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File - Hicks A&E

Laurel Reuter--February 29, 1992 -- Submitted to Artpaper

Critical positions, tenaciously maintained, limit one's ability to see.  I prefer the intellectually promiscuous, those who believe for a moment, dispel, cast aside, and then discover--or better yet, invent--new theories, only to repeat the process again and again.  Critical positions should simply be a means of organizing one's active thinking for brief segments of time.  

For example, for three decades the "art versus craft" issue has blocked whole areas of aesthetic life from general view.  Anyone who has given Asian art ten minutes of serious time knows the issue is one of art history and not of either the making of art or of critical thinking.  But anyone is not most people.  Case in point:  Ann Hamilton, along with two or three other currently "hot" artists, is credited with leading the decade into a new era of "installation art."  With absolute political correctness, Hamilton claims as her intellectual mentor Joseph Beuys. Certainly Hamilton's laconic attitude, which she literally acts out in her pieces, parallels Beuys; but the mother of her invention is Sheila Hicks. Nowhere have I ever seen Hick's termendous influence on Hamilton recognized--because Hicks is known as a fiber artist and that is esthetically incorrect.

Hicks, an American who studies under Albers at Yale, and then with the anthropologist, Junius Bird, was a dominant player in the international fiber movement during the sixties and seventies.  Her luscious, wrapped silk, large-scale works were emulated around the world, especially in Japan.  Then, in a radical breakthrough for her, one  that bewildered the fiber world and was unnoticed elsewhere, she began to collect mounds of darned sheets and socks (Stedlijk Museum, 1974, and the Cleveland Museum, 1978), blue worker's shirts (Street Environment in Montreuil, France, 1978), old khaki army shirts from