Airing Laundry Part 2

To start where we left off is the prerogative of domestic labour, society, narrative plot.

Then I took my laundry basket

And put the linen all in it

And everything I could fit in it

And all our dirty clothes that hadn’t gone into the wash

And all your shirts and jeans and things

And put them in the new washing machine

Washing machine

Washing machine

The purposeful mid-chorus pause between washing machine, washing machine in Kate Bush’s ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ from Aerial, released in 2005, communicates the repetition of domestic labour. This is followed by the mocking onomatopoeia employed by ad guys to soften the appearance of domestic labour:

Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy

Get that dirty shirty clean

Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy

Make those cuffs and collars gleam

Everything clean and shiny

The ‘clean and shiny’ closing line intimates a shift in laundry—no longer the gruelling and haptic pursuit of women in basins and communal wash-houses, but a well-oiled machine.

Any residual romanticism elected by the laundry basket was sharply blunted by the technological development and rollout of the washing machine in the late seventies, eradicating the need for women to participate in communal clothes-washing while also setting new customs around laundry. It would still be women’s labour, but aestheticised—fetishised even—by industry. Women were to be as efficient as machines—both kept under control.

With no wicker basket or aged pegs to speak of, the will of Capital upon our bodies became more explicit.

The taught ropes, dead weights, pulleys and steel frames that structure Soft Acid by Hendrickje Schimmel at Camden Arts Centre infer a likeness between instruments of torture and those of industrialised laundry in the 19th century. For her first institutional show, Schimmel, who refers to her practice as Tenant of Culture, pays heed and reference to the long-forgotten female workers of the laundry industry in Acton, London, at the turn of the century. Technological advances had reached laundry but not yet entered the home as washing machines. This was a sweet spot for Capital—keeping poorer women (pre)occupied with hand-washing and household duties and instigating an entirely new industry laundry in which middle to upper classes sent their loads to large facilities in poorer neighbourhoods where they would be washed, wrung, hung and neatly folded and returned to them often by those same women. Despite its brilliant veneer, laundry was a dark and oppressive industry—from the 18th to the late 20th century, the Magdalene Asylums, also known as the Magdalene Laundries, were first Protestant and then Catholic institutions that spread from the UK to the United States, housing ‘fallen women’ who slaved in industrial-scale laundries and raised our expectations of both the body and women’s industry, by which I mean efficiency.

Beyond the laundry industry’s violent attack on women, Soft Acid impresses the environmental impact of fabric treatment. High-tech and synthetic offcuts commonly treated with acid and dyed in noxious artificial colours, are roughly ruched, knotted and stitched into a patchwork and suspended from a height as a great tapestry. The performance of performance-wear as a streamlined and flawless endeavour is exposed by these processes. In ‘Soft Acid (Series) Yellow’ and ‘Soft Acid (Series) Beige’ both 2022, Schimmel explores the manifold shades of denim dying from deep indigo to paling blue in one long ream, pulled taught using wire and washing machine counterweights, and then poured like spilt milk onto the floor.

With its weights and lines and pulls, the structural framework of the installation delineates space while mirroring the fetishisation of industrialised labour by high-end fashion and its appetite for fabric innovation and exposing the various stages of dying, rinsing and pressing, and pressing that demand water, power for machines and drainage systems. ‘The act of deconstructing a garment provides information about the supply chain but also makes way for new and productive contexts for the cast-offs of the fashion industry,’ says Jules Gleeson in her file note on the show. It also attends to the (wo)manned and un-authored laundry industry of the early 19th century, some rare traces of which exist in Camden Art Centre’s own archives and which Schimmel used as a starting point for Soft Acid. There she discovered an entire industry which has since been eradicated or swallowed back into the domestic sphere, as if nothing ever happened, as if clothes washed themselves.

Helen Lewis, the author of Difficult Women, says that the washing machine was the real heroine of the feminist movement, freeing up time to spend on other pursuits. We know now that heroics are obsolete—unheroic acts make the difference. In The Company She Keeps, Celine Condorelli talks about taking a ‘hidden mechanism, and putting it on show while also considering its aesthetics,’ and the responsibility of culture to take these ‘modest proposals, as a project and as a way of living, and make it present.’

It is apt then, that The Company She Keeps is about and constructed from conversations between friends as an imperative for the practice of art-making she says. It takes the form of transcripts of conversations over coffee, in studios, not a million miles away from the communion of clothes washing done by women.

Despite our best efforts, laundry comes back to us—or we return to it and its endless consumption of time. But what of its function as a modest proposal for living—a hidden mechanism?

When I wrote the first instalment of this Airing Laundry essay, about the lines we tow and err from, women responded strongly. They shared it and wrote to me with the guttural reaction of a thing buried so deep within our psyche it seems innate. Lucy Kumara Moore, visual artist, mother and owner of Claire de Rouen bookshop wrote:

I think often of Kate Bush’s washing machine song… and the washing detergent adverts I saw as a child that baffled me then but are reaping the rewards now as I look for anything that will ease the load.

In a way, ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ eases the load—airing and thus sharing in the lived experiences of women from the very fabric of the laundry basket and travelling from the soap suds of the washing machine out into the surf:

I watched them go ‘round and ‘round

My blouse wrapping itself in your trousers

Oh the waves are going out

My skirt floating up around my waist

As I wade out into the surf

Oh and the waves are coming in

Oh and the waves are going out

Oh and you’re standing right behind me

Little fish swim between my legs

I relish this minor communion—forging female friendship as a ‘way of shifting one’s investments and attentions away from a male-centred existence and way of life,’ writes Condorelli. We can glean something from between the folds of our laundry—harking back to the resounding slap of washing on the cold stone slab and the airing of—and then erring from—these lines we tow.

***

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.

Tenant of Culture, Soft Acid, Camden Art Centre, 8 Jul-18 Sep, 2022