Installation shot of Bespoke

The handmade, as this show's title makes clear, is never far away. Rather, it inhabits all sorts of spaces in between, and often brings together very disparate elements of aesthetic, class and care sensibilities/ economies. It's also, as this show also reminds in rangy variety, both before and after: it's the prototypical and experimental, and the reproduction, the prosthetic or restorative. In all of this it operates around more potent processes of production and reproduction: as such it both enables, complements, and often works against the larger machinations and temporalities of capital, class, and care.

When Western production of domesticated crafts was nudged aside by modern factory production, artisan work underwent some particular convolutions, which saw it enclaved within and outside the production processes. Enclaved inside, in pattern and toolmaking, design and prototyping, where it often sat in an avant garde, bringing some aesthetic and differential taste implications for mass production, if somehow always at least once removed from aesthetic avant gardery.

On the other hand, when enclaved outside, and pushed over into leisure economies, hobby and craft guilds, and restorative work, it entered a domain where knowledge and objects circulated according to received knowledge and traditions, and within locally reproduced and shaped patterns of authority, reproduction and some prised individual innovation. Here too it entered (or was revived in) domains of domestic gendered production, where it often sat between gift and emotional/ caring/ ceremonial/ symbolic economies: as family heirlooms, as markers of particular family points of passage, or care in time of vulnerability. Or it travelled within the attentive pedagogic timbres of a craft apprenticeship, now mounted often on a voluntary basis in implicitly relational settings. In any case, care, preservation, and even a conservative fastidiousness characterised both its making and the transmission of its craft.

Class-wise, artisan production has always crossed class boundaries, though mostly in one direction: upwards. Especially as mass production provided commodities instead of crafts for everyday consumption, high quality (and performance) bespoke goods increasingly became the acquired property of those who could afford to pay for large amounts of someone else's labour. Who it was appropriated from was of course another matter: items in this show including handmade lace, or central Asian carpets, were elsewhere turned out in craft villagers by involuted and domesticated labour, came to adorn the formal gownery and salonship of urban aristocracy; and, soon enough, of middle classes. On the other hand, this kind of production remained something new that artisan and working classes could master, if mostly now in their spare time, where as a leisure activity artisan work provided a vital counterpoint to the alienations of commodity production. Here, it might become a part of a different kind of transcendence and valorisation: high occasion, ritual and celebration, adorning a wedding or a church service, celebrating passage or valued accumulation of cultural capital.

These descriptions of class, productive, temporal and gendered mobility, however, go nowhere near capturing the scope of artisan bespokery on display in this show, which presents things bespoke from wedding cakes and book bindery to railway wheel moulds and scientific glassware. Rather, the show offers a cleverly disparate widening out of such understandings and their permutations, through both the range of bespoke objects curator Anna Miles has munificently assembled, and the way she and catalogue co-writers have written about them in terms that closely reference the complex personal, productive and exchange implications at work in and around this material.

It's worth teasing out a number of dimensions of the interstitial nature of the bespoke, and its sitting implicit between economies, classes, sometimes as evidence of leakage, or of hegemony, or care. Prosthetics are a case in point: hand made legs and false teeth involve that close personalised attention to fitting that is usually the preserve of moneyed self production. However, class- wise, it is precisely the working classes which have historically had most need of both. In New Zealand, for example, prosthetic (false) teeth like those in the show were for many years overwhelmingly worn among working classes, who routinely had all their teeth extracted by dentists who apparently set it to save them future care expense. The welfare state's provision of such bespokery (and other customisations of houses and means of movement) to its more vulnerable citizens speaks volumes about the care implicit in a sufficient vision of the social, or loss, of social exclusion on purely financial grounds. At the same time, the bespoke can be a marker of the much more individual determination of the disadvantaged: overcoming multiple aspects of disability, for example, as NZ amputee Everest climber Mark Inglis has done, by clamping on the prosthetic climbing limbs in this show, and assaulting conspicuous summits.

In fact, the show has plenty of evidence of the bespoke's capacity for breaking up any simple notions of the bespoke as markers of hard class boundaries, or as simply a symbol of economic capital wealth. The clothing- especially ceremonial clothing- ritual objects, musical instruments, sporting equipment in this show all exist in their own series of aesthetic and other economy entanglements, all of which place them beyond commodity or symbolic class status marking, and in some more personalised exchange relations: but, again, in diverse ways. The show's stunning fortepiano might expect an upper class home not wanting the ostentation of splashy Steinway, but would, say, an expensive guitar, or the show's surfboard be anything like as reliable a marker of class status? Ceremonial embroidery like Jo Dixey's might grace a royal coronation, or the artisan's own wedding slippers. Here, clearly, it is not just economic capital and its possession that calls the shots. In fact, in the bespoke, whatever the relative class positions between producer and consumer, exchanges can involve high levels of cultural capital- meaning close knowledge and appreciation of distinction- on both sides, which is not always the case in routine luxury goods exchanges. Yes, cultural capital is hoarded by elites: but they by no means have a monopoly over it, and the multiple distinctions it can give rise to (Bourdieu 1989).

Explicitly not included in the show, studio pottery has always occupied two-sided, doubly implicated position, whatever the high art intentions of its crafters. In aesthetic economies, too, this is a field where there is considerable crossover, where noted potters will turn out very everyday journeyman's coffee mugs. These provide a mundane economic basis for forays into higher art ceramics, which, with rare exceptions, have barely impacted art markets and museums. This much travelled arts-crafts duality (which Justin Clemens explores in multiple dimensions in his 2003 essay 'Towards a Secret History of Ceramics') may well have given the show's curator pause about including studio pottery in this particular show's exploration: but its peculiar betwixt and between nature arguably just another characteristic twist in the Interstitial History of the Bespoken.

In all of this Interstitial History, however, artisan production has rarely (until perhaps now) had profound or particularly happy relations with the front end of contemporary high art. And ironically now it is in many senses high art which has moved, as artists involved in various kinds of critical assemblageand related practice have had to become artisans themselves across multiple media. Now, as Grayson Perry remarks in a recent Guardian article (March 5 2005), craft is hot in the art world, as artists seek ways beyond mere conceptualism, and, I'd suggest, find themselves needing to be able to put all sorts of practices and objects up for interaction. But clearly too, a range of conceptual and other affinities are here for art people, to the point where a front end curator and art writer like Miles finds sufficient implication to have been drawn as much as she has been into this craft.

What's interesting here too is that high art may well be following craft into its interstitial territories, emotional and domestic economies, closer relations with design and around commodity. High arts own explicit territories and claims, then, are maybe becoming implicated in a whole lot of other fields, from which it seems by no means clear that it can easily extract itself. Entering into domains of artisan production, then, might involve a whole series of implicit re-workings and positionings which, over time may even (temporarily?) erode high/ low culture boundaries already under fairly pervasive threat from the collapse of hegemonic academic and formal aesthetics. As high arts practice approaches craft, then, in its current incarnation, there will be a considerable melding as it and its markets gather materials to reassert their own particular cultural capital.

As Bespoke extensively evidences, we're in such a moment.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans Richard Nice. London : Routledge.

Clemens, Justin (2003) Towards a Secret History of Ceramics. In Ceramics ( Australia ) edition 54, on Art and Perception pp 89-93

Perry, Grayson (2005) A refuge for artists who play it safe. Guardian 5 March 2005