ABSTRACT
The principal area of focus for this chapter will be the six Floorpieces that Harmony Hammond made in 1973. Produced by the artist braiding together sections of synthetic knit cloth which she had salvaged on her rag-picking excursions in New York’s Garment District, whilst they were arguably more akin to domestic rugs, on the artist’s insistence they were to be understood as operating within the disciplinary framework of painting. Taking Hammond’s predilection for the “local and the temporary” as being emblematic of the negotiations that were taking place between a particular approach to painting in relation to a broader, more antagonistic milieu, Any Kind of Fabric will also consider how Hammond’s weakened form of painting was able to develop an approach that no longer was beholden to the so-called strong theories of formalist art criticism as they had worked to shore up the position of post-war modernist abstraction in the US.
