From rag factory to rag gallery
YOU wouldn’t expect a rag for cleaning surfaces could get this much attention. And yet nearly 200 artists from 40 countries have turned their craft to kitchen cloths and posted rag-centred artworks to a former factory in Germany.
The special exhibition took place in an old factory where Europe’s first cloths were produced from cotton waste.
In a village an hour outside of Dresden, where once machinemade cotton rags rolled off assembly lines in the mid-19th century, artists exhibited their variations on cloths, rags and mops.
Scores of artists from 40 countries showed their work in a special exhibition in the Art
Factory Flox gallery in the German village of Kirschau, located in the state of Saxony, last month.
Artist Holger Wendland, curator and creative director of the exhibition, says last year he began wondering how the history of the factory as a former world market leader in the production of rags and blankets could be merged with the space’s current use as a gallery.
And so the members of a local art collective decided to create a “mail art project.”
“The origins of mail art lie in the New York Correspondance School founded by Ray Johnson in 1966,” says Wendland. The idea is nothing more than art sent by post, something many artists were also doing in the German Democratic Republic.
The call from Kirschau on the subject of cleaning rags spread worldwide through social media. Soon, letters and packages showed up in the former village of weavers.
In the middle of the 19th century, the textile industry brought the economic boom to the village, giving it the nickname “village of golden roofs.” It was then that Gotthelf August Friese invented a new, industrially manufactured cloth.
The products were soon being exported to India and Africa. In the 1920s, the company developed into the world’s largest producer of blankets and cleaning cloths. To this day, the
Kirschauer Textil company still produces rags just a few steps away from the gallery.
“We have works from Ghana, India, Venezuela, Australia, Canada, the United States and many European countries,” says Wendland.
“I had expected to receive 100 submissions. There were over 200 works of art – painted, embroidered, written on, sewn on the sewing machine, printed, perforated, collaged. Even installations and objects were created.”
There were also works by amateurs and a school class. And according to the rules of Mail Art, the works of art are neither sold nor returned. — dpa