Category: Text

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The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction

‘The Plinth in the Age of Digital Reproduction’  Keynote address at Localities conference at Northumbria University, UK (2003)

… that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

Walter Benjamin ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations (trans. H. Zohn) London: Fontana, 1973 (orig. 1936), p. 223

to lift clay into the heavens is against nature

Plotinus The Enneads (trans. Stephen McKenna) New York: Pantheon, 1969 (orig. 270), p. 86

For those concerned with putting objects into public view, the plinth is a familiar device. Its clean flat surface creates a separate neutral space on which we can gaze upon the object from all angles and appreciate it in its own right as a thing of beauty. The plinth makes art.

So it was. Today, a new device has come along and stolen the privileged role of the plinth. It is the screen that viewers look to now—a mirror world where the world appears as spectacle. The plinth by contrast now looks like a lump of MDF, taking up space and harbouring clutter.

So where today does the object go to find recognition as a thing-in-itself? Does the screen offer a way of realising the beauty of objects as receptacles of the here and now? These are questions for this paper.

I will present two examples of curatorial practice that have found a place for the object in the screen world. They both challenge the simple tale of technological progress, which sees the screen as a successor to the plinth. Both examples converge on the new development in Melbourne known as Federation Square.

In his classic essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin developed an opposition between the priestly aura of the cult object and the mass enjoyment of cinema. While evoking the poetic charge of the singular object, Benjamin embraced the increased engagement of the senses in modern life. By contrast with a contemplative art form such as painting, which absorbs the viewer in internal reveries, cinema mechanically directs attention on particular paths.

In the twentieth century, the aura of the cult object was to a degree sustained in art galleries. The white cube provided a relief from the cascade of images flooding the world outside. Walls and plinths secured our gaze.

But the barbarians are at the gates. As we become more used to screens, with their changing views from afar, the object becomes increasingly dumb by contrast. Nothing seems to happen on the plinth. It’s dead space. Our inherited ability to gain rich pleasure from appreciating the complexity of craftsmanship is being superseded by more speculative ways of seeing.

And now new architectural practices are introducing the cinematic process into the art gallery itself. As a case study, I wish to present a newly opened development in the hub of Melbourne known as Federation Square.

At first glance, this new design seems to signal the demise of craft as a source of aesthetic experience in the art gallery. Cinema flattens the world onto the screen in order to jump through space and time.

Progress is often imagined as the increasing pace of this transformation, though with a caveat. In Spielberg’s film Minority Report the hero investigator operates a device that enables him to physically manipulate the screen world through a dizzying process of hand-sorting. The moving image has become so pervasive that even cereal packets sport animations. But as with most futuristic plots, the film contains a kernel of the real that defies the distracted world outside. The hero visits his ex-wife’s rural retreat, filled with old-fashioned darkroom photographs. The still world provides an emotional anchor for subsequent engagement with the dizzying world of screens beyond. We journey through the mirror in the hope we can recover a lost object from the real world.

A number of design ethics converge on Federation Square. I will follow two: the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Like Spielberg’s film, Federation Square beckons a web-like visuality of interconnected images, but leads eventually to a rediscovery of the thing-in-itself. Along the way, we find that conventional modes of presenting craft are radically challenged.

Federation Square

Federation Square opened in late 2002 as a series of buildings opposite Melbourne’s central railway station. It contains the Australian wing of the National Gallery of Victoria, the newly forged art institution titled the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the major ethnic broadcasting service and many bars, cafes and restaurants.

Federation Square is based on the designs of two young architects, Peter Davidson and Don Bates, known collectively as Lab Architects. In this their first commission, Lab have departed radically from the conventional modernist white cube. Galleries are designed with multiple visual planes. On entry, visitors are granted views not only of the work in their immediate space, but also of art from neighbouring rooms exposed through niches and orthogonal walls. Screens at the entry of galleries provide dissolving menus of art currently on display. On entry into one space I counted up to thirteen different visual planes. This is not a conventional gallery experience. What is going on?

My reflection on the architect’s intentions was gleaned from an interview with Peter Davidson. According to Davidson, NGV: Australia is about providing visitors with an experience of how artists see the world. In his words, their design was about ‘giving air to visuality’ and providing visitors an opportunity to ‘get inside the look’ of the artist. The parallel with film-making seems relevant, as Davidson explains:

‘Just as the cinema profoundly affected the way that we dream and imagine, I think that creating space as an architect that can contribute to the same thing is also what our responsibility is.’

In this scheme, space is not a neutral container for art, it is rather the structure that gives it meaning.

While seeming to offer exciting possibilities for viewing works of art, there is one disturbing feature of Federation Square for those who work in the crafts—their rarity. Apart from one or two works stored in niches, NGV: Australia shows none of its rich collection of decorative arts. According to management, this is a purely logistical issue. The money ran out before specially designed cabinets could be constructed. While this is no doubt a contributing factor, it does speak for a lower priority assigned to objects. I would argue further, though, that Federation Square is philosophically antipathetic to craft.

The gallery design reflects a license to manipulate space that is partly a product of the digital age. Screen technologies have given a new mobility to the visual plane; images are readily captured, processed and transmitted. This is particularly the case with contemporary architecture, where CAD technology makes it possible to design with vectors that arrange space dynamically.

As a product of this facility, Federation Square has an almost kaleidoscopic complexity. This is not a space conducive to what Robert Hughes claims as the ritual of art devotion—the ‘long look’. Instead, it is a space for the restless contemporary eye, seeking constantly changing views and connections.

Conventional plinths would be out of place in this kaleidoscope. Their presence would rupture the dynamic visual flow of the space. The plinth’s invitation to view the object ‘in the round’ would create a kind of whirlpool in the visitation experience, disrupting the designed trajectories. It would be the awkward crease in the seamless ‘fly-through’ constructed for gallery visitors.

When I put these thoughts to Peter Davidson, he claimed that there is nothing antithetical to objects in Lab’s design: it was a curatorial issue, rather than an architectural feature. He described plans for new cabinets that would be more easily altered and defended the bifocal structure of the existing niches.

Indeed, I hope that craft is a challenge that NGV: Australia eventually confronts. Lab Architects appear not to be fundamentalist in their commitment to visuality. But at this stage, we must deal with the evidence before our eyes.

And here, if we look long enough, we do find a place where the journey comes to a dead end and the object finally reappears, albeit without the plinth.

One of the works to be displayed in the initial hang was a sculpture by a visual artist Ricky Swallow. Swallow’s surreal mechanical assemblages are heralded as much for their craftsmanship as their imagination. This head of Darth Vader is menacing in its reference, but undercut by its exaggerated construction. To orchestrate this piece, Lab architects built a black room in the middle of the gallery—a kind of blind spot in the kaleidoscope. For a reason unbeknownst to the architects, the artist objected to this space and the black box was left to other artists’ works.

While not used as intended, the black box suggests that a kaleidoscope is not sufficient to itself. At some point, there needs to be an intensive experience that grounds the trajectory back in the physical being of the visitor. Here, perhaps, is where craft might creep back into the gallery as cinema.

Susan Cohn: Black Intentions

The idea of the black box was eventually realised in a profile of the Melbourne jeweller Susan Cohn. Cohn has made a mark not just for her ability to translate urban sociology into ornament, but also her innovation in exhibition designs, eschewing readymade options in favour of bespoke display solutions. Plinths are rarities in Cohn shows. Her Black Intentions explored the netherworld of jewellery as a binding device that embodies the culture of nocturnal Melbourne. To exhibit this work inside NGV: Australia, Cohn recreated her own black box. Walls were painted black and the works were isolated by theatrical lighting. Rather than plinths, Cohn placed her objects on a series of cylinders, reflecting a modernist discipline for function. Visitors engaged with a subtle play on bodily encirclement, including spare tires, bondage and rings that bore the trace of their wearer. Any sentimentality was rigorously avoided using an industrial aesthetic that evoked the engine rooms of modern buildings.

So what are we to make of this? The destiny of craft in the screen age appears to be as the grand exception. Robbed of its plinth, the object has sought refuge elsewhere. The white cube has become the black box.

Freed from the institutionalised plinth, Cohn developed a materialist form of display, with metal on metal, clay on clay, glass on glass and fibre on fibre. Here craft exists in the digital netherworld as its material shadow. It can be seen to feed on the hunger created by a world increasingly removed from the here and now.

So here is the first alternative for craft beyond the plinth. The object may survive within an installation that screens off competing visual stimuli. In doing so, craft provides a kernel of the real that sustains the cinematic experience outside.

Australian Centre for the Moving Image

Meanwhile, in the actual netherworld of Federation Square, a very different place for the object has been found, this time in a more direct partnership with the digital. The guiding artistic mission of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image comes largely out of Sydney, from a group of ‘poetic modernists’ engaged with replacing institutional display structures and releasing opportunities for reflection.

The Museum of Sydney team included Ross Gibson, ACMI’s founding creative director, Peter Emmett, previously director of the Crafts Council of New South Wales, and designer Gary Warner. The architect was Richard Johnson (Denton Corker Marshall).

The Museum of Sydney was built on the original site of government house. It had no collection, and was dependent on the archaeology of its own premises for display. Artists and designers were recruited to participate in presenting the objects in a way that gave a sense of their aura. For designer Peter Emmett, the abiding mission of the museum was to give a sense of the history of uses for objects.

For Peter Emmett, exhibition display was a matter of ‘taking the guts out’ of the museum. Rather than the standard ziggurat, objects were suspended in mid air and screens were embedded in walls. Removing boxes made the space for the physicality of the object to come forward. The result was a kind of digital elementalism, where the fleeting mystery of moving image returned an enduring aura to the object.

Like NGV: Australia, the museum had its own kernel experience. Ross Gibson and Gary Warner worked on a series of story-tellings that evoked the life experience of ordinary people of the time. These stories were presented in a room called the Bond Store, using a method called Pepper’s Ghost, where the image is projected from the screen onto glass, giving the impression of a floating figure. Theatrical lighting highlighted props from the colonial era, such as barrels and heavy iron chains hanging from the ceiling. The screen here returned to its elemental role, which in the words of Gary Warner is ‘a light flickering in the hearth’.

This methodology involved releasing both image and object from their respective boxes—the plinth and the screen. Image and object could now come into contact without one transcending the other. The objects anchored the ethereality of the image and the image amplified the tactile experience of the objects.

Like many experiments with digital media in the 1990s, the Museum of Sydney has itself reverted back to a more conventional museum. But its spirit has re-surfaced in Federation Square.

Lynette Wallworth: Hold Vessel

This poetic modernism is reborn in the Screen Gallery, located in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, in the basement of Federation Square. The business here is to take the moving image out of the cinema and project it onto gallery walls. The result engages the viewer’s body in the process of display, as visitors walk through the gallery to take films into their stride.

The unique aesthetic experience of this space was evident in the first exhibition, Deep Space, curated by current director Victoria Lynn. One work in particular stood out. Visitors to Hold Vessel #1 by Lynette Wallworth, enter a darkened room with video projected down from the ceiling to floor. Cradling a glass bowl, visitors can catch the moving image by placing their object under its rays. The experience is quite mesmerising. The video of fantastic sea life appears to be swimming inside the bowl. What’s critical in this illusion is the responsibility of holding the bowl. If the bowl was on a plinth, the effect would be severely reduced. Cradling the bowl brings into play an implicit haptic knowledge about holding liquids in vessels. It seems the image itself is a fluid that requires containment.

In its search for life outside the plinth, Lynette Wallworth’s work shows an alternative place for the object—on the body of the viewer.

Naturally, there are immediate problems with such a method. The bowls used were quite generic with little sign of craft. But this can develop. What’s important is that Wallworth and these designers have initiated a relationship between the dominant medium of our time and the art form it appeared to replace.

Conclusion

Federation Square provides a curious twist in the tale of aura in the modern world. Above ground, architects have turned a gallery into a cinema, while below ground the cinema has been transformed into a gallery. It would seem that in this process the moving image is liberated from its role as mirror to the world. Instead, we see potential for film to become an accessory to reality, its flickering shadow, an ornament to the real. The challenge now is similar to one faced by Peter Pan—how to stitch the shadow back onto material form.

For those reluctant to deprive gallery visitors of contact with objects, there do seem to be ways forward. Beyond the homogenising context of the white cube, craft is freer to embrace its own materiality. This physical encounter provides a dialectical counterpoint to cinema and thus tempers its more escapist tendencies. Alternatively, craft can engage directly with the moving image, realising its expression in the physical presence of the viewer. The alchemical challenge of combining screen and object provides opportunity for future creative endeavour. Aura and mechanical production may not prove to be mutually exclusive.

Paper delivered at conference Locate and Classify: Curating the Crafts at Northumbria University 26-27 September 2003.

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The fundamentalist urge in contemporary ceramics

‘The fundamentalist urge in contemporary ceramics’ Red Deer College, Canada Keynote address Consequence of Material conference (2004)

The Cave

The Cave by Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago is a Kafkaesque tale worthy of much thought. The story is about a ceramist whose work is increasingly marginalised by a force simply called ‘the Centre’. The Centre is a huge expanding complex where people work, rest and play.

The Centre is the ceramist’s only buyer, but orders are increasingly hard to obtain. Its isolation from the world outside means that the Centre has little regard for the handmade product. Early in the novel, the Centre discloses that it is about to launch a range of imitation crockery made from plastic. Though there are obvious advantages in price and durability, the ceramist tries to argue that the very fact that earthenware cracks makes it more appropriate for human use:

The difference is that earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated, So does plastic, but you’re right, not nearly as much. (21)

Jose Saramago The Cave (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) London: Harvill, 2002 (orig. 2000), p. 12

This kind of plaintive humanism does not register at the Centre.

The Cave is the kind of novel designed to send a shiver of apprehension down the spine of all those involved in crafts. The Centre conjures up images of hypermarts like IKEA, where huge economies of scale have enabled them to sell mugs for as little as 50 cents each. There have never been more things in the world, but they have never meant less than they do now.

It is natural to feel dismay at this situation. We are pushed into an antagonism against the modern world, seeking an alternative to the manic excess of consumerism, where there is an ever increasing range of products for an ever reducing cost. But there are hazards in this position. In this paper I’d like to outline those hazards and consider how the path of ceramics leads us around them to what are some new and positive developments in the art of clay.

It’s getting harder.

Scepticism towards modernity has been around as long as modernity itself. However, recent events have complicated matters. There are now figures in our world who share a distaste for aspects of the modern world, but subscribe to radically different means of resolving the situation. We hear them say, ‘The spectre of fundamentalism haunts the west.’ This familiar sentence is the shadow cast over the bold new millennium.

Just when globalisation delivers its bounty of luxury and freedom to the west, a well of violent resentment springs from the east to threaten these gains. Increased security awareness means that our lives are ever more clouded by threats to our way of live. We learn to live with suspicion. At regular intervals, the media uncover another gowned hirsute man living amongst who is linked to overseas terrorist cells.

So Bilal Khazal is discovered in a Sydney suburb. This Qantas baggage handler compiled a book entitled Provisions in the Rules of Jihad—Short Wise Rules and Organisational Instructions Which is the Concern of Every Fighter and Mujahid Against the Infidels. The book, posted on the website, was written in Arabic under the name of Abu Mohamed Attawaheedi. Khazal had drawn sections of it from the text of other authors as well as his own words, the court was told. He had referred to war and the enemy throughout, and promoted violent acts against people and countries, including Australia.

To an extent, we are familiar with this sort of situation from the cold war. However, the enemy then was communism, with an identifiable agenda linked to the protocols of international relations. It was even possible to identify with elements of their cause—championing the repressed and seeking collective good above individual greed. Terrorist networks like Al Qaeda, however, have no rule book of action and a fighting for such a grim world it defies even the most imaginative to consider it redeemable.

Fundamentalism looms thus as a complete ‘other’ to the West. Writers like Stuart Sim Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age Of Dogma (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004) depict this force as a cancer eating away at our freedoms—not just the Moslem variety, but also the market fundamentalism of the IMF as well as the other nationalisms in countries such as India. It seems indeed that fundamentalism is the antithesis of western values.

There are calls now to combat fundamentalism not just as a threat from Islamic extremists, but also within the west. Free market fundamentalism is seen as an ideology of the World Bank which has had dire consequences, such as the collapse of the Argentinean economy. And of course many see the Iraq conflict as a battle of fundamentalisms – the noble Jihad of Moslem ideals versus the God-given American way. Tariq Ali calls it the ‘clash of fundamentalisms’. Elsewhere in the world there is Hindu nationalism, Jewish orthodoxy and even the Earth Liberation Front.

It is quite plausible to see fundamentalism as a disease that is taking over the world, like some atavistic force from the dark ages threatening to overwhelm advances in freedom and tolerance.

It might be something about being an Australian, perhaps it is similar in Canada, but faced with binary oppositions I feel compelled to seek some kind of mediation. The other side of the coin is still the same coin, you might say.

The question I’d like to ask is this: In casting fundamentalism as our ‘other’, are we denying ourselves an important modality in our creative life? This question has particular pertinence to the crafts, and special relevance to ceramics. I’d like to begin considering the creative force of fundamentalism in ceramics, and then proceed to consider how contemporary practice might be understood as a dialogue between fundamentalism and its other.

To begin, let me clarify what I mean by fundamentalism — beyond the spectacle of men with angry expressions wearing strange clothes. I see fundamentalism as a call for the return to basics. It sees a situation of decadence, where power has gone to rulers’ heads, life has become self-absorbed and dysfunctional, and there appears to be little overall direction. In this situation, one might look to the ‘founding’ principles, as articulated in canonical texts and sacred traditions. Fundamentalism sees the opportunity for renewal in returning to society’s mission statement.

While positive as a galvanising force, fundamentalism contains within it a measure of Thanatos. The Freudian understanding of the death instinct points to our desire since leaving the womb to reduce the unwelcome complexities of life to the tranquillity of non-existence. Like pruning a garden, the fundamentalist urge seems best as part of a natural cycle, complimented by periods of growth. The antithesis of fundamentalism is the chaos of life, reflected in Libido and its desire to made connections between things. But left unchecked, growth will eventually stangle itself.

There are reasons why ceramics lends itself particularly to fundamentalist tendencies, and equally good reasons why it also shows signs of resisting this urge.

Fundamentalism in ceramics

Indeed, it would be hard to think of a material more fundamentalist than clay. We can go straight to the Bible and look to the origins of man. To quote from Harold Bloom’s translation:

‘Yahweh shaped an earthling from clay of this earth, blew into its nostrils the wind of life. Now look: man becomes a creature of flesh’. … Yahweh, unlike the rival creator-gods of the ancient Near East, does not stand in front of a potter’s wheel. Instead, he picks up the moistened clay and molds it in his hands, rather like a solitary child making a mud pie or building clay houses near water… Adam is fashioned out of the adamah, or red clay, as a tribute to the earth, and so as a tribute to humankind.[1]

The very word Adam comes from the Hebrew for red clay—Adamah. There seems little more fundamental than literally returning to the soil in order to make things.

It’s a long journey from the origins of culture to the sophisticated technological world of today, but there are some stepping stones for us to straddle.

The Greek legacy has granted Western culture with a hierarchical understanding of ideas as transcending things. For the Greeks, thought was more important than action. And in the Christian church, the path of contemplation was preferred before the path of action.

But there are contrary forces, as ever. The Reformation wrested religious life from the specialised domain of the church and placed it in the common world of work. The Arts & Crafts movement of the nineteenth century obviously borrowed from this Protestant spirit in asserting the dignity of labour above the luxury of consumption.

Bernard Leach

Many of these ideals were taken up in the twentieth-century by the patriarch of modern ceramics, Bernard Leach. Leach railed against the ‘high-collar’ lifestyles of middle class urban elites and championed hand-made pottery as a direct language of expression. The studied self-consciousness of the individual artist was seen as a barrier to the innate creative expression of the humble artisan.

The Leach vision was founded on layers of timeless truths. In ceramics, it was the ‘standard ware’ appropriate to each culture. Beyond nationality, there was a universal language of the body.

It is not without reason that important parts of pots should be known as foot, belly, shoulder, neck and lip, or that curve and angle should often be thought of as male or female. Beauty of ceramic form, which is at once subjective and objective, is obtained in much the same manner as in abstract (rather than representational) sculpture. It is subjective in that the innate character of the potter, his stock and his tradition live afresh in his work; objective in so far as his selection is drawn from the background of universal human experience.

Bernard Leach A Potter’s Book London: Faber, 1940, p. 19

Leach offered a common horizon by which each follower could direct him or herself.

The reaction against Leach’s self-righteous conservatism is probably not as intense today as it was in the rush of postmodernism in the 1980s. But he is still hard to warm to. His kind of fundamentalism seems to quite limiting, enforcing a uniform Sung standard by which ceramics of quality should conform.

Bernard Leach is certainly not an Osama bin Laden, but there are still reasons why we would not feel comfortable limiting our horizons to his vision today. Our path ahead now branches. There are those who would pursue his spirit by less constrained means, and those who deny it altogether.

Studio Ceramics

The English studio ceramic movement encourages experimentation yet retains a commitment to the Modernist dictum of ‘truth to materials’. Two figures who may be seen to play an active role today are Edmund de Waal and Julian Stair[KM1] . Their writing and making form a backbone to contemporary craft. Both are critical of the Leach legacy, though they promote a purity of style with a particular Zen resonance.

Their work accords with the standards of simplicity and repetition held as a Leach ideal, though their artistic sensibility is modernist rather than nationalist. The work Edmund de Waal showed last year at Contemporary Applied Arts adhered doggedly to a Leach-like repetition of form. However, the verities of the vessel were subtly undermined by creating false bottoms. The inner gap between wall and base makes a subtle distinction from utility. The gap instead is charged with an ineffable meaning.

The Australian scene is closely connected to Britain and many of our leading artists reflect the modest poetry of Studio Ceramics. Gwynn Hanson Piggott[KM2] presents Mondrian-like assemblages that offer a precious theatre for subtle variation in glaze.

For Prue Venables, the variable of experiment is more form than colour. Her classic shapes make reference to simple kitchen utensils, Limoge porcelain offers a special dignity to these ordinary objects. Her forms are quite modernist in their avoidance of excess, either in colour or shape.

Recently at Craft Victoria we experimented with a context that would suit the logic at play in Venables’ work. The One Bowl Show attempted an exhibition reduced to absolute essentials: one bowl for one day in one gallery. It was common practice in the nineteenth century to have one painting shows, particularly panoramas, which toured the provinces. What was noticeable in this instance was the power granted the object by the surrounding negative space. It was as though all the energy distributed in the gallery was concentrated on a single object. Here was an opportunity to enjoy the timeless qualities of the vessel.

Likewise, Jane Sawyer has created a language of form and colour that makes a virtue of humility. Jane Sawyer trained at Shussai-gama, a traditional Japanese pottery based on Mingei principles. Though she maintains a Japanese rigour in her work, she breaks certain traditions attached to materials. She has defied the lowly status attached to terracotta clay and created objects that accentuate its rich orange-red colour. This colour is highlighted by the white slips that partly conceals it. The slip is applied while the vessel is moving, so that the result reflects the process of making. Sawyer has found a natural medium of expression.

Ceramic fundamentalism has read heavily from the book of nature. While this has traditionally been those chapters concerning the soil beneath our feet, the Adelaide ceramist Robin Best has uncovered earlier texts. Australia is known as the oldest continent, and much of its substructure has been exposed by the elemental forces of wind, rain and sun. This has brought to the surface striations that tell stories going back to the Gondwana age, when all the continents of the south were once connected together. Her Sugarloaf Hill and Blackcliff pieces are based on the geological site at Hallet Cove, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The sedimentation in this area can be traced back 280 million year ago when an ice sheet melted forming a lake. In Best’s more recent work, she has drawn from the underwater calcification at play in coral formations. ‘Brain Coral’ and ‘Membrane’ both celebrate the fine textures that are the by-product of reef life. While Best’s work strays from the traditions of the vessel, her primal focus complements the direction of fundamentalist ceramics.

The broad school of what we might call ‘Studio Ceramics’ share a particular craft sensibility. It seeks through repetition and modernist discipline a poetic reflection on elemental meaning.

Miscegenation in Ceramics

As we know from the physical world, for every effect there is a counter-effect. And while there are many who seek purity in their calling, there are others who seek to lighten the tone by mixing in other influences, mucking things up.

One obvious means of straying from the true path is through the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque usually indulged in a straight inversion of hierarchies, such as medieval feasts of fools where beggars are made kings for a day. There are ceramists whose work elevates what are considered low art forms, particularly kitsch. Richard Slee is an obvious candidate of a ceramist who seeks a playful engagement with tradition, drawing on popular idioms such as the Toby jug. In the context of the Puritan-like rigour of the Leach tradition, Slee’s work as a welcome irreverence.

Turner prize winner Grayson Perry is best considered not in a ceramic context, but in the rarefied world of Charles Saatchi, and his stable of Young British Artists. Here, the very fact that Perry is a ceramist is enough to make him from the other side of the tracks — he certainly isn’t lauded for the technical quality of his pots. And the personal stories that he paints on these vessels are quite maudlin and personal.

Merely being a ceramist in the ultra cool world of new Brit artists confirms his audacious will to expose his vulnerabilities. On accepting the Turner Prize, Perry appears as his alter-ego Claire, wearing a patterned lilac satin knee-length dress with a high waist and puffed sleeves. He commented, ‘I think the art world had more difficulty coming to terms with me being a potter than my choice of frocks.’ By their very nature, the carnivalesque ceramists are unlikely to nurture schools of followers. Certainly, Perry’s status rests on his very uniqueness as a potter.

Ceramics and breadmaking

The carnivalesque counterpoint to Puritan seriousness is to be expected. Alternative opposition comes from attempts to develop links between ceramics and other forms of creation. As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, ‘To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself’.[2] So where might a dialogue with ceramics be formed?

One of those links can be found at the fundamentalist heart of ceramics. Repetition was so central to the Leach philosophy that he presented the humble baker as the ideal model for ceramists.

Repeat work is like making good bread. That is what it is, and although one is doing repeat work it is not really deadly repetition; nothing is ever quite the same; never, cannot be. That is where the pleasure lies.[3]

Ceramics and bread-making have a fundamentalist common ground that seem to complement each other perfectly, hand in glove. If we go back to Saramago’s The Cave, we find that the beleaguered ceramist begins to question his calling and compare his lot to others:

there is not much different between what happens inside a kiln and what happens inside a bread oven. Bread dough is just a different sort of clay, made from flour, yeast and water, and just like clay, it can emerge from the oven undercooked or burned. There may not be much difference inside, Cipriano Algor admitted, but once out of the oven, I can tell you that I would give anything to be a baker.[4]

How many times have we each wished we were in some other occupation? In such situations, it is tempting to look to those in another field, but which is parallel to one’s own. It was with this in mind that I tried out a curatorial method to make connections between crafts and partnered careers. Symmetry: Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions invited crafts practitioners to make work that reflected their chosen partner. The jewellers made work for dentists, glass blowers for jazz trumpeters, weavers for journalists, word artists for surgeons, and ceramists for bread-makers.

To quote from the catalogue:

They bake. Their working substance is moist and elastic so that it can be formed by hands into discrete forms. After fashioning, the form is left to rest while it settles into its own shape. Sometimes a glaze is applied to improve appearance. And then it is placed with its batch in the oven. Their techniques are paradigmatic of the art of civilisation.

One draws on the earth, while the other takes from the grain that grows in the earth. One squeezes air from the substance to make shapes that hold food, the other aerates the forms so they are edible. The goods of one endure through millennia, whereas the others are worthless the next day. One makes utensils, the other makes food.

One of the binding forces in these dalliances was the very human quality of ‘mutual envy’.

For the breadmaker, the life of a ceramicist is an impossible romance. Day after day, loaves are no sooner produced than they disappear leaving only a trail of flour dust. What is there to show for it all? Sure, there are certain batches that win special acclaim, but their fame comes in a finite number of slices. Imagine that this loaf, this perfect loaf, were to achieve such greatness that people would be tasting it for generations to come. Where in posterity is there a place for master bakers which matches the heritage of master ceramicists?

Even to acquire fame that lasts a day is not an easy thing. ‘The best thing since sliced bread…’ may be one of the most pervasive superlatives of modern consumerism, but it is also a deadly attack on the subtleties of daily bread production: the seasonal quality of the wheat, how humidity affects the leavening, how hot the oven was fired today, which way the wind is blowing, etc. Chris Downes, founder of a contemporary sourdough bakery Natural Tucker, laments: ‘Bakers have become food technicians instead of craftsmen.’ The demands of making our daily bread deprive bakers of any space like a gallery where their art might gain recognition beyond the mouths they feed.

The two ceramists who responded to this brief were Neville Assad-Salha and Rod Bamford. The three structures built by Neville Assad have an allegorical reading. The first enclosed structure presents four bowls of water, the second contains grains of wheat and the third suggests the convections of the oven: water, grain and fire—these are the elements of bread, all housed in these clay structures.

Assad-Salha has spent long periods in his Lebanese village, working in a simple pottery ‘Furren-El-Shibbeck’ means ‘window to the oven’ and refers to that part of the village where oven-work is conducted, including both bread-making and ceramics.

As an act of homage, Neville Assad’s work can be read as both allegory and testament. One of the striking aspects his work is the intense fingering of the surface. The outside of the clay forms has suffered a rainstorm of digital impressions (from fingers, that is). The shared space of clay and bread is suggested in the physical act of making.

For Bamford the comparison with bread-making is a way of focusing on the organic quality of clay. For instance, during the Sung dynasty it was practice to store porcelain at the base of a newly made communal pit lavatory. Urine and dung create a bacterial brew that absorbs the oxygen from clay and makes it pliable enough to use.

Bamford’s forms are roughed kneaded shaped from which has been extracted the shape of breads and ceramics. Also in his installation were fired DNA structures. ‘Dividing line’ is a complex allegory ‘

More recent examples can be found of other conversations with ceramics. I believe many of you in Alberta will be familiar with the work of Fleur Schell, West Australian ceramicist. Fleur has a life-long love affair with porcelain. Unlike Prue Venables, she does not honour her material by seeking its essential form. By contrast, she uses it as a versatile language for translating other mediums. Her musical instruments introduce porcelain as a foreign material that contributes new aesthetic experiences. The contrast between the hard ceramics and the soft velvet references the bagpipe but also contains its own ineffable feeling.

It is not only bakers who find themselves mixing with ceramics. Sue Robey is a fine ceramist from Melbourne who has found her art after a successful career as an architect. She uses paper clay to create ceramic forms that make reference to buildings. Her shapes have a unique expression that evokes the security of shelter while doing so in an effervescent and deliberately slipshod way. As often seems the case, a person moving from a profession to an art seeks a compensatory gesture. In Robye’s case, an architect who feels constrained by delays and building codes, turns to a form of ceramics that celebrates its immediacy and lose expression.

Like the carnivalesque ceramists, these hybrid pairings are unique. For someone else to follow these paths would be seen as imitative.

New fundamentalism

So to return to the fundamental question in this paper, how can ceramics be seen in healthy opposition to the excesses of capitalism while avoiding the negativity of harsher fundamentalisms? The Bernard Leach school is tightly patriarchal and based on racist ideas about innate creative powers. The contemporary Studio Ceramics in England is beautiful but overtly formalist in its bearings. The closest we could get is an association between Jane Sawyer’s slow clay and the Slow Food movement established in Italy in 1986 to champion local produce. The maverick hybridists are certainly exciting and innovative, but do not form a coherent school. We seem left between a rock, a hard place and mid-air.

Offline

I’d like to begin again with a couple of curatorial interventions. These are designed primarily to create a space in which the social aspects of contemporary craft might be brought into profile.

The first, Offline, considered the new dispensation of craft as an unplugged medium. In our time there are ever-increasing demands on us to be connected, whether by phone or email. It is almost the case now that broadband is considered a basic human right along with food and water. At the same time, there is fascination for the problem of how one might survive such isolation, as evidenced by the number of survivor programs on reality television. Going offline today seems to have the same sense of adventure that sailing the high seas used to have in the previous centuries.

This plight of the connected world seemed an interesting context in which to present craft. Offline brought to the fore the experience of being in a gallery itself. Visitors were encouraged to experience the exhibition as something on its own. They were offered placebo pills on entry and given a map rather than refer to labels next to works. Naturally, they were advised to switch off mobile phones.

Offline was presented in an arts festival setting, which gave visitors licence to enjoy this ruse. In this atmosphere, the ceramics on show was mostly unglazed. This was presented as part of the minimalist experience of immediacy in the gallery. The texture of unglazed clay is very difficult to reproduce in printed form. The result was a playful exhibition that opened visitors experience to the sensory qualities of craft.

Heresy

Just recently opened in Melbourne is a more sober positioning of craft. Heresy:The Secret Language of Materials is an exhibition of warmly modernist craft that is presented as going against the tide of image culture. Playing on the idea that the roundness of the world was once heresy, these works are gathered as a testimony that the world is three-dimensional.

The local context for this exhibition is the recent development of the new state gallery of fine arts in what is called Federation Square. The architecture of this gallery was designed to reflect a cinematic experience and thus its only really suits two-dimensional works. With no room for plinths, there is very little facility for showing ceramics.

Heresy includes ceramics by Prue Venables as well as Neville French. They are placed alongside makers who adopt geometrical form in order to profile the texture of their materials. Like Offline, this exhibition was framed in a way that would give a broader context to work that has its own intrinsic qualities. The exhibition attempts to give these modernist works an aura of alchemy

This exhibition was introduced by a manifesto that made reference to Dogma 95, developed by the Danish film-maker Lars Von Trier. Heresy outlined a series of six neo-Puritan craft principles:

1. No expression without material

2. Art is hard

3. Skill grants meaning

4. The hand knows

5. Know your place

6. Stay in touch

These seem obvious enough precepts for those involved in the crafts, but worthwhile making public now and again. However, as a creative act they are largely afterthoughts to the creative process.

Franciscan ceramics

While curatorial gestures like Heresy are occasionally important, there is another more spontaneous movement in contemporary ceramics that engages with consumerism in a more subtle way.

Honor Freeman is an Adelaide-based ceramics whose work relates to forms of street art, such as stencilling, which is proving quite a vibrant new public art form. Freeman’s work relates directly with our dumb acceptance of things by making subtle interventions into non-art space. She places false ceramic power-points on the outside of buildings. In doing so, she turns the plainest of objects into a decorative element and inverts the relationship between the private domain of the consumer and the outside sphere of the public. Her intervention is subtle enough to be missed by most passers-by, but once noticed, its presence becomes haunting.

There is little in Freeman’s work that might reflect the eternal verities of clay, but she is seeking a truth that is just as meaningful in terms of her own existence as a modern consumer floating in a sea of objects. She gives expression to the spirit of fundamentalism which is to give a quiet dignity to things.

David Ray is a Melbourne ceramist who has an enduring interest in popular trash culture. In this installation made for the exhibition Goodbye Kind World, Ray reflects on the ubiquity of fast food by constructing a table setting dedicated to what he calls ‘clown food’, after the patron saint of consumerism, Ronald McDonald. The product has a Dresden-like excess, a baroque splendour that makes ironic its reference to the most common form of consumption.

More sober in their construction is the work of ceramist Nicole Lister. Nicole’s work also makes reference to disposable objects like paper cups. Her wrapping series made a thing of beauty in its own right out of the packaging in which ceramics is normally contained, but then thrown away. Like Freeman, she inverts the relationship between inside and outside.

To an extent, Lister shares with the Studio Ceramists a discipline of repetition. However, we don’t look for subtle variations in the works. Repetition is more conceptual in naure, reflecting the serial nature of consumer production. Lister also strays from the ‘essence’ of clay in its familiar forms. She shares the rigour, but adds the conceptual leap into the real world of commodification.

Lastly, an artist who seems to defy categories is Sally Marsland. Though a jeweller by reputation, she has an abiding interest in the life of simple objects. For her the process of casting provides a means of reflecting the inner qualities of objects without usurping them. She uses materials such as paint to cast objects that accentuate the artificiality of the process. Casting seams are treasured. Objects are obtained by chance, from what Australian’s call Opportunity Shops. They are most humble in the order of things. It is the act of honouring them which we can appreciate Sally Marsland’s work.

Though widely different in their references, what these young ceramists share is a commitment to the conditions of the world in which they live. While their works embody what might seem the antithesis of ceramics — in the disposable world of avaricious capitalism — they actually fulfil the broader mission of clay to express the fundamentals of life.

Of course, one cannot deny the presence of irony in certain works. In some cases, they indicate the absence of meaning through their work. But this, still, is part of the drive to be true to one’s experience of the world, rather than evoke a remote purity.

So as part of the continuing history of ceramics as a cycle of purity and contamination, I would like to posit as a new and creative form this Franciscan style of work. It seeks dignity in the most common of things.

Conclusion

In his introduction to Persistence of Craft, Paul Greenhalgh described craft as a ‘consortium of genres’. I would like to see it as more than that.

In the late modern culture the crafts are a consortium of genres in the visual arts, genres that make sense collectively because for artistic, economic and institutional reasons, they have been deliberately placed together… They have no intrinsic cohesion; they have no a priori relationship that makes them a permanently peculiar or special gathering…[5]

For me, the persistence of craft is not its institutionalisation in museum collections. The enduring role of craft is as an essential counterpoint to the excesses of capitalism, which devalues the material world to mere ‘stuff’ for either consuming or wasting.

To see where things are heading, I would like to return back to The Cave. The reference in this title is to Plato’s allegory of the prisoners who are bound inside a cave so that they only see shadows on the wall. They believe these to be actual things rather than their representations. The hero finds that the entire edifice of the Centre is build on an actual functioning version of this arrangement in its basement.

The society of spectacle does seem to be turning to its own kind of cave. New home furniture has been devised that offers theatrical seating for the home cinema. La-Z-Boy furniture has produced a new collection titled Matinee which includes roles of seats. They feature not only cup holders but also special Tempur-Pedic cushioning that conforms sensitively to the body. This is the same material they use in hospital mattresses to prevent bedsores among the chronically ill.

It is the spectre of consumerism as much as fundamentalism which should be seen as haunting the west. While there are many who see craft as a mere nostalgic vestige of the 70s and unrelated to the real world of contemporary markets, there is one message that craft has to offer: get real.

[1] Harold Bloom The Book of J (trans. D. Rosenberg) New York: Grove Widenfeld, 1990, p. 175.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss makes broader claims for clay as a common ground on which the idea of culture is fashioned.

Every art imposes form on matter, but, among the so-called arts of civilization, pottery is probably the one in which the transformation is the most direct, involving the smallest number of intermediate stages between the raw material and the product, which comes from the craftsman’s hands already formed even before it undergoes firing.

Clay extracted from the earth is also the ‘crudest’ of all raw materials known and used by man. With its coarse appearance and its total lack of organisation, it confronts man’s sight and touch, even his understanding, with its primacy and the massive presence of its shapelessness. ‘In the beginning, the earth was without form and void’, as the Bible says, and it is not without reason that other mythologies compare the work of the creator to that of the potter. But imposing a form on matter does not mean simply imposing a discipline. The raw material, pulled out of the limitless range of potentialities, is lessened by the fact that, of all these potentialities, only a few will be realized: all demiurges, from Prometheus to Mukat, have jealous natures.

In the case of pottery, restrictions imposed on the raw material are the source of other restrictions: as a container the waterproof vase will keep shapeless liquids within its walls, and it will keep tiny solids, such as grains of wheat, from being scattered and lost.

Claude Lévi-Strauss The Jealous Potter (trans. E. Chorier) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 (orig. 1985), p. 177

[2] Full quote: ‘To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognised, unremembered. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into to eyes of another or with the eyes of another.’ (Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. C. Emerson) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 (orig. 1927), p. 287)

[3] Bernard Leach A Potter’s Challenge , p. 17

[4] Jose Saramago The Cave (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) London: Harvill, 2002 (orig. 2000), p. 187

[5] Paul Greenhalgh ‘Craft in a changing world’, in (ed. Paul Greenhalgh) The Persistence of Craft: The Applied Arts Today London: A & C Black, 2002, p. 1

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Magicians of the South

It seems these days we are blessed, or cursed, by long-term incumbent governments. Yet despite their seeming inexorable hold on power, we know that eventually, as night follows day, the UK will eventually be Tory and Australia will be Labor.

For Hegel, the popular understanding of the dialectic is expressed in the phrase, ‘Live and let live… each should have its turn…’ While Hegel’s logic is most commonly applied to the relationships of social class, dialectics can be useful in understanding other hierarchies, such as the one we all live in—the world. History has conspired to divide the world up into quarters—north and south, east and west. The uneasy relationship between these parts has provided the engine of much that we know of as world history. Today, the process of globalisation is seen to realise the dominance of one quarter over another—the west over the east, and the north over the south.

The role of craft in this world dialectic is particularly interesting. The crafts movement has defined itself by reference to the creative energies of the northern peoples. We can see today, though, a new destiny for craft in the post-colonial predicament of the south. The purpose of this paper is to outline what this destiny might entail.

To find our way south, in the space of a few minutes, we need to begin at the start of our journey—the west.

The Greek world view was defined by contrast with the barbarians beyond its borders. The Persians by Aeschylus is the earliest known Greek play, taking as its theme the invasion from the east. After the defeat of Xerxes’ Persian armies in 490 BC, the chorus laments:

Now All Asia’s lands
Moan in emptiness

For post-colonialist Edward Said, this play sets the stage for the dialectic of orientalism that dominates the West’s imagining of the east in centuries to follow: to Asia is a lost glorious past that only the West can recover. I’m sure that we are all familiar with this position and it doesn’t bear rehearsing here.

Orientalism was clearly important in the development of Western decorative arts. Styles such as Chinoiserie helped the rigid Europeans break out of their rigid conventions and embrace the arabesque.

North-ism

But such exoticism is vulnerable to the inevitable criticism of decadence. In the late nineteenth century, the Arts & Craft movement proposed an alternative polarity that replaced the lost civilisation of the East with one more directly related to Europeans—the noble world of the north. The spiritual centre of William Morris’s craft revolution was Iceland, which he described a ‘holy land’, evoking the romance of the Norse sagas. On a parallel path, John Ruskin praised the ‘magnificent enthusiasm’ of the Gothic.

Along the vertical moral axis of the Arts & Craft movement, the vigorous character of the north is contrasted with stultifying hierarchies of the Latinate south. There were ample precedents for such a hierarchy. Germania, written by Tacitus in the first century, marvelled at the rude energies of the northern races. In the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws laid the philosophical foundation of the European state with a climatic analysis of politics, contrasting the sincere north with the passionate south.

This movement certainly had its timeliness.

This North-ism is an occidentalist alternative to the decadent fascination with an exotic orient. It turns the gaze back on the orientalist to question his own lost origins. But the dialectic never rests: North-ism leads to its own alternative (with an interest) in the spontaneous creative energy that lies in the south.

‘Each should have its turn.’

South-ism

In the early twentieth-century, many French artists looked south to refresh their jaded imaginations. In 1930, Henri Matisse travelled to Tahiti ‘to find simpler ways which won’t stifle the spirit’. One of the distinctive crafts in that part of Polynesia is tivaevae, appliqué quilts in bright colours. This flat decorative style re-emerges in Matisse’s later works using the cut-out technique, such as the Jazz series. As far as we know, Matisse established no enduring relationship with Tahitian crafts practitioners. His debt to their tradition is never acknowledged.

Closer to our time, this primitivist idealisation is often directed to the indigenous races of the south. The 1989 exhibition Magicien de la Terre invited third world artisans who had for so long been an inspiration to French artists. They were taken out of their ethnographic cabinet to sit alongside the individual western artists in a contemporary art setting. Magicien de la Terre was widely criticised for its Benetton-like global context. These artisans were the exotic guests in a modernist palace.

At this point, I should acknowledge the hospitality of Edinburgh College of Art in allowing ten Australasian jewellers to present their work in conjunction with this conference. Guild Unlimited works its way into this argument as a neoclassical regeneration from the antipodes: the intensely hierarchical structures of guild from the old north are here opened up to a pluralistic imagination of the new colonies.

Returning to south-ism, there have been attempts in Australian decorative arts by those originally from the north to incorporate indigenous motifs. The Australian printmaker Margaret Preston called for a new school of decorative arts influenced by Aboriginal designs. In 1925, she called for a national theme based on indigenous crafts:

… I have studied the aboriginal’s art and have applied their designs to the simple things in life, hoping that the craftsman will succeed where, until now, the artist has certainly failed.

Though artists like Preston seemed to celebrate indigenous culture, they were largely oblivious to the need for Aboriginal participation in this process.

This brings us to the post-colonial phase of the world dialectic, when the subaltern eventually asks to take the lead. In their recent book Empire, Hardt and Negri draw on Sartre’s concept of the ‘the moment of the boomerang’ to describe this phase. Here the exotic other begins to speak back, and so Aboriginal Australians began to increasingly assert their independence. In Australia, every important occasion is now preceded by an acknowledgment of traditional owners.

Thus we have seen a flowering of Aboriginal crafts in Australia. Just to take one example, Tiwi Island ceramics, originally established by Michael Cardew, was recently revived and exhibited as Yikwani, containing sculptural works of great invention.

Craft has become so associated with Aboriginal culture that in a recent government report (Inquiry into the Contemporary Visual Arts and Crafts by Rupert Myer), the generic term ‘Art and Craft Centres’ was used to describe Aboriginal places for making art. It was assumed that an ‘Art and Craft Centre’ would not be something that non-indigenous Australians would use.

We might feel a sense of completion with such an arrangement, as though we were at the natural end of the dialectic, when the passive object of colonial fascination is finally the active agent in the construction of their own culture. Yet, as Soviet Marxists found to their dismay, the dialectic is never finished. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

The indigenous flowering of craft occurs surrounded by a non-indigenous audience. They are the writers, curators, gallery visitors, administrators, bureaucrats, art advisors and connoisseurs. They are the silent participants, enjoying the other’s enjoyment.

As the identity of place is increasingly deferred to the original people, the moral tenure of northerners gone south becomes problematic. The question is raised: what can they give in exchange for the exotic delights they receive from the southern peoples?

And here we come to the present crisis in south-ism. In recent years, this has become especially evident with the defeat of apartheid in South Africa, and the increasing recognition of first peoples in Australia and New Zealand.

Politically, bi-polar dialogue seems stymied with fears of land claims. Sport is often seen as the level playing field for Western and traditional, but there is little evolution of understanding. However, quietly working away in their studios, craft practitioners are stitching, soldering and dove-tailing together two otherwise incompatible cultures.

I’d like to mention briefly some developments in what used to be called the ‘southern dominions’.

Australia

To begin in Australia, textiles tend to be the preferred medium for craft exchange between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. In Western Australia, the fibre artist Nalda Searles has developed a strong collaborative method with Aboriginal artists—Noongar in the south and Ngaanyatjarra in the Western desert.

In her art, Nalda Searles has been exploring ways of combining natural and man-made fibres. This includes embroidery of flora on found fabric, such as blankets and clothes. Her work reflects on the tenuous place of white people in this land. Searle’s signature piece is White Boy Blazer, a school uniform on which have been sewn the brachia of Xanthorrhea, known colloquially as Black Boy. Each of these brachia has been painted white, showing the uneasy tension between settlement and the wild bush beyond.

As a result of her long involvement with Ngaanyatjarra people, Nalda Searles is known by the word Kabbarli, which means ‘grandmother’. This term had been applied most famously to another woman living in the Nullarbor Plain a century earlier—Daisy Bates. Searles is currently developing a series of works that explore the confrontation between European dress and the more natural indigenous ornament. Bates’ morning toilet is a fascinating ordeal of Western decorum sustained in dramatic isolation. She writes,

I made my toilet to a chorus of impatient twittering. It was a fastidious toilet, for throughout my life I have adhered to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it, when Victoria was queen—a neat white blouse, stuff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coast, stout and serviceable, trim shows and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil, and, for my excursions to the camps, always a dust-coat and a sunshade. Not until I was in meticulous order would I emerge from my tent, dressed for the day. My first greeting was for the birds.

This encounter between Western dress and southern wild nature provide the perfect scene for Searles’ craft process. Initi gloves combines the white gloves that Daisy Bates wore all the time during her dealings with the Aborigines and the initi seeds that they wore in their hair.

Searles’ combines both modern and traditional elements in a way that exposes their separation.

New Zealand

The dialogue mellows as we cross the Tasman Sea. There has been a more consistent history of reciprocal dealings between the Maori’s and their British guests. In the spirit of bi-culturalism, those of European descent refer to themselves as Maori term, Pakeha, meaning ‘those who arrive on ships with tall white sails’.

In the twentieth-century, there was much interest by Pakeha in the Maori ornamental traditions. This culminated in the Stone, Bone & Shell exhibition which toured Australia in 1988. It included jewellers and sculptors who drew from the Maori carving traditions, especially using Pounamu, or greenstone.

In 1998, the school was criticised for its appropriation of Maori culture. The jeweller Warwick Freeman was singled out as a ‘plunderer of the Pacific’. At a conference in Hobart in 1998, Freeman defended his practice as a form of dialogue between cultures.

Bi-culturalism calls for active exchange between the cultures—art is a fundamental participant in this engagement—it functions well in the so called ‘negotiated space’ – the space between two cultures

More recently in New Zealand, there have been a number of Polynesian artists, especially from Samoa, who have begun to exploit this irony. Niki Hastings-McFall is of Samoan descent and combines in her work reference to traditional islander forms and modern symbols, such as the conjunction of Solomon Island breastplates and modern symbols such as mag wheels. Her series ‘Flock’ uses the techniques of traditional breastplates but incorporates alternative materials, pearl shell and silver. Included in the radial design are aeroplane symbols which reflect an ironic continuity of traditional and modern.

For all the inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings, New Zealand craft appears to play on a relatively reciprocal exchange between Western and traditional cultures.

South Africa

The parallel path of relations between first and subsequent peoples has taken a dramatic turn in South Africa. Under the Dutch Reform Church, Afrikaners saw themselves as the chosen people and their Great Trek was a journey to the Promised Land. Now, in the Rainbow Nation, they must take their place amongst the heathens not as masters but as equals.

Apartheid had extended to the arts as much as politics. There had been little appropriation of African crafts by settler artists. The curios that could be purchased during holiday treks to the Transvaal were largely imported from countries like Congo and Nigeria.

It’s different now.

New crafts have emerged as hybrids of traditional technique and modern lifestyle. Telephone wire weaving was developed initially by city nightwatchmen, who sought to fill their time by weaving as they would in their village home. Without natural grasses, they were forced to gather whatever was to hand. Odd pieces of telephone wire provided particularly colourful materials for weaving.

Today, telephone wire weaving has become the main source of income for villages like the township of Umlassi in Durban. It has reached the stage now where the main telecommunications company Telkom distribute the wire for free—for the practical reason that otherwise people would steal wires off the poles and so disrupt the telephone system.

While these crafts provide important sources of income, they have not as yet been able to establish themselves as individual artists with reputations in their own right.

Among visual artists gaining reputation in the new South Africa are Zulu men who aspire to the status as healers. These are often charismatic figures whose work is informed by visions.

Lange Magwa looks particularly to objects that are held as sacred to both Western and traditional cultures. ‘Made in China’ is a large gramophone horn woven from cow hide, inside which is a speaker broadcasting in different languages represented in Durban radio. It rests on a springbok hide which is laid over an Indian fabric. For Magwa, his work aims to operate magically to heal the rift between the three main races of Durban. In Zulu ritual, the horn is used as a symbol of magical protection: it can be ground up as healing powder, used as a container of medicine or added to other objects, like a house, to protect it from evil spirit. By finding a link with the European white magic of the gramophone, Magwa is extending the power of the horn into the new South Africa.

So where does this leave white Africans? Many white artists have moved now from their own work to facilitating others. One such artist is Andreas Botha. He has established a philanthropic project, Amazini Abisifazane (Voices of Women). This is a cooperative venture presenting embroideries by women about their traumatic experiences. While such projects are important to the economic development of the new South Africa, they do risk entrenching a victimary identity on the previously disadvantaged.

Botha’s own sculptural installations move towards greater self-understanding. In his monumental series What is a Home (1995), a three-metre high steel-plated man with Afrikaner hat is clutching a straw woman in Zulu headdress performing a dance known in Afrikaans as binne boet (‘inside the arse’). In his own work, Andreas is attempting to uncover the folk tradition of Afrikaner culture to find something that is more complementary to the Zulu values.

Contemporary sculptors in the new South Africa are drawing on their own craft traditions to weave together the black and white cultures that have been kept strictly separate during most of their lives. There’s a long way to make up.

Magicians of the south

And here we get to the bottom of things. The bottom of the world is emerging as a forum whereby the European self and its exotic other can finally meet and engage in reciprocal dialogue. This ‘south’ offers a backstage where the exotic actors can exchange masks with their ordinary audience.

In this setting, craft provides an important common language whereby exchange can develop between traditional artisans and Western artists. Old techniques can combine with introduced materials. Alien symbols emerge out of traditional patterns. Using the charismatic authority of magicians, prophets, healers and artists, these individuals can realise new similarities and differences between the two worlds that find each other in the south.

The wrongs of the past certainly demand reparation. Someone needs to say sorry. But the process of empowerment still bears the legacy of colonial paternalism. ‘Live and let live’ carries an onerous responsibility—not only to allow others to fulfil their lives, but live one’s own as well. While global culture offers a nowhere-land of vicarious experience, the local cultures of the south provide a way of re-orienting ourselves where we are, if we can listen.

References

G.W.F. Hegel Logic (trans. W. Wallace) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 (orig. 1830)

Edward Said Orientalism New York: Pantheon, 1978, p. 57

Fiona MacCarthy William Morris: A Life for Our Times London: Faber, 1994, p. 309

John Ruskin Stones of Venice New York: Da Capo Press, 1960 (orig. 1853), p. 176

Thomas McEvilley Art & otherness: crisis in cultural identity Kingston, NY: Documentext/McPherson, 1992, pp. 69-70

Margaret Preston ‘The indigenous art of Australia’ Art in Australia 1925, , pp. 3-11

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Empire Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 130

Daisy Bates The Passing Of The Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among The Natives Of Australia London: Murray, 1938, p. 198

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Review of Design through Making

Design Through Making edited by Bob Sheil, Wiley-Academy Vol 75 No. 4 July/August 2005

Design Through Making promises a fresh take on the role of construction in architecture and related design practices. The principal argument of the publication is that new technology enables greater involvement of architects in the construction process. Software such as CAD grants the architecture more control over how ideas are realised. While these developments increase the power of the architect, the new appreciation of making also affords more collaborative possibilities.

There are some interesting practices mentioned that invite a more reciprocal relationship. In Mark Burry’s ‘Homo Faber’ article on a Gaudi reconstruction, he writes that ‘the craftsperson is judged as a crucial partner to the digital dialogue.’ Nick Callicott describes his practice with Kris Ehlert in developing advanced fabrication techniques (‘Adaptive Architectural Design’). He argues that the work ‘required a reassociation of knowledge and skill, and the need to operate in a wholly collaborative manner with engineers, fabricators and users.’ (p.69) This appreciation of the skills involved in realising architectural designs is welcome. But one can’t help but wish it would go further. It would have been good to invite contributions from the technicians, craftspersons and others involved in giving form to what’s on paper.

Though not advocating collaboration, there are some articles that acknowledge the importance of the making experience to architectural practice. An article about architectural education (Mark Prizeman ‘Hooke Park As a New AA Initiative in Education’) argues for the importance of practical experience in professional training. Prizeman writes, ‘Good design is, like drawing, a question of how hard one looks at something… Designing by making takes observation to a greater emotional and intellectual involvement with the developing product of one’s musing than the distancing of a drafting process.’ (p.56) It is refreshing to see some allowance of the importance of haptic experience, despite the increasing sophistication of screen-based activities.

Perhaps the most radical case in this collection is the development of DIY architecture. Craig Kellog’s article ‘Just build’ documents an intriguing new paradigm that has architects actually building their own constructions. Whether this turns out to be a New York fad, or a sign of greater teamwork in professional life, will be interesting to see.

That Architectural Design should devote an issue to Design Through Making says something quite important about the evolution of architectural practice in Britain. Closer to home, it evokes an event held last century at the Meat Market in 1988. Organised by Deidre Missingham and Alex Selenitsch, Collaborative Designs: Working together in Architecture featured a wide range of partnerships active in that time between designing and making. John Cherry’s reception desk for Howard Raggatt is an example of how making skills can add a new perspective to architecture. How wonderful it would be to have a similar survey of collaborations today.

Design Through Making indicates an important argument current in architecture about the limits of screen tools. For some, CAD programs enable the architect to acquire supreme control over the minutia of the building process. For others, there is a renewed appreciation of the tactile involvement of making in the realisation of successful design. This is an important argument and one that I hope makers themselves will have a voice in.

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A Common Project: Where Craft and Design Meet in a Democratic World

Part One – The March of Democracy

At the end of the eighteenth century, King George III had a lot on his plate. He particularly prized the gifts from India—certainly the precious diamonds from Bengal—which contributed to the splendour of the British crown. But it wasn’t only jewels that King George needed. The loss of the American colonies left the empire short of wood for its ships, so explorations were ordered far afield to secure new supplies. But by the time the continent of terra Australis was identified as an outpost of the British Empire, a more pressing need had emerged—the disposal of the growing criminal class. So Australia’s birth as a British colony began at the opposite end of the imperial spectrum to India—from the jewel in the crown to the bottom of the pile. Hopefully, we’ve come a little closer over the past two hundred years.

My purpose in setting this scene is not to reflect on alternate national trajectories, but to place what we know today as contemporary jewellery into an historical perspective. In its time, royal jewellery constituted a symbol of national identity, even if it was the wealth of the few. It fostered innovation in the jewellery craft and produced works that stood alone as rare works of art.

Clearly, there have been radical changes between the time of the royal court and today. It hardly needs saying in this, the world’s largest democracy, that people power has provided a driving force in modern history. We only need to look today at what’s happening Egypt to realise that the force of democracy in history is far from over.

Democracy is more than the formal procedure of marking a piece of paper every few years. It is also something we try to realise in our everyday lives. The imperial framework still reaches deep into our way of thinking, such as the celebrity cults in popular culture. There is still work to be done in liberating ourselves from the feudal thinking.

But there are dangers. One image evoked by democracy is that of an unruly mob storming the royal palace, looting and destroying national treasures. Democracy can be a destructive force. One of the challenges of art in our age is to realise a creative dimension to democracy, to create new values.

We see this in contemporary art—dramatically in the work of the British artist Anthony Gormley. Asian Field was produced by 347 inhabitants of the Chinese city of Xiangshan, aged between 7 and 70 years. Their brief was to produce clay figures that were the palm-sized, could stand upright, and have two holes for eyes. Gormley had planned to include 100,000 figures, but total ended up being 192,000, made over a five day period. While the kudos does still return to Gormley as the head artist, Asian Field does help us envisage what democracy might look like if it reached the world’s most populous nation, China. This work reflects the force of the democratic ideal in contemporary art through both its subject matter and process of production.

Does jewellery have a role to play in this? Given its natural association with prestige, one might think that it has little part to play in growing egalitarianism. But it is its very elitism that provides people power with a creative challenge.

Part Two – The Contemporary Jewellery Movement

Contemporary jewellery is defined by its small but significant role in democratic thinking. In post-war Europe, contemporary jewellery adopted a critical position to preciousness. In particular, it confronted the modern tendency to reduce ornament , along with most other cultural practices, to its economic value. The exclusive emphasis on precious metals and rare stones was seen to transform jewellery into a form of hard currency. Why bother being creative with jewellery when it is nothing more than a bank account?

At first, this involved the replacement of gold and silver with much cheaper materials, such as the use of nylon thread in the work of English jeweller Caroline Broadhead. Here the value of the work could not be reduced to its materials, but lay clearly in the original vision and innovative techniques of its creator. From this developed a movement that took contemporary jewellery into new experimental domains. With the introduction of new materials, contemporary jewellery engaged in a more conceptual exploration of jewellery beyond the everyday use of personal ornament. In the early 1980s, Caroline Broadhead extended her use of nylon into neckpieces the enveloped the entire head in a way that could only be viewed within an artistic context. At an even further extreme, Peter Degan would envelop the entire body in a jewellery contraption purely as a form of artistic performance. To a degree, the English approach to the critique of preciousness can be seen as enabling an empirical approach to jewellery—viewing it in terms of the experience of the body rather than an object in itself.

My core thesis today is that while the project of contemporary jewellery brings artists together on a shared democratic platform, the critique of preciousness does allow for a broad variety of individual expression. While the gold standard is the same for all, our own commonness is unique. Thus the critique of preciousness in jewellery has taken different forms in other cultures.

The contemporary jewellery movement began in Australia with the migration of European gold and silversmiths from northern Europe after the Second World War. They arrived at a time when our tertiary education sector was expanding rapidly, providing opportunities to pass on their skills to a new generation of students. In Australia, our critique of preciousness focused particularly on recovering value from what gets left behind. We see this in one of our most innovative jewellers, Roseanne Bartley, who attempts to make elegant necklaces from materials such as ice cream sticks that are left on the street. The Queensland jeweller Mark Verwerk has developed the remarkable technique of spinning plastic bags to create material for rings. And in Welcome Signs we see the work of Katheryn Leopoldseder making a splendid necklace out of communion cups discarded after religious service.

It is perhaps not surprising, given that the nation of Australia was founded by people who were thrown out as social waste, that we attempt to find ways of making precious the common. In doing so, we provide a test of creative ability. This involves an alchemic transformation—not lead into gold, but waste into splendour. Other countries of the South explore this in their own ways. In South Africa, jewellers like Beverley Price also use recycled materials, though this is less a modernist exercise and more a celebration of popular culture than in Australia.

In New Zealand, contemporary jewellery challenged the kitsch associations of materials like paua shell. Jewellers such as Alan Preston employed paua in the design of serious modernist works. This use of local indigenous materials was officially recognised in the 1988 exhibition Stone, Bone and Shell.

Across the Pacific in Chile, the other tourist craft of crin (weaving with horsehair) has recently become a focus of work by the emerging scene of contemporary jewellers, such as the work by WALKA studio, including Claudia Betancourt and Ricardo Pulgar.

So you could say that the critique of preciousness is a global project. While there is the universal gold standard of value that all countries share, now there is a shared project where each culture can contribute its own national commonness to the celebration of preciousness.

Part Three – A new horizon – ‘power’ jewellery

But there are other ways in which this movement operates to bring us together. Jewellery has a very important non-commercial function in making important social rituals. The Welcome Signs exhibition brings jewellers together from across the Asia Pacific in celebration of the shared heritage of the garland, or malaa, by which hospitality is marked. So we have the silver wreath by Marian Hosking, one of two Australian ‘living treasures’ in the exhibition, which reflects the subtle and dry floral forms that bedeck the Australian bush, by contrast by the bright lush flora of tropical southern climes. We see now a new contemporary jewellery scene emerging from countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, exploring connections with social networks.

Another project with a similar premise is Southern Charms, which will open in Melbourne early next year and brings together jewellers from Australasia and Latin America. Here we look to the traditional associations of jewellery with luck, to explore how new forms of charms can be designed to reflect the challenges we face now, such as climate change. While there are traditions such as the charm bracelet, contemporary jewellers like Warwick Freeman have been designing new symbolic jewels, such as his Earth Ring. By liberating ourselves from the gold standard of preciousness we can return to the power of jewellery to affect the shape of our lives.

Part Four – A new horizon – ‘ethical’ jewellery

The final horizon can be found behind the scenes in jewellery. This pertains to democracy not just in the symbolic elevation of common materials, but also in the social relations by which jewellery is produced. One hierarchy that persists in our work is between the idea and its realisation. In the case of crafts, this often pans out in the greater value given to design rather than its production, particularly when using craft skills.

At this point, we can recall the oft-quoted words of Indira Gandhi: ‘My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. ‘

We see the new relevance of production in the work of German jeweller Martina Dempf, who worked with basketmakers in Rwanda to develop a form of jewellery that would provide a sustainable basis for their craft skills. She continues to source woven grass components from the Rwandan women for her silver jewellery, but they in the meantime have set up their own enterprise selling grass jewellery.

Jewellery plays an increasingly important role in world craft upliftment, enabling languishing crafts like basketmaking to take on a new life. In the case of Martina Dempf, her work has two sources of value. In one, the work stands on its own in beauty and craftsmanship. But in the other, it also has an ethical value in the impact this jewellery has on the world. We see increasingly now in jewellery, as in other forms of consumption, a growing value that is accorded to the way objects are produced. This is especially so in jewellery, which is something we like to wear with pride. This can be compromised when the brilliant diamond we display become associated with a bloody civil war in Africa.

For the last two years, the Two Hands Project has been exploring the logic of this craft-design hierarchy, and to consider alternatives, such as the film industry where the relation between director and actor is more even. This tag cloud, or mandala, has been developed to allow meditation on this relation, and see it in other ways.

More practically, the Code of Practice for Creative Collaborations, endorsed by UNESCO and the World Craft Council in Hangzhou, begins now to gather perspectives from all participants. This is being administered by the recently established New Traditions Foundation in conjunction with the Ethical Design Laboratory, especially created for this purpose at RMIT University Centre for Design.

The first step naturally begins here, in India, where there is not only the greatest concentration of craft but also such considerable thought reaching back to Gandhi about the continuing relevance of the handmade in our modern world. We are pleased to work with local partners such as the Craft Revival Trust on a seminar workshop this October to gather thinking on this matter.

Conclusion

Jewellery does not command the same profile in our museums as other art forms, like painting or sculpture. But nor do those art forms have nearly the same penetration into our everyday life as the objects we use to adorn our bodies. In this way, jewellery has great potential to affect our relations with each other. We have seen how the splendours of royal jewellery help consolidate the power of the monarch. Our challenge in a period of growing democracy is to work out how we now mark our relations with each other. Do we all try to be kings and queens, wearing diamonds and pearls?

We must admit that this aspiration is still the dominant paradigm for jewellery in our democracies. It certainly is the economic logic that drives our industry. But this is where the contemporary jewellery movement can provide an alternative perspective. Rather than each of us trying to elevate ourselves above others, we can use jewellery as a means of upliftment for all. This is a key message in an age of global warming, where the individual quest for consumer goods has led to the depletion of our common environment.

Materials that are devalued for their very commonness, seen as ubiquitous rubbish or tourist kitsch, can be elevated through jewellery as proud symbols of our cultural identity. It’s doubtful whether this form of contemporary jewellery will ever displace the mainstream global economy of precious gems and metals, but creative jewellers play an important role in keeping this idea alive.

And at this moment, the eyes of the contemporary jewellery movement look to India. What will India’s contribution to the project of non-preciousness be? We are certainly familiar with the splendour of jewellery from the Moghuls, but what does Indian jewellery have to say about its current and future identity? How can this reflect the wealth of skill amongst its artisan population and the energy emerging from the new generation of designers? India has the potential to re-vitalise a movement that has largely played its course in other countries.

Contemporary jewellers help us sustain the dream of a common wealth—not in the rare treasures of the few, but in the precious wealth of the common.

This paper was presented at the Abhushan Jewellery Summit, 6 February 2011, organised by the World Craft Council. The writing of this paper is supported by the Australia Council of the Arts, as part of a New Work grant of the Visual Arts Board.