HAND-MADE AND MACHINE-MADE

In the anti-utopian futuristic novel The Pesthouse (2007), author Jim Crace depicts a rusty and poisonous post-apocalyptic world littered with the ruins of buildings, hulks of ships, and machines decayed into scrap metal. One character, Margaret, hangs onto a couple of personal treasures: a silver necklace ‘old enough to have been machined’ and a scrap of fabric ‘too finely woven to have been the work of human hands’. In a world without machinery or mass production, where everything man-made must be a hand-made one-off, relics of the 20th century have the status of antiques. They bear witness to now lost modes of production and a collapsed culture of plentiful material consumer goods.

Thinking on this, the notion occurs that pottery would actually be among the items most likely to survive in such a scenario, as it does not corrode or burn or melt, and can last almost forever unless you actually smash it by direct impact. Even then, its shards are informative, as evidenced by their significant role in archaeology. The prominence of pottery among surviving ancient artefacts in museums is part of its cultural aura. Another aspect of this is that, unlike glass or metal and wood-based products, ceramics are not recyclable; a fact of which environmentally-conscious potters are aware as they make use of clay.

In his novel, Crace neatly extrapolates to a scary possible future by reversing the norms and values of our own times. In our world where almost everything we use routinely is mass-produced and standardised, unique or hand-crafted items are generally deemed to have special status for rarity, antiquity or alternatively novelty, as evidence of the maker’s artistic skill, and/or statements of the owner’s personal taste and discrimination.

In visions of an economically-collapsed anarchic future, personal items and tools are hand-made because there is no other way for them to come into being, just as was the case in medieval times and in more recent pre-industrialised societies. Human labour was cheap, but objects were expensive, so only the rich had more than the most basic few possessions. A famous, albeit relatively late, step in the reversal of this scenario for the developed economies was when Henry Ford took the radical step of paying his employees and pricing his products so that the people who made cars could also buy and own them. Thus was the mass-production worker elided with the mass-market consumer.

It is no wonder that Aldous Huxley, in that earlier anti-utopian novel Brave New World (1932), rebadged Our Lord as Our Ford. Quasi-divine status of the car-maker seems less laudable from the perspective of the early 21st century, despite the extent to which manufacturers have been the creators of our world. We live with millions of cars fouling the air, clogging roads and cities worldwide, and consuming non-renewable petroleum resources for ‘recreational’ purposes. The competitive marketplace which allegedly gives us wide choice and low prices depends on thousands of trucks exploiting subsidised highways for bulk transport of cheaply-made quickly-obsolescent items from east to west and other almost indistinguishable objects from west to east.

Of course the story of large-scale mechanical production of consumer goods did not begin with motor vehicles and Mr Ford, but goes back to at least the early 19th century, and naturally we find that hostile reactions against the machine’s domination of production also go back to that era. Art, architectural and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) was perhaps the first to extol the role of the craftsman (such as the stone carver), as much as the designing architect, in his seminal studies of medieval gothic buildings. 

Of course the story of large-scale mechanical production of consumer goods did not begin with motor vehicles and Mr Ford, but goes back to at least the early 19th century, and naturally we find that hostile reactions against the machine’s domination of production also go back to that era. Art, architectural and social critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) was perhaps the first to extol the role of the craftsman (such as the stone carver), as much as the designing architect, in his seminal studies of medieval gothic buildings.

At the opposite extreme from the imaginative, and sometimes witty or even subversive craftsman of the Middle Ages, Ruskin saw the factory worker of the Victorian era, performing a small repetitive task without skill or freedom or opportunity for advancement, thereby being prevented from ever realising his or her full human potential. Thus industrial modes of production would degrade the worker. Ruskin expressed his concern in the often paraphrased observation that if a man spends day after day for many years just making the heads of pins, he may become unable to do anything truly creative in any aspect of his life.

Ruskin’s followers, including some Pre-Raphaelite artists and their associates, tried to counter this dehumanising effect of factory employment by establishing Workers’ Educational Associations, to give working people opportunities to develop skills and knowledge in their scarce leisure time. Although 19th century Australia was not as highly industrialised as Europe, the movement took hold here, and by the end of the Victorian era there were workers’ institutes establishing libraries and holding night lectures on history and literature.

At that time, and into the 20th century, the art schools in our state capital cities had literally thousands of students doing drawing courses by correspondence, and practising woodcarving, leatherwork and pottery in suburban and regional outposts.

The reigning design aesthetic was derived from the English arts-and-crafts style, developed and promoted by William Morris and other Ruskinians. But arts and craft education in Australia was not focussed exclusively or even predominantly on elevating otherwise unskilled workers, as many of the students were middle-class girls learning some ladylike skills in the interval between school and marriage. Many of them produced a small body of high quality work, but few progressed to professional or even long-term dedicated amateur craftswoman status.

In many households you would find a painting by Grandma, a picture frame made as a Christmas gift by Cousin Joe, a side table carved by a ‘crafty’ auntie, or a china vase hand-painted with birds and flowers by a daughter before she left home. Whether highly valued for their personal connotations, or not, these items did not deflect general popular taste away from factory and machine made products. The latter were more evenly formed, more glossy, more modern and ‘stylish’, more easily obtained and easily replaced. And in a nation suffering from the cultural cringe, items imported from England, Europe or the USA had an additionally glamorous status.

Unfortunately, the efforts of Morris and others to establish craft-based production of well-designed items had not been entirely successful. The Morris firm survived until the second world war, by which time the taste to which it was appealing had become very old-fashioned. Various craft guilds and gallery-shops devoted to tapestries, glass, and church furnishings flourished in late Victorian and Edwardian times, and indeed at least one such supplier (Watts and Company in London) still exists having traded for over a century. 

However, still within Ruskin and Morris’s life time, some artists and designers were uncomfortable with the commercial reality that the arts-and-crafts movement which began with ideas of social(ist) reform had become a purveyor of luxury items to art collectors and fashionistas at the wealthy tip of society. This concern led to efforts to apply good design to mass-produced items that could be afforded by a wider range of people. This campaign had its limitations too, as it soon became obvious that uneducated popular taste was fickle and easily led by advertising, so mass-market customers rarely wanted what the professionals called ‘good design’. A continuing response from designers and makers has been to borrow the notion of limited editions from arts like printmaking (where it has a raison d’etre) and try to give mass-produced items some of the cachet of rarity or exclusiveness. As comedian Julian Clary once mocked: ‘Oh, yes, it’s a limited edition; they only made ten million and then destroyed the mould.’

At the height of the machine age, those who respected craft skills and traditions, and worked to ensure their survival, were generally considered simply old-fashioned. For example, in its obituary for the ecclesiastical architect Sir Walter Tapper, The Times (23 September 1935) cited a speech in which he had bemoaned mass production and the resultant loss of ‘the subtleties of the handicrafts’ as evidence that he was out of step with the exciting changes occurring as part of architecture’s foray into the modern.

Today, the creations of the arts-and-crafts movement and of early modern design reformers command high prices at auction and are found in museum collections of movable heritage, while copies or new versions can be bought from galleries, upmarket dealers, or online. The preservation of traditional crafts is a major aim of heritage agencies in many countries, with programs to teach trade skills to young people. Skilled stone-masons and shingle-splitters are unlikely to be out of work until the planet runs out of old buildings in need of repair and conservation. However, the fact is that the current world-wide urgency of increasing training in heritage trades, while necessary and commendable, results from the neglect and demise of these trades and skills over previous decades. It was really only in the 1990s that it was widely recognised that the last generation of practitioners was fast dying out, and there was little time left for them to teach any successors.


CERAMICS IN AUSTRALIA

Australia has its own history of ceramic production, with local factors impacting on the way in which international trends materialised here — or didn’t. The first ceramic production was strictly utilitarian, in the form of food and chemical containers, drainpipes and sanitary ware. Slightly later came roof tiles and architectural ornaments. The founders of the Australian ceramics industry were former employees of English and European potteries. ‘Art’ or ‘studio’ pottery, as it was known, did not appear here until the 1890s, and the first manifestations were, predictably, derived from the products of Doulton and other English makers. 

By the early 20th century, the use of Australian floral motifs, both in form (eg tree trunk handles on Merric Boyd’s work) and decoration (including painting on imported blanks, by teachers like L. Howie and their students) allowed Australian natural imagery into our nationalistic version of the arts-and-crafts style, giving it a cultural significance arguably greater than in some other countries.

In the first half of the 20th century there were many small ‘art’ potteries in Australia, making domestic items such as vases and ornaments. Some retained an arts-and-crafts feel with evident hand-making and runny ‘greenery-yallery’ glazes, while others worked in a more moderne art deco vocabulary. Most were individual or family-run small businesses that operated only for the duration of the founder’s working life.

In the first half of the 20th century there were many small ‘art’ potteries in Australia, making domestic items such as vases and ornaments. Some retained an arts-and-crafts feel with evident hand-making and runny ‘greenery-yallery’ glazes, while others worked in a more moderne art deco vocabulary. Most were individual or family-run small businesses that operated only for the duration of the founder’s working life.

Even the biggest commercial potteries found it increasingly difficult to compete as tariff barriers were reduced and the tide of cheap Asian imports became a flood. Thus large-scale commercial ceramic producers succumbed to global economics. Australian Fine China in Perth, which once produced the popular decorative domestic Wembley Ware but chiefly focussed on corporate hospitality customers using pioneering technologies (eg installing the first commercial overhead oil-burning tunnel kilns of post-war design in the world), closed its local plant in 2006 and moved all production offshore. Mid-sized Bendigo Potteries, with a different market positioning, and now celebrating its sesqui-centenary, is a rare survivor.

Interestingly, the hospitality industry continues to provide a market niche for the contemporary studio potter who can supply batches of items such as lamp bases and large decorative platters. This fact evokes a personal memory, of my own art education as a baby lecturer at the South Australian School of Art (now part of the University of SA) in the late 1970s. My university art history courses had concentrated on paintings and prints, so I was trying to learn about contemporary ceramics and sculpture by hanging around the studios. I was surprised to hear the Head of Ceramics, Queensland broadcaster turned potter Milton Moon, telling students that the proof of professionalism was being able to produce sets of identical plates or cups, and that a skilled potter could hand-throw table ware to compete on price with commercial makers. Many contemporary potters combine doing this with producing individual ‘art’ works in raku and other techniques, and we may well ask: why do they bother with the latter, and why should we be interested?


WHY VALUE CRAFTWORK?

In our greedy, power-hungry society, there is prestige in demonstrating the ability to command, rather than inspire, the labour and creativity of others. This is the downside of the noble and ancient art of patronage, and the cult of rarity and exclusivity. Remember that early episode of TV’s Absolutely Fabulous in which Jennifer Saunders’s character responded to criticism of a piece of ‘ethnic’ or ‘folk’ fabric by asserting that a whole family of weavers went blind making it?

Keeping skills alive is only worthwhile if there is some use for them, some application beyond a sort of living archive of trades and techniques. Such uses could be either utilitarian as in buildings conservation, or because they provide a medium or language for artistic expression.

Aesthetics, or at least aestheticism, has been a dirty word in some circles lately; but this attitude should not go unchallenged. In a lengthy review of the photography of Craigie Hosfield (The Weekend Australian, 7-8 April 2007, Review p.19) Sebastian Smee comments on what he sees as that artist’s ‘almost retrograde’ sensibility; and asks:

Is it his concern with aesthetics? Carol Armstrong, a writer whose discussions with Horsfield are reproduced in the catalogueÖ rejects the charge. She claims Horsfield’s work provides “a much-needed corrective to the contemporary morass of anti-aestheticism, all stirred up as it is with an equally confused spectacularism”.

The mention of spectacularism alerts us to the danger, or at least the limitations, of demonstrating and admiring virtuosity for its own sake. Attendance at some of the more exotic musical contributions to arts festivals is enough to reinforce that virtuosity alone does not necessarily guarantee an interesting or enjoyable experience for the audience. While there is nothing wrong with admiring skill and technique, works with no other apparent merits are stuck on or below the second to top rung of the ladder of cultural value.

Demarcation disputes are as tiresome and potentially destructive in art as in industry. Regardless of any real or imaginary differences or distinctions between art and craft, it seems to me that the most valid reasons for valuing traditional craft skills and their living outcomes (works such as ceramics) are the same as those for valuing (other forms of) visual art: development, reinterpretation, exploration and communication of visions, images, concepts and ideas — including cultural, ethical and aesthetic values — by predominantly non-verbal means. This can involve the creation of new techniques and visual vocabularies, and/or the use and expansion of traditional ones. And in craft media like ceramics, while they are not in price competition with mass-produced commercial items, hand-made artworks can be modest in scale and affordable by ordinary interested people.

For a defence of this aesthetic, we need not rely on Walter Pater and the ‘art for art’s sake’ devotees, or cite the financial verdicts of the contemporary art market. We can cultivate what that serious Victorian moralist George Eliot (alias Mary Anne Evans, born in the same year as Ruskin) identified a hundred and fifty years ago, in 1857, as ‘that sublime spirit which distinguishes art from luxury, and worships beauty apart from self-indulgence.’


DAVID DOLAN
Professor of Cultural Heritage,
Curtin University, Western Australia.