"Knitting as a positive social force"

Earlier this month I wrote a brief column about the Knit 2 Together exhibition that opens today at the Crafts Council Gallery. The curators kindly sent me an invitation to a private view of the exhibition last night, along with a note suggesting that I might like to attend as it had provided me with “my column inches” in the previous day’s newspaper (I assume this was a double-entendre alluding to the “knitted willy with realistic head and veins” that I referred to in the original article, but cannot be sure).

In the circumstances it would have been churlish to decline, especially as my scepticism about “the reclamation of knitting as a positive social force” appears not to be widely shared. (I was listening to the lunchtime news yesterday and looked up at the mention of this exhibition, to hear one of the curators explain that only “some buffoon called Oliver Kamm in The Times” had written a harsh word.)

Having seen it, I am none the wiser and got no drink. One of the constants is that the political sentiments the exhibits depict are striking only in their banality. An American knitter called Andy Diaz Hope has an exhibit called Everybody is Somebody’s Terrorist. It is:

… a topical expose of the fear propagated by the blanket label of terrorism – a term that may mean different things to different people.

It accomplishes this by means of “a series of hand-knitted balaclavas representing a variety of socioeconomic or political groups that someone might consider terrorist”. The series in fact comprises only two: one in the form of a monk's habit and cowl, and one depicting a pin-striped business suit and tie. The point, I guess – though it doesn’t take a great deal of guesswork to infer the artist’s train of thought – is that the oppressive forces of clericalism and big business are as - or possibly more - real a terrorist phenomenon than those conventionally understood to be terrorists.

What can you say, except that the crudeness of the reasoning is more than matched by the ineptitude of the artefact? It isn’t even a surprising thought, but a cliché from a collection that includes “institutional violence” and “root causes”. The pinstripes (I was the only person in the gallery wearing such a garb, so perhaps was over-sensitive) in particular will be familiar to readers of The New Statesman, whose editorial line after 9/11 concentrated on the culpability of … the bond traders murdered in the Twin Towers.

Kelly Jenkins (Knit Uncensored, 2003) is concerned with “the politics behind and the history of knitting”. So she says, anyway. I think she has her mind on other things:

My work transforms knitting from a domestic hobby into a naughty, but thrilling, erotic “must-have”.

A must-have you never knew you must have, in fact. The exhibition continues to 8 May, and if you’re in the area of the Crafts Council Gallery on Pentonville Road in Islington I recommend you hurry straight on past it.