Lueckenhausen, H, The Crafts Council of Australia - Challenge and Opportunity
Craft West, Western Australia

It's been less than six years since I was 'absorbed' into the Crafts Council fraternity, chronologically a relatively recent portion of my working life. From a background in design practice and education, via a body of craft-based work and the contacts that I made through doing that work, I came to be associated with the crafts movement at a critical watershed.

The use of the word 'movement' hints in large part at one of the issues central to the 'whither the crafts' dialogue of the moment.
It's one of life's little ironies that service on arts boards places one on a learning curve so steep that one comes to terms with most of the subtleties, challenges and opportunities of the job at approximately the same moment that one's term of office (and possibly one's capacity to dedicate the necessary energy) ends. In respect of the Crafts Council of Australia (CCA), that problem was addressed to some extent through Marion Marshall and myself being able to forge a working partnership over the period of our respective offices. Nonetheless it is only now, with the benefit of hindsight (and through needing to clarify both a history of, and a projection for crafts practice) that I am able to articulate what I see to be the significant difference between the crafts movement of the sixties and seventies and the development of an industry today.

I'm frankly not too concerned with the discomfort that the word 'industry' gives some people. The negative images of mass production and the 'industrial alienation' that were appropriated from early responses to the Industrial Revolution and reaffirmed within the socio-political reaction of the 1960s are no longer pertinent. There are some questions to be asked about the various meanings of the word 'industry' and whether the considerable range of models of crafts practice (represented by a parallel range of meanings of the word craft - an issue that has overly exercised our minds) can be heralded under one banner. I would say that contemporary crafts practice is an area of endeavour that admirably suits the Post-Modern concept of a multi-faceted reality. The range of crafts practice which engages issues of production and marketing of goods (the implications of investing objects with meaning within our culture notwithstanding) is significant enough to be recognized as an industry. Similarly the concerns of craftspeople with engaging contemporary culture, with engaging technology and all the implications of impacting on the Australian economy are no longer being met by a sentimental, revisionary outlook.

This has immediate implications for the Crafts Council. The system of state and national councils, which in turn became part of an international (World Crafts Council - WCC) system, has developed into an organizational framework not equaled in any area of the arts to this day. The benefits of this network have been legion and the runs are clearly on the board. Nonetheless the imperatives are changing and the realities of a broad and changing mix of crafts associated organizations, or departments thereof, need to be separated from the various articles of faith about sustaining the 'movement' through a vertically articulated and sacrosanct 'network'. The type, number and relative effectiveness of organizations working on some kind of crafts delivery programs has changed (and will continue to change) and the network needs to be catholic enough to be deserving of the name.

Within the context of national deliberations on the future of the crafts, including reviews by the Visual Art Crafts Board (VACB) and various state ministries, the CCA has dedicated the first of what is intended to be a series of periodic conferences to looking at issues identified through a survey of crafts professionals. The essence of a substantive part of those issues is contained in the titles for the three keynote addresses: Australian Culture and Creative Challenge, Fashioning the Future and Intellectual Property and Hard Currency. Cooperation between the CCA, the VACB, the Crafts Council of Western Australia, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, most state ministries and the Jewelers and Metal smiths Group of Australia bodes well for the strategic partnership concept.

The WCC head office is in serious danger of being overtaken by the growing strength and focus of the regions. In our case that is the Asian Zone, currently headed up in Pakistan and soon, it appears, to be moved to Iran for a term. This potential waning is, in my opinion, the result of the WCC finding it too difficult to plot common ground between the varying national manifestations of crafts practice and between the concerns of the relevant crafts bodies from country to country and region to region. Assuming the regions do become the prime foci for world crafts, it will be because the WCC will have failed to identify a discrete sphere of influence that justifies its existence and in which it can make a substantial contribution.

Nationally, we have a more workable delineation between those areas, which have state implications, and those that have national and international implications. They are not and cannot be entirely separable but they do offer us a framework within which to direct scant and diminishing resources.

The concerns and programs of the state Crafts Councils vary considerably, as does the perception of each as to its role within the national context. When I became a member of the Board of the Crafts Council of Victoria the push was on to align the programs of the Council with crafts professionals and to draw away from the more general concerns of community crafts (for want of a better term). That push, via the short lived 'Professional Craftspeople's Association', led to a new statement of purpose for all crafts councils that dealt with the needs of the 'professional crafts industry'. The extent to which that has become the operating principle of the states is variable and at times has been tempered with political and operational pragmatism. So it aught.

The CCA evolved (and continues to evolve) a program that dealt with the issues of crafts practice overall, with its economic, cultural, educational, governmental and diplomatic implications for Australia both nationally and internationally. In response to these imperatives the constitution was changed to allow a smaller policy board with invited specialists to take on some of the functions of a management committee. The process of making the work of the CCA operationally and constitutionally discreet has not been without its problems. The Board, without a constituency of individuals, draws from a membership of state councils, via the Electoral College made up of three members of each. This has left us with some ambiguity in that some state councils have assumed that their responsibility for electing the board transfers into the right of directing it. It may well be that we will need to explore further constitutional changes. Whatever happens we cannot allow the CCA to be sidetracked into becoming the conduit for particular agendas or for parochial concerns to be realized. Every member of the Board understands his/her prime responsibility to the bigger picture of Australian professional crafts practice. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Australia maintains a significant position in the Asian zone of the WCC, the difficulties of huge cultural differences notwithstanding. Marion Marshall is a Deputy Vice President and I have been secretary for the meetings in Isfahan and Kyoto. While the immediate effects may be more diplomatic than practical, which is one of the reasons why the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has been sponsoring our attendance, we have managed to utilize our contacts overseas, most recently in Japan, to further our export initiatives. The plan to show Australian crafts in the prestigious Matsuya department store in Tokyo owes part of its success (so far) to the WCC contacts that enabled Jane Burn's delegation to be so successful early this year. The DFAT, as a further example of the opportunities for cooperative endeavour, have funded me to do some ad hoc cultural liaison work in Thailand Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam. I explored potential links with ministries and departments of trade and culture, art schools, universities and individuals. Hopefully we can exploit the potential for highlighting Australian crafts in the infrastructures of countries in the corner of the world to which we now see ourselves belonging.

A huge window of opportunity has been prised open in the establishment of a joint export committee with no small thanks being due to to Jane Burns and the CCA (which chairs it). This might well represent one of the quantum leaps of my time in the Council, in that the potential for crafts as an export commodity is coming to be recognized by the organizations willing to be represented on (and more importantly, put their time and money behind the work of) the committee. These include the VACB, DFAT, the Department of Industry Technology and Commerce (DITAC), the National Industry Extension Service (NIES), the Academy of Design, the Department of Art Sport the Environment Tourism and Territories (DASETT) and Austrade.
In September the CCA and the VACB will take a number of galleries to the Chicago International New Art Forms Exposition (CINAFE) for the second time and a number of cultural events in Italy, Latin America, and France are being negotiated.

It's a truism that one can't export from a weak base and the implications for policy and program development for the CCA include the maintenance of a system of national intelligence on crafts development and delivery. The very real potential for major lines of support for Australian crafts coming through DITAC for example puts us into a whole new ballgame. The funding and infrastructure support that could flow from bringing on side the kind of people who in the past have never understood the part creative endeavour can play in economics is likely to make support from the Arts gift pale by comparison. That brings us back to the point about fearing the 'industry' image. Clearly the challenge (and I believe this has been central to CCA thinking) is to forge links between cultural and economic concerns, not swap allegiance from one to the other. The work the CCA has been doing to represent crafts people’s concerns in the development of a Commonwealth policy for the arts has been based on that informing principle.

There is such a fine line between ending and beginning. Like most of my predecessors I was absorbed into a continuum and it is difficult at this proximity to know what has been given and what has been taken. I am the last in a long line of presidents to have worked with Jane Burns, the unmatchable personal commitment of whom cannot be separated from the whole rich history of the CCA. Being involved at this level is like an initiation. There is no leaving. There is no going back.