Lueckenhausen, H, Summoning the Spirit, Object, Crafts NSW, May 1996 .

The last session of a seminar: ‘Folk Traditions in Australia, Custom, Community, Craftsmanship’, involved three practitioners addressing the question: ’How do contemporary artists and craftspeople draw inspiration from folk traditions?’ The backdrop to the seminar was an exhibition of American folk art: ‘In the American Spirit’, culled from the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Apparently still touchy after two decades of ‘what is craft, what is art?’ border skirmishes, a couple of contemporary practitioners with whom I discussed the question drew in their breath at the words folk art. Whatever their preferred designation, contemporary craftspeople aspiring to top shelf validation have experienced the cost of being associated with the folksy. I was invited to contribute because of what was known, or supposed, about my work—how was I to interpret that?

Dean Lahikainen, curator at the Peabody Essex offered us a starting point in his essay for the catalogue to a much larger show, from which this one had been drawn. He wrote: “…the record-breaking prices for folk art at recent auctions underscore its final acceptance as art equal in value to the best academic works.” Referring to the previous locations of many of the exhibits, he stated they “…were being displayed in a context totally unrelated to art.”

Inherent in those statements are values and opinions which include firstly the primacy of monetary value, secondly the fixed or agreed place of art, and thirdly, as a consequence, the place of non-art. Truck loads of contemporary critical text dedicated to analyzing these assumptions has been generated, I will stick to exploring some points where various reasons for making, my own included, overlap. To Dean Lahikainen’s location of folk art “…outside of the country’s main academic or fine art traditions…”. We should add, in this case, well inside a western, European tradition.

Most folk artists, Dean Lahikainen suggests, fall into three categories, the first being the professional artisan. The imagery is largely middle class, historically it is patriotic, and it usually combines use function with decorative function. The work could be considered to aspire to high art, although the suggestion is that it falls short. This is where the battle weary know to gird their loins. This is where the complicated layers of validation with differing levels of perceived value for vernacular and high art reflects a contemporary hierarchy within which craftspeople and designer makers struggle to mark their space.

John Normalye, a collector and dealer, offered the seminar the proposition that a lack of skill is a necessary ingredient of folk art. What an interesting parallel this makes with the (more than twenty) years of fashion for deskilling fine art for fear of dragging art down to the level of artisanry. It’s a nice irony to find high and folk art to be sometime bedfellows.

The second of Dean Lahikainen’s categories is the amateur artist. That often meant the educated gentlewoman working with textiles or decorative painting, frequently on domestic items and small furniture. It also meant military and seafaring men engaged in hobby work related to their working lives such as scrimshaw and the carving of powder horns.

These days we are equally likely to position folk art in a semi-fantasy of the past, where contented villagers in embroidered outfits cobble and carve their way into a model for new-age revivalists to re-capture at Sunday morning fairs and markets. Similarly we have little problem gathering in the Museum of Sydney to track connections with these (albeit belatedly) hallowed, and now expensive items from the past. The subject that begs discussion after the seminar is—how does genuinely contemporary art, craft and design, created in the vernacular by twentieth (almost twenty-first) century) folk manifest?

One suggestion made at the seminar was to consider western-suburbs panel-van art as an example. Another might be, that as personal computers, desktop publishing and digital communication become more wide spread, digital decoration may well overtake graphic design. The World Wide Web for instance was set up by engineers—consequently the visual forms show all of the subtlety of the panel van aesthetic. In the same vein, many popular software programs may well be taking information design out of the hands of professionals and putting it into folk hands.

It may well be that the very ubiquity of folk art forms is what makes them difficult to categorize except at a historical remove. It may well be a sort of natural selection which determines what will concentrate over a period of
time into the recognition of a key element of our culture, popular or otherwise.

The third category of folk artist presented in the catalogue is that of the visionary amateur, the outsider artist engaging in personal quirky expression. The suggestion is that the outsider artist may well seek a personal validation as exactly that, and not seek a place inside the charmed circle. Consequently s/he is spared the curious, western paradox of the savant working for tribal acceptance through a demonstration of individuality and difference.

We might add a fourth category of folk artist, not adequately represented by the other three, the keeper of alternative traditions. Particularly evident in a multi-cultural context, usually working class (even peasant class) this artist attempts to preserve a well-scripted visual tradition in an alien, possibly even hostile environment. One of the propositions of this conference was that parallels can be drawn between two new-world cultures, New England and New South Wales. The migrant maker embodying longing and nostalgia in objects for domestic ceremony is a living parallel.

Naturally the most wide spread forms of arts practice are precisely that because of their accessibility. Makers who aspire to a special excellence within those forms and who exist within an arts culture predicated on the cult of the new, the sharpening of the cutting edge, can find folk traditions that touch on their media a particular choking point. The move to fitting work into a conscious, educated and consequently sophisticated critical narrative is a tactic, which allows exclusivity. In a culture (and a market) predicated on that exclusivity, it is easy to become ‘holier than thou’ about universal franchise of the arts. The catch 22 is that newness and difference need to be managed within a safe, neutered area which the contemporary art world can be accused of setting up for merely playing at subversion.

Responses to the opportunities and imperatives contained in these categories which are exhibited in contemporary making, include nostalgia, tradition (and attendant revivalism), romance, intuition, pragmatism, reaction to circumstance, patriotism, and also—rejection. In my own area—furniture—we can see bush and salvage furniture actively plugging in to a power pack of re-created memory. In outward form at least, this work is created and re-created, often by well-educated professionals with mature design skills, with an eye both to a rich Australian outback mythology, and a conscious personal and/or social narrative.

At the pragmatic end of the scale, that which is perhaps closest to the professional artisan in folk art history, country cottage and arts and crafts traditions re-surface continually. Romantic longing is factored into marketing, production and consumption of both the individual/naive and the commercial end of making.

I would suggest that a look at what common denominators exist between contemporary makers and folk traditions, rather than how one might rely on the other allows us to reflect on our work. This may be pertinent to most contemporary makers not interested in conscious revivalism. Unconscious traditional roots are another, more complex matter. The relevant categories in my own design may well prove to be:
(i) work made for domestic or personal space; exploring the relationship between people and the objects they gather about themselves, to mark and to protect their environment,
(ii) mannered manifestations of an invented mythology—winged hearth gods, functional items that explore the reconciliation between benign deities (a metaphor for challenge and opportunity, as well as for linking past and current imperatives) and our built environment,
(iii) work with grander pretensions—the public gods—invoked for curated exhibitions and public galleries, looking for academic validation of the eclectic, the celebratory and the theatrical.
(iv) work made for institutionalized celebration, for example, a Tiq for Jewish worship, an ambo for Christian ceremony, a mace and chancellors suite for university ceremony.

This sort of self-analysis sits uncomfortably within our Australian culture of self-abnegation. The implications of the set question for a designer/maker is: from where do I draw inspiration? What is my work about? If anything was gained from the seminar it was that we shared concerns across tribes, we attempted to overlap some of the continuous layers of individual and group identification.

D. Lahikainen, In The American Spirit: Folk Art From The Collections, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts 1994, p. 7