It's a great honour to be invited to present a talk here in Toronto at a conference on Danish craft. You might find it curious that an Australian has been invited to open this conference. I find it curious myself. We might view it as a useful example of the increasing traffic between cultures, particularly in the west. This increasing exchange creates its own problems, particularly in maintaining a sense of where you come from.
So forgive me if I begin this talk by reclaiming a sense of place though a quintessential image of my origins. The Sydney Opera House encapsulates the elements of Australia’s most loved scene—the white sails billowing throughout the sparkling blue harbour. Though a spectacular piece of architecture in its own right, what seems special about this building is its ability to reflect the natural beauty of its setting. From our perspective today, however, it is interesting to add that this sensitivity to Australian elements springs from a fundamentally foreign imagination—that of Danish architect Jorn Utzon.
So what about Utzon’s design lends itself to well to the Australian environment? The famous shell-like structures are formed from thousands of ceramics tiles, fired with a shiny glaze using a groggy clay that produce a coarse surface reflecting light in all directions. Architectural critic Philip Drew describes the tiles as ‘a parable with a fairytale message that exalts ordinary things by showing us how they are really extraordinary if we can only discover their true nature.’ Indeed, there is something in the Utzon’s rigorous simplicity that seems so appropriate for the sun-drenched country.
Utzon’s methods can be readily extended to other Danish designers. Danish icons such as Arne Jacobsen and George Jenson demonstrate the genius of Danish design to hone the beauty of organic form. This, so far, should be familiar and safe territory for us—perhaps even verging on cliché. But alongside this highly cultivated modernism lies a much rawer edge. It is this edge which has interesting things to say about our current condition.
Current Dogma
Dogma 95 was founded in Copenhagen, spring 1995. Four film directors, including Lars von Trier, issued a manifesto that advocated a ‘Vow of chastity’ to counteract the dream machinery of Hollywood. It particularly attacked the culture of special effects. I quote from the Dogma manifesto: ‘By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation.’ Like many other cultural revivals, such as Italian neo-realist cinema, American ‘gritty realist’ fiction and English punk music, Dogma presents a defiant attitude that puts a raw truth before polished idealism.
While few films have stayed true to this vow, the Dogma school maintains a rawness that is at odds with mainstream cinema. Lars von Trier’s recent film Dogville was filmed on a single set without walls. It seems highly artificial compared to life, but reflects more truthfully the circumstances of making films.
Though modern in its outlook, Dogma carries forward the protestant spirit of Danish Lutheranism, embodied in its central figure Nikolai Grundtvig. Grundtvig turned religion back to Danish values and language, encapsulated in his maxim Menneske Først (1837) ‘Person first and then Christian’. The primary focus of religion must spring from who you are rather than the imposition of a foreign orthodoxy. For Grundtvig, the only authentic way to be Lutheran was to first become a Dane.
An event such as this conference on Danish craft is a good opportunity to explore how that Lutheran spirit finds its place in the world of contemporary craft today.
If we were to map the concerns of Dogma onto our field, we would be seeking a dichotomy between an over-produced artificial medium and its more authentic raw state. We would be setting Latin flourish up against Nordic honesty.
The design dream machine
I propose as a starting point, the move by museums away from craft towards design. This trend reflects the opposition between Dogma and Hollywood—the immediate truth of making against the mediated industry of production. Of course, in reality the situation is not so black and white. The polarisation is being set up here more for the sake of vigorous argument, to help get the ball rolling in what promises to be a most interesting meeting of minds.
On 1 October 2002, the American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design. According to the press release
The Museum’s new name expresses the institution’s mission as a contemporary museum dedicated to celebrating materials and the processes of transforming them into expressive objects—transcending the boundaries that currently separate craft, art, and design. The name change also affirms the Museum’s commitment to presenting the work of artists from around the world and its role as an international educational resource.
The transformation of materials into ‘expressive objects’ is an elegant formulation, but the ‘transcending of boundaries’ lapses back to the unthinking modernist logic that sees distinctions as limiting thought, whereas we know the opposite is true. What is particularly significant in this explanation is the reference to the museum’s role as ‘an international educational resource.’ While it loses an official acknowledgment of both America and craft, it gains the world.
In our time, design is one of the many conduits for international capital, alongside travel, the financial market and Hollywood. As different cities aspire to the status as ‘design centres’, they seek to conform to a world’s best practice of technology, fashion and marketing. Along the freeways of design travel brands, logos, corporate capital, executives, money and inevitably jobs.
Take one recent design icon. Microsoft has just released a new mouse, conceived by the ‘guru’ designer, Philippe Starck. What’s distinctive about this mouse is not what it does, but how it looks. According to its publicity, ‘it will transform the mouse into a badge item that makes a statement about your taste and personality.’ The purpose of this kind of designer is to find new ways of making consumption conspicuous.
Design makes the world go round, and no one would want to stop that. But it would be a shame if its growth comes at the cost to the world itself, particularly the appreciation of local craft skills that have evolved over deep time. It would be bad for design itself if it became exclusively a status game, rather than continuing the craft mission of cultural expression. The victory of the empire of ego over the republic of common sense would be a sad thing. There are two main areas that design seems unable to represent.
One is difference, particularly at a local level. We don’t look to design to find a sense of place, where people come from. It is a creature of globalisation, rather than its antidote.
Second, the design circuits are inherently elitist. They pander to status needs and inevitably fail to represent the rest of the world on which its wealth is based. The miners who dig for the metals, the timber workers who fell the trees that make the glossy magazines, the growers who provide the coffee for the morning lattes—these have no place in the world of design.
As the world becomes ever more consumed in its items of enjoyment, it is important that we find a contrary trend that has the same kind of feistiness as Dogma 95.
The meek shall craft the earth
How can crafts resist the march of international capital? One ‘low road’ of resistance lies in the almost Gandhi-like use of humble materials. Making the common precious serves to assert the place of individual imagination against the pressures of brand conformity.
There are a number of artists who have recycled common materials. The Japanese jeweller Mikiko Minewaki has made elegant bracelets and rings out of carved miso soup bowls. Ritsuko Ogura has made rings from a range of materials including cigarette lighters. And the Finish jeweller Janna Syvänoja has made works out of paper, such as telephone books, with an interest in the recovery of natural beauty from manufactured materials.
Work by artists such as these are elegant and inventive, but represent largely individual creative responses to materials. In Australia at the moment, there is such a prevalence of artists working in this manner that it verges on being a movement. Here the poverty of materials is quite the radical. While it has never been christened as such, this paper is an opportunity to consider its broader implications.
The origins of this movement are varied. Vernacularism in Australian craft has certainly a strong Danish influence. The Sydney jewellery scene owes much to the Copenhagen-born jeweller Helge Larsen and his Australian wife Darani Lewers. This marriage celebrated references to Australian nature in elegantly simple ornament. But this style of work is more about the representation of environment, rather than its material use.
Though Australians would be reluctant to admit it, a considerable influence comes from its smaller neighbour, New Zealand. In the late twentieth-century, the interest in use of indigenous materials was encapsulated in the stone, bone and shell movement, where jewellers played an important role in defining national identity by celebrating what’s at hand. Craft as exercised by artists like Warwick Freeman, has been critical in developing the non-Indigenous or Pakeha identity.
Roseanne Bartley – archaeologist of consumerism
There have since been many successful New Zealand implants on Australian soil. Roseanne Bartley is a New Zealand jeweller who has brought that indigenous sensibility to Australia. With what she describes as a blackbird’s eye, Bartley recovers the detritus of modern life and transforms it into precious objects. She developed a whole range of ornament utilising parts of typewriters, turning keys into pins and strikers into flower like clusters.
While expressing a quaint poverty of means, Bartley’s work maintains a political edge. Her Body of Language event elevated mass consumption as a national symbol, rendering a fries packet in precious silver.
Living next to a 7/11 convenience store, Bartley found her front yard to be a regular deposit of ice cream sticks, ironically called Heaven. These she has set as necklaces and brooches.
Her work becomes ever more extreme.
For instance, I found the toe strap of a thong in a park in Sydney, and when we went to Edinburgh I found a small chewed up paint brush at the school. And I start to think these materials are not really needing to be altered terribly much to be small wearable iconic little forms that tell you about, if you’re willing to look, about places and people.
Bartley is an archaeologist of consumerism. In celebrating its detritus, she reminds us of its consequences beyond the act of consumption.
Lorraine Connelly-Northy – minimal impact
In Australia currently, the responsibility for representing place is increasingly devolved to Aboriginal artists. This has been evident primarily in the iconography of dot paintings. But Aboriginal craft is developing, it has begun to reflect place not in images but materials.
Lorraine Connelly-Northy is a Koori artist brought up along the Murray River, which irrigates much of south-east Australia. The product of an Aboriginal-Irish marriage, she has been recovering her Indigenous identity by studying the local bush, particularly from the experience of local farmers. While many Aboriginal craftspersons draw on natural materials, interpreting traditional techniques such as eel trap weaving, Connelly-Northy reflects her mixed background by turning to those materials of the bush that do not belong, yet are of it. She works mostly with scrap metal, treating with same kind of care as one would local flora—honouring its natural shape. An example of her work is the One Hundred Dilly Bags installation. The dilly bag is a traditional accessory worn around the forehead or neck for collecting bush tucker. Rather than natural grasses, she has fashioned these bags out of odd bits of barbed wire, fly wire, mesh.
There’s a quiet dignity in her work. Like Bartley, she rescues the most humble of materials and imbues them with a unique cultural voice.
Damien Wright – democratic wood
Non-indigenous Australians have had an uncertain relationship to place. Used to looking north, local materials have been considered rough and ungainly, compared to the more familiar European timbers such as teak and Baltic pine.
Damien Wright’s family background is Irish Catholic, rural Queensland and proudly working class. He has carried this dogmatic egalitarianism into his craft, and focuses on redressing this colonial hierarchy. This means establishing new techniques for treating and working with timber previously considered fit only for firewood, at best. Using geometrical modernist designs, he is able to evoke the rich colours and textures of Australian timbers.
Honor Freeman – 3D stencilling
In an urban context, a new spontaneous art form has emerged in stencilling. A welcome relief from tagging, this anonymous decorative impulse has a strong craft element, with the skilful cutting of card to produce the image outline. It releases art from the gallery and into ordinary lives.
Honor Freeman is an Adelaide-based ceramicist who works within a graffiti sub-culture. She is particularly interested in the everyday physical contact with materials, such as bathroom tiles and switches. During an attempt to create an entirely porcelain room, she found herself taken with the production of light switches. These she has placed in public places, turning inside outside. For Freeman, the point of her public art is to work at the simple phenomenological level, the innocent surprise of encounter not the slippery nothing of plastic, but the hard resonance of high-fired porcelain.
Sally Marsland – the minimalist
Whereas some artists dedicate themselves to labouring over materials, Sally Marsland holds to an obverse discipline. Her approach seems the antithesis of craft. In minimising artistic intervention, her work gives greater freedom to random processes—a kind of relaxed modernism.
Her first major exhibition was titled, A Group of Juicy Green Protrusions (with Nicholas Bastin, 1997). The multitude of objects resisted the format of the precious object, reflecting more the scene in an opportunity shop than an art gallery.
After studying with Otto Kunzli in Munich, Marsland returned to Australia with an even less interventionalist approach to jewellery.
Almost Black (2000) featured objects based on a near random assortment of things. They included silver, pearls, wood, bone, a carbon fibre ski sock, bicycle tube, shirring elastic, cotton darning thread, and King Billy pine (coloured with ink). These were turned black in various ways, through either colouring to being cast in a black material. The catalogue evoked in ‘almost black’ a metaphysical engagement between being and nothingness. ‘Black’ in its pure sense is nothing but nothing:
Uninterrupted black, monotone, does to the visible what fur does for the audible. It muffles, cloaks, flattens an object, creates almost silhouettes of things.
‘Almost’ provides some space that allows for life to occur.
Almost is most alive when very, very close to its object. Almost is the difference between the part that is and the part that is not yet.
Like much of Sally’s work, Almost Black is initially disconcerting. At first it seems a random collection of charred objects. They seem an incongruous gathering of things to have on the pristine white shelves of a chic Melbourne gallery. Marsland recovers a poetry in the humble object.
For Flat Colour (2001) Marsland made highly expressive brooches using epoxy resin and powders. Her technique has a childlike simplicity: colours are mixed and left to harden on flat glass. It is defiantly unpretentious work that both challenges and liberates the wearer. A subsequent exhibition, Why are you like this and not like that? (2004), appropriates objects from an opportunity shop in country Victoria. Some are cast in brightly coloured paint; others have only minimal interventions, such as an edge sawn off. Rather than present objects in their Puritan simplicity, as you might in a Mirandi painting, Marsland makes no bones about her inventions. Casts are quite roughly made, leaving evidence of seams. Marsland indicates the world of simple things by their physical absence, rather than their representation.
Marsland retains a creative distance from the slick world of commodified object. Her minimal poetry, however, is more tied to purely aesthetic ends than anything too literally related to democracy.
Stephen Gallagher – a bush Elizabethan
Even more aesthetic in his approach is fellow jeweller Stephen Gallagher, born to four generations of butchers in rural Queensland. Gallagher’s desire to create began in Florence, a ‘golden’ city, with ‘gold and golden sunsets’. He was particularly impressed with seeing the jeweller’s bench in the store.
When he returned to Brisbane in 1988 he immediately started making jewellery. He had no training or equipment. He started making on the kitchen table, using whatever came to hand. His first pieces were aluminium, which was cheap. He then started going to leadlight shops for ‘bits and pieces’ that he could incorporate into jewellery.
Jewellery for friends quickly expanded into a serious occupation. He started making street jewellery for a 50s recycled clothes shop in Fortitude Valley, using reflector tape and perspex. It was mostly cold-joining, using screws and bolts.
He eventually enrolled in a jewellery course at Griffith University. The emphasis was on base metals, but Stephen’s primary interest was in finding ways of turning precious materials into something common, to produce alternative golds in purple, green and black.
A number of residencies, including a mentorship at the Victorian Embroiderers Guild, have enabled Gallagher to include a number of textile techniques in his jewellery. Most recently, he has been developing a series of work that strives for an Elizabethan style, though using modern materials. In work resembling Sally Marsland’s flat colour brooches, Gallagher extrudes resin through mesh to create dense chaotic patterns. Rather than the forced intricacy of Elizabethan craftsmanship, Gallagher coaxes complexity from the free expression of material. The final construction of the brooch contains this chaos within a more familiar narrative.
Another series of work uses the textile technique of chenille to create elegant brooches out of mere plastic bags. By slashing black and grey plastic, Gallagher is able to create a wonderfully textured surface that belies its humble origins. For Gallagher, these pieces contain the irony that with ‘green consumerism’, it is likely that plastic bags in the future will be as rare as pearls today.
Gallagher’s work reflects the more alchemical fascination for humble materials. The transformation of common into precious challenges the artist with a creative quest to exercise the mysteries of their craft.
Limits of the ordinary
In these antipodean artists we find a carnivalesque spirit that inverts the hierarchy of precious and common. It’s a Franciscan-like simplicity that is oblivious to the dominant elite cultures.
In relation to craft, design will always have the alternative dimension of production. While these pieces are one-off expressive works, design will always have a broader reach through its role in popular consumption. On its own, this humble craft does not directly confront the commodifying processes of global design.
Making virtue of necessity has always been a rich ground for craft. But without a broader collective horizon, it risks being limited to necessity. Is there a collective path into the global stage that might reflect the same kinds of values as present in the modest craft of Australian artists?
A different trend is emerging through artist collectives growing in the global south. Time permits mention of any one of these. Pulse is a Durban-based group that worked with a community in rural KwaZulu-Natal
Pulse – a collective solution
We can find a very different take on design at the other end of the world. One of the conditions in being an artist in the new South Africa is dealing with the enormous social problems of health and poverty. One artist collective has tried to respond to this by leaving the gallery behind and focusing their creativity on useful community actions. Pulse is based in Durban and includes artists from across the world. In their Hive initiative, artists went to a rural community where AIDS is particularly severe and new centre for children at risk has been established. These artists went to work making useful items like shade cloths, compost bins, swings, bag holders and so on. While these were much appreciated by members of KwaZulu-Natal village of Hlabise, they were also recovered as works of art and made the subject of an exhibition back in Durban.
Pulse shows how design need not be a purely aspirational practice, but also respond to local needs. Ventures like this are important for reminding us that design need not be purely for elite consumption. It can also have a redemptive power over ordinary life.
Conclusion
Today we find a generation of craftspersons gravitating towards the ordinary as a focus for their work. Some do it with a specific political purpose in mind, to champion the common. Others are more fascinated by the aesthetic power of transformation. Together, they are addressing a vacuum in a contemporary culture that is increasingly distracted by global consumption.
The Danish Lutheran spirit is as important today as it ever was. It is critical to ensure that design does not extinguish our sense of who we are—that it does not extinguish design itself.
Notes
The exhibition Make the Common Precious is at Craft Victoria 25 August to 24 September.
Philip Drew The Masterpiece: Jorn Utzon: A Secret Life South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 1999, p. 289
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