Craft Australia Research Centre
presents the forum paper, How to change the world without making too much noise, delivered by Kevin Murray as part of the Interpreting Contemporary Craft forum held in association with Transformation: the language of craft conference held at the National Gallery of Australia in November, 2005. Kevin Murray is Director of Craft Victoria, a Melbourne-based organisation that promotes contemporary craft and is the Director of the South Project, a major five-year scheme to build a cultural highway linking countries of the south. Murray has curated a number of ntational exhibitions and was awarded a VACB Writing Fellowship in 1996. His recent book Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious (Thames & Hudson, 2005) describes the phenomenon of 'poor craft'. He is curating Common Goods: Cultures Meet through Craft for the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in 2006. His PhD was in the field of narrative psychology.

In reflecting on the interpretation of craft, I'd like to consider the problem of saying something about a field that is increasingly defined by its innovation and diversity. For Thames & Hudson, I'd been commissioned to write about a number of emerging craft practitioners. In striking on a theme, it seemed that the use of found materials was broad enough to encompass quite a range of makers from different media and regions.

The initial task of interpretation was to define a series of categories by which the diversity of practices could be represented. Six categories were struck: Gatherers use material from nature, such as the Blackstone artist Kantjupayi Benson, who makes fantastic figures out of desert grasses. Fossickers draw on materials around them, such as Paull McKee who invokes the folk craft of the wagga blanket. Gleaners like Nicole Lister find a new use for what gets left behind such as packaging. Alchemists transform materials such as Stephen Gallagher's use of the pinking technique on plastic bags. Dissectors like Tiffany Parbs enact violence on their material. And liberators seek life beyond the gallery, such as Honor Freeman's porcelain power points that she puts on the outside of buildings.

Like most categories, these words form clusters that help pace the flow of information but are of limited use in analysing the situation. So where is the idea? What is the broad argument at play in their work? What can we make of this phenomenon sweeping Australian craft and beyond?

At these moments, one turns to the past.

The use of found materials resonates particularly with art movements in the 1960s. In the early 60s, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski established 'poor theatre' as a rejection of costume drama for the raw energy of the actor. Inspired by 'poor theatre', the movement of 'poor art'-Arte Povera-emerged in Italy to take art onto the street. 'Poor craft' in Australia, and elsewhere, shares a similar Puritan energy-a return to the fundamentals of one's art by using merely what's immediately at hand.

There certainly seems similarity of theme between these poor cousins, craft, art and theatre. But the way they manifest these themes is radically different. And here's the problem.

Unlike Arte Povera, we are not dealing with a 'poor craft' movement as such. These makers are not in communication with each other, there is no manifesto, there is no shared story. Each seems to be seeking a personal rather than political engagement with craft.

To go further back to more familiar territory, there's certainly nothing organised at play here like the Arts & Crafts movement of the nineteenth century, with its dedicated societies and guilds.

Perhaps this is the nature of our time.

Do we want another movement? We all seem perfectly aware of the major problems facing us at the moment. Our lifestyle is unsustainable. Record trade deficits, greenhouse gases, skills shortages, Asian sweatshops, overpopulation, decline of local culture-everyone knows that the world is out of kilter and needs to change tack.

The problems are so immense, what can one person do to change things? Political action seems quite abstract. Al Qaeda has hijacked the hope of revolutionary change as a mad fundamentalist obsession.

In these times, political action takes quite different forms. We no longer tune in, we download. We no longer chant slogans, we blog. We no longer march together, we text.

The internet is currently blossoming with websites for people to share the fruits of resistance.

An example is the website Flickr, one of many services for placing private images into the public domain. It's up to users to set up particular interest groups. One recent example was called 'eye hand', where you could submit a photograph as self portrait, alongside of which was a hand-drawn version. It's a very modest initiative that gives participants a sense of contributing to a common project. The involvement of the hand enables a sense of personal expression not otherwise found with purely digital images. The are hundreds of these online projects like Mexican waves rippling through the Internet.

Change seems to be something that happens at a personal level. The slow food movement, for instance, advocates an alternative to global capitalism based on what we eat.

In craft, the use of found materials provides makers with a cheap creative challenge while circumventing the world of brands.

There is room for criticism. From a historical perspective, these forms of protest look particularly insignificant. How can you compare the storming of the Bastille to the purchase of organically farmed olive oil?

To pose the question In the classic Australian vernacular, are we looking at a Clayton's revolution, something which has the mere taste of change without the intoxication of ideology? Or, to use a phrase recently coined, is this a 'Latham revolution', the choice of tangible community action rather than the evil of public life?

We should certainly maintain a critical eye. In the cultural cycle, revolutionary moments quickly become part of the fashion cycle. We have to discern the genuine from the affected, or maybe the genuinely affected from the imitative.

Tanya Harrod calls craft a 'barometer of our current anxieties'. One interesting reading of this barometer was an online survey of Craft Almanac readers. Their responses were most positive about the state of craft, but perhaps one might suspect that. However, the open ended comments reflected an especially intense commitment to craft. One line in particular summed it up-'I love being part of a quiet revolution.'

Yes, it does seem like a quiet revolution that we are witnessing in craft, which is shared with developments in design and even fashion. Increasingly, we are seeing makers attempting to circumvent the trap of commodification, where meaning is pre-prepared, to give rather than receive.

There is a phrase in Maori, ahi kaa roa, to keep the tribal fires burning in order to maintain one's claim on land. In interpreting craft today, we might see not a revolution that burns down all that went before, but a continuity of belief in the capacity to be responsive to one's world.

To leave on an optimistic note, I'd like to quote from William Morris' 1878 lecture The lesser arts,¹ an address to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, where he says,

it is not by accident that an idea comes into the heads of a few, rather they are pushed on, and forced to speak or act by something stirring in the heart of the world which would otherwise be left without expression.

In interpreting craft today, we might say that the patient still has a pulse.

there are some of us who cannot turn our faces to the wall, or sit heedless because our hope seems somewhat dim; and, indeed, I think that while the signs of the last decay of the old art with all the evils that must follow in its train are only too obvious about us, so on the other hand there are not wanting signs of the new dawn beyond that possible night of the arts, of which I have before spoken; this sign chiefly, that there are some few at least, who are heartily discontented with things as they are, and crave for something better, or at least some promise of it-this best of signs: for I suppose that if some half-dozen men at any time earnestly set their hearts on something coming about which is not discordant with nature, it will come to pass one day or other; because it is not by accident that an idea comes into the heads of a few, rather they are pushed on, and forced to speak or act by something stirring in the heart of the world which would otherwise be left without expression.

The radical critique of society and its most advanced industrial phenomena led to the emergence of a model of operative extremism, based principally on values of marginalisation and poverty. Street theatre was born when, along with radical architecture, body art and arte povera, which all belong to the tradition of spontaneous creativity, which aims at exploding the reasons behind common dreams and exalting their fragments and crazy shards...

Art is therefore an instrument of memory, or rather, it is a musical score on which to write the notes of a history that it can play again and again. It is on the regeneration of culture that the vitality of an arte povera, a 'poor art', rests.²

Kevin Murray, Canberra, November 2006

Footnotes

1. William Morris 'The lesser arts', in (ed. Ada Briggs) News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (orig. 1878), p. 92
2. Germano Celant Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002 Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002, p. 25