Lesley Kehoe Gallery perches on a Flinders Lane rooftop, aerie-like, peculiarly inconspicuous in the otherwise busy, gallery-packed strip. Visiting is an adventure for someone more familiar with galleries which go to lengths to be accessible. The process of arriving is maybe more akin to meeting with some kind of secret society: telephone for an appointment, obtain the door code, find the correct lift, the secret password, navigating false walls, the iris scan, and finally a door swings open and you are welcomed in with smiles.
The gallery, which is also Lesley Kehoe's home, specialises in art objects which are either from Japan or with a Japanese flavour. It is a lovely place. Here, up in the gods, above the pace and clutter of the city, there is peace, space, order, breadths of blue sky through generous windows and beautiful things to admire. I must admit that there is also an appeal founded in a combination of the sense of achievement when successfully unearthing a hidden location (very Flinders Lane-esque) and the privileged opportunity to sticky-beak at someone's beautiful home. Earthly matters, however, are quickly dispensed with when in communion with the objects themselves. A delicate ceramic bowl sucks me into the depths of its glaze, a floor-standing screen sweeps a flurry of cherry blossom petals around my body, a vase apes my own asymmetrical posture from its shelf (but is significantly more elegant).
Founded on antiques, the scope of the business has recently broadened to include contemporary works. While the antiques were originally made for a well-financed and appreciative domestic market, contemporary Japanese craft practices are increasingly having to negotiate Western economics and Western art values. Kehoe elaborates with reference to a magnificent antique lacquer box she is in the process of showing me. “People look at it and ask why it is so expensive. An eighteenth century box would have been produced in a feudal system for an aristocrat, nowadays time equals money. You've got fourteen people working for a master in a studio, they take a year or two years to make one piece. The cost is cheap!” These days, in a different social and economic environment, as each layer of lacquer dries so do the financial resources of the practitioner, and this magnificent practice gasps for breath in the sea of modern economics and consumer culture.
Still, a deep reverence for craft endures in Japan, and worthy practitioners are hailed ‘national living treasures'. However appropriate the seriousness of the Japanese for their craft might seem to a craft convert, it can seem surprising, even quaint to others in a very Western world. Kehoe observes that, when attempting to make inroads into a market beset with anti-craft values, contemporary Japanese crafts practitioners particularly suffer from this mentality.“It's hard for the Japanese. Because of the language problems and the cultural problems, it's quite difficult for some of these artists to find places to go in the West to have their work exposed in an environment which is supportive and nurturing and not exploitative.” But she adds that the craft scene within Japan is not exactly ideal either, where the weight of heritage can stifle new blood and hinder developments. It has, however, opened up opportunities for her own mission to bring the Japanese aesthetic to Western attention. “In Japan, though it seems to be changing, there's little opportunity for an artist to gain credibility outside of the system. But what I've found fascinating is that the screen artist is a woman, and this potter is a woman. I can't name one female artist in the antique world. I mean they just didn't do it, they just didn't exist. Young! In Japan you can't get recognised as an artist much until you're over sixty. So we have people in their thirties and forties who are doing fantastic work.”
The gallery in which she enacts her vision is a curious hybrid of hybrids. It is partially for living in, partially for the formal display of objects. It is also partially for admiring, and partially for selling. There is, however, no sense of discontinuity between these multifaceted roles, indeed, they somehow feel harmonious and appropriate. From talking with Kehoe, this seems consistent with the Japanese admiration for graceful integration of functionality and aesthetics in their visual practices. She enthuses on the subject: “I find it really appealing the way their art is intimate, the way their art is an integral part of their daily life. This is a personal opinion: I find western art, particularly recently, in my life, in the twentieth century, it's separate from us, it's intimidating, the artist is put on a pedestal. I don't want art to alienate me, I want it to invite me.”
I return to work at Craft Victoria with a somewhat modified eye. Whenever I enter Craft's gallery I am struck with a sense of my incredible good fortune to work in such a beautiful space: big windows, wooden floors, clean white walls, a sense of setting and place. I love its visual clarity and exhibitions invariably look fabulous here. But my sojourn down the road has opened my eyes to an alternative. In comparison to Kehoe's warm, comfortable, home-like environment in which objects are less displayed than embedded, the more ‘neutral' void in which we like to exhibit objects d'craft perhaps does serve to alienate in some way. This space owes most of its heritage to display practices from fine-arts, which purposefully distance the throng from the Great Works. Brian O'Dougherty documented the concept in his landmark 1976 essay Inside the White Cube :
The art is free, as the saying used to go, "to take on its own life". The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a firehose but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism's transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete. This, of course, is one of modernism's fatal diseases.
Maybe Kehoe would agree that this is a ‘diseased' space. There is, I admit, a touch-me-not vibe here. Please don't touch the craft. (Don't feed the animals. Keep off the grass.) It seems ironic that such a vibrant wing of visual practice should be displayed in an environment vaguely reminiscent of the interior of a refrigerator.
At its best, craft harmonises the function of design with the manual integrity of art. As such, craft objects provide a double-whammy of tactility: while they address the human frame and touch the body, there is also a lingering consciousness that they were originally wrought by someone else's flesh. When touching a craft object with your own hand, you also touch the hand of the maker. Keeping Kehoe's gallery in mind, a home is an apt comparison in spatial terms. The domestic air of her gallery contexturalises the works, does not leave any sense of conflict or frustration, and lends an enormous amount of appeal to the works themselves.
I'm reminded of a seminar I attended a couple of years ago when Otto Kunzli was on a lecture tour of Australia. Despite his own status as a highly respected jeweller, he spoke mainly about the work of his students at the Munich Academy of Fine Art, and showed images of their exhibitions. Notably, each of these exhibitions refused the white cube model, opting instead for organic, human-derived contexts in which to display the students' jewellery creations. These included an ironic display home furnished with kitsch treasures from op shops, a purpose-built temporary café, a line of middle-aged women in a corridor. These were creative alternatives to a common problem when displaying jewellery: sterilise the object completely on a white plinth, or contaminate its purity (and subject it to risk of damage) by allowing interaction with the chaos of a genuine human body.
This probably extends to displaying other spheres of craft practice too, or anything where the human and the object are expected to be in symbiosis. Given that craft and design orient their practice at tactile encounters with human bodies, it can be frustrating when bodies and objects are kept separate by plinths and glass boxes. But it is irresponsible to risk the safety of objects by exposing them to the varied and occassionally insensitive handling of the hoi polloi, especially in galleries which receive a relatively high volume of visitors.
So it seems that the way we display objects reveals much about the values we endow them with. To aspire to a ‘neutral' space, which the familiar igloo-style gallery aspires to do, is futile. Every interpretive gesture places some kind of filter on the experience. What, then, do we find when we decode these environments that distance audience and objects from one another, especially when the objects and the audience positively pine for one another as with craft?
Is our little white cube the product of habit? Is it pandering to a public expectation in order to get more bodies through the door? Could there even be something vaguely more sinister at work here? Could it be that, in displaying craft objects in a space perhaps better suited to (or at least issuing from) the fine arty end of the spectrum, there is an unwitting push for craft to aspire to the same ends as fine art. Is it reasonable, then, to extrapolate this and sniff out a subtle submission to the heirarchy where craft is subordinate? Kehoe and Kunzli are pleased to place objects within a more organic context, but yet give them the reverence they deserve. Could theirs be a more appropriate alternative? But how much do their presentations genuinely interfere with the object's delicacy, purity and safety? It is unlikely that we'll ever uncover the answer to these questions, if indeed they have answers at all. At least the alternatives exist, and it is gratifying that while crafts practitioners provide an endless diversity among the voices to be heard, there is also diversity in the way in which their custodians mediate them. A white cube does not necessarily indicate a boxed-in mentality.
The Lesley Kehoe Gallery is an offstreet gallery located at 73 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. To arrange an appointment call
9 671 4311.
Last modified 24-Jan-2005
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the official policy of Craft Victoria. Please log into the online forums to discuss the content of these articles.