Category: Text

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Stop the Moats: Recent work by Cecile Williams and Nick Mangan

‘He who lives on an island should not make an enemy of the ocean.’ Berlin proverb

The interregnum that followed the 2010 Federal election drew attention to the voices of Independents, speaking free of the constraints of party machines. Refreshing views came to the surface. During his campaign for election to the electorate of Port Macquarie, Rob Oakeshott questioned both party’s approach toward asylum seekers. He said, ‘If you spend time looking at it, we in Australia are the moat people.’ His point was that the natural isolation of Australia as an island continent will always temper exposure to hoards of refugees. The generous airing his views received during the tussle between Labor and the Coalition for his vote enabled him to put this phrase into the public domain repeatedly.

But ‘moat people’ has resonance beyond Oakeshott’s intention.[i] It evokes the image of the ‘big pond’—the conceit that Australia is naturally separated from its neighbours. This understanding of regional isolation has a long history. The notion of Australia as the ‘last outpost’ of the British Empire underpinned the White Australia Policy, determined to keep out those nearby.

While it might seem that much of this xenophobia is whipped up by sensationalist media, particularly the Sydney talk show hosts, the concept of ‘moat people’ strikes deep. The cultural theorist Suvrendrini Perera ties the notion of Australian ‘exceptionalism’ to the suburban tradition of the backyard. For her the quarter-acre block is ‘the little Aussie battler’s own kingdom and domain’,[ii] caught between ‘the racially charged wilderness of terra nullius on the one hand and the besieging ocean frontier on the other.’ In this picture, Australia is a backyard on a continental scale.

How do we respond to this? It seems the default position is to despair at the inherently racist nature of the Australian population and dream of a more Scandinavian liberal consensus. This is a comfortable dream. It positions those of us with university education safely above the suburban rednecks below. Still, neither of us ends up any closer to our neighbours across the water.

Two Australian artists point us in a different direction. Their work emerges from a particularly charged test of the moat people. As is legend now, in August 2001 a Norwegian vessel rescued 438 Afghan asylum seekers on their way to Christmas Island to seek refugee status. In the political storm that emerged from that incident, inflamed by the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre, the government took various measures to protect the moat. Christmas Island was excised removing the obligation to process refugees who arrived on its territory, and eventually those aboard the Tampa were re-located to Nauru, as part of the ‘Pacific Solution’.

This kind of operation was not new to the moat people—in fact it, was how they came into being. Australia was, after all, settled as a penal colony in order to rid England of the unsightly vagrants in their midst, mostly refugees of the industrial revolution. As often happens in the post-colonial, a nation perpetrates on others the act of subjugation of which it was originally victim.

But there is a contrary strain in southern cultures like Australia which contests this hierarchy. The practice known as ‘poor craft’ collects detritus what is left over to alchemically re-create a new preciousness. ‘Poor craft’ can be seen in the fibre works of Nalda Searles, the milk bar jewellery of Roseanne Bartley and transformation of fine furniture from firewood by Damien Wright. Recently, two artists have explored the Pacific Solution and found ways of re-connecting us with its refuse.

Denmark (WA) artist Cecile Williams first visited Christmas Island in 2001 as a part of a schools circus program. This has continued in recent years and she has begun to involve local people in making costumes, sets and large scale festival puppets for their recent 50 years celebration. She is particularly attracted to Greta Beach, which receives a huge tide of plastic debris bought on from the tides of the trade winds. Once while combing the beach she found a Muslim good luck charm, used by an Indonesian fisherman to gain safe passage at sea. This prompted her to consider the stories associated with flotsam.

Back in her studio, Williams sorted through the detritus and collected ten- and twenty-litre plastic containers from her tip. With a background in puppet theatre design, she constructed dioramas to re-create diverse scenes from life on Christmas Island, including phosphate mining, the early history of the island like beriberi sickness, local Malay and Chinese culture, the Hungry Ghosts Chinese Festival, golf and the detention centres. The results were shown in the Perth International Arts Festival under the title Contained: Collected Moments from Christmas Island.

Given the subject matter, we would expect to find tragic scenes of suffering. But Contained reveals something new. The installation of nine containers called ‘Detained’ is particularly grim, featuring grills and body parts collected from washed-up toys. But I particularly like Buddhist Chant. Toothbrush heads ornament its border and the interior space is beautifully suggested by the over-sized foot, delicately constructed shrine with a yellow glow within. A stray fragment of Australia has drifted into the moat .The familiar moral drama of detention centres for refugees has brought us this unexpected scene of Buddhist life. Both tragic and festive scenes are brought together in a humble aesthetic of found materials.

As a visual artist, Nick Mangan has a more austere story to tell. The Melbourne-based sculptor has been engaged in a particularly rhizomic aesthetic, imitating the work of termites in a theatre of speculative exoticism. His Gertrude show Colony in 2005 featured a Danish table top used as an atavistic altar. His work is a kind of reverse primitivism familiar elsewhere around the South, such as the South African sculptor Brett Murray and the Colombian artist Nadín Ospina. Mangan recovers primitivism from its colonial gaze and re-directs it back on the viewer.

Mangan’s more recent work has been inspired by found objects that match his aesthetic. The crude pinnacles outside Nauru House in Melbourne stand as a Neolithic exception to the polished granite surfaces of the city. Mangan was inspired to travel to their source.

Nauru is one of the most extreme examples of the resource curse. ‘Thanks’ to its phosphate deposits, Nauru once boasted the highest per capita income in the world. Having squandered its wealth, the nation now seems a litany of failures. It has the highest level of diabetes, the highest road mortality (despite having only one intersection), and unsustainable debt. Mangan has mined this tragic story for a series of works that first featured in the Adelaide Biennial. Notes from a Cretaceous World includes a series of coffee tables made from slabs of coral limestone that remained after the strip-mining in Nauru. Their source was the pinnacles that once adorned Nauru House in Melbourne. These tables realise a dream of the past President of Nauru, Bernard Dowiyogo. It is unreliably reported that , as he lay dying of diabetes in the USA, before signing over the use of his land, Dowiyogo suggested that the nation’s fortunes might be stored by developing a furniture industry making table tops from coral rock.

Mangan’s work has none of the unexpected delights of William’s dioramas, but they do share a parallel logic. While Williams is recovering the plastic detritus of consumerism, Mangan is dealing in an older sedimentation of marine guano. Mangan too uses the complicity that connects Australia with Nauru to conjure a story closer to home. The ‘resource curse’ is a presage of Australia’s fate, living high on the profits of mining without adequately planning for its future.

Their work can be seen as part of a broader southern aesthetic. As an alternative to the ‘big pond’, Perera invokes the concept of ‘tidalectics’, which originated in the writing of Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tidalectics reflects an island aesthetics of iterative rhythms. For Perera, tidalectics is a counterpoint to the exclusive binary of land and water that typifies the colonial imagination. As Australia has pushed a tide of refugees back to places like Christmas Island and Nauru, Williams and Mangan have shown how it is possible to draw back new elements into Australia, both critical and enlivening.

There are moves afoot currently to engage more creatively with the region. There is clearly more to learn than the tourist spectacle of grass skirts and kava. The University of the South Pacific has been producing challenging scholarship of relevance to Australia, particularly in Indigenous studies. A good source for this is the Fijian education theorist Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, who has been publishing on the subject of knowledge practices in Fiji. She has proposed a Fijian Vanua Framework for Research (FVRF). As she writes, ‘Knowledge is seen as a gift by Fijians; hence within the frame of Vanua research the gift is sought for and derived accordingly.’ She also proposes a ‘cultural taxonomy of silence’ involving fifteen different expressions of silence in Fijian culture. Along with others, what is emerging is an epistemology that strays from enlightenment assumptions and is as much about sustaining boundaries of ignorance as it is about spreading knowledge. The Institute of Postcolonial Studies has embarked on a series Southern Perspectives that aims to explore such vectors of south-south that are emerging in Australian research and thinking.

And in Suva last November, the Pacific Craft Network was established as an organisation to promote craft practice within the context of the World Craft Council. Australia happens to share this with Fiji as members of the Pacific sub-region. As late as 1999, Australia was once able to host a regional meeting in Suva on this platform. The opportunity exists now to recover that relationship.

Australia was originally conceived as a sewer for the English class system. Pacific is increasingly a drain for the world’s crap. But this contains the magical potential of reversal, transforming rubbish into beauty. The moat may end up being what connect us, not what keeps us apart.

References
  • John Connell ‘Nauru: The first failed Pacific State?’ The Round Table (2006) 95: 383, pp. 47-63
  • Unaisi Nabobo-Baba ‘Decolonising Framings in Pacific Research: Indigenous Fijian Vanua Research Framework’ AlterNative (2008) 4: 2, pp. 140-154
  • Unaisi Nabobo-Baba Knowing and Learning: An indigenous Fijian approach Suva: IPS Publications, 2006
Links

[i] Oakeshott goes on to say, “The very fact that you have to get in a boat to get to Australia means we have much less of an issue than most other countries in the world.” (5/7/2010 Port Macquarie News http://www.portnews.com.au/news/local/news/general/were-moat-people-says-mp/1875959.aspx)

[ii] Suvendrini Perera Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, And Bodies New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p.51

Originally published in Artlink  vol 30 no 4, 2010

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Designing with the Neighbours in Mind: Unlimited Asia Pacific

Unlimited Asia Pacific is a platform for the Queensland state government to join Victoria as a leading force in Australia’s emergent design economy. While the Victorian State of Design Festival is focused on state-based activity, Unlimited triennial builds on the work of its visual arts sister, the Asia Pacific Triennial, to position design within the wider region. The question is: What does Unlimited add to the APT?

Unlimited offers promising opportunities. The APT deals largely in the cultural reflections in our region, questioning stereotypes and familiarising ourselves with a contemporary Asia Pacific sensibility. Despite massive audience numbers in Brisbane, participation from the region is likely to be limited to those with the resources to engage in visual arts. Unlimited offers the possibility of partnership beyond the performance of cultural difference—it engages in the everyday life of the region.

Besides its relevance to our dialogue with the Asia Pacific, Unlimited coincides with the birth of the Australian Design Alliance as a lobbying group to promote design as a capacity across government. This design push takes aligns itself with the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, which has historically supported the crafts. It argues that ‘Australia should keep pace with the rest of the world in generating creative capital through innovative ideas, product differentiation and systems effectiveness.’

From a government perspective, support for design is seen a business-friendly initiative. The focus of the Queensland event reinforces the link to economic growth – the theme of the 2010 Unlimited festival is ‘opportunity’.

Yet the concerns are not purely profit-driven. There is much in the program that focuses on improving social condition in the region. One of the great successes of Unlimited was Bunker Roy, of Barefoot College, who received two standing ovations for his account of the south-south enterprise teaching grandmothers to become solar engineers. Cases studies of ‘Design in Action’ mostly focused on needs of poor communities in the Asia Pacific region.

But sometimes business and development combined uneasily. There’s a growing school of thought, reflected in C.K. Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid, that a win-win scenario for global North and South can be created by harnessing informal economies in poor countries to the efficiencies of global capital. Mark Ingram from Millennium Business Development told the story of a village in the highlands of PNG, where responsible women farmers were contrasted with indulgent men wasting their time in body decoration and spear-sharpening.

While few today would argue for the interests of men above women, MBD can be seen as advocating a missionary approach. This kind of business development isolates the primitive elements of a culture off from its progressive capacities. It’s doubtful that MBD would overtly identify as imperialist, but critical discussion is important to clarify its aims.

Unlimited has some important issues to work through. Given the urgency of poverty, perhaps cultural identity is an unnecessary romance. Conversely, the prioritising of economy above culture may itself be specific to a Western world view that focuses more on the future than the past.

If it were to articulate such issues, Queensland’s Unlimited would not only position the state in this growing region but also play a leading role in a national conversation about our place in the world beyond. Figures like Noel Pearson have alerted us to these issues within Australia, now we are finding resonant voices from our neighbours outside.

Links

The Unlimited Asia Pacific website http://unlimitedap.com contains a full range of videos of presentations from the event; a visit is highly recommended.

Australian Design Alliance http://www.design.org.au

Originally published in Artlink vol 30 no 4, 2010

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Ten Years Before and After

Lecture to the Chicago Institute of Art 3 October 2007 as part of a series associated with the Object of Labor publication

An evaluation of the role played by collectives in recent craft

It’s a great pleasure to be back in Chicago. I was shocked to realise that it has been ten years since I was here last, and delivered the paper that eventually became the chapter in the publication Object of Labor. So my presentation this evening provides me with an opportunity to reflect on the issues of that paper, and consider what has developed in the subsequent ten years.

But to develop the ideas, I want to jump ahead another ten years’ time.

500 years ago

In almost exactly ten years’ time we will be commemorating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, nailed to a church door in Saxony. The impact of Luther’s hammer still reverberates. In 1960s Australia, when I was growing up, we took it for granted that the world was inexorably divided into two worlds, the Catholic and Protestant, the Micks and the Proddies. Each side would taunt the other with the same phrase ‘Catholic [or Protestant] dogs stink like frogs jumping off hollow logs.’ Since then, Australia has become a more multicultural society and this British fault line has been superseded by other differences, particularly the Muslim-Christian divide.

While the Reformation may seem a period of purely historical interest now, the broader issues that it concerns are as relevant as ever. For me, the critical question is not whether one religion is better than the other, but how they can coexist. In particular, how can we see Protestantism in dialogue with Catholicism, rather than its replacement? This is essentially a question of specialisation. Catholicism was criticised for investing ultimate spiritual authority in specially trained priests. Lay followers had simply to take the priests on their obscure Latin word. So Protestantism argued that faith was an individual responsibility, independent of the institution of the church. The broad question concerns the endeavour of human society—how do we balance the specialisation of knowledge in individuals against the common interests of the people?

This question goes beyond religion. It is critical in democracy, where the specialised task of government operates in a tenuous relationship with the broader appeal of politics. In this hemisphere, I am particularly interested in how it casts the difference between the north and the south as reflected in the dialogue between modernist and baroque, literacy and idolatry. And, more relevant to today’s discussion, the question of specialisation is now of critical relevance to the crafts, where the democratic energies driving the art world challenge the treasury of techniques that is our craft heritage.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago, I groped towards this by examining the question of collective creativity as expressed in the metaphor of the hive. Here, by targeting artists as priests who mystify and disenfranchise their audience, we can pose the question of collective creativity. We all know the romantic inheritance of western art. Henry James could claim that ‘the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.’

In my original argument, I posed the question of collective creativity. How can a work of art be created outside of the guiding impulse of individual expression? What kind of art emerges from a group of individuals operating freely, without any purposeful direction?

Taking a broad view of this question, I invoked the art of insects. Spiderwebs, hives and ant mounds are produced unconsciously through a series of repetitive actions. In 19th century Christianity, this was taken as proof of divinity—a world whose beauty emerges spontaneously from the smallest of its creatures. But with industrialisation, as life became increasingly mechanised, the insect reversed its meaning and came to symbolise instead the demise of creativity. The final throes of this reaction can be seen last century in narratives such as Star Trek Next Generation, where individual Star Fleet officers are threatened with assimilation into the hive-like Borg colony.

But this individualism has gradually given way to an increasingly collective way of understanding the world. The paternal welfare state was transformed into a society of individual economic units existing in a free market. In science and technology, models became increasingly modular—the free exercise of parts exceeding their whole. Socially, phenomena emerged such as the Mexican wave, where a crowd flexes its collective muscle. The age of the individual seems to have given way to the era of the group —from I to we.

The challenge is understand how art can be produced collectively.

Artist as insect

Seen in these terms, I identified four models of artist as insect. The first was in the actual employment of insects to produce art, such as the French artist Hubert Duprat, who used the natural cocoon building capacity of Caddis larvae to create brooches of precious jewels. The second was artists who followed the insect method of using their own body substances to create works. Sue Saxon collected tears in lachrymatories to produce a tree of sorrow. The third model used the new medium of the Internet to create a matrix for collective action. So Persistent Data Confidante solicited confessions from visitors and then asked them to rate the disclosures of others—what emerges is an evolutionary sense of group curiosity. Finally, the last model was set aside for the romantic return, based on the re-emergence of individual consciousness. The example was Gwendolyn Zierdt’s Unabomber Manifesto, which used the binary machine logic of weaving to express a message of revolt against technology.

In retrospect, the romantic return may have been a little, well, romantic. If anything, the collective turn has accelerated in the 21st century. In Australia, the epic Australian Idol has now evolved into the Singing Office, where divas of the shower can compete on the main stage. What is called Web 2.0 has brought us new ways of inter-relating. The institutions of the media were devolved to a sea of blogs. Social networking sites such as Facebook offer a new frontier for information exchange.

And in the art world, what has been called relational aesthetics has continued to provide creative challenges as they exchange the isolation of the studio for the conviviality of the café. French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud heralded relational aesthetics as an art for the network age, where the masterly production of precious beauty for the appreciation of elites is replaced by the construction of new possibilities of community.

So, for example, Felix Gonzales Torres’ work for the Sydney Biennale consisted of a room filled with candies wrapped in gold cellophane, which visitors were free to take. The work was not in the installation itself but the situation in which it placed the visitor—do we follow our appetites and destroy the work or save it for others to enjoy? The visitor is no longer a passive recipient of the work’s aura, but an active participant in its operations. From this perspective, the seeming innocent scene of an artist at his easel is a spectacle of proto-fascism, forcing viewers to submit to a privileged view of creativity.

Collective art has continued to grow around the work. Last year in the Russian village of Arkhstoyaniye, artists attempted to return to the medieval model of the anonymous artist involved in the construction of churches and icons.

In the textile arts, popular hobbyist crafts have become an important arena for creative action. The renegade craft movement advocated DIY crafts as an antidote to global consumerism, particularly through socialised media such as blogs and podcasting.

Towards our part of the world, it is particularly New Zealand artists who seem to have embraced collective action. Anie O’Neill developed a methodology under the title Buddy System to teach visitors a simple crochet technique for making flower forms. These contribute to an installation which grows during the course of the exhibition, and is eventually distributed as gifts.

In Melbourne, what’s called the ‘knitting revolution’ has led to many artists using the accessibility of knitting to bring people together. For the past five years at Craft Victoria, we have staged the Melbourne Scarf Festival, which uses the democratic nature of scarf making to explore different themes of textiles and identity.

Recently this spread to Canberra with a very clever exhibition at Craft ACT which used the extensive network of online knitters to produce works for an exhibition Knit1 Blog1.

Craft 2.0

These developments suggest a movement we might call Craft 2.0, where work is produced not by the master craftsperson but by the audience themselves. Rather than be intimidated by the virtuosity of the skilled master, the visitor is allowed to partake of the creative process directly. It is for visitors now to enjoy the plasticity of clay, the hardness of metal, the silky surface of timber, the viscosity of glass and the pliability of fibre. It seems a natural extension of the democratic processes that are advancing our societies.

But we know that this comes at a cost. Clearly, there’s a limit to what a newcomer can achieve when they pick up a material for the first time. In developing a work for popular production, the artist must lower the standards of execution. The years required to understand the inner qualities of one’s material are no longer valued. The life-long investment in making has been rendered as worthless as shares in Enron. As the sub-prime market in craft booms, we await the cultural crash that will come when our skill bank is finally emptied.

This paragraph no doubt leads some to feel a sense of loss in this democratic revolution. Indeed, there are reasons to question the enduring worth of this movement. Without the structure that skill provides, will we be left simply with the momentary sense of transgression?

For critic Hal Foster, the problem with relational art is that it conforms to the destructive processes of global capital, which dissolves tradition and culture into an atomised group of individuals. In arguing that art needs to take a stand, he finds relational art too compliant with existing forms of consumerism. So how might we radicalise relational art without reverting back to privileged notions of the avant-garde?

While the past ten years have witnessed the development of new democratic energies, at the same time there has been a decline in the reproduction of individual skills. You know this particularly in the states, where so much manufacturing has moved on to China. So the small town of Kannapolis in North Carolina, once known as the ‘City of Looms’ is a virtual ghost-town today since the closure of the century-old Cannon Mills complex two years ago, no longer able to compete with the flood of cheap Chinese textiles.Rather than learning to make things ourselves, we have taken the ‘smart’ option of outsourcing those specialised tasks to a largely invisible working class in Asia.

What’s left to Western countries like Australia and the US are the information industries, such as design, entertainment and business. These enable much greater interconnectivity than the specialisations required in manufacturing. However, this is only possible in the context of a greater global specialisation whereby whole countries are dedicated to particular kinds of production.

It is in this context that I’d like to introduce a modified form of collective creativity—a form of world craft based on collaboration.

The craft of collaboration

Last year, Craft Victoria staged an event called Common Goods that marked the 100th anniversary of Gandhian non-violence, ironically founded in Johannesburg on September 11. Common Goods looked at the various concepts of hospitality found in different societies, particular the concept of Ubuntu—a person is a person through other persons—which was forged in the acts of forgiveness that occurred during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Apartheid. These concepts of humanism provide doors that connect cultures with each other. In the Indian case, Gandhi’s grandson Ramchandra nominated the concept of Sanmati, or reality mindedness, which assists tolerance between Muslims and Hindus.

To realise this concept, we brought out a couple of darners, or Rafoogars, from Najibabad in North India. While a lower caste activity, darning is an integral part of society. Pashmini shawls are revered as heirlooms. Worn everyday, these shawls have been passed down through generations. The techniques for carding and milling the wool have since been lost, so these shawls survive thanks only to the careful work of Rafoogars. Today, the amount of repair on these shawls is greater than the original fabric.

In Australia, we teamed these Rafoogars up with a textile artist Wendy Lugg, who has specialised in darning. It was very strange at first for these Rafoogars to be working with an artist. We set up a project involving the repair of a flag that had been damaged by a recent storm. The Eureka Flag is a revered symbol of Australia’s only republican battle, when gold miners rebelled against the heavy taxes they were force to pay. The Southern Cross design that was stitched into this flag has since become an important rallying symbol for worker’s rights and the fraught republican aspirations of this English colony. The original tattered flag is held in the gallery where the Rafoogars worked.

As soon as the local community learnt of their presence, they were besieged with interest. There were some who wanted to assist with the materials necessary to repair the flag. There were others who brought in precious family heirlooms that were in a state of disrepair. Consistent throughout was a sense of wonder at the nature of darning, a domestic art once so common and now so exotic. Darning seemed to provide audience with a way of connecting with a lost past.

In the meantime, the artists Wendy Lugg sourced and dyed various materials that the Rafoogars stitched together. Other local textile experts assisted with the sourcing of appropriate materials. Such was the demand that it seemed possible that they could have set up permanent residency in the gallery, repairing not only textiles but also memories.

The Rafoogars have since returned home to India, where their own craft is under threat with the inevitable flood of cheap textiles made in China. At the invitation of Intekhab, Wendy Lugg has recently visited the Rafoogers. As revealed by her blog, Wendy was careful to ensure that her visit was not commandeered by other interests. This new international contact is of considerable capital in his community. There continues to be potential that they might be able to sustain their revered craft through commissions from countries that have lost the art.

The worth of this kind of exercise is subject to question. The final products of these collaborations are not as important as the process of bringing cultures together. The skill of an artist like Wendy Lugg is as much in negotiating her role with the two darners as the actual work that she produced—which was itself extraordinary given there was only three weeks to create a new work.

Collaboration does represent an important frontier of craft production, as western artists and designers are increasingly commissioning work from traditional artisans. This genre of world craft certainly has its dangers, as it lends itself to a kind of exoticism that does not seriously value the contribution of makers. However, world craft does have the potential to sustain traditions and cultures. The challenge now is to strengthen this emergent genre with critical examination. To be sustained beyond fashion it needs to deal with the spectres of primitivism and missionary values. If it can proof itself to be a genuinely liberating practice, then world craft augers well for constructive dialogue between first and third worlds. This will not happen spontaneously. It requires much care and critical self-reflection.

Marcus Aurelius said ‘That which is not good for the hive, is not good for the bee.’ When it comes to the production of honey we might say, what is good for the beekeeper is good for the hive.

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Between the Wheel and the Mobile Phone: Ceramics in a network age

Thanks to Jane Sawyer

‘Between the wheel and the mobile phone: ceramics in a network age: Keynote address’ Verge Ceramics Conference  (2006)

Congratulations to the organisers on what’s been a most stimulating conference thus far. I am grateful to Garth Clark for laying out the dilemma in contemporary ceramics so eloquently in his keynote address, and to Gwynn Hanssen Pigott for her animated potter’s tale, which reminded us of the richness that ceramics can bring when reduced to its simple forms. Thanks also to Janet de Boos concept of the distributed studio and its rhizomic metaphors.

I’d like to position this paper in relation to what’s come before. Like others, I’d like to explore the paths leading out from Fortress Ceramica. Not that the fortress is necessarily a bad institution, but for the moment it seems to have been bypassed by modern society.

The image of Fortress Ceramica suggests a particular position for ceramics today. It conjures up the scene of a roundtable with knights sitting in worried discussion as the Normans are just about to scale the ramparts. What will they do? Some decide to join the Normans, with the hope one day they can make it to the glorious court of Paris. But I imagine one stubborn knight, Sir Bernard, who prefers to go underground for a while, in the hope that the ideals represented by Fortress Ceramica might be restored.

My talk considers how ceramics as a field might fare out of its familiar craft setting and in some of the new developments in the art world. The question to be asked through this journey is how these new opportunities advance the field of ceramics, a field which has developed techniques and traditions that enable us to give expression through clay to the things that are important to us.

Following the theme of medieval romance, our journey will take us to a region called ‘the green world’, in reference to the forests like Arden and Sherwood when heroes disappear into a mysterious other world of camaraderie and magic. In the green world, heroes leave beyond the royal power struggles for the utopian world of common folk.

You are wandering down the forest path and what do you find?

Kinki’s handbag

Welcome to Kinki’s handbag. What do we see there? You might notice a wallet, a digital camera, some tissues, candy, the inevitable iPod, keys, chewing gum, pocket PC and sundry other items. It’s hard to imagine ceramics in this sea of disposable items and gadgets. But that’s not what is most remarkable. It’s particularly interesting that we have this image in the first place. Why would someone share an image of the private contents of their handbag? It was taken from a photo-sharing site, Flickr, where users often share an image of ‘What’s in my bag’.

There’s been quite a remarkable opening out of inner experience in recent times. Though reality television programs like Big Brother and the Internet explosion of blogs, we are erasing the boundaries of public and private.

The ‘network age’, as some call it, reflects an increasing interconnectness between people, particularly in the affluent west. We see it in the street, with the rise of café society and the hegemony of the latte. The talking head of current affairs has been replaced by the panel format. A glimpse at any train or bus will find commuters busy texting and talking on their mobile phones. I link therefore I am.

So how goes our noble knight of clay? Rather perplexed, one might say. Ceramics as we know it seems best appreciated from the paradigm of the individual. We need a means to appreciate the investment of time and labour that has gone into the development of skills, embodied in the hands of the potter. We saw this with Gwynn Hanssen Pigott’s life story, involving long hours spent in isolation honing her skills.

Long hours of solitary labour are required to test the limits of the clay, experiment with glazes. We are talking about the moment of connoisseurship, where the collector holds the vessel and appreciates its rare colour and form, and covets private ownership.

Next in the forest, Sir Bernard comes across quite a strange gathering of people – a group of merry men, no less.

Relational aesthetics

In visual arts, the paradigm that many have adopted to respond to the convergences of our time is relational aesthetics. Defined in the writings of Nicholas Bourriaud, relational aesthetics moves the focus in art from the lone object to the relations between people that the art is seen to enable. This art creates fluid communities, which assert democratic values in resistance to the consumerism that hijacks social relations for brand identification and market penetration. As Bourriaud defines it, ‘relational art [is] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space).’[1] Here is art for the age of the mobile phone.

Relational art hardly seems like art at all. For instance, for a work in a previous Sydney Biennale the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres filled a gallery with candies wrapped in gold cellophane. Visitors were free to help themselves to this bounty. The meaning of the work was not in the installation at all, but in the position as a viewer that we find ourselves in having to weigh up individual desire against the collective responsibility to preserve an art work for public enjoyment.

Relational art might involve an artist cooking a dinner for a number of people. In 1993, the French artist Georgina Starr handed out sheets in a restaurant to customers dining alone, that spoke to them about the anxiety of solitary eating—anything to bring people together in unorthodox combinations.

Sir Bernard and Robin Hood seem unlikely companions. Relational aesthetics has a puritan disdain for art as a form of idol worshipping. Bourriaud rails against the ‘dead object crushed by contemplation.’ It may seem there is little prospect for an object-centric art in this movement, but there are new works which honour craft in ways that do not focus on the individually made object.

Let’s meet some of the merry men.

The Buddy System

In craft, an example of a work that fits within relational aesthetics is the Buddy System by Cook Island artist Ani O’Neill. Inspired by her Raratongan grandmother, O’Neill has devised a touring art work that recruits visitors to learn crochet and make a simple flower design. At the end of the installation, these flowers are sent to a person nominated by the maker. The work has been quite successful for O’Neill, featuring in many cultural festivals, including the first Auckland Triennial.

Textile art would seem a natural medium for gregarious uses as it lends itself to the social group. In Melbourne, we have witnessed the knitting revolution develop as younger people sought meaningful ways of coming together outside of the commodified spaces of entertainment.

Asian Field

How might be apply this paradigm to ceramics? A pertinent example may be found in a much publicised work on view at the current Sydney Biennale, Anthony Gormley’s Asian Field. Asian Field is part of a series of work produced by the British sculptor by recruiting people from communities to produce figurines with local clays. Previous works have come from Bristol, Mexico, Brazil and Sweden.

Asian Field was produced by 347 inhabitants of Xiangshan, aged between 7 to 70 years. Their brief was to produce clay figures that were the palm-sized, could stand upright, and have two holes for eyes. Originally planned to be a little over 100,000 figures, the total ended up being 192,000, made over a five day period.

The effect of standing before Asian Field is quite impressive. As one individual, you feel yourself subject of the gaze of nearly half a million eyes. There is an ambivalence of omnipotence and humility. There are also subtle variations in the clay evident across the installation, as the figures reflect the different qualities of clay distributed across the land.

For Gormley, the series has two motives. The first is to honour the primordial mission of sculpture, as witnessed in the first interventions into landscape which lifted horizontal rocks into vertical forms, reflecting the ascent of man from a four to a two legged beast. Thus Gormley transforms the resting nature of earth into the animated works of art. For his second interest, Gormley states ‘I want to democratise the space of art.’[2] Gormley gives over the privilege of making to the people, by no longer being the sole artist who creates the work, but by enabling others to express themselves. This reversal is parallel to the transformation of the gallery, from the crowd visiting the unique object to the multiple objects visiting the unique visitor: ‘you become the subject of art’s gaze rather than the other way round.’

By situating a work about democracy in a Chinese context, Gormley provokes a critical response. An Englishman comes into a Chinese town and recruits villagers to mould pieces of clay. The installation contains photographs of these individuals with their names and one of their pieces. Is there any way of distinguishing their figures from one made in Mexico or England?

Xiangshan

Let’s think about Xiangshan for a minute. In Chinese history, Xiangshan is the revered home town of the nation’s father, Sun Yat Sen. Today, it is one of Guangdong’s ‘four little tigers’, specialising in hardware, appliances, casual wear and mahogany furniture industries. Many of us are probably wearing clothes made in Xiangshan, or use their devices in our kitchens. It’s part of the revolution in consumerism that has made inflation history and has given us all access to low-cost goods. Someone else often pays the price. In a famous case, workers in a Xiangshan factory were found working for as little as $22 a month making handbags for Wal-Mart. They were forced to hand over identity documents under pain of arrest, denied overtime pay and fined if spent too long in the bathroom.

Gormley’s work was part of a campaign called Think UK, it was first exhibited in the Imperial Palace next to Tiananmen Square. He can be seen to be following a similar path to that other Western visitor, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch aimed to introduce STAR TV into the Chinese market, which he considered the fastest growing into the world. As Murdoch said to the Asia Society:

Today, hundreds of millions of Chinese not only dare to dream but have confidence that their dreams will become reality.

Like Murdoch, Gormley is presenting China as a sea of individuals, each with their own unique aspirations. But alas, there is nothing in what they produce that connects with the traditions that inform Chinese history, from the ceramics of the Ming Dynasty to the communist ideologies of the post-imperial era. These are placeless Chinese, ready to enlist in the Hollywood dreams of Foxtel. This Robin Hood turns out to be a undercover agent of King John.

Asian Field raises broader concerns about an infantalisation of ceramics, where clay is seen as a form of spontaneous expression innocent of skill and virtuosity. A museum in Melbourne is developing a touring exhibition of ceramic horses made by children. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it would be a shame if audiences forgot the power of clay as a form of artistic expression.

Ai Weiwei

Let’s compare Asian Field to other ways in which the tradition of Chinese ceramics engages with the west. Also in the Sydney Biennale is the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His signature piece is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), which is photographic documentation of the artist doing just that. Ai Weiwei comments bluntly: ‘China is a factory of the world. So boring porcelain stay same 2,000 years: break.’ Naturally, our first response is to recoil with horror. Here is modernism at its most brutal—the destruction of tradition for sensational effect.

But in a way, there’s also something refreshing about this honesty. Ai Weiwei is being open about the unspoken neo-colonial agenda in work by Anthony Gormley. His recent work Ghost Valley Coming Down the Mountain (Museum für Moderne Kunst) featured 96 vases from the Yuan period reproduced from the original workshop. These filter ceramic tradition through a modernist lens, reducing the singular masterpiece into a grid of reproductions. This Asian Field has more to say to ceramics than Gormley’s installation.

Ah Xian

In Australia, we have some notable examples of dialogue with China. Of great success recently in Australian galleries is Ah Xian, a refugee from Tiananmen Square. Human Human is a life-sized figure finely ornamented by the traditional craftsmen at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei Province, east of Beijing. The principal motif is the lotus, the traditional sign of hope on the journey to enlightenment. While incorporating a very traditional form of Chinese ornament, Ah Xian has made quite a radical shift in substituting the body for the vessel. For Ah Xian, this places the human body at the source of life, rather than nature.

Ah Xian can be compared to Gormley as someone who brings a humanism to China. Though his is something that engages more with the traditions of Chinese ceramics.

Writing a Painting

Such a path is followed by Robin Best, in work for the exhibition curated by Vivonne Thwaites, Writing a Painting, which was presented at the University of South Australia School of Art gallery at this year’s Adelaide Festival. The exhibition featured works by Robin Best in collaboration with the Chinese ceramic painter Huang Xiuqian and the Ernabella artist Nyukala Baker. Best’s methodology is similar to Ah Xian’s, though she herself creates the forms that are then ornamented by specialist artists. Like these artists, she introduces a modernist aesthetic that abstracts traditional form. But hers is a more aesthetic interest in the formal beauty of spaces created by these shapes. In flattening the traditional vase, she has heightened the painterly quality of their work.

After meeting the false Robin Hood, there is still much to offer Sir Bernard and the Anglo-Oriental Company in possibilities of cultural exchange with China through the medium of clay.

While I’ve dwelt mostly on China, allow me to mention briefly a few other less familiar terrains in which ceramic practice might flourish.

There are some opportunities in relational aesthetics, but there may be more prospect for ceramics in cultural collaboration, in what might be understood alongside world music as part of the genre of world craft.

Handshake

Ceramics as a means of bringing people together achieved its most literal expression in a recent series of events staged by Karen Casey, titled Let’s Shake. These reconciliation events involved indigenous and non-indigenous people shaking hands—the dental filling placed between the two hands slowly forms a solid impression. During the celebrations of NAIDOC last week,

While celebrating the humanism of clay, this event highlights the seeming opposition between specialised skill and shared meaning.

But perhaps we can tread a different path in looking at ceramics. Rather that look at its role in bringing strangers together, there is a strong theme in the way it serves to acknowledge existing relations.

David Ray

In Melbourne, David Ray is one of a school of merry men, including his St Kilda studio brothers Stephen Benwell and Vipoo Sviralasa.

Coming from the far flung suburb of Ringwood, David has an interest in the emancipatory potential of clay. For his Open Bench residency at Craft Victoria, David created a ceramic BBQ. At the performance that culminated this, David invited audience to make pinch pots that finished the installation. While his work remained the centrepiece, the audience could experience for themselves the plasticity of the materials.

For the Commonwealth Games, David participated as host in an exhibition Common Goods. Common Goods was under the umbrella of the South Project, which looks to possible exchanges between artists from across the south. There are many untapped connections for Australian ceramicists with the traditions of our southern cousins in Africa and Latin America. This was just a taste of that.

His guest was the Sri Lankan artist Chandragupta Thenuwara. Thenuwara has invented his own genre of art—barrelism. Barrelism is the appropriation of the military paraphernalia of Colombo as art rather than sedimented violence. Thus Thenuwara explores camouflage as a form in itself and took advantage of this residency to start to develop a three dimensional camouflage. David responded to this militaristic theme with a ceramic gun position as though building of a city-scape. The pervasive military nature of Sri Lankan life as evidenced in Thenuwara’s barrels provided Ray with an opportunity to pull out the stops in Melbourne.

Poor Craft

…

Reflecting the knitting revolution in textiles, the recent genre of poor craft reflects an attempt to renew craft with the use of common materials. In ceramics, Nicole Lister has employed her skills in porcelain to ennoble the humble packaging that normally accompanies ceramics. Beyond the object, Honor Freeman places porcelain in the public domain in the production of fake power points. Poor craft is a definite guerrilla movement of the Fortress Ceramica, determined to maintain the ideals of object making in a world dominated by hyper-consumption.

The new labour movement

An alternative path is to focus on the way the object embodies the time spent in making it.

A work by Christian Capurro has some quite interesting relevance to ceramics. There are reports of a shortage of kaolin affecting porcelain production. One of the main uses of kaolin is the production of glossy magazines. Capurro is one of a new generation of artists that turn labour into art. His work Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette commissioned a number of people to erase a page each from the male fashion magazine Vogue Hommes. They were asked to record how many hours it took to rub out the page, and what their normal hourly rate was. The work was thus calculated at $11,349.18.

While this kind of perverse conceptualism seems far from the ideals of the craft movement, it does suggest other paths for ceramicists, who might make a feature of their labour. Rather than selling a pot, one might sell the equivalent labour…

Blogs

Finally, a new realm of underground action has developed recently in the production of blogs, daily web diaries. Blogs not only enable individuals to upload images and writing about their day’s concerns, but importantly it is a means of connecting people together based on shared interests. The blog becomes an informal project that solicits a mobile audience. The Danish ceramicist Karinne Erikson reflects not only on her challenges in the studio but also her involvement in a choir and occasional purchases. She adopts a popular method of dividing the week up into colours, so Red Friday includes images of Galerie La Fayette and an English stove. Part of new network includes Queensland ceramicist Shannon Garson, who used a bird theme for one week and encouraged visitors to submit works accordingly. Ceramic blogs

Already there

To a degree, one could say that a theory like a field like ceramics already embodies many of the values in relational aesthetics. At an everyday level, ceramics is used as structure for the relationships between people, from the consistency of plates on which people dine to the range of quality in cups that represent the specialness of the occasion.

It may be tempting to stop at this point and say that’s enough. We don’t need to worry about this new theory.

However, we need to acknowledge that there has been a change, which is probably reflected in the greater fluidity of human relations, the absence of the ‘special guest’ whose presence demands opening up the porcelain cabinet. The formality and ritual of social life has declined.

We need to explore other paths.

In one element, the field of ceramics is likely to differ from other forms of conceptual visual art. Ceramics takes longer. There is more work involved.

[1] Nicholas Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002 (orig. 1998), p. 14

[2] http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,921159,00.html

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Painterliness in contemporary glass art

Delivered as the Strattman lecture, Adelaide GAS Conference, 9 May 2005

At this moment, Australia plays host to an international gathering of glass artists. It would seem remiss, then, not to mention one of Australia’s most noticeable contributions to the international world of glass art. The Peter Carey novel Oscar and Lucinda used glass blowing as a key narrative element. The film, starring Kate Blanchett and Ralph Feines, presented Australian glass-blowing to the world—albeit as a historical recreation. Though historical fiction, it is a promising platform for some burning issues in contemporary glass art.

Lucinda in the glass factory

If we look at the actual content of Oscar and Lucinda, we find quite an interesting question about the business of what it is to be a glass artist. The story revolves around the acquisition of a glass factory by a young recent arrival to colonial Sydney.

For Carey, glass is where reality and fantasy intersect. Unlike the down to earth male world of glass-blowing, tied to the market for utilitarian objects, Lucinda Lepastrier dreamily engages with the fantastic world of glass. Her attention is drawn to the purely useless item—Prince Rupert’s drop. Lucinda believes that ‘glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all.[1] Glass is conducive to the realm of the fantastic that figures so strongly in Carey’s fiction.

Contrary to expectations, Lucinda takes a great interest in the business of how glass is made. She insists on being part of factory life. It is here that she encounters the pre-eminent senior blower, Arthur Phelps.

But Lucinda’s presence at the glassworks is not welcome. A delicate, and maybe even interfering female, is not a familiar presence. Phelps fears that she might distract the men from their labour. When Lucinda protests that she is the proprietor of the glassworks, Arthur Phelps complains, ‘I know, mum, but it be our craft, mum, you see. It be our craft.’[2] The male technical pursuit proves surprisingly vulnerable to womanly presence.

Josiah McElheny

One artist who seems to have overcome this barrier between glass and mainstream art is the American artist Josiah McElheny. McElheny has served his apprenticeship in glass-blowing and spent his time at the feet of the Venetian masters. While being beholden to the world of glass, McElheny has managed to break through into the contemporary art circuit, including the prestigious White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square, London.

Most of my reference to McElheny comes from the substantial catalogue to a retrospective at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostella.[3] The exhibition contains a formidable range of work. It expresses not only technical excellence but also conceptual sophistication..

In the interview that has been published in the catalogue, McElheny does not disavow the craft basis of his work: ‘The subject matter of my work assumes that the anonymous, artisanal, industrial activity of specific glass-factory cultures could be viewed as a complex, creative and meaning-generating activity.’[4] This seems an honest avowal of skill by contrast with the celebration of ‘cleverness’ by conceptual artists like Jeff Koons.

We can see here a new interest in skill that is emerging in the contemporary visual art scene. While celebrating conceptual play, it could be argued that visual art has always had a place for an unquestioned point of certainty. In recent times, this has been often what is considered indigenous, including customary forms of knowledge. We can see in McElheny’s career the possibilities that skill itself could become a quasi-sacred element in the visual art arena.

Here McElheny promises to take craft to a new level. There have been a few craftspersons in the visual art world. In many cases, they fail to pave the way for others of their medium. The Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry uses his status as a potter as evidence of his idiosyncrasy. Would McElheny be any different?

Despite an extraordinary corpus of work, blessed by both skill and intellect, McElheny misses the chance to take craft seriously in its own terms. We can begin with cover of the catalogue. Rather than a glass work, it depicts a nostalgic image of an elegant woman walking through the factory. The text within identifies her as Ginette Gagneous, the wife of the master glass-blower Venini. According to the story, the Dior outfits worn by the boss’s wife became an object of fascination for the blowers and led to new designs in glass, which McElheny reproduces in his exhibition.

Maureen Williams

At this point, it is possible to select any number of Australian female glass artists, many of whom are forging a new language for landscape in glass. I chose the Victorian artist Maureen Williams as someone whose work is the closest to a traditional painting practice.

In a series of images over the past ten years, we can see a steady journey in glass through landscape. Beginning in 1996 with the Transition Series, Williams creates a cylindrical white canvas on which she paints vertical rock-like shapes. There is relatively little sign of landscape, though the forms are clearly drawn from nature. The accompanying empty shapes lend the work a formalist quality that emphasizes their status as drawings.

It is tempting to ascribe a linear development to Williams work. Certainly there seems to be a development from literal representation of landscape to the thing itself with the rock-like forms. But the disappearance and re-appearance of the figure in her landscapes seems like a continual play that she engages in. This oscillation highlights the fragility of self in land, particularly a land as archaic as Australia.

Painterliness is an interesting quality to associate with glass. The allusion to the brush seems contrary to the essence of hot glass, being a medium that resists the organic. Painterliness suggests an opacity that is the opposite of the glowing transparency of glass.

The brush is something we associate closely with the hand of the individual artist. It is the instrument that elects the painter into the fine arts, alongside the pen of the writer and the baton of the conductor. Henry James could thus write about ‘his brother of the brush.’

The material arts are more haptic in nature, involving the body as a whole. Blowing glass, throwing ceramic vessels, weaving a tapestry or hammering out a ring—these activities require the weight of the body to be successful.

In the case of Maureen Williams, painterliness draws our attention to the differences between her work and painting. Rather than render the world on a flat linear plane, she adopts a cylindrical format. Williams claims that her choice is medium is more from a deficit on her part. She says:

I find it hard to paint two-dimensionally because I don’t know what to do with the edges. I’m used to going around. When I hit the edge, I don’t know how to deal with it.

While this might explain the choice to work on a circular medium, the choice of glass rather than ceramics or metal still remains a mystery.

To understand more fully what is happening in Williams’ work, we need to consider the basic elements of the pictorial frame. In the case of painting, the frame gives its content a clear sense of beginning and end. Beginning and end are the basics elements of any narrative structure. It is what Frank Kermode calls ‘that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions’

As a framed structure, painting is very much a window onto the world, one which is contained by our own needs. This window has metamorphosed into today’s screen, which with the growing popularity of plasma technology is increasingly replacing the window that once looked out on our now non-existent gardens.

Williams’ journey as an artist harkens back to the romantic quests of painters to capture the essence of their world. By taking this journey into the radiant three-dimensional world of glass, she grants this quest a relevance that is otherwise missing. Glass is the future of painting.

Notes

This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Australian artist Neil Roberts. The full version is available online at www.craftculture.org.

[1] Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,

1988, p. 135

[2] Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,

1988, p. 329

[3] Josiah McElheny Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea; 18 April –

17 June 2002