Lueckenhausen,H, Culture in the Making: Ecumenism, Economics and the Arts, The 1991 Gillian Bradshaw Memorial Lecture, Curtin University, 1991.

To put this paper and of course my thinking into a context it helps to know that my background includes work in a continuum of Industrial Design, Art and Craft. My professional practice includes the design and sometimes the making of furniture as well as paper engineering/sculpture, art education and design education
In terms of representation and lobby I serve on a number of boards and committees representing the crafts and design Industry,
This along with writing and lecturing represents a fairly catholic involvement with the making of object and human environment.

My interests lie in the exploration of object- [in my case furniture] as 'cultural artefact'. That is - object within the counter cultures of art, craft and design. What is particular to each of those areas, both claimed and actual and what is common to them in respect of the conception, manufacture and appreciation of object in our culture? By 'Culture' I mean the broad sociological, economic and for want of a better word, 'spiritual' frameworks of our existence.

I reiterate - 'explore', because I think we spend most of our lives trying to frame the questions, never mind articulating the answers.
Doubt, like error, is after all one of the expressions of our humanity. I have never been able to mask my doubts with 'faith' - perhaps that's why I become increasingly more cynical.

The place of art in the continuum.
Of course in looking at the role that the fine arts play in positioning object within our culture, the first issue that springs to mind is the enormous effort, the many years, even the lifetimes, that have been spent by twentieth century artists and their critical infrastructures de-objectifying art.

Edward Lucie-Smith dates the conscious effort to elevate art beyond the mundane well before modern times, "The pattern Rubens set in the seventeenth century was followed in the eighteenth by artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Royal Academy which Reynolds presided over, was a body which quite deliberately set out to give artists 'professional status' to make it clear that they were something more than mere tradesmen".

Even though we have now moved onto a post-modern era the critical and particularly the educational infrastructures of the fine arts are frequently peopled with representatives of at least two generations of adherents to the position illustrated by Peter Dormer's extraordinarily bold assertion that "Mystification and subversion we leave to artists and from them we demand insight and intelligence of a very rare order indeed".

Well as I said before I am becoming more cynical as I get older and perhaps that is part of the reason I find that proposition to be the most unmitigated piece of tripe any one has had the temerity to try and pass off on me. I have worked too long with and amongst artists/designers/craftspeople and with and amongst art students/design students/crafts students to allow any one part of the equation to claim the whole. Yes I have known and do know some extraordinarily intelligent artists. But on the whole they do not exist in any demonstrably different proportion to the incredibly average or even the downright stupid than in any other calling.

Even more difficult to swallow is the inference and often the bald statement that technique, in other words craft skills deny art. In a sense this gets to the heart of the matter of ‘object’ because it suggests that increase in art exists in direct proportion to decrease in object. Some artists or observers purport to be able to pinpoint the demarcation between craft [object] and art [idea] absolutely.
Now it seems to me that like many a theological argument, the inevitably protracted discourse relies heavily on the acceptance of an underlying article of faith, without which the argument collapses.

Let us accept that in order to make an artistic statement we make some mark on, or create some manipulation of, our environment.
Let us further accept, for the moment, that concept is paramount and that material and technique is vehicle. However, how can anyone expect me to believe that on the continuum from idea to image there exists an absolute, identifiable point on one side of which exists that "insight and intelligence of a very rare order" and on the other, material and technique has objectified that intelligence into mere structure? What intellectual dishonesty to identify that point as falling miraculously and conveniently at precisely that amount of technical expertise, which is currently fashionable in the fine arts.

Clearly in any one case we can have either, both or neither attributes present. Clearly whether artists like it or not, if they manipulate the environment they leave a mark which more often that not exists as object and therefore is guaranteed to impact on the rest of us as object, irrespective of whether a mannered avoidance of skill effects the quality of that impact. One could wish for as certain a guarantee of intellectual content.

The point in the context of this paper is to understand the potential for the fine arts to impact outside of the 'priestly' art classes and certainly outside of the art school 'seminaries', on the broader social and specifically the built environment. For all their potential, ideas are like sperm, if they are not successfully implanted they die.

The place of craft in the continuum.
Whatever craft is or is not no one denies it is object, even though we've been through all the silly stages of equating conceptual with non functional. To begin with, material brings with it a mixed history and mythology of association that often taps into ancient archetypes.
Timber, a material of which I use a good deal, elicits an immediate, often emotional and sometimes irrational response. Completely oblivious to the inherent insult and certainly not intending it to be, people frequently descend on a piece of my work declaring that point with which they are immediately impressed -"isn't the wood lovely?"
Similar responses can be expected for metal and precious stones and to a lesser degree to stone, all of which are consistently associated with both ancient and contemporary mythologies about human beings and their relationship to the environment - and I believe many of these responses to be valid. I do not however see the imperative in material as being sufficient unto itself. If we interfere, we must do so boldly and affirmatively, otherwise we can be well advised to leave nature to its own ends.

Skill, paradoxically can be admired and undervalued at the same time. When not dealing with other makers, who are a breed unto themselves, I find people are impressed with quality but don't have too many concerns about how that quality was achieved. The method is frequently outside their frame of reference in any case.

For example a friend of mine who is a metal worker/blacksmith makes repousse wind veins the price of which often shocks people until they are reassured that they contain real gold. In fact the gold leaf is worth about $20, yet people are more willing to credit that material value than they are the skills and experience that took twenty years to develop. This has implications for both the maker and the consumer.
The question is, have technology and mass production [i.e. the ready availability of an ever increasing array of sophisticated, complex, exciting and above all affordable products] leeched process of its mystique? Has the celebration of process in some crafts practice become at best a sentimental delusion and at worst a bogus quality?

Peter Dormer boldly states "the craft aesthetic is anti-technology, anti-science and anti-progress". In fairness this sounds like the dated view of a high modernist accepting uncritically [somewhat worrying for a critic] that there exists an uncrossable gulf between yesterday's technologies and today's high-tech aesthetic. The latter being the only honest expression of the economic empiricism underpinning the built environment. Again in fairness, the socio-political nature of the crafts revival over the last three decades has manifested itself at times as sentimental and sometimes even reactionary. However what I am most concerned with here is to explore the current potential for crafts practice to impact on the production and appreciation of object in an affirmative not an oppositional mode.

There is much to commend the position of the Commission for the Future. Peter ELLYARD, its Director puts it thus. "The three major bodies of human knowledge namely those relating to the arts, the sciences and the technologies are all needed for the production of products and services in a 'knowledge based' or 'first world ' economy.....Most creative Australian artists, scientists and technologists are denied the opportunities to participate in the economic mainstream....If we are to develop a 'brain base' economy in Australia we will need to use much more effectively the contribution of these creative people". I agree wholeheartedly in so far as we can identify a huge middle ground of small scale, limited run production that will allow many craftspeople to rationalize their particular emotional and aesthetic concerns in a way that has increasing relevance to the geographically and culturally discreet production models being demanded in a post-industrial environment.

In fact arts and industry, arts and architecture initiatives and Government sponsored programmes are proliferating at the moment.
As an individual producer I can attest to an increase in the number and scope of opportunities available to me, the current economic climate not withstanding. However there is a tendency to put the entire onus for change, for rapprochement, on the arts. Inherent in that is the assumption that business and industry have known what they are doing all along and we, the creative people, need to jump on board or be left behind.

The danger of course is to be swallowed up in the kind of economic rationalism that has been beavering on almost unchecked for a decade the results of which so far have been less than edifying. Do we leap from one declaration of faith to another?

A NOTE OF CAUTION: Business/industry in Australia has given us quite a few examples of a lack of creativity and foresight.
It must take a large part of the responsibility for the economic and social malaise in which we Australians find ourselves, - we went from the boring, 50's to the broke 90's.

With due respect to those who are longer term Australians than I, the torpor in which Australian society slumbered during those many years in which Donald Horne warned us that our lifestyle was based on being a "Lucky" rather than a deserving country gave way, from the 70's into the 80's, to a short sharp period of disastrous self-abuse.
Governments rooted in neo-colonial values, along with an often conservative, short sighted business community [aided by a rural rump which refused to recognize the inherent contradictions in calling for reduced government spending in the same breath as calling for increased rural subsidies] having lead us through a stultifying fog of anti-intellectualism for all those years, discovered international economics. Given their head in the electric eighties the financial and business communities hijacked the political debate and embraced economic rationalism with all the skills and social responsibility, of their squatocracy forebears. Indeed, 'babes in the woods', they were gobbled up and we are all left to foot the bill. It is to these people and their infrastructures towards which artists and craftspeople are being encouraged to direct their efforts.

I was asked after a recent lecture why I insisted on coupling design with 'artiness'. Surely asked the Director of a Western Australian TAFE College a good deal of 'real' design [substitute Engineering] might have nothing to do with 'artiness'. Frankly it's a moot point which branch of our culture needs to make the greater effort to enfranchise itself within a functioning whole. The arts have responded to being marginalized by marginalizing themselves further in the classic 'we didn't want to play anyway' manoeuvre. Yet one could hope that the anti-intellectual beer-baron captains of our industries might be miraculously made over into the image of some of the cultured, well-rounded industrialists of Europe.

Another point on the issue of the place of creative people in the larger social and economic equation is that western artists have been conditioned into a culture of the individual.
In an I/me/now culture we are more I/me/now than most.
It may well be to satisfy that particular egocentric need that many artists
work in areas predicated on a sometimes tortuous rate of differentiation and change. This begs the question as to how people of this disposition will be able to impact on industries in which the anonymity of part players is more often the norm.
Perhaps the superstar status of some designers is in itself a manifestation of the system adjusting to that phenomenon.

The place of design in the continuum.
Where I started in my career and where I expect, in one way or another to finish. The word Design has surpassed Craft in its ability to mutate and refer to an ever increasing variety of phenomena.
In one sense it is a problem solving method, which may like learning and living, having and raising children be a natural and innate ability. Organizing a shelf, a meal or an appointment may all be aspects of design. In another it is a counter culture, with a 'look' and like most counter cultures it can proscribe language, behaviour, dress and at times, an inflexible aesthetic.
In Melbourne for example dress black, the designer uniform, has become known as Fitzroy beige alluding both to an ideologically acceptable suburb and the ubiquity of its use.

Similarly ubiquitous and a good deal more serious, is the heritage of 70 years of high Modernism resulting in a particularly vacuous aspect of minimalism, which at times confuses simplicity with simple mindedness.
Using dieting as a parallel, you can only shed so much fat before you change from becoming more and more healthy to being dead. In Architecture, the 'living machines' into which early modernism's concerns with people and values degenerated have now given way to the beginnings of a Post Modern or at least 'after modern' reconciliation between structure, people and the culture in which they exist.

As Marshall Berman sees it, "our desperate allegiances to ethnic, national, class and sexual groups which we hope will give us a firm 'identity' ...", as opposed to "...the internationalization of everyday life - of our clothes and household goods, our books and music, our ideas and fantasies.....", is evidence of our need for a new modernism.
Be that as it may, whether we subscribe to New Modernism, Post Modernism or any other model, it at the very least points out that the absolutism of international formulas have mislead us into yet another vexed attempt to locate the 'Holy Grail'. It is of course, part of the human condition that we are cursed to continually try to do so, within the sociological and historical framework of the pendulum swing.
It seems as if, for the moment at least, it's swinging to the 'people first' end of the arc.

I am reminded of the title to an exhibition of graphic design in Germany: Design ist Kunst die sich Nuetzlich macht - Design is art that makes itself useful. Apart from the disquieting suggestion that in the widest sense, there should be any art, which does otherwise, this is a neat turn of phrase.

Another face of design has seen it become somewhat of a wonder word, being loaded with some real and some imaginary expectations with regard to its ability to halt the decline of production in some countries, or even more unrealistically, to facilitate a belated development into a production based economy in Australia.

Francois BURKHARDT can find little evidence that product design has followed architecture into Post Modernism. " Indeed, design today is in difficulties and is facing a crisis just because of this attachment to the Modern Movement, and because there has been no ideological replacement for it. Modernist doctrines are hardly tenable these days; design appears ideologically out of step, tied to the past when functionalism was the order of the day". One of the damaging aspects of mainstream design, at least that sector of it to which Burkhardt's comments fairly apply, is that the very internationalism which was to have been such a workable formula for arriving at the big answers to the big questions, approves only of designers in its own image.

The perpetrators of that 'culture' within Australia and that includes the magazines that contain 'the word' as it were, approve mainly of work from Europe, in respect of furniture, particularly Milan, or of work at the very least in the 'Euro-chic' image.

Interesting also, in respect of the continuum between various branches of our creative professions, is that some of the products of early modernism, designed for and produced by machines for large scale if not mass consumption have assumed a certain 'specialness' that makes them sought after, even in reproduction. Similarly it is no accident, particularly in respect of marketing expertise [and budgets] brought to bear, that designers such as Phillippe Starck successfully aspire to superstar status with a world following and representation in public collections. Design is taking on some traditional 'Art' world methods.

The challenge for us in Australia, is to link the various aspects of mainstream design with the whole continuum of creative professions so as to be able to walk that fine line between a mature internationality [I refer here to geography not style] and the specific contributions we can make to, as well as the benefits we can gain from, that internationality.

Theory = practice or practice = theory
The question of the role of theory, that is, does theory inform practice or does practice inform theory, is in itself worthy of a doctoral study never mind the theories themselves.

It is claimed by some that contemporary French theory, currently
Postmodern theory, has dominated discourse on the fine arts and we can agree at the very least that it is a primary platform in the 'arts as higher philosophy' school. It is perhaps in recognizing that fact that the crafts and design worlds are currently trying so hard to develop their own critical vocabularies. This is in one sense the next logical stage in the evolution of a movement and in another a conscious mannerism to allow them to lay claim to some of the philosophical high ground seen to be enjoyed by the fine arts. In respect of the crafts, the wholesale dipping into fine arts terminology was what lead us to the ludicrous situation of making critical and curatorial distinctions between idea and function. I have been asked on occasion whether a particular work is conceptual or functional. Talk about the tyranny of language.

Labeling is a classic fascist control mechanism and it is both fascinating and disturbing to have so many organizational functionaries become so [albeit innocently] powerful. It may well be in the rejection of that authority that so many practitioners make the jump from anti-authoritarianism to anti-intellectualism. For craftspeople, the rejection of theory as an informing frame of reference innocently becomes a capitulation to relegation to a lower point in the 'hierarchy' of creative pursuits. As DORMER says, "...what is and what is not "Art" is decided by the art world..."

Design similarly is evolving a discourse beyond economic rationale, although no one suggests it should or can be divorced from it. A good deal is now being written, albeit belatedly, about the place of design after modernism and its relationship to art, architecture and particularly to the cross over areas with other object based practices such as the crafts. As with all attempts to codify the movement from intent to practice we begin to see in design writing, the evolution of a rich urban mythology.

Even theorists can be impatient with theory that remains divorced from practice. Jenni Zimmer asks, "The theory is in place, but will the 90's apply it? A section of the crafts population is eager, but many artists remain skeptical, architects seem insufficiently committed and industry is proving too slow too respond. And the subject is just about talked out. Opportunities for action must be accelerated or the theory may remain marginal and the game will be lost". So the links between theory and action need to be made. Without wishing to exacerbate an anti- intellectual conservatism, we need to arrive at the object.

Much of what designers and makers do stems from immediate responses to opportunity or lack of opportunity.
There is a pragmatic/reactive component to practice, born of an honest practicality but which does not necessarily deny concern with images and contexts of meaning. What we do springs from a lifetime store of ideas and values, which are all part of theory. Few of us chart a mannered path from Proust to pot. Yet how diminished is the latter without some appreciation of the former.

According to Nola ANDERSON "... the thing we consider least, if at all, in our theory of art is the artist, and the last thing an artist considers in the moments of creating, is the theory".
With deliberate irony she hints at and questions the idea of the conscious, centralized, all pervading super-theory, resulting in linear enactment. It reminds us of the pressures to develop concepts that have current ideological acceptability, around the weighty issues that are fashionable for the moment and will be acceptable to the 'issues mafia'.

The [human] community.

Most of us are actually concerned with a range of issues and concepts; sometimes humble yet particular to our circumstances, sometimes broad and widely encompassing. Those of us who design and make, explore the relationship between structure as symbol/statement, structure as process and structure as commodity. In the former, lies the potential for object, both domestic and public, to act as markers or signposts of our personal space, both physical and intellectual, against the larger backdrop of the impersonal - and as an extension of that, the post modern revival of concern with decoration, whether eclectic or not, also addresses the potential for individuals to personalize object and structure in what can be, and frequently has been, an alienating urban environment.

In structure as commodity we have the chance to have creative thinking impact on the wealth generating part of our community. Despite the alienation between these sectors for which, for some reason, Anglo-saxon societies are particularly notable. We exist in a peculiar juncture in our national history where lost opportunity for Industrial development may give way to new opportunity in the post-industrial age.

As John THACKARA notes in a discussion of the general perception of design, " the 'opening to art' in design is significant because it represents the first signs that the super- rationalistic, anti-nature, mechanistic world view of planners and designers is beginning to soften".

Therein lies the answer to DORMER'S charge that craft is basically anti- technology, a concept based on the controlling principle of dividing 'them' from 'us'. Just as THACKARA points out that some designers "...remain utopian believers in the idea that technology is necessarily a good thing on its own account", we can find numerous examples of representatives of the various aspects of our creative culture becoming so imbued with the forms and aesthetics of their relative disciplines as to allow them to become ends in themselves.

So getting back to that point about designers and makers being affirmative rather than oppositional, it involves, amongst other things the further development, appreciation and promotion of the concept of value in intellectual property being in parenthesis to object.
It involves an appreciation of cultural, and again for want of a better term, spiritual power of object and even material to make metaphorical statement - and of our obligations to extend that potential by putting ourselves and our creative skills firmly into the equation.

I am not unaware of the danger of deifying structure in the attempt to empower it - but I do believe whole-heartedly in the potential for the things we make, for the environment we build to be a celebration of living. Of theatre, of sex, of awe, of wonder and of passion - and yes, to be realistic and fair, we also voice our doubts, our fears, our baser motives of greed and egocentricity.

The coin, as do all those of our choosing, has two sides.