Lueckenhausen, H, Words and Work
Craft Victoria, vol 24, no 223, March/April, 1994, pp 4-7

"By industrie and diligence any perfection may be attained . 1576" (1)

An American friend once told me of an experience she had in the days when she was a jeweller presenting her work at a craft fair. An 'older' couple had been moving slowly along the aisle, the wife in particular showing appreciation of everything she saw. Frances heard her ask her husband something to the effect of "look at all this fantastic work, how on earth do they manage to do all of this?" "It's easy", the husband explained, "they don't work".

In the crafts, one response is working for validation within a contemporary, industrial (if not post-industrial) and often urban context. This has involved giving up the vexed battle to prove craft and art are essentially the same thing and looking instead for links with the culture and cult of design at the fringes of an industrial culture. Whatever one's opinion about that is, the key to attempting an understanding of the crafts is to realise that no one absolute 'truth' exists - this is one of many models in a multiplicity of realities.

For a start we need to look at a number of implications of that terminology, not only for practice (the making of objects), but also for the other sectors of what I will argue is appropriately called the crafts industry.

Many of the concerns and operating methods of contemporary craftspeople are reflected in the pragmatic nature of the work of Craft Australia (previously the Crafts Council of Australia). In my time much of the language and culture of the crafts 'movement' has evolved into that of a fledgling 'industry'. Some of the issues deemed to be current by my associates and myself, not only at Craft Australia but also at the Visual Arts Crafts Board and in the wider crafts community were incorporated into the Craft 2000 conference held in Perth in 1992. I refer you to a report on that conference by Caroline Miley entitled 'What Crafts Industry?' (2) in which she was unable to cite one redeeming feature in the program.

The range of definitions of industry in my copy of the Shorter Oxford, cite "intelligence, ingenuity, dexterity and diligence as well as systematic work or labour and habitual employment". Who can argue with that?
Industrialism, by contrast, is described as "a system of things arising from or involving the existence of great industries". It is the latter interpretation, fitted into a picture of industrial alienation that has been the cause of so much reaction and to this day can lock the crafts into an oppositional stance.

Caroline Miley makes a number of critical claims in her report. She asks why craftspeople need an industry body as artists neither have nor seem to need one "... and aren't they the closest of all to what and who craftspeople are?" (3) I had rather thought there was still some disagreement over that. In fact Caroline's words from another part of the same article provide a suitable response. "It puts forward a particular position as being the norm, or the accepted consensus view, when it is nothing of the sort". (4)

Further on she says, "If craft is to be an industry, let's stop pretending it has anything to do with art, artistic qualities in any shape or form, self-expression, theory or 'making a statement about society'". (5) That, in my opinion, encapsulates the separatist tendency of our culture to alienate one form of endeavour from another. Where on earth did the idea that one part of our culture ie that of anything connected to industry is intrinsically and absolutely separate from another part of our culture (the arts) come from? I see the contemporary crafts as being able to bridge one off and batch production, inherent or associated meaning and pragmatic functionalism and not least, poetry and bread and butter. It is not that any one object or even any one practice needs to address all of these things but that a multiplicity of related imperatives is allowed for.

In respect of crafts reaction, Jim Falk, agrees that "...the separatist character of that movement - the attempt to divorce action from market and dominant social relations - also greatly limits its potential". The central issue for us is to establish linkage and to understand that"...an approach in which craft practitioners seek to blend and shape their skills, and more importantly their values, with practitioners based in art, science, technology and the market who are seeking to accept this contemporary challenge, could make a real contribution towards producing the changes which are needed". (6)

The agenda for crafts discourse is largely set in academic and publishing circles. It is worth considering in what way the imperatives and modes of practice for crafts theorists and critics effect the accepted idea of where the crafts sit.

Crafts practitioners, more often than not, assume the centrality of their function around which a number of related practices orbit. However crafts writers may not and we can now see the development of an assertive movement which has theory as its own end. At the Interventions conference in Wollongong in 1991 a number of references were made to the need for a theory of theory. The truism that practice and theory are parts of the whole doesn't resolve the struggle for the greater part, the desire for which, despite our rational posture, sits just under the skin.

Practitioners can be deeply resentful of intrusion into what they see as their choice of how to lead their lives, what to make and to what end. Carolyn Miley makes a significant point when she states that "... people who have never thrown a pot may be the experts in their field of craft theory, history and criticism, whose opinion needs consulting". (7) The problem with advice proffered in this tone however is that it can manifest as alienating bossiness to which practitioners are likely to switch off, thereby adding to the cause of the writer's frustration - that of not being listened to.

The key is that inherent in theory and critical writing is criticism. Criticism of theory is not usually inherent in practice. Writers can and do take on 'Kingmaker' roles as well as 'issue maker' roles so their work is not always benign.

In my working life I have occasionally taken on the roles of critic and writer. The fact that I'm involved in education and my own post-graduate work puts me in the camp of those who value critical discourse. That doesn't stop a kind of primal, protective urge from welling up in me to face down those presuming to lecture me on what the crafts aught to be. Carolyn Miley may well insist that we need to "...look for the best possible authorities to guide us..." (8) but a little warning bell goes off somewhere deep in my self-willed, anarchic psyche that interprets her 'we' as craftspeople and 'authority' as theoreticians such as herself.

Furthermore, with the development of theory as its own end, as product in its own right, improved crafts practice is not necessarily a prime goal.
Writing has its own imperatives, its own markers of achievement. In the popular press the desire to engage in witty word play and the seduction of word and sentence combinations can prove irresistible even at the risk of
slanting the content.
The result for the crafts may just as well be diminished as enhanced practice.

Even in scholarly writing the beauty and 'craft' of the argument can claim first allegiance.
Peter Timms believes that "Theoreticians and academics have an inordinate amount of influence on contemporary art practice. It's no accident that those calling for more critical debate in the crafts are, by and large, those who are making a living from providing it". (9)

What is interesting is that theorists may not have been as successful in influencing contemporary crafts practice as they have that of the arts. Given that the avant garde of the fine arts in this century has for the most part tried to distance itself from materiality, indeed even from physicality, the conclusion that theoretical and academic writing has become inseparable from the other aspects of its practice is hardly surprising. Is it possible that crafts, still partially (and arguably intrinsically) anchored in material and technique and therefore maintaining established linkages with other modes of production contributing to our material culture are not as dependent on the industry (industrialism?) of theory? Is this part of the reason some theorists find the crafts so exasperating, not so much by its irrelevance to contemporary society but from the fact that it manages to maintain a significant part of its primary relevance without academic intervention? After all, for better or worse, journeyman craft has a better chance of staying close to the centre of crafts practice than journeyman art has to that of the fine arts. One is more likely to find a beautiful, if humble contemporary ceramic bowl in a public gallery than a canvas with nothing other than decorative or even representational intensions.

Getting back to the point of the crafts involving a multiplicity of realities, if we do accept a contemporary model of industry friendly crafts practice, how does that relate to industrial design, or more importantly for some, how does it differ from it? It is still common in some circles to see crafts production as indefensible sentimentality in the face of technological developments. Designers are trained to be process oriented, with the creative star currently losing favour to the team player who can be involved in the whole management and organisational continuum. The crafts are still very much anchored in material and process. This is at once their strength and their weakness. It can manifest in an obsession with traditional attitudes to material and technique which catches the work in a time warp. It can also result in creative and technological developments which only a mastery of the material will allow. Could Warren Langley have developed Ozone into a such a significant concern and become a Design Academy corporate heroes nominee without his deep craftsman's experience of glass? Why did metalsmith Susan Cohn and not an industrial design graduate prototype for Allessi?

Clearly, the range of possibilities for craftspeople to make an impact are varied and I prefer to see the craftsperson as a doppelganger to other manifestations of production and/or creative expression. The word craft, like the English language, refuses to be controlled and has a dynamic of its own. Craft practice keeps doggedly reasserting itself, even in the face of lucid arguments against its moral and historical right to do so. Maybe its time to credit the primal, immediate relationship between people and the icons of their material culture and the fact that the crafts are still central to that. Then we can stop asking whether crafts have a right to exist and we can stop trying to put a universally agreed framework onto crafts practice and begin to plot points of impact. Then, when a designer's work touches the crafts we can stop agonising about whether alternative technologies and modes of practice deny craft and start appreciating how crafts effect other processes.

The term designer/maker is a great example of the dynamics of language. In my own case I adopted the title at almost the precise moment that I, as a designer, decided to make one of my designs. So simple really, designer / maker - what could be more direct? Although I was unaware of it at the time, as an invitation to engage with the crafts was still some time in the future, the title would not have been logically interchangeable with craftsperson. Not unless I would have been willing to argue that all the time, experience, material and technical skill that go to make up part of what a craftsperson is about was accessible in the moment it took me to decide to buy some wood and ask the machinist at college to show me how to dress it. I'll stick with it now despite the fact that since then I've developed some of the skills, partially because it is a reasonable descriptor of the range of my professional practice and partially because circumstance has not thrown up a better. This is despite the fact that I have become an advocate for the use of the words craft and craftsperson where appropriate.

In my time I have had some experience of falling between stools. I have spent as much time promoting design to craftspeople as I have defending crafts to designers. I have defended artists to manufacturers and recommended marketers to craftspeople. The point is that any attempt to lock the crafts into or, for that matter, out of a proscriptive construct of our material culture is vexed. In our own way we are all working at the edge. There is no fixed centre.

I conclude with an obscene suggestion, communicated to me second hand, that craftspeople produce too much and would be better off if they had day jobs which freed them from the necessity to make money from their work - they could then simply make work rather than largely worthless production work. Of what would these craftspeople be free? They would be free of any connection between their creative endeavour and the main portion of their working lives. They would be free of the responsibility to make a contribution to the economic and working life of their culture. They would be free of the challenge to change production work from being worthless to being worthwhile. They would be free to marginalise their endeavours as hobby work. They would be free to attach themselves to an increasingly isolated, increasingly socially dislocated secret brotherhood.

We appear to have people within the industry no better informed than the husband at the American craft fair.
Craft and crafts related making is not an abstract exercise.
This is what we do. This is our work.

Notes

1. Shorter Oxford Dictionary
2. Caroline Miley, 'What Crafts Industry?', Craft Victoria, March 1993, pp 14-16
3. As above, p 14
4. As above, p 14
5. As above, p 15
6. Jim Falk, 'Craft, Science and the Natural - An Introduction', Artlink,
Winter 1992, p 19.
7. Caroline Miley, 'What Crafts Industry?', Craft Victoria, March 1993, p 16
8. As above, p16
9. Peter Timms, 'Yes, But What Kind of Craft Debate?', Craft Victoria, Dec/Jan 1992/3, p. 3