In 2010, the artist Olaf Nicolai had an extremely colorful silk curtain woven in Crimmitschau, Saxony, and called this work Why women like to buy fabrics that feel good. This title is a free translation of a 1937 study by Elias Smith, which deals with consumer behavior when buying fabrics. “Elias Smith” is a pseudonym used by the sociologist Paul Felix Lazarsfeld after his emigration to the USA. Together with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel, Lazarsfeld wrote the first long-term study on the consequences of unemployment in the twentieth century: The Unemployed of Marienthal. In this town east of Vienna, almost all workers became unemployed between 1926 and 1932 due to the collapse of what was once one of the largest textile factories in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The study, which is still considered a milestone in the development of empirical social research, provides Nicolai with a starting point for a complex network of references in the publication accompanying the curtain, ranging from the demise of the textile industry to the development of consumer needs and psychological studies on the tactile perception of fabrics. In this way, the conceptual and the sensual combine to form the curtain’s invisible ornament.

A curtain is a border. It separates the outside from the inside, what is behind from what is in front. The curtain embodies the idea of concealment par excellence, because what we have before our eyes reveals nothing to us, but instead hides it. The curtain is therefore always a projection surface for the individual imagination of what is absent and invisible. Olaf Nicolai uses it as a typical decorative element of interior design in order to create a sensual and narrative object by way of its manner of production, the title, and a multitude of references.