The Australia Council and Design: A Serious Lacuna
(published in Overland, 172, Spring, 2003
© Donald Richardson, 2003
The recent report of the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry
- which was conducted during 2002 - reveals a serious deficiency
in the conceptual structure of the visual sector of the Australia
Council. In short, this is that there is no board or committee
covering design.
This deficiency was both revealed in many submissions and also
alluded to in the report itself, most significantly on pages
30-31 (28-30 in the on-line version). Although the inquiry specifically
excluded design - its scope was 'the visual arts and craft' -
many contributors talked a lot about design, and the report itself
mentions the term on nearly every page!
To practitioners, there is nothing surprising about this, but
the report clearly errs in that it makes no attempt to discuss
or explain the situation. It merely notes that - in nearly every
educational institution in the country - craft has, in fact,
actually been replaced by design. More significantly, it quotes
a number of submissions which reveal that there is general confusion
about what craft actually is. And it blandly states that 'craft
practitioners themselves are increasingly insisting on being
recognized as designers....'
Clearly there is a problem here, yet all this is reported with
a straight face - as if it signifies nothing. Surely, it should
have generated a major recommendation to the effect that the
Australia Council (whose categorization and terminology the inquiry
used) should redress this serious lacuna in its conceptual structure.
But, it didn't!
The inquiry was sponsored by the Department of Communications,
Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), not by the Australia
Council, and just what the connection is between the two has
not been made public. But no doubt DCITA sought the Council's
advice on terminology. And the report is probably protecting
the Council by claiming that substantive conceptual issues, such
as the connection, confusion or difference between craft and
design are mere matters of 'nomenclature' (page 30; pages 28-29
in the on-line version).
But this is about more than names. Craft and design - as well
as art - are real, existing, distinguishable and interconnected
entities in the visual world, and the report is letting us down
by not recommending the rationalization of all three into
the Council's conceptual structure. Clearly submissions to the
inquiry indicate that there is a need for this to happen.
In the past, design had a place in the Australia Council, but
it quietly slipped out of sight as long as a decade ago! This
seems to have been at least in part due to confusion - or, perhaps,
confrontation - with craft. Reviewing the following history,
one feels the clandestine clash of powerful egos with vested
interests, made more complex by poor conceptualization and inadequate
use of language (none of which - one has to admit - is uncommon
in the visual sector). But one is unable to be sure because,
in this arcane system, none of the changes were ever discussed
publicly and none of the protagonists ever identified. The system
has been entirely closed - for whatever reason. It is high time
that it be opened.
Design and the Australia Council
When the Australia Council was set up in 1970, design was
not included, but this was objected to by some leading architects
who insisted that architecture is as much art as painting is.
Consequently, the Architecture and Design Committee was formed.
This became the Design Arts Board in 1984, alongside the two
separate Visual Arts and Crafts Boards. Three years later, art
and craft were amalgamated into the Visual Arts and Crafts Board,
and the Design Board was established independent of it. In 1988,
this board became a committee again, but with the avowed intention
'to concentrate on the arts-related aspects of design' - whatever
that meant!
However, only one year later - in 1989, all three boards were
telescoped into the one: 'Visual Arts/Craft and Design'. The
architects must have been unhappy with this arrangement because
they withdrew from the Council entirely and formed their own
Design Academy. But this entity also disappeared from the radar
screen after a short while.....
One can only surmise and speculate about the reasons for these
changes in nomenclature because none seem to have ever been justified
or discussed publicly. Perhaps they track the Council's gradually
maturing conceptualization of the field. Perhaps they are the
result of the bureaucracy of the Council having been largely
composed of well-meaning amateurs, rather than practitioners.
But one unsatisfactory aspect of it is the entire disappearance
of design from the Council's visual sector from about 1989.
Definitional Problems
It is a commonplace that conceptualization within the visual
sector is a total mess in the West (the problem is not so acute
in other cultures), but it behoves a national body like the Australia
Council to sort it out, rather than avoiding it or denying it.
That it has patently failed to do so is a national scandal.
This mess has developed over a century or so due to the fact
that leading theorists, in defining such entities as art
or architecture, have often been less than helpful. Thus,
for example, Nikolaus Pevsner delivered the dictum: 'a bicycle-shed
is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture'.
(But, isn't even the greatest piece of architecture a building?)
And Herbert Read, in a statement that was intended to be revelatory
(!) declared that pottery is the highest form of art.
But the most confusing pronouncement is E H Gombrich's 'there
really is no such thing as Art; there are only artists.' (So
- what do artists make if it is not art? And what are
all those things in art galleries?) Unfortunately, people have
taken Gombrich's ridiculously illogical maxim as an excuse not
to define art (if it doesn't exist, isn't it futile to
define it?).
'Definitions' like these have only confused the issues. And none
of them is any guide to understanding - or what we should call
- what is excluded from their definitions - What is not-art?
What is not-architecture? What else is there in art other than
pottery?
Art, Craft and Design
We have no way of knowing what those who made submissions
to the inquiry meant when they used the terms 'art', 'craft'
or 'design' - although they obviously believed that they were
naming categories that actually exist - because there is still
no agreed definition of any of them.
I cannot understand why people find the field so difficult to
categorize. If we take a good, clear, logical, look - without
prejudice, and leaving aside the legacy of Pevsner, Read, Gombrich
et al - at the entire universe of things humans make,
we find they fall easily and logically into the functional
or the non-functional. 'Functional' is a term that has
been used for many years by designers and design theorists. No
dictionary definition of the term covers adequately its usage
in this theory, but it is usually used to indicate a constructed
entity that is inherently intended to be instrumental to human
survival or well-being. Thus, it covers buildings, machines,
utensils, clothing, communications, advertising, entertainment,
traffic systems etc etc.
It is generally agreed that people who create these things 'design'
them and that these people are, therefore, designers. Even
with identical mass-produced things, like cars or coffee-cups,
a designer created the prototype from which all the clones derive.
It is usually easy to decide whether a made object is intended
to be functional or not; in fact, this category is so easily
defined that one really wonders what the problem is with the
Australia Council excluding design from its structure. Common
parlance speaks of 'house design', 'furniture design', 'product
design', 'environmental design', 'industrial design' etc etc.
Most of the things humans make, in fact, are functional and -
therefore, in principle - belong in the category design.
It is an indispensable category and the Australia Council has
diminished its own status and authority by ignoring it.
As to the non-functional, this is largely confined to pictures
and sculptures in their many and various forms: things that are
created entirely for aesthetic reasons - things that we might
call 'beautiful' or that arouse in us some other emotion. This
is not to say that these things have no - or negative - instrumental
value, but that this is not their primary reason for existence.
Such things are usually termed art and the people who
make them artists.
So - where does craft come in? As submissions to the inquiry
indicated, not nearly so much these days as it did. The problem
is embodied in the history of the usage of the term. Ever
since the Arts and Crafts Movement of the nineteenth century,
craft has been juxtaposed to art, and this duality
was revived in the post-World War II Crafts Movement. This was
necessitated to redress the blatant conservatism and elitism
of the afficionados of high art. There was a need to recognize
the inherent human worth - and, often, the beauty - of every-day
manufactured or crafted things. Thus, the Crafts Movement embraced
- and gave status to - many things which the arcane art curatoria
ignored: pottery, fabrics, fashion, jewellery - even sculpture
in media other than bronze and marble and painting in media other
than oils and watercolours. In those days, architecture had its
own recognized status. It was in this cultural milieu that the
Australia Council was formed.
Clearly there was considerable overlap - and confusion - between
craft and design in all of this, and the Australia Council has
erred greatly in never defining the boundaries of, and the interactions
between, the two. This is a great shame and has caused many practitioners
immense anguish over the years. But surely, as in the case of
the mass-produced motor-car, there is a clearly-distinguishable
difference between the person or persons who designed
the prototype and those who clone the vehicle by the relatively
uncreative use of skills. In the past, these latter have been
referred to as 'tradespeople', 'craftspeople' or 'artisans',
but now we usually call them 'workers'. They are those who use
skills in relatively uncreative ways to realize the things designers
have designed. Thus, skill is the true essence of craft.
It is time to realize that the Crafts Movement has served its
purpose in having us recognize the value of functional things
as equal to - through different from - works of art, but that
the world has moved on. What we value most in a ceramic vessel
by a Harold Hughan or jewellery by a Darani Lewers is the creativeness
of their design. The skill of manufacture can be performed
by artisans or machines - but its originality is that of a designer.
Designer-makers, of course, execute their concepts themselves.
And, of course, those who use pottery or metal materials and
techniques to create non-functional things are artists.
None of this is mere theory. It describes the world as it really
is, and if this system of designation were adopted by the Australia
Council, every practitioner of every type would not only be included
but would also be honoured with an appropriate and valid term.
Some Complications.....
There would remain some minor problems, which would have
to be overcome by education (but this is par for the course:
it only requires intelligent leadership to institute). For one
thing, 'art' is commonly used in popular parlance as an honorific
rather than to designate a category of human activity. (This
is ironic, given that our ocker culture heaps scorn on art per
se!) If anything made by humans achieves excellence - be
it brain surgery, sport, politics, accounting or mathematics
(actually, anything but art itself) - it is 'art'. This probably
derives from a passé definition of art as 'skill'. We
even call a major building like the Sydney Opera House 'art',
although it clearly is functional - and, therefore, design.
The architects who, in the 1970s, insisted that architecture
is 'art' were, of course, in error. Perhaps they wished to accrue
some of the intellectual status of art (and the prospect of government
funding, maybe?) to their own profession. But, more probably,
they were unhappy that architecture/design had been excluded
from the honorific of 'art'. However, design has its own
cachet, even though the term is rarely, if ever, used as an honorific.
The same dilemma characterizes our dealing with Aboriginal, or
indigenous, practice. Although many people with vested interests
refuse to acknowledge it, the unspoilt Aboriginal culture had
no concept of 'art' as it is understood in the modern West. All
individuals learned the traditional forms of painting and of
making functional things as they progressed into adulthood -
and were forbidden to use these forms divergenly or creatively,
often under threat of punishment. It is no denigration to admit
this. Aboriginal culture was different from the Western in this
respect, as in many others. In fact, it is yet another example
of cultural hegemony to try to subsume traditional Aboriginal
work into the western concept of 'art'. This does not apply,
of course, to Aboriginal practice which adopts 'western' creativeness
in areas where it is free to do so.
The contemporary western concept of art as being untrammeled,
individual self-expression has changed the way we must view ancient
traditional cultures in the West also. Modernism has changed
things to the extent that most works made before the nineteenth
century can no longer be called 'art' in the sense in which the
term is used today. We have to maintain a valid sense of history
in all these matters.
The term design, too has its complications. In Renaissance
Italy, it meant 'drawing' of any sort, but this meaning has not
survived to today. However, it is commonly used to mean the composition
of any work of art, craft or design. The confusion generated
by this usage, too, has to be tackled by remedial education.
Finally, it has to be emphasized that the categories art, craft
and design as delineated here are not confining and mutually
exclusive. As it was often put to the inquiry, many practitioners
today use notionally functional forms and craft skills to create
works of art: pottery and glass containers which were never intended
to contain anything, fabric creations which are impossible to
wear, jewellery that would maim any wearer. This is a current
fascination, but it does nothing to invalidate the distinctions
between the categories; in fact, it draws our attention to -
and creatively comments upon - their validity.
A historical validation of this flexibility and inclusivity is
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. Although usually treated
as art (which the pictures - considered in themselves
- are), it is also a great work of design (Michelanglo
had to follow what we today would call a design-brief which covered
its contents; but, also, it had to be designed to fit - and to
fit in with - the structure of the ceiling), and that it is a
master work of craft was proven by its recent cleaning.
Categorizing this great work in this way makes it possible for
us to appreciate its various and complex interactions more intelligently.
Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles is another case worth discussing
within the suggested categorization. Those who objected to our
paying so much for it felt vindicated when it was discovered
that its paint was falling off. But the picture was bought for
its art value, not its craft, and the peeling paint
was stuck back on by craftspeople trained in the skill
of restoring works of art.
Thus, the suggested designation of art and design
as creative pursuits (the latter only dealing in the functional)
and craft relating to the relatively un-creative use of
skill is not a theory, or even just the present writer's opinion,
but a statement of objective fact. It describes the real world
as it is. Those practitioners who resist categorization in this
way have to realize that they already are categorized by their
practice, whether they recognize and admit it or not.
The Department of Communications, Information Technology and
the Arts has conducted an inquiry into the visual field using
Australia Council terminology and conceptualization and the report
clearly shows that this is inadequate and out of date. It is
now incumbent on the Council to recognize this and take the initiative
to lead the visual sector out of the mess it is currently in.
It is far from an impossible task, but it does require dedication,
intelligence and integrity.
If it does not tackle it, we will need an inquiry into the Australia
Council itself.
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