Airing Laundry Part 1

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash…

On 19 June 1978, The New Yorker published a short piece by Antiguan-born writer Jamaica Kincaid, which began like this. Kincaid employed her payroll position as party columnist at the newspaper to expose high society’s absurd behaviour with sardonic and brilliant effect, while also publishing these miscellaneous anecdotes of being black and broke and hot (as in sweaty) and a woman in New York in the seventies. The wryly instructional tone of ‘Girl’ from 1978 reads like an inventory of how to become a woman accepted by society—an amalgam of demands on the body and the spaces we inhabit with that body. It is not unsurprising then that it opens with laundry—the long and endless labour of presenting an immaculate body. Kincaid’s malevolent voice continues, always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming… and I think of starched cool whites pressed flat along the line that we tow, like lacerated cutouts of night dresses, work dresses, housecoats, petticoats.

This kind of oppression—on time and on bodies—is made manifold in the case of a black woman for whom cleanliness has historically been both slave labour and political tool against people by the coloniser, upheld by segregation and Apartheid. The hot sun and the hot sweet oil of the pumpkin fritters sing of Antigua rather than New York, but laundry is a universal language—we load it and load it with meaning.

Until the invention of the household washing machine, laundry was social. From the communal washing pursuits of rural villages to wash houses, it was an activity in which women came together to toil, but also converse and exchange information, knowledge and experiences outside the home and thus beyond the all-seeing eye of their husbands.

The beating, rinsing and airing of communal washing elicited conversation but also revelation—stains and wear exposed the secrets of the garment’s owner and it was women who owned this knowledge—one that could one day be leveraged for liberty and thus a danger to the systems that hold us.

‘Der klatsch’ is the German for ‘gossip’ meaning an onomatopoeic and ‘resounding slap’, a stain as well as ‘a pejorative word for prattle, typical of women’s conversation’ alluding to the act of laundry—communal laundry—and the violence of language. The manifold meaning of der klatsch exposes patriarchy’s tactic of oppression that presented washing, like conversing, as time-wasting—eventually eradicated by the glaring orifice of the household washing machine. While the implication that dirt is bad and sexually deviant was the tactic of capital, thus dressing oppression as efficiency.

In Venice this year, I watch as hot starched clothes lines are hoisted by dismembered hands that rifle with pulleys from behind shuttered windows in a private labour.

By the seventies women were either contained within the home by washboards and increasingly, washing machines, or banished to the glaring scrutiny of the laundromat and the exposure of underwear in glassy shopfront windows. Laundry continued to be labour but now it was confined to the spaces of domesticity and capital. But Roberta Cantow’s ‘Clotheslines’ (1981) reclaims the long-lost social and communal aspects of laundry through a poetic assemblage of voices and footage—against the grainy and picturesque footage of translucent tea dresses waving in the breeze and colour-blocked clotheslines in urban sunsets and upon rooftops, women recount their experiences of doing laundry. It opens with I had the kind of husband who, as an electrician at that time, insisted on wearing white duct pants to work everyday. Oh yes they were washed by hand. There was no other way.

…I began to hate him then.

….how could I have thought I was so modern and be so stupid

…it was so many years ago but you know I could still weep over it

This woman’s remorse for her lost years, her lost self, and the recognition in hindsight of her husband’s control, weighs heavy in her voice. Later in the film, amidst footage of women mounding and sorting heaps of laundry in sweltering laundromats the pitch becomes explicitly angry…

It was the bone in my throat

I hated laundry because it was never finished

It was the worst burden I could ever remember

It was not so much the act that burdened as the solitary confinement it instated upon lives and its corruption of time that could be spent making or doing other things. In the latter half of the seventies, women began to breach this privatisation and do other things—part of a broader impetus to co-opt the structures of care, domesticity and labour that held them in place that extended to Adrian Piper’s book-keeping and Judy Chicago and CalArts’ ‘WOMANHOUSE’ in LA. Cantow, along with Kincaid, Patti Hill and Mónica Mayer framed the quotidian clothesline within their art-making as a common experience and thus a powerful subject through which to think.

Cantow’s film montage of laundry lines and voiceover captures the sensualism and ritual of laundry: the pinch of the peg and the feeling of plastic and metallic between your teeth and moving in and out of the shadows, between the makeshift lines, and the sheets absorbing the heat… and it is energy someone says with poetic realism. The filmmaker summons that elemental energy, the bristle of the fabric, the communal endeavour of laundry its propensity to be anti-monumental moving between the lines, flexing in the wind:

Women who don’t consider themselves artistic put a great deal of themselves into household tasks…

I used to hang them nice, I used to put them out in colours. I used to play games

There’s something about hanging clothes on the roof that’s not really like work but like pleasure.

Others describe the tender exchanges that take place when hanging out laundry, finding ways still to share stories and knowledge usually denigrated to gossip—a lot of women used starch but I used sugar one woman says and it reads like alchemy. Back in Venice, lines criss-cross, high-low, from building to building, forming also lines of connection—connecting women in common experience.

The same year that Kincaid wrote ‘Girl’, the Mexican artist Mónica Mayer was creating her seminal work ‘El Tendedero’ (1978)—or ‘The Clothesline Project’—an installation composed of a pink clothesline, wooden clothes pegs and hundreds of pink slips. Mayer invited 800 women of different ages, social classes and professions to answer the question, ‘As a woman, the thing I most hate about my city is…’ revealing, largely, overwhelmingly, women’s experience of sexual violence in the streets. Over the course of the exhibition, women visitors spontaneously added to the clothesline, revealing ‘secrets’ and transforming the line into an opportunity to expose the institutional violence placed upon them. The manifold pink slips were accumulative and thus insistent like Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ is insistent in her syntax, undermining the ‘girl’ as universal law.

It’s everyday living and you’re part of it, someone says in the final throes of Cantow’s lament, if you let it go for a couple of days you were finished, she continues, normalising the violence of repetition—one that domestic labour demands. But Kincaid in her syntax, Mayer with her pink slips and Cantow’s ceaseless washing lines, turn repetition into something generative, believing perhaps in Getrude Stein’s protestation that there’s no such thing as repetition only insistence.

Artist Patti Hill sought repetition in the material of quotidian life and the mechanics of the photocopier. She stored everyday objects in a laundry hamper and reproduced their images, flat like laundry, on an IBM photocopier. For an exhibition titled Dreams, Objects, Moments, she reframed bars of soap, scissors, buttons as decorative and fleeting matter as things that were ‘close to hand’ and relinquishing them of household duty. These pressed negatives, proffer the weft and wear of objects while operating as intimate portraits of a life.

In ‘Six Photocopied Garments’ a white linen dress, riding pants, swan’s feathers are unencumbered by a body and reflect Hill’s disdain for the original image—she discarded it during the photocopy process, seeking instead the residue—or imprint. ‘The laundry was like her, it belonged to her’, someone says in Cantow’s film like the ghost of the person who wore it—a body in absentia. And this extends to Mayer’s ‘Clothesline’ and Kincaid’s ‘Girl’, in which no given body actually appears. Through the starch cutouts of the laundry line, repeated like a mantra or insignia, these women rethink laundry as an extraneous arrangement—a disembodied self.

The line errs or we err from it.

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Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer working at the intersection of creative and critical practice. Her work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published in The White Review, Art Monthly, MAP Magazine, PIN—UP magazine, The Skirt Chronicles, Ache, Worms Magazine, Passe-Avant, Deleuzine and upcoming in Bricks from the Kiln and LA Review of Books. She is the author of chapbooks including Herēma published by Sticky Fingers Publishing and Foam of the Daze (Bottlecap Press). She co-runs the practice-based writing workshops Devotion with Sophie Robinson.

Bibliography

Letters to Jill: a catalogue and some notes on copying, Patti Hill, Kornblee, 1979

Clotheslines, Roberta Cantow, 1981: www.folkstreams.net/fi… Kincaid, The New Yorker, 1978

El Tendedero, Mónica Mayer,1978