Grace Cochrane
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia

The role of the real

These efforts could perhaps be described as a ‘re-branding’ to ensure a continuing ideological as well as economic place in people’s minds and in the marketplace. The American Crafts Museum opted for ‘Museum of Arts and Design’, and curator David Revere McFadden explains that he sees the crafts as an approach to making embedded between those areas (McFadden 2003). Peter Hughes in Tasmania, Australia, is one who argues that the crafts can’t be ghettoised between the two; that they have a distinct set of practices (Peter Hughes 2004). In a recent issue of the Sydney Morning Herald  newspaper a page providing instant answers to topical issues includes a small column: ‘FYI: a beginners guide to the modern world’. This time it’s a guide to ‘Cool craft’ and it has taken its message directly from the press release issued for the Collect fair in London in February 2004, that is: craft is the new art, the new collectable, celebrities want it so why not you? (Tolhurst, 2004). It’s an interesting angle for this newspaper to pick up, I think, because while we have generations of mature practitioners making exemplary one-off and limited series works who would call themselves artists as much as craftspeople – and who have been doing it for some time for a substantial collectors’ market, so it’s hardly new – the market trend in recent years for us, has been to make a link with design rather than art.

The quality of one-off contemporary works coming from crafts traditions in Australia and New Zealand is, I believe, at an all-time high. We have several generations of exemplary practice practising now and the work gets better and better. But there has been a quite distinct shift in the language of the marketplace, if not necessarily in practice, from ‘craft-art’ to ‘craft-design’, reinforced by newspapers and journals targeting specific consumer groups, and also by galleries and museums responding to pressure to expand audiences. A strength of this shift is that well-designed objects are valued for their functions in everyday life, and writers like Sir Christopher Frayling in London and Paul Greenhalgh in Nova Scotia see this as the most realistic way to go (Frayling, Greenhalgh, in Crafts, 2003).

One of the characteristics of this shift is the strong government support for design in some Australian states, especially Queensland’s Creative Industries program and also the Victorian Design Initiative, both of which see design as a way of boosting manufacturing industry. As a result of the special Creative Industries project in the UK, and for the same reasons, we have seen a sequence of British design exhibitions coming our way, supported by designers, educators, curators and critics. Design is competitive between institutions at this level, and ‘design’ is the buzzword in this context.

At the same time, despite the fact that ‘design’ as we understand it today, is a contemporary term for both a process of working something out and a kind of product made for a client, there are pressures in some places to use it to identify all forms of production, including what have in the past been known as decorative arts or applied arts – and the crafts. What popular perception through all the lifestyle magazines calls ‘design’ is part of what we in museums do, for example, but it doesn’t describe all of what is represented in our collection. We don’t have an adequate coverall term for the broad field. In this context the handmade sometimes gets lost in the argument.