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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

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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