Flax, if it had a voice, would be screaming while processed. It’s grabbed by the head and pulled out of the ground. Roots and all. It’s sown thickly for self-suppression, so that it grows stunted and does not branch out.
Flax needs oppression. It’s pulled around. It’s spread-eagled on the fields, and elsewhere soaked in pits and rivers.
Rivers used to wash flax are damned rivers – they have no fish anymore. Then, the flax is scotched and broken.
I want freedom.
But if I get it, I’ll go look for bondage – by a woman, by a publisher. Still the writer does need a gap to take two steps, like a boxer for a strike, he needs the illusion of choice.
For the writer, illusion is a strong enough material.
There are two ways now. One is to leave, to dig yourself in, to make money with something other than literature and to write privately, at home.
The other way is to dedicate yourself to describing life, conscientiously looking for the new way of life and the right world view.
There is no third way. This is the way to go. The artist should not follow tram lines.
The third way is work in newspapers, magazines, to work daily, to care not for yourself but only for the work, to change, to interbreed with the material, to process it again, and then, there shall be literature.
Out of Pushkin’s life, Dantes’ bullet was probably the only thing the poet did not need.
But he did need the fear and oppression.
What strange work this is. Poor Flax.
—
Viktor Shklovsky (1895-1984), The Third Factory, 1926: ‘On Freedom of Art’, translated by Dr. Alexandra Berlina.
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The oldest documented human use of flax dates to the Upper Paleolithic period, around 30,000 years ago, based on the discovery of spun, dyed, and knotted flax fibers in the Dzudzuana Cave in present-day Georgia.
In ancient Egypt, temple walls were decorated with paintings of flowering flax. Linen made from flax was used for embalming mummies, and flax fibers are two to three times as strong as cotton fibers.
Even today the flax plant remains the painter’s material twice over: linen for the canvas, linseed oil for the paint. Fibre from the stem; oil from the seed.
Flax in Drejer’s Flora Excursoria Hafniensis
Flax is found in Drejer’s index of Flora Excursoria Hafniensis (1838): Hörsilke is Cuscuta epilinum, epi linum, upon flax, a parasite that grows on no other plant.
It has no roots and no leaves; it is thread only, which is why Danish calls it silk. Nineteenth-century farmers called it Fandens sytråde, the Devil’s sewing threads, and troldegarn, troll’s yarn.
Danish keeps the two registers apart the way English does: hør is the plant, Germanic; linned is the cloth, from Latin linum.
Linen and The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer
« Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878–1881, pigmented beeswax, clay, metal armature, rope, paintbrushes, human hair, silk and linen ribbon, cotton faille bodice, cotton and silk tutu, linen slippers, on wooden base, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1999.80.28 »
Curatorial description of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans – / The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC – the only sculpture Degas exhibited during his lifetime at Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881. The model was a Marie van Goethem, dismissed from the Opéra and lost to history.
The credit line separates the threads. The bodice is cotton faille; the tutu cotton and silk; the ribbon silk and linen; the slippers linen only.
Three natural fibres make the costume, and flax reaches her at two points: the hair and the feet.
The ribbon is the one element in the list where plant-thread and moth-thread are twisted into a single object.
The slippers – the part of the costume that meets the floor and does the work, and insulates the dancer’s feet from ground – are flax alone. And the silk is present on a condition: reeled silk requires that the moth never emerge.
It is the Butterfly/Moth Greimas square from The Artificiality of Art & Degas’ Obsession restated as a materials list.
The fibres are those of the object in Washington; the costume has been repaired and replaced since 1881.
The Glyptotek in Copenhagen owns one of only four complete sets of the 73 bronzes cast by Hébrard after Degas’ death. The foundry numbered the sculptures 1 to 73.
