                                       ~  Eleanor Pritchard

anni albers

knot

1947

Anni Albers Black White Gold Ia gift to composer John Cage

Cage musical score

  "  they taught me 

        there is no separation

            between studying, performing

                 the daily chores

                         of living, and creating

                   one's own work . . . 

                           I used to unwind

               the wire

                      tags that labeled crates

                                of vegetables

                       and took the fine brass

                               and steel wires

                  and braided and twisted 

                            them together

               to make bracelets, rings,

                       and figures . . .  "

                ~   Ruth Asawa

 " Of patterned energies;
and first, Buckminster
Fuller on knots.

He grasps and tenses
an invisible rope, on which we are to understand a common 
overhand knot, two 360 degree rotations in
intersecting planes, each passed through the other:

   Pull, 

and whatever 

your effort each lobe

 of the knot makes it 

impossible that the other 

shall disappear.

 It is a self-interfering pattern. 

Slacken, 

and its structure hangs open 

for analysis, but suffers 

no topological 

impairment. 

Slide the knot along the rope: 

you are sliding rope 

through knot. 

Slide through it, 

if you have them spliced 

in sequence, hemp rope, 

cotton rope, nylon rope. 

The knot 

is indifferent 

to these transactions. 

The knot 

is neither hemp 

nor cotton 

nor nylon: 

is not the rope. 

The knot 

is a patterned integrity. 

The rope 

renders it visible. 

No member of Fuller's 

audience has ever objected 

(he remarks) that throughout 

this exposition he has been holding 

no rope at all, 

so accessible to the mind 

is a patterned integrity, 

visible or no, 

once the senses 

have taught us its contours. "

             ~   Hugh Kenner, on Bucky Fuller

                       braid

                                                          with others like you, such   

                                                          extricable surface   

                                                          as faun and oral,   

                                                          satyr lesbos vase

                                                                             ~    Charles Olson

                                     

                           

Breath

for Susan Rothenberg

Breath as a braid, a tugging

squared circle, "stream, vapour --

an odorous exhalation,"

breaks the heart when it

stops. It is the living, the

moment, sounds curious

complement to breadth

brethren, "akin to BREED . . . "

And what see, feel, know as

"the air inhaled and exhaled 

in respiration," in substantial

particulars--as a horse?

Not language paints,

pants, patient, a pattern.

A horse (here horses) is

seen. Archaic, in fact,

the world alone

presumes a world,

comes willy-nilly thus back

to where it had all begun.

The horses are, they reflect

on us, their seeming ease

a gift to all that lives,

and looks and breathes.

~     Robert Creeley

breathes

lines 

braiding

three  major themes:

love

thinking 

the creative process . . .

                                                                   annie albers
                                                                   line involvement ii