Bogle, M, The Chicago Fifteen - Contemporary Australian Furniture, SculptureObjects Functional Art (SOFA), Chicago, USA, 1996
The story of furniture in Australia follows the pattern that Mark Twain observed during an Australian lecture tour in 1896 "Australian history is almost always picturesque, indeed, it is so curious and strange that it is itself the greatest novelty the country has to offer. It pushes the other novelties into second and third place.”
In the mid-19th century, Australian furniture made one of its first appearances abroad when Britain invited the Australian colonies to exhibit in the Great Exhibition of All Nations in the famous Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London. The colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Van Diemen's Land [Tasmania] answered with extraordinary specimens of exotic timbers such as Blackwood; Huon pine, Pencil pine, Muskwood and other rare specimen timbers that the European world had never seen. The pleasure that Australian designer/makers continue to take from their native materials can been seen in the work of SOFA exhibitors such as Philip Monaghan, Helmut Lueckenhausen, Stuart and Brad Montague, Neville Selleck and many others.
Contemporary Design & Traditional Materials
Neville Selleck's career illustrates some of the unique elements of the Australian designer/maker. He was introduced to design skills during architecture studies in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria. He abandoned his full-time study to develop his woodworking skills and since 1974, he has worked as a cabinet-maker and woodworker. He values his materials. I usually start with a small log I have chainsaw and air-dried years before." It is this intimacy with the natural history of his timbers that found him working as a "Artisan in Residence" at the Hattah Kulkine National Park in the mid-1980s. This residency (living in a caravan or mobile home) allowed him to work with local timbers and allow the innate qualities of the materials to direct his work. Selleck filled the Park's Information Centre to overflowing with twenty-eight pieces of furniture.
Contemporary Design & Contemporary Materials
University training in design has slowly altered the direction of Australian furniture design. For example, all of the designers showing in SOFA have trained at universities. While timber has shaped the syntax of Australian domestic design for over a century, access to metals technology through university workshops has introduced more and more designers to the medium of metal. This is important, for metal-based furniture is part of the primary vocabulary of international modernism. While technological restrictions still prevent the full use of ferrous metal for most designer/makers, low melting-point base metals (aluminium, brass, copper) often appear as castings for furniture hardware.
Designers such as Peter Prasil, Marc Pascal, Luis Nheu and Helen Quinn have developed their careers around the core beliefs of late 20th century modernism. That is, the manifestations of new technology and materials are to be celebrated and adapted for use. Affection rather than fear is the dominant emotion. The Tasmanian Peter Prasil, however, has a bit of fun with the audience
with his "I Want to Examine You" chaise lounge by evoking the dystopian nightmares of the technophobe.
Helen Quinn, Luis Nheu and Marc Pascal, on the other hand, want to engage fearlessly with the New. "The role of the designer," Quinn says, "is to find ways of making new connections between existing conditions and transforming original processes to fit the changing way we work and live." Pascal, who trained as an industrial designer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, also knows from his university studies and his own designs for M2 Products that new connections are essential elements in design retailing. He is one of the few working designers who have embraced plastics technology.
Modernism has also integrated the World of Ideas into furniture design and provided some designer/makers with a new path that allows them to skirt both regional and international styles. Designers such as Anne Harry and Helen Quinn trade in ideas and use their furniture to make observations on a wide range of issues. The Hobart-based designer Anne Harry, for example, explains that her work draws on the late 1990s elements of sexuality.
Her "Audrey Dressing Table" is a plaintive comment on isolation and loss of friends over time and distance. While she notes that function is part of the vocabulary of design. Harry confesses that she prefers to work intuitively.
Quinn's exhibition work, conceived in the Melbourne urban milieu, moves in and out of the modernist aesthetic. She too has explored the topical notions of human sexuality and the urban cityscape in her design work. But while she describes her "Bodyworks" chair as exploring the ambiguities of gender and sexuality, it unquestionably acknowledges the essential requirements of functionality.
In contrast, Martin Corbin, a South Australian designer/maker, is often positioned as a bush furniture (or primitive furniture) designer. The folk art style has a long-standing furniture tradition throughout rural Australia. But this self-taught timber artisan's work is much more demanding than that. Following an exhibition called "Domestic Alchemy" in Sydney, New South Wales in 1991, the critic Anne Brennan perceptively observed, "Corbin conducts his investigation through an inversion of the usual process of the (artisan). While the traditional cabinetmaker starts with raw materials and refines, modulates and embellishes to arrive at a planned result, Corbin starts with a finished product, dismantling and then reassembling a new object. He designs by the already existing fractures... He neither adds nor subtracts anything... By cutting across the grain of the making process, (he) uncovers unexpected possibilities...".
While Corbin's reductive idea-based work is eloquent, an unarticulated core of Australian regionalism underpins his work. By way of introduction, while the "Bushfire Shrine" exhibited at SOFA hints at the drama of the explosively flammable Australian bush, Corbin's use of indigenous Blackwood underlines the point.
Narrative Furniture
The Tasmanian Patrick Hall and the Victorians Bern and Gerhard Emmerichs are high-spirited designer/makers who employ their art to create narrative work that is structured like prose. They tell traditional stories that have beginnings and ends. The Emmerichs are well known for their
ceramics that include snatches of Shakespeare and a range of painted glass panels and functional objects that allude to Durer, medieval legends or classical mythology.
The Emmerichs were once at the centre of a fine artist's cooperative, "Whitehall" located in a Melbourne industrial suburb. At "Whitehall", they led rich, imaginative lives that seemed to draw on the creative fermentation of an atelier. In recent years, they have moved to rural Victoria, but there is no deflection from their purpose. Their partnership is a rare melding of temperaments.
Patrick Hall also works within the community of Hobart where the University's School of Art is at the centre of the Tasmanian arts community. Like the Emmerichs, he enjoys a tale and his fertile imagination has provided work for posters, prints, book illustration and covers as well as his idiosyncratic furniture. "My furniture is like telling a story," Hall explains. "They are quite personal things that try to tell a story about someone that might have owned it, or even a situation, thought or idea."
Sculpture & the Designer/Maker
A number of exhibitors come to domestic design from a background of sculpture. Simone Le Amon, Philip Monaghan, Helmut Lueckenhausen and Wayne Z. Hudson have had professional experience in sculpture. Simone Le Amon has a B.F.A. in sculpture while Lueckenhausen, a senior figure in Australian design, founded and taught college-level sculpture courses in Victoria in the mid-1970s. The Montague brothers and Susan Rowlands, on the other hand, treat furniture like sculpture and their work can been viewed from either vantage point. The sculptor's aesthetic is evident in the work of all these designers: an acute recognition of the presence or absence of three-dimensional space; the importance of surface and the ability to manage the scale of objects.
In spite of itself, interesting furniture behaves like interesting sculpture and the more successful designers acknowledge this inescapable quality. Although they have not had formal sculpture training and experience, the Montague brothers, Stuart and Brad, produce challenging three-dimensional work. They come from a long line of New South Wales commercial furniture makers and the traditional trade skills learned in their factory have proved liberating. Stuart, who studied furniture design at the University of Tasmania, has exhibited at SOFA three times before. He combines the skills and necessities of commercial furniture with an instinctive, almost Japanese, sculptural sensibility.
Wayne Hudson works within the black-smithing milieu, a conservative art form in an innovation-resistant medium. While his unconventional career and equally unconventional work resists classification, he has exhibited widely in Australia and New Zealand. Hudson has interned with the Paley Studios in upstate New York and although he sidesteps the considerable technical demands of the Paley aesthetic, his style is equally energetic.
While they share an exuberant joy in their materials, the South Australian Philip Monaghan's work provides a formidable contrast to Hudson. Monaghan acknowledges the 19th century English furniture traditions inherited by Australian cabinetmakers by including some of the floral carving details of cabinetry and enlarging them into structural elements. Woodcarving has had an important place in early South Australian furniture, decorative panels and domestic design since the 19th century. The colony of South Australia was settled, in part, by German immigrants who transplanted many of their woodcarving skills to their new home much as the Pennsylvania German community were to do in the United States.
Susan Rowlands, a Canberra designer/maker, is also an heir to the Australian woodcarving traditions. In the early decades of the 20th century, a majority of the art and design prizes of the Agricultural Shows (the Australian equivalent to the County Fair) were claimed by women carvers and makers. While fewer women are attracted to wood-carving in the 1990s, it is worth noting that Rowlands' work has been voted the most popular exhibit three years out of four at the Australian Capital Territory's Woodcraft Guild annual exhibition. Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory are analogous with Washington and the District of Columbia.
In conclusion, the work of Helmut Lueckenhausen seems to summarise many of the issues present in contemporary Australian design and making. Lueckenhausen has worked as a designer and educator in a range of media, including the graphic arts and 3-dimensional paper. He has also travelled, exhibited and lectured internationally in the service of Australian design and education. As a designer, he is a Citizen of the World.
His conceptual work is so powerful that the issues of artisanry are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work. The objects are presented as philosophical critique and comment on furniture, past as well as present. The skills required to produce the work are not the issue but merely means to an end. This mastery is liberating.
The iconography of Lueckenhausen's furniture has always been difficult but this leads the observer to speculation and the enjoyment that this affords. His titles, however mysterious, hint at mythological archetypes and encourage the sense of wonder. This too, is a motif amongst many of the SOFA designers.
As suggested by his SOFA work, Lueckenhausen has often worked with architects and he has said that his pieces can aesthetically support decorative elements only because underneath there is a very structured geometry. This is especially evident in the "Wundercabinet" in Chicago.
Lueckenhausen's work draws together many of the themes found amongst the Chicago 15. There is an acknowledgment of the importance of ideas; the act of making is suppressed when it might intrude on the themes presented; regional issues and elements are suggested through the use of indigenous materials and methods and finally, in the midst of High Seriousness, there remains an element of whimsy or perhaps even satire.
What Mark Twain said of Australian history is equally true of Australian furniture and domestic design. "It does not read like history” Twain said, "but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures and incongruities and contradictions and incredibility’s. But they are all true...”.
Michael Bogle is a curator with the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales and a part-time lecturer in design history at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has taught at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York and the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.
