So what makes the art gallery so appealing for contemporary jewellery? Benjamin was reflecting on the first exhibition of contemporary jewellery at Gargosian Gallery, arguably the most prestigious commercial visual art space on the planet. It was an occasion well worth noting.

What followed was a series of salutary disappointments. Rather than select a known figure of the contemporary jewellery scene, Gargosian chose the work of a fashion designer with Dior, Victoria de Castellane.

Benjamin’s review was characteristically incisive, critiquing the show not only for its cloying craftsmanship, but also for its disdain of wearability. Indeed, the images of work online did look like wearable Dale Chihuly miniatures. It seemed to confirm the seeming irreconcilable separation of contemporary jewellery and visual art.

But this wasn’t the reason that Lignel’s review unsettled me. I had already braced myself for the news that a visual arts gallery was not sensitive to the unique qualities of contemporary jewellery.

It was something else. In describing the theme of Castellane’s show, Benjamin left a question hanging. The exhibition was titled Fleur d’excès and featured ten ‘unique precious objects’ each celebrating a different drug, such as Heroïna Romanticam Dolorosa and Crystalucinae Metha Agressiva. According to the accompanying media release :

Hallucinatory drugs and their promise of mind-expansion have fascinated and inspired artists the world over. De Castellane’s flowers are intoxicating, but also dangerous because of the poisons that they secrete. Here they personify the Romantic idea of women “under the influence”

So, this inaugural show of contemporary jewellery is a celebration of drug addiction. That is not surprising in a Gargosian context. Elite contemporary art defines itself against mainstream values, particularly tight-arsed middle class morality. But it is sobering to learn that this is how contemporary jewellery is located—as a sphere of decadent excess.

Rather than signify an enduring amorality in art jewellery, this review brought more starkly into relief the opposing trends in our scene today—established European aestheticism versus emerging United Statesian activism. These positions seem largely at odds with each other. The celebration of individual originality is cancelled out by the urgent call for collective action.

That’s the question: what’s the place of ethics in the world of contemporary jewellery?

Ethics has become a broad dimension of our critical engagement with the world. We are less likely now to skip down the supermarket aisle, grabbing seductively packaged goods from the shelves. Now each product demands careful scrutiny. We look first at the list of ingredients for substances that are harmful to ourselves or the world. We Google the brand on our smartphones to see how it fares on ethical checklists.

The same applies to cultural consumption. In Australia, we prefer that films made about Indigenous culture are made by Indigenous people themselves. Celebrity artists like Anthony Gormley and Ai Wei Wei are valued not just for their art, but also for their visions of global democracy.

Meanwhile, the broader world of jewellery is embracing ethical agendas. Standards such as Walmart’s Terracycle and industry initiatives like greenKarat attempt to counter anxieties about ‘blood diamonds’: the universal symbol of love should not be tainted by the violence of civil war. Jewellers working in Africa like Sarah Rhodes and Martina Dempf, as well as environmental projects like CO2 pins, currently sit on the edges of contemporary jewellery. Can we broaden the field to include ethical practices?

At first glance, ethics appears far too blunt an instrument. You can’t make an ornament out of morality. So does this mean that contemporary jewellery must exempt itself from our otherwise ethical engagement with the world? Aesthetics has no room for ethics.

But rather than despair at this opposition, we can gain some mileage out of its dialectical tension. To move the argument along, met me try ramping up the opposition between the aesthetic and ethical. I hope by this means that we can develop an understanding of contemporary jewellery that might encompass both its aesthetic roots and the critical ethical response.

Thesis: the aesthetic

World of contemporary jewellery is one of wit and excess. The scene is mercifully too boutique to be bothered with the same rules as apply to earnest worldly activities, like books or computers. It minds its own business. This endogamous morality of contemporary jewellery is based on four principles.

1. Conviviality

After all, shouldn’t there be some space in our world for pure pleasure? As Ortega y Gasset once said, ‘Humans are animals for whom only the superfluous is necessary.’ Jewellery is the space of friendship, not strategic alliances. It is only by putting the world at a distance that we can enjoy the spontaneity, freedom and downright wickedness of good friendship. Friendship is more an art than it is a science.

Contemporary jewellery will only be a relatively minor scene in the broader context of world art. It exists independently of grand statements as found in biennales or glossy magazines. Rather, it is underpinned by the personal liaisons between jewellers, clients, professors and curators. As such, it values individuality—the recognition of each other’s uniqueness.

When Economist devoted an article to the field, it concluded, ‘Humour and subversion are an intrinsic element of this kind of jewellery’. As Peter Skubic claims, ‘The only rule is that there are no rules. It’s all just a good laugh.’

2. Internal currency

Contemporary jewellery eschews external forms of value, particularly money. Jewellery should not be reduced to its exchange value. It is better to use non-precious materials, whose value is derived from its position internal to the artistic field, rather than precious metals or stones that can carry a value which can circulate outside the scene. In removing itself from the real world of precious metals, contemporary jewellery absolves itself of the politics of global wealth distribution.

3. The game

The self-referential nature of contemporary jewellery is essential to its meaning. It’s a game. But this is not to dismiss it as a pastime without depth. It’s a tremendously serious game—testing its participants to their utmost in craftsmanship, intelligence and audacity.

Contemporary jewellery is hardly unique in being a world of its own. The most significant human pursuit on the global stage is no doubt the field of sport. Here we applaud the efforts of the athlete or team, despite the utter uselessness of its outcome. And in the other side of sport, the world of work, professionalism and passion for success are seen as the mark of a modern executive, regardless of which company they work for. The end is a pretext for the means.

Such a devotion to the game is not unique to modernity. Around two thousand years ago, in the great Indian epic Bhagavad Gita, the Lord Krishna argues the case for war, despite the meaningless loss of life it entails. For Krishna, the earthly consequences of battle are not as important as the honour that will be upheld in the process. The supreme value of Dharma transcends any worldly relevance. Above all, one must follow one’s chosen path in life, one’s Karma Yoga.

So rather than dismiss contemporary jewellery as a ludic venture, this becomes its virtue. As Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.’ Contemporary jewellery is thus a field in which we can exercise rare qualities that are essential to life. Through it we forge friendships and exercise our capacities independent of any compromise with the world outside. Far from amoral, the aesthetic dimension of contemporary jewellery is pure deontology.

Antithesis: the ethical

Whereas on the other hand…

Aestheticism attempts to create a set of values that seem independent of worldly forces. But rather than exist outside the system, its purpose is precisely to support it by offering an alibi—taste. Rather that basing class difference on brute economic power, it is seen to be founded on individual sensibility. Thus, the working class are not of low status because they lack money, but because they don’t have the inner taste to appreciate finer things. It’s their own fault.

1. Surplus capital

Jewellery itself is pure surplus capital. In its traditional form, jewellery functions to store value that is in excess of requirements. What’s left of the harvest once immediate needs are met is exchanged for precious metals that are fashioned to fix on the body of women. Surplus capital can then circulate along kinship systems with the exchange of women in marriage. Traditional jewellery is simply a portable bank account. Today we have plastic credit cards. In detaching itself from the currency value of jewellery, contemporary jewellery becomes surplus of a surplus. It marks a class society where the capacity to own precious jewels is no longer a marker of high status.

2. Status symbol

Capital investments can sometimes have another purpose. A house can also provide shelter, a vehicle transport. In the case of jewellery, there is no purpose other than to identify one’s social status.

While it does serve as a reserve of capital that can be drawn on when convenient, it also provides an overt symbol of class. In many societies, only certain classes are eligible to wear particular types of jewellery. According to the sumptuary rules in Renaissance Europe, commoners were forbidden from wearing pearls. In feudal India, only the Brahmin caste could wear gold. Traditional jewellery provides a vertical society with the ceiling that prevents movement up its hierarchy.

Contemporary jewellery appears to contest this by questioning the value of economic capital in jewellery. But this isn’t about re-investing wealth into worthy causes—melting down gold to buy food for the starving. It is rather about increasing the freedom of the artist to experiment with materials. The results then become markers of a cultural elite who use it to distinguish themselves from both the bling below and pearls above. These are just a postmodern version of feudal sumptuary laws.

3. War footing

While in the past we might have been able to afford the indulgence of ornament, it’s a different matter today. The phenomenon of climate change has prompted a ‘war-footing’ for all human endeavours. Everything has to be accounted for its terms of its effect on our rapidly diminishing planet.

Even a seemingly incidental a practice such as contemporary jewellery—the surplus of a surplus— is now being taken to account for its environmental impact. The USA collective Ethical Metalsmiths was launched at SNAG in 2005 as an attempt to introduce political action into contemporary jewellery. It addressed the immediate impact of jewellery in the well-documented environmental damage caused by mining.

While relatively insignificant as a user of such resources itself, contemporary jewellery can operate as an advocate for more responsible practices. Ethical Metalsmiths draws on the DIY sensibility that has been the main source of energy in contemporary craft thus far in the third millennium. DIY is about the solidarity of makers using the free market to contest dominant corporate powers. Radical Jewellery Makeovers bring communities together to transform out-dated items into re-charged jewels with fresh value. Such activities escape the consumerist treadmill that seeks always for the new, quickly replacing last year’s fashion with next year’s rubbish. The makeover re-charges the unloved object with the magic of social exchange.

The game’s over, contemporary jewellery. You are either with us or against us. You are either contesting the system that is destroying the planet or you are supporting it by providing a distraction from the main issue.

Dialectic: Keep moving

The aesthetic and the ethical seem diametric opposites. One argues for an entirely internal set of values, the other brings jewellery to account in its external effects. Maybe they both have a place in contemporary jewellery. As Liesbeth den Besten notes ‘author jewellery’ sits in between elite art and democratic design—the freedom to be original and the duty to serve the people.

What kind of space can we find to bring these positions together? But perhaps it’s not a space at all, but rather a time that they share—a cycle of growth and destruction.

The aesthetic position provides a generative platform for the creativity. It’s hard to contest that part of what we do to make life meaningful is produce things of beauty. But without some external intervention, such a scene threatens to become in-bred. Aestheticism is a point in a cycle which must at some stage be pruned by a fundamentalism if it is not to decay. The over-indulgence of Victorian taste eventually needed the Arts & Crafts movement to re-ground English decorative arts.

Ethical Metalsmithing comes at a time when contemporary jewellery needs to re-connect with the wider world. It draws on our anxieties about ‘blood diamonds’ and prompts us to examine the conditions that make jewellery possible. The taint of exploitation jars particularly with the seeming innocence of jewellery from the wider world. This provides an opening for alternative self-sufficient systems such as the DIY movement.

But we must be wary of the fundamentalism that is housed within the ethical turn. The idea of a ‘war-footing’, in which all human activities must be brought to a common account is a condition of totalitarianism. We see a version of that today in the unstoppable growth of managerialism. The growing democratic expectations of government have led to a greater sense of accountability for what might be seen as elite cultural institutions, such as state art galleries. Government support for art practice is increasingly beholden to instrumentalist outcomes, such as social cohesion, job creation or environmental sustainability. Rather than serve the people, such processes support a technocratic society more interested in control than justice.

To prevent fundamentalism ossifying into bureaucracy, we need to keep extending the field of action. Beyond Ethical Metalsmiths, there are many other future courses of action. Let me conclude by mentioning three potential developments in engaged jewellery.

1. Agiprop

Rather than focus only on issues like mining that are directly related to jewellery, it is possible to use the viral capacity of body ornament to send messages of great political moment. We saw the potential for this with the ‘Make Poverty History’ white silicon bracelet, which was instrumental in focusing the attention of the G8 summit on the reduction of poverty. The Millennium Goals that it produced have been remarkably successful in alleviating the condition of suffering. The challenge here is to find a way in which a wave of support can be interlinked by body ornament that gives it daily visibility. If only we could find the viral ornament to cohere action around climate change.

2. Microsocial

Besides environment, the other major currency of creative endeavour in our century is the social network. Facebook has leapfrogged millennia of social traditions and provided us with ideal tools for maintaining networks of friends, family and acquaintances. If anything, it is too successful. Allow Facebook to rummage through your address book and you’ll soon have thousands of friends—at the click of a mouse. The global success of Facebook now confronts us with the challenge of recovering the ties that bind close friends.

Jewellery remains a hard currency of friendship. Pins, bracelets and rings can be given as markers of a relationship that invests in a future. Unlike status updates, they are personal. Jewellery has an important role in contemporary society by re-connecting people.

3. Poor jewellery

While the use of rubbish to make jewellery can demonstrate the ingenuity of the maker, it can also be used as a strategy for subverting social hierarchies. Popular social movements such as the South African freedom struggle found expression in what has been called a ‘re-discovery of the common’. The use of readily available materials from the street finds parallel with the democratic energies that seek to give power to the masses over the repressive elites.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda tried to achieve something similar in writing classical odes for common objects, such as a pair of scissors or an orange. Conventionally, social change is reflected in bling, which signifies an aspirationalism whereby an individual can rise above their ranks to join the privileged elite. By contrast, the ‘poor jewellery’ represents a solidarity that contests the hierarchy as a whole.

Onwards

Ethical Metalsmiths are the fundamentalists of our time. They represent a break with a tired aestheticism. But in following their lead, we do not have to be limited to one particular paradigm of engagement. Ethical Metalsmiths have opened the door. But neither we nor they have to linger around the entrance. There are many interesting alternatives ahead.

Inevitably, particular individuals will begin to stand out as especially innovative in their work. They will gain recognition in a field of other individuals. And eventually aestheticism may flower again, just as the garden regains it bloom after a radical pruning.

The ambivalence of contemporary jewellery towards ethics is not a bad thing. Aesthetics prevents mindless moralism: it keeps us honest. But without ethics, we are left talking to ourselves.

See you at the pearly gates.

The other day I renewed my driver’s license. Uploading my identity into the matrix was a strangely disembodying experience. Accompanied by the clatter of scans and clicks, I made my way to the front of the queue before finally being snapped by a photo-bot and then ushered out into the street. It felt like I’d been mugged, even though all my belongings were intact.

But a pleasant surprise was in store. When the card arrived, my portrait wasn’t the only ghostly presence on its surface. Amid the phantasmagorial holograms and reflective stripes I could discern the abstract outline of a plant form. Indeed, the accompanying letter informed me that the card was embedded with the image of a ‘common heath’, the official floral emblem of Victoria. I was quite touched that this connection with nature would survive the technocratic state.

High up in the information cloud, we are increasingly grateful for such signs of the world of here below. Traditionally, jewellery played an important role in forging the floral emblems that signify place. The development of this local language runs parallel with the emergence of a national identity. While much of the goldfields jewellery was styled after the cameos in transatlantic centrepieces, the late nineteenth century English Arts & Crafts movement turned our attention to local flora. European migrants like the Latvian Niina Ots played a major role in moulding a nationalist jewellery. From today’s perspective, such craft can often seem quite literal in its reliance on iconic Australian symbols. This nationalism was expressed through gems, such as opal and pearl, and fauna, particularly the kangaroo and emu.

From the 1970s, the influence of modernism liberated jewellers from their debt to tradition. The inherited understanding of nature was stripped back to reveal lived individual experience. A key figure in this modernist turn is Marian Hosking, who developed a unique language of silver in order to express a certain tactile experience of nature, beyond familiar motifs. This language is expressed largely through metal by piercing and casting. Such techniques present a nature immanent in touch.

While Vicki Mason also makes the connection between adornment and place, her work is unusual for at least two reasons.

First, she draws as much from the haberdashery as the foundry. She manipulates plastic like a fabric—cutting, folding and coiling it to create new textures. With these materials, she can create works of great colour intensity that at the same time continues the mission of contemporary jewellery to critique preciousness.

Her work has a particularly suburban feel. The power-coated brass, silver and copper presents an artificial sheen produced by chemical processes, rather than hand-filing and polishing. It evokes not just the blooming garden bed, but also the cast iron fence. Part of the effect of Mason’s jewellery is the alchemic capacity to transform such artificial materials into objects of organic beauty.

Second, she deals mostly with the symbolic meaning of flora, rather than her own experience. While this may make her work appear stereotypical, it also opens great potential for semiotic play. Her work creates historical resonances. Vicki Mason draws from past ornamental traditions, such as the mid-nineteenth century ceramics of Mason’s Ironstone China. But it also evokes the collective ritual of flowers.

The semiotic play in her work engages with traditions for arranging flowers. The works in this exhibition reflect the form of the bouquet—a cluster of flowers bound at the stem to be used as a handheld decoration. The bouquet is found in comic festivals, such as wedding ceremonies. In gathering a garden bounty, arrangements like the bouquet celebrate our natural world. Vicki Mason’s jewellery gives this seasonal display a more enduring presence.

Vicki Mason opens up the potential for exploration of other floral bundles. In our Asia Pacific region, the garland is popular way of honouring guests. Like the daisy chain, it is a series of flowers threaded sequentially, then bestowed on a visitor as a sign of welcome. More soberly, the wreath is a series of flowers woven around a circular structure to decorate a grave. Each particular constellation of flowers has a unique syntax that parallels different jewellery forms, like the ring and bracelet. In her handsome brooches, Vicki Mason joins jewellery with floristry.

As technology ‘smartens’ our lives, taking us out of ourselves, jewellers like Vicki Mason play an increasingly important role in finding our way back home. Welcome back.

The title Jugalbandi is used as an initial starting point. It refers to a duet in Indian music were performers from two different traditions, such as Carnatic and Hindustani, play together. Its literal meaning is ‘entwined twins’, which evokes the pre-history of Australia and India as once connected in Gondwana. 

This exhibition will feature a variety of Australian artists, craftspersons and designers, including some established but with a particular focus on those emerging. The prime venue will be the gallery at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, which will coincide with the Australian Year of India. 

In the lead up to this, there will be a series of pop-up exhibitions during Sydney Design Week in August 2012. Venues for this will include the Powerhouse Museum, COFA and the new India Cultural Centre. The plan is then to take this back to Australia for an exhibition in 2013. 

I am interested to hear from others involved in this exchange across the Indian ocean. I hope that Jugalbandi provided a platform for experimental creative dialogues between two quite opposite cultures.

As the Germans say, ‘Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied’—everyone makes their own luck. So how do you make luck? Or is it something that can be made at all? We assume that luck is something bestowed by fate. Like a shamrock, luck is found rather than made. Luck reflects all those factors that are out of our control, like bolts of lightning or random rolls of the dice. You can’t make it. It makes you. So it seems a paradox. How can you harness a force that must be out of our grasp?

Last year, a woman accidentally drove her car off a six storey car park in Melbourne’s CBD. That she survived was described an amazing stroke of luck. But if we were to subject the scene to scientific analysis, nothing occurred that could not be accounted for by the laws of physics. Yet somehow, we are drawn to the idea of luck as a guiding force. Why? Why do we persist in saying ‘good luck’ to friends when we no longer believe in any supernatural forces?

Perhaps more than just wishing someone good fortune in their affairs, we are also making a space where luck can happen. Luck is saying ‘good luck’. It says that someone’s future is going to be subject to unknown factors. This is when stories happen. There’s no story to tell about a perfectly predicable and expected course of events, like breakfast. Saying ‘good luck’ expresses an interest in what will happen, and invites a story in return. It’s a space for expressing the gamut of feelings, from hope to fear. Luck is the deus ex machina that moves the narrative along.

Objects can play an important role in marking this space. Unlike abstractions, things are subject to the whims of fortune. They can be lost, found, broken or repaired. Their presence acts as a witness to a course of events, in the way that a wedding ring provides a physical continuity through the ups and downs of marriage.

As the originary forms of jewellery, charms, amulets and talismans have helped deal with the uncertainty that accompanies a life. In the modern era, they were largely abandoned in the belief that science and technology would eventually enable us to control our world. The charm then became nothing more than a fashion accessory, like the Pandora brand today.

Technology has certainly achieved miracles in the modern era, but we are increasingly aware of its limits in controlling our world. The spate of recent disasters—floods in Australia and earthquakes around the Pacific—make us realise that seemingly random factors can still determine whether we live or die, no matter how thorough our preparation.

But this is not necessarily a problem. Regardless of risk, we need the concept of luck in order to find commonality with others. Our shared vulnerability becomes the point of empathy that connects us to others. If it all comes down to technology, then the world is inevitably divided between those who have and those who don’t. On the other hand, luck is universal. It assumes we begin together at the same starting line. That some succeed more than others is due to life circumstances—which side of the track you were born on, even the genes you were given.

To restore this space to our world requires objects in which we can invest our belief. The Pieces of Fate exhibition contains intriguing contemporary charms that seek to exert power through their sheer aesthetic force. They are deftly crafted enigmas.

Pieces of Fate is among other things a celebration of the pendant. The charm makes the most of the double-sided nature of the pendant. It is a private object that rests close to our chest. Through contact against our skin, we are always reminded of its power. But it is also a public object, to be presented to others as a prop for an intriguing story. One way of reading the pendants is to imagine how they are manipulated in the act of story-telling, even inviting the listener to finger its shape.

The talisman has been a subject of growing interest in contemporary jewellery world. Ruudt Peters’ recent exhibition Lingam included interpretations of the fertility charm by 122 artists. The challenge ahead is to go beyond the purely symbolic association with jewellery traditions and to attempt to restore their actual power. This involves thinking more about the experience of the wearer, even giving over some meaning for the wearer to activate.

Those fortunate to acquire one of the Pieces of Fate will receive an ‘activation’ from the jeweller in the form of a short statement. These incantations represent an important step forward in the restoration of jewellery power. They’re more than reflections on the personal inspiration of the jeweller. They also anticipate how the pendants will be experienced by the wearer. Some of them even have directions for use.

And as the Yiddish expression goes, ‘Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold.’ The artists in Pieces of Fate have recovered one of our enduring precious materials. Unlike gold, it is renewable, free, and available to all. But like gold, it demands the utmost skill to make the most of the little we can find.

This essay was written for the exhibition ‘Pieces of Fact’ at the gallery Pieces of Eight. Kevin Murray’s writing about luck in jewellery has been supported by an Australia Council New Work grant.

Social actors often need a past to satisfy the requirements of many different dramatic situations. These situations can vary from the extraordinary ‑ the television show “This Is Your Life” ‑ to the mundane, such as getting to know an acquaintance. The way in which the biographical subjects and their audience construct this past is likely to vary according to the rhetorical demands that govern the situation in which this practice of life emplotment occurs. This context is likely to influence at least three dimensions of this process: the choice of events that are seen as relevant to the construction of the life, the themes that provide coherence between these events, and the degree and type of narrative closure to the life story.

The structures used by people as they construct lives ‑ the language of self‑reflection employed in this discourse ‑ is an important new field of research (see Potter, Stringer, & Wetherell, 1984). Such an approach assumes that life construction is a discursive practice governed by the social settings which demand that a life history be presented. In the present chapter, I examine the form of the life manual, especially Gail Sheehy’s Passages, in order to discover the sort of resources offered through this medium for the social construction of lives. In common with other theories of biography (see Kohli, 1981; and Runyan, 1980) this analysis assumes that more than one possible account can be construed from the events of a person’s life, according to the perspective of the biographer. This chapter emphasizes, in addition, the role of narrative structures in the way an account is constituted, specifically those structures provided in the language of self‑reflection employed in life manuals.

The language of self‑reflection is most obvious in specialized forms of discourse such as works of autobiography and biography, but there are other social events and institutions which are partly designed for the construction of life narratives. Two common rituals which involve the telling of a story about a life are the speeches at testimonial dinners and weddings. These stories usually have contrasting emphases: wedding speeches emphasize human and everyday aspects of character, while retirement speeches highlight achievements that distinguish the subject from others.

The process of life construction is important in many social events designed to establish a moral character (see Gergen & Gergen, 1983, for a discussion of the social utility of this practice). This is highlighted in the statements of a character witness in the courtroom, though it is no less evident in the responses of an interviewee when asked to account in a research interview for certain actions. In the former, the witness attempts to construct a story about character which makes more sense of one interpretation of the accused’s acts than another, less innocent one; and in the latter, the research question of the interviewer makes it imperative that the interviewee construct an account of past actions that is coherent and sensible (see Mishler, this volume).

In each case, the rhetorical demands of the situation require a relatively unambiguous reading of motive: the situation demands thematic generality over a disparate course of events. So, for example, a character witness might begin the testimony with, “When he was five he saved a kitten from drowning,” in order to highlight how the theme of consideration for others marks the life events of the accused. For the account to have an easily read point (that is, the likely innocence of the defendant), the narrative must sift out those details that do not add to the coherence of the story.

Given the pervasiveness of the process of narrative construction of life events, one is naturally prompted to investigate its function. However, there is an obstacle to this investigation. One of the reasons why these processes have received relatively little study is the assumption that the function of telling stories about lives is mimetic and therefore unproblematic; that is, that life narratives are largely a transparent means of representing the truth. However, while it is necessary that these processes bear an ostensible relation to a commonly perceived reality, the success of an account is also likely to be judged by how well it fits certain rhetorical demands, including the set of conventions in language that govern the telling of stories.

The debate about the representational nature of narrative has occurred in other disciplines. History has been popularly conceived as concerned exclusively with the mimetic function of revealing the truth about the past. However, in an analysis of nineteenth‑century historians, Hayden White (1973) demonstrates the importance of other factors in writing history such as ideology, world view, and what he terms “explanation by emplotment,” which is presenting a description of the past that convinces by its success as a story; specifically, how well it conforms to the conventions of comedy, romance, tragedy, and satire. Although White would agree with other relativists, such as Runyan, on the plurality of narratives for the construction of life events, he would differ in the emphasis placed on language as a system that imposes form on reality. For Runyan, relativism extends only to the ideological and theoretical perspective of the biographer, whereas for White, the narrative account of the past is determined by the preconscious linguistic structures (tropes) imposed on reality by the constructor ‑ the choice of structure is determined by aesthetic and moral reasons.

The nonrepresentational factors which figure in this professional sense‑making are also likely to apply to everyday constructions of the past. The criterion of truth is certainly not dominant in informal social activities such as gossip, when the members of a group exchange “interesting” stories about people not present, and popular culture, especially in magazines concerned with media personalities whose lives are regularly encapsulated in touching, shocking, and amusing stories.

Given the prevalence of narrative structures in constructions of the past, it is difficult to argue for life stories as a transparent means of representing truth. A qualified case for this mimetic view may, however, be cast in information‑processing terms. These stories may be seen as attempts at information reduction, in which the large variety of life events is reduced to a set of narratives so that it may be cognitively processed more efficiently. The function, therefore, remains representational, though this is by means of an information‑simplifying structure rather than by a mirror of reality. However, this ignores the pleasure with which apparently useless additional information is sought about people who have no practical relation to one’s life. Who should care if Elizabeth Taylor marries again? It would be difficult to see a story of Elizabeth Taylor’s remarriage being used as an aid in the cognitive organization of the social environment. The moral function of such a story seems more evident than the information‑processing function; the remarriage may continue a story about a prominent public figure whose actions have relevance as standards of conduct in everyday life; the happy or sad outcome of the story indicates whether the course of action is correct or misguided. For Hayden White, one purpose of narrative is moral:

Narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system, that is the source of any morality that we can imagine. (1980, p. 18)

If one looks again at the process of gossip (Sabini & Silver, 1982), one finds emphasis on the embodiment of codes of conduct on the elaboration of moral rules in concrete examples. The gossipy stories in the popular media seem to instantiate the moral order, thus exercising it and ensuring that it is able to organize the events of everyday life.

Besides the moral function of this process, life construction is also likely to be an attempt to find a narrative structure by means of which life can be granted meaning. This is what Frank Kermode describes as an explanatory fiction: “In ‘making sense’ of the world we still feel a need, harder than ever to satisfy because of the accumulated scepticism, to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end, which is the essence of our explanatory fictions” (1967, pp. 35‑36). This sense of beginning, middle, and end, in terms of a life path, is provided by a set of conventionalized narrative forms. Jerome Bruner, in his essay “Myth and identity” (1962), describes this set as the “controlling myths of community,” which provide a “library of scripts” that give recognition to certain life paths. This library of scripts is an abstraction of the narratives that are evident in the ways the biography of an individual is presented in public. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate, in popular psychology at least, that these life constructions are determined as much by the moral and narrative conventions contained in the hypothetical library of scripts as they are by the facts of life.

GAIL SHEEHY

The popular book Passages (1977), by Gail Sheehy, presents a revealing document for studying these socially recognized life paths. First, it explicitly sets out to provide a prescribed route through life events, and tells many stories about people as examples of a general theory. Second, Sheehy is a popular writer (her books reach the top of bestseller lists), and her books are more likely to be consumed as myths than books directed to an academic audience. Given these factors, Sheehy’s works are likely to indicate ways in which lives can be constructed as resources that can he used by members of society in the choosing of a life path.

Sheehy’s work is examined here with an emphasis on the manner in which she constructs life narratives and on the theory from which she draws to support her constructions. The relativity of her constructions can be established by two sets of contrasts: first, by a comparison with two of her contemporaries: Daniel Levinson and Roger Gould; and second, because many of the assumptions Sheehy makes may seem at first to be self‑evident to participants of the same culture. 1 cite a theorist from a different time: the Victorian moralist and biographer, Samuel Smiles. Smiles, like Sheehy, achieved great popularity while telling stories about how people should live their lives.

Because our interest is partly in the consumption of Sheehy’s book it is useful to approach it initially from the perspective of the ordinary reader. It is likely that the prospective reader goes to this book as a guide to ways in which one deals with problems in life. This seems to be the ostensible purpose of the book. As the reader inspects it in the bookstore he or she sees the blurb on the cover reinforce this expectation:

‘A revolutionary way of looking at adult life’

THE SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON

Brilliant new insights on the predictable crises of adult fife.

However, if at this point the reader decides to gauge Sheehy’s style by examining the first page of the main text, the expectation of a serious academic work is soon put in doubt. Chapter One of Passages, entitled “Madness and Method,” immediately immerses the reader in the excitement of Sheehy’s adventure in Northern Ireland. There is no conceptual argument; it begins much more like a novel than an academic tract.

If the reader had looked at the cover notes in a little more detail the expectation would not have been of a serious theoretical work. The notes on the inside of the cover are more representative of the style of the introductory chapter:

‘A lively, passionate and readable message . . Margaret Mead

‘Provokes the same recognition that we experience in a good novel . . .’ New York Times Book Review

‘Extraordinarily good reading . . ‑Publishers Weekly

The readableness of Sheehy’s book is evident in the clever literary style she adopts throughout. This style partly consists of tropes, such as, “Killing time is a suicidal act. The time she is killing is all she has left to live.” This emphasis on the literary style may seem irrelevant to the purpose of this chapter, but it is important to recognize the context in which Sheehy’s theory is cast ‑ the medium which contains the message. The decision in adopting this particular style may be related to what she is trying to say, and the way in which she wants her message to be consumed.

The rest of the statements used to package Passages emphasize the involvement of the reader in the text.

PASSAGES IS YOUR LIFE STORY. You’ll recognize yourself, your friends, and your lovers.

‘Passages shakes you up, shakes you out, and leaves you shaking hands with yourself.’

Shana Alexander

These statements stress the prospect of the reader being changed by the text ‑ either in the acts performed in life or the process of self‑reflection. (For a discussion of the influence of reading on everyday life, see Sarbin, 1982.) The impression of Passages gained from this bookshop browse is likely to be of an entertaining text which has the power to recast one’s own life story.

At this point we will leave the impressions of the prospective reader and turn to the actual theory which Gail Sheehy offers to account for life events. According to Sheehy, adult life consists of a negotiation between two powerful forces within the psyche, and the outside world. The primary force is essentially good, Sheehy calls it the “dream.” The dream has its origins in the fantasies of childhood. Adult ambitions, such as vocational success, establishing a secure family, and becoming famous, are attempts to realize this dream. Opposed to the dream is the “inner custodian.” This is a negative psychic force, similar to the superego,l which has its origin in the demands that parents make of the child. The inner custodian, which Sheehy calls a “nasty tyrant,” demands that one live up to these ideals or be nothing. It is a critical annihilating force that engenders a feeling of helplessness.

The conflict between these forces comes to a head in midlife. In this “passage” there is usually a threatening event which triggers a crisis, usually a memento mori such as the death of one’s parents, or a heart attack affecting oneself or a friend. Sheehy’s book begins with the event which triggered her own crisis: the sense of futility in life resulting from her experience of a Northern Ireland massacre. For Sheehy this is a particularly dramatic event in the lives of everyone: “There is a moment an immense and precarious moment ‑ of stark terror.” This crisis engenders a period of depression and inactivity ‑ a sense of hopelessness in coping with the threat.

Sheehy advises people at this point in their lives to act bravely, to face the conflict squarely and be hopeful of the future. The hope which Sheehy offers is a romantic one; there is an optimistic commitment to the self as the only force of authority in one’s world. This becomes clear when her statements about the crisis are examined:

For whether we know it or not, and usually we don’t, it is this dictator guardian from whom we all are struggling at last to be free. In midlife, all the old wars with the inner custodian flare up again. And eventually, if we let it happen, they will culminate in a final, decisive battle. The object of that battle is to overtake the last of the ground held by the other and end up with the authority for ourselves in our own command. (1977, p. 436)

Given Sheehy’s literary style, it is not surprising that she employs a metaphor to describe this conflict. It is, rather, her choice of metaphor which is interesting. By using a metaphor of battle she is encapsulating the event of midlife crisis in terms which make it compatible with the literary structure of a romance.

Indeed, Sheehy’s theory readily allows for a romance narrative. There is already the notion of a dream, which can be seen in terms of a romantic quest, and the inner custodian, which can be easily viewed as the elemental foe opposed to the realization of the quest. Given these initial terms, the equation of romance is completed by Sheehy’s view of life as a perilous journey consisting in a series of adventures leading up to a crucial struggle in the midlife crisis. This is clearly indicated by Sheehy’s statement of romantic hope:

To reach the clearing beyond, we must stay with the weightless journey through uncertainty. Whatever counterfeit safety we hold from overinvestments in people and institutions must be given up. The inner custodian must be unseated from the controls. No foreign power can direct our journey from now on. It is for each of us to find a course that is valid by our own reckoning. And for each of us there is the opportunity to emerge reborn, authentically unique, with an enlarged capacity to love ourselves and embrace others. (1977, p. 364)

Sheehy aims to inspire the reader with a sense of hope in life by constructing personal development in terms of a romance. And given the nature of the crucial struggle in romance ‑ that it allows for the rebirth and rejuvenation of the hero ‑ it structures a difficult period in life in a way which allows for the possibility of an optimistic outcome. If she had chosen to structure life according to alternative forms, such as a tragedy in which childhood hopes are destroyed by the cruel realities of adult life, or a satire where the idealistic dreams of childhood are disillusioned by the ironies and complexities of adulthood, the effect would be to engender despair.

The purpose of using a literary style can thus be seen as allowing Sheehy the license to use literary forms to construct lives. In effect, Sheehy is teaching the readers to read their own lives in terms of romance so that they may share in this hope: “the capacity for renewal in each human spirit is nothing short of amazing.” The message on the cover saying “Passages is your life story” now can be translated as “You too may emplot your life as a romantic adventure.”

There is further evidence for this point in Pathfinders (1982), the sequel to Passages. Here Sheehy presents heroes of her system. The heroes must pass three tests:

1. To confront crossroads
2. To cause a minimum of human damage.
3. To seek a purpose outside oneself.

What is significant about these three tests is that, according to critics of the romantic literary form (see Frye, 1957), the heroes of classic forms of romance must also face three tests, and the nature of these tests roughly corresponds to Sheehy’s. The first test (agon) involves conflict between the hero and the evil force. The second test (pathos) is the final death struggle between the combatants. Sheehy’s second test is compatible with this; it assumes that the person has tried to resolve the conflict by reassessing commitments such as an unchallenging job or a sour marriage. She is specifying that the outcome of this test should not merely be the annihilation of previous commitments ‑ persons should salvage some of their pasts from this crucial struggle. The third test (anagnorisis) is the discovery of a transcendent meaning or truth as part of the process of renewal after the struggle. Sheehy similarly specifies that the pathfinder should discover a meaning beyond the pursuit of pleasure or self-gratification. It is understandable that if Sheehy invests in the mythos of romance as a source of optimism, then she also buys the baggage of the romantic conventions.

In Passages Sheehy refers to the work of two other researchers as promoting her own interest in human development: Daniel Levinson and Roger Gould. Levinson’s book, The Seasons of Man’s Life (1978), is seen by some as an academically respectable work from which Sheehy draws her theory. Certainly, the Dream concept figures as strongly in Levinson as it does in Sheehy, but, unlike Passages, Seasons constructs a force opposed to the Dream which is not an object with whom one can engage in battle ‑ it is not like Sheehy’s inner custodian (“nasty tyrant”); rather it is a tragic flaw within the character, something over which one has no control. Levinson’s scenario for midlife does not provide the reader with the same sense of adventure as Sheehy because the enemy or frustrating force is part of oneself ‑ it cannot be easily externalized as a foe: “The tragic sense derives from the realization that great misfortunes and failures are not merely imposed upon us from without, but are largely the result of our own tragic flaws” (1978, p. 225). Given the absence of clear opposition between good and bad, the metaphor for the process of growth cannot be battle; Levinson chooses instead to compare development in midlife to a geographical study, in which basic faults are revealed to the explorer. The aim then is discovery, rather than the victory which Sheehy envisages.

Gould is another theorist who refers to the Dream as a primary force in human development, but he provides a different metaphor for the process of growth. The negative force for Gould rests with the “angry demons” of childhood, which remain fostered in the illusions carried into adulthood: “To enjoy full access to our innermost self, we can no longer deny the ugly, demonic side of life, which our immature mind tried to protect against by enslaving itself to false illusions that absolute safety was possible” (1978, p. 218). Midlife thus becomes a period for facing up to reality. The metaphor Gould employs is breaking a wild horse; evil cannot be defeated in battle, it must simply be exposed to reality and, through experience, tamed. Gould holds an existentialist position toward life ‑he sees it as a process of demystification: “Time … strips away our last remaining illusion of safety and makes existentialists of us all.” The breaking down of illusions through experience is the goal presented by Gould, contrasting with Levinson’s discovery of tragic flaws and Sheehy’s victory over the inner custodian. The goals typify the myths of satire, tragedy, and romance, respectively.2 The fact that these authors examine the same issue, with similar materials, yet construct their theories in such contrasting ways, demonstrates the relativity of narrative constructions, and especially highlights that Sheehy’s view of life is as much a product of the structures of narrative emplotment and their associated assumptions about human nature as it is of representation.

SAMUEL SMILES

Samuel Smiles is a writer whose success in the Victorian era is compatible with Sheehy’s success in our own time. Smiles authored many life manuals, the most popular being Self‑Help (1925, originally published, 1854). The impact of Self‑Help on Victorian culture can be gauged by the fact that it sold more copies than any of the great nineteenth century novels. The purpose of the comparison between Smiles and Sheehy is not to analyse historically the changes in sensibilities concerning life constructions, but simply to highlight more distinctive features of Sheehy’s approach.

Looking at the cover notes of Self‑Help, the reader is less encouraged to find a literary masterpiece within. Smiles’ style is praised as being 11 clear and attractive,” but the emphasis is largely on the inspirational nature of his works:

[Self‑Help will] help to inspire the rising generation with ennobling sentiments.

Builder

There are few departments of public life in which this book may not inspire to higher self‑devotion….

Liverpool Mercury

Smiles’ style is less colourful than Sheehy’s, and more precise.

The force which drives personality in Smiles’ system is character. Character is made up of various elements or moral qualities of personality. These are energy. duty, reverence, will, courage, self-control, cheerfulness, and manners. The general theme of these qualities is a positive desire to do right by society. According to Smiles, character is determined by social milieu. Thus the greatest formative influence on personality is family, followed by teachers. peers, spouse, patrons, books. and society’s heroes.

Many of Smiles’ books display the means by which character can become manifest to others, especially as it is evident in the lives of heroes of Victorian society; their story is usually of boys from modest and devout backgrounds who through application are able to raise themselves and do good in society. Their character is made evident in two ways. First, it can be seen in the daily contributions to society that eventually amount to a character‑building set of good works: “Indeed, character consists in little acts, well and honourably performed; daily life being the quarry from which we build it up, and rough‑hew the habits which we form” (1925, p. 468). Alternatively, character may become manifest by means of a dramatic gesture: “When Stephen of Colonna fell into the hands of his base assailants, and they asked him in derision, ‘Where is now your fortress?’ ‘Here’, was the bold reply. placing his hand upon his heart (1925. p. 453). In this way character becomes something which is easily read by others. in terms of one’s history of good works (moral career) or through self‑presentation strategies.

Compared to Sheehy, the essence of Smiles lies on the surface. Smiles’ lives are flat and undynamic ‑ there is no struggle within the self to arrive at a self‑determined meaning. In the language of self‑reflection discussed by Potter et al., Smiles holds an “honest soul” theory of character. one which sees self as consisting of a stable set of traits, whereas Sheehy sees self as something that must be strived for, the romantic self.

For Smiles, the meaning which determines one’s life comes necessarily from outside oneself; there is an objective moral order, the same for all, by which one’s personal worth is judged. This may sound restrictive and uninviting, but Smiles does offer a bonus. Because the example of others acts as an independent force which permeates our moral capabilities, our own actions are granted a significance outside ourselves as they become part of the moral fabric of society which in turn controls the behaviour of others. Smiles’ theory of character thus implies a secular immortality:

The spirits of men do not die: they still live and walk abroad among us…. Thus, every act we do or word we utter, as well as every act we witness or word we hear, carries with it an influence which extends over, and gives a colour, not only to the whole of our future life, but makes itself felt upon the whole frame of society. (1925, p. 428)

According to Sheehy the worth of an individual is in the ability to face reality by finding a balance betwen seeking and merging, independence and intimacy. In contrast, Smiles simply believes that people operate like a Marxist economic system; that the value of a product is directly related to the labor involved in its creation, thus there is no honor without struggle. The value for Smiles is labor, whereas for Sheehy it is authenticity. A comparison of the moral orders of Islam and St. Thomas of Aquinas by Rom Harr6 (1984) reveals a similar difference. While the Islamic concept of quaadar prescribes a universal life path for all that is achieved by faith and determination, Aquinas refers to the necessity of making decisions in the life‑course.

So far, Sheehy and Smiles have been contrasted in their theories of how lives are constructed. To gain knowledge of their method, attention should be paid to the many case histories included in their books. Both writers use cases very much as exemplary lives which not only demonstrate their theories about human nature and conform to the narrative patterns seen as typical in life, but also provide models of how the readers should live their own lives.

THE CASE OF DWIGHT

In Passages (1977, pp. 256‑27 1), Sheehy uses the case of Dwight to illustrate the rebirth of a person who avoided experimentation in earl. life. It begins as an example of the hazards involved in a lack of risk taking when young, and ends as a celebration of the potential to overcome a bad start by taking on adventures later in life.

Dwight is presented as a person whose early development was stamped with the traditionalism of his established New England family. Sheehy exploits the rhythm of language to highlight his lack of experimentation. After Dwight gains a large inheritance from his grandfather:

He safed it all away in blue chip stocks. Lock!

He wasted not a moment between finishing basic training and starting married life with Vanessa. Lock!

And she describes his becoming a teacher despite his father’s objections:

With almost no experimentation Dwight had found his one true course in life.

Lock!

Slowly becoming aware that his life had been too restricted to allow the realization of any authentic sense of self, Dwight begins to break out. He leaves his wife and starts experimenting with one of Sheehy’s stock figures, the Testimonial Woman When she leaves him Dwight is devastated, but this leads him to realize that: “a change of mates was not the key. A change in him was.” Following this revelation Dwight sets out on the romantic quest to find himself, and he begins to grow: “As he began to assume the authority for his own support, Dwight stretched on all levels.” In keeping with the romantic mythos, Sheehy even has Dwight disappearing into the sunset: “On the brow of 40, brimming with vitality and more daring than he had ever before displayed, Dwight whisked off with his new wife to the last wilderness in the West to make a documentary: in his field, using her medium.”

There is, however, another story embedded in the case of Dwight that Sheehy chooses to deny by her use of poetic license. Dwight’s previous life may be alternatively represented as a series of rebellions. First, he turned against his father’s expectations of him to become an executive and chose to become a teacher instead. This, according to Sheehy, happened with no experimentation, but “experimentation” seems to be something which serves the narrative structure of the case rather than the “facts” of Dwight’s life. Second, he entered the political arena by working for a year as an administrative aide to a congressman; but this was, “For want of excitement…. It tickled him to make contacts with celebrities.” After this change of style he went back to teaching. By employing metaphor, Sheehy again uses poetic license to make one interpretation seem more obvious than another: “At 30, the outlines of his life in the academic world seemed to fall into place as clearly as the stone geometry of an old land‑grant college.” The metaphorical neatness of Sheehy’s image allows her interpretation to slip in without being subject to a serious critical scrutiny.

Sheehy’s romantic story of Dwight’s life is not the only one that can be constructed. One could construct it as a satire, in which a good and honest man is influenced by the romantic ideal of selfhood and destroys his family and personal future in the misguided belief that he would achieve greater authenticity. Instead, Sheehy chooses the romance mythos which generates an altogether more inspiring and optimistic scenario. Her choice is not guided solely by the match between this mythos and reality; also at play are Sheehy’s moral and aesthetic visions of life.

THE CASE OF DOCTOR LEE

A typical case from the works of Samuel Smiles reveals a different force driving personality. The case of Dr. Samuel Lee (1925, pp. 41341 5) typifies the story of the man who through the force of character hauls himself up from modest beginnings to outstanding achievements. “One of the dullest boys” at school, Dr. Lee began life as a carpenter, reading books with Latin quotations in his leisure. Becoming more interested he mastered Latin, and went on to study ancient Greek, followed by the Chaldee, Syriac, and Samaritan dialects. All this was without support from any academy. However, the strain of reading began to tell on his eyes and he had to forego his study until a fire destroyed his carpentry tools and he was forced to take up teaching language for his livelihood. Through the patronage of Dr. Scott, a neighboring clergyman, Dr. Lee expanded the languages under his command and eventually became a professor of Arabic and Hebrew at Queen’s College, Cambridge. According to Smiles, the point of this story is to reveal “the power of perseverance in self‑culture,” though it could just as easily be to demonstrate the unpredictable and impressive nature of a natural gift for languages.

Absent from Smiles’ narrative is any discovery within Dr. Lee of a goal which has personal relevance, which would have marked Sheehy’s version of the same story. The catalyst for Dr. Lee’s rise was not selfdiscovery, but the patronage of Dr. Scott and the recognition from others of Dr. Lee’s “unaffected, simple, and beautiful character.” The story of Dr. Lee’s life can be viewed as an epic narrative in which the hero undergoes adventures that do not interact with his relatively static and simple character. Scholes and Kellog (1966) contrast the epic with the romantic form, especially the modem romance involving a psychological search for identity, where the adventures dynamically affect the character of the hero. The form of character emplotment used by Sheehy typifies the themes of modem romance.

Despite these differences in their chosen forms of life emplotment, Sheehy and Smiles have in common a moral framework upon which their constructions are based. In this framework the hero is understood to be an exemplar of certain virtues ‑ for Sheehy it is authenticity, and for Smiles it is commitment. An alternative framework for constructing character is suggested by Hunter’s (1983) study of the practice of “reading” character in drama criticism. Sheehy and Smiles typify a practice of reading character in which the worth and workings of a person are formed by moral qualities. An alternative means of reading character was practiced in the eighteenth century. This involves viewing character as a rhetorical object, whose plausibility and quality is determined by the dramaturgical rules of everyday life. This practice is evident in the typification of characters into such categories as the “eccentric” and the “conformist.” What such characters lack is a temporal dimension which would give their lives a stronger narrative underpinning, and thus a greater moral relevance. By providing definite narrative frameworks for life, Sheehy and Smiles enable character to be read morally.

CONCLUSION

Gail Sheehy’s books can be seen as attempts to construct life in terms of the narrative conventions of romance, of a struggle between good and evil which sets the stage for a discovery of inner truth. The outcome of this construction is to create adventure in personal conflict and thus allow the possibility of hope in a period of potential despair; it gives personal crisis a meaning by encapsulating it in narrative terms. Compared to Sheehy, Smiles’ narratives grant the individual much less authority in resolving the issues of selfhood, and offer the less individually determined Stoic path of moral goodness as a guarantee of happiness. Smiles’ books demonstrate that the conventions used by Sheehy are relative. What is found in the works of two of Sheehy’s contemporaries, Levinson and Gould, are the life manuals which do grant the individual this authority, but their metaphors for selfhood lack the spirited adventure with an externalized foe that characterizes Sheehy’s vision. Certainly there are enough materials in any life for the construction of a romance, but whether romance is chosen before other narrative structures such as tragedy and irony will depend on the aesthetic and moral will of the constructor.

All of these life constructions serve a basic need to provide a narrative concordance in human development, but they obviously differ in the values they attach to the individual and society, the limits of human freedom, and the resulting degree of hope, despair, resignation, or pragmatism that is appropriate in life’s progress. The first step has been to recognize the process of life construction at work in the popular life manual, the next stage is to determine its aesthetic, moral, psychological, social, cultural, and historical contexts.

NOTES

Reference: Kevin Murray ‘Finding literary paths: The work of popular life constructors’ In T.R. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger (1986)

1. For an analysis of Gail Sheehy’s relationship to popular psychoanalysis see Murray, K. (1984). Romanticizing psychoanalysis. Unpublished manuscript, University of Melbourne, Australia.

2. For a description of these myths see N. Frye, 1957; and for a statement of their theoretical relevance in the social sciences see K. Murray, in press.

REFERENCES

Bruner, J. S. (1962). On knowing: Essays for the left hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Frye, N. (1957). Anatomy of criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gergen, K. J. and Gergen, M. (1983). Narratives of the self. In T. R. Sarbin and R. E. Scheibe (Eds.). Studies in social identity. New York: Praeger.

Gould, R. (1978). Transformations: Growth and change in adult life. New York: Simon & Shuster.

Harré, R. (1984). Psychological variety. in P. Heelas and A. Lock (Eds.), Indigenous psychologies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Hunger, 1. (1983). Reading character. Southern Review, 16, 226‑243.

Kermode, F. (1967). The sense of an ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kohli, M. (198 1). Biography: Account, text, method. In D. Bertaux (Ed.), Biography and society. California: Sage.

Levinson, D. (1978). The seasons of man’s life. New York: Ballantine Books.

Murray, K. (in press). Life as fiction: Proposing the marriage of dramaturgical model and literary criticism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior.

Potter, J., Stringer, P., and Wetherell, M. (1984). Social texts and context: Literature and social psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Runyan, W. M. (1980). Alternative accounts of lives: an argument for epistemological relativism. Biography, 3, 209‑224.

Sabini, J. and Silver, M. (1982). Moralities of everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarbin, T. R. (1982). The Quixotic principle: A Belletristic approach to the psychological study of meanings and imaginings. In V. L. Allen and K. E. Scheibe (Eds.), The social context of conduct: Psychological writings of Theodore Sarbin. New York: Praeger.

Scholes, R. and Kellog, R. (1966). The nature of narrative. London: Oxford University Press.

Sheehy, G. (1977). Passages: Predictable crises in adult life. New York: Bantam.

Sheehy, G. (1982). Pathfinders. New York: Bantam.

Smiles, S. (1925). Self‑help: With illustrations of conduct and perseverance. London: John Murray. (Originally published in 1854).

White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

White, H. (1980). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry, 7, 5‑28.

The interregnum that followed the 2010 Federal election drew attention to the voices of Independents, speaking free of the constraints of party machines. Refreshing views came to the surface. During his campaign for election to the electorate of Port Macquarie, Rob Oakeshott questioned both party’s approach toward asylum seekers. He said, ‘If you spend time looking at it, we in Australia are the moat people.’ His point was that the natural isolation of Australia as an island continent will always temper exposure to hoards of refugees. The generous airing his views received during the tussle between Labor and the Coalition for his vote enabled him to put this phrase into the public domain repeatedly.

But ‘moat people’ has resonance beyond Oakeshott’s intention.[i] It evokes the image of the ‘big pond’—the conceit that Australia is naturally separated from its neighbours. This understanding of regional isolation has a long history. The notion of Australia as the ‘last outpost’ of the British Empire underpinned the White Australia Policy, determined to keep out those nearby.

While it might seem that much of this xenophobia is whipped up by sensationalist media, particularly the Sydney talk show hosts, the concept of ‘moat people’ strikes deep. The cultural theorist Suvrendrini Perera ties the notion of Australian ‘exceptionalism’ to the suburban tradition of the backyard. For her the quarter-acre block is ‘the little Aussie battler’s own kingdom and domain’,[ii] caught between ‘the racially charged wilderness of terra nullius on the one hand and the besieging ocean frontier on the other.’ In this picture, Australia is a backyard on a continental scale.

How do we respond to this? It seems the default position is to despair at the inherently racist nature of the Australian population and dream of a more Scandinavian liberal consensus. This is a comfortable dream. It positions those of us with university education safely above the suburban rednecks below. Still, neither of us ends up any closer to our neighbours across the water.

Two Australian artists point us in a different direction. Their work emerges from a particularly charged test of the moat people. As is legend now, in August 2001 a Norwegian vessel rescued 438 Afghan asylum seekers on their way to Christmas Island to seek refugee status. In the political storm that emerged from that incident, inflamed by the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre, the government took various measures to protect the moat. Christmas Island was excised removing the obligation to process refugees who arrived on its territory, and eventually those aboard the Tampa were re-located to Nauru, as part of the ‘Pacific Solution’.

This kind of operation was not new to the moat people—in fact it, was how they came into being. Australia was, after all, settled as a penal colony in order to rid England of the unsightly vagrants in their midst, mostly refugees of the industrial revolution. As often happens in the post-colonial, a nation perpetrates on others the act of subjugation of which it was originally victim.

But there is a contrary strain in southern cultures like Australia which contests this hierarchy. The practice known as ‘poor craft’ collects detritus what is left over to alchemically re-create a new preciousness. ‘Poor craft’ can be seen in the fibre works of Nalda Searles, the milk bar jewellery of Roseanne Bartley and transformation of fine furniture from firewood by Damien Wright. Recently, two artists have explored the Pacific Solution and found ways of re-connecting us with its refuse.

Denmark (WA) artist Cecile Williams first visited Christmas Island in 2001 as a part of a schools circus program. This has continued in recent years and she has begun to involve local people in making costumes, sets and large scale festival puppets for their recent 50 years celebration. She is particularly attracted to Greta Beach, which receives a huge tide of plastic debris bought on from the tides of the trade winds. Once while combing the beach she found a Muslim good luck charm, used by an Indonesian fisherman to gain safe passage at sea. This prompted her to consider the stories associated with flotsam.

Back in her studio, Williams sorted through the detritus and collected ten- and twenty-litre plastic containers from her tip. With a background in puppet theatre design, she constructed dioramas to re-create diverse scenes from life on Christmas Island, including phosphate mining, the early history of the island like beriberi sickness, local Malay and Chinese culture, the Hungry Ghosts Chinese Festival, golf and the detention centres. The results were shown in the Perth International Arts Festival under the title Contained: Collected Moments from Christmas Island.

Given the subject matter, we would expect to find tragic scenes of suffering. But Contained reveals something new. The installation of nine containers called ‘Detained’ is particularly grim, featuring grills and body parts collected from washed-up toys. But I particularly like Buddhist Chant. Toothbrush heads ornament its border and the interior space is beautifully suggested by the over-sized foot, delicately constructed shrine with a yellow glow within. A stray fragment of Australia has drifted into the moat .The familiar moral drama of detention centres for refugees has brought us this unexpected scene of Buddhist life. Both tragic and festive scenes are brought together in a humble aesthetic of found materials.

As a visual artist, Nick Mangan has a more austere story to tell. The Melbourne-based sculptor has been engaged in a particularly rhizomic aesthetic, imitating the work of termites in a theatre of speculative exoticism. His Gertrude show Colony in 2005 featured a Danish table top used as an atavistic altar. His work is a kind of reverse primitivism familiar elsewhere around the South, such as the South African sculptor Brett Murray and the Colombian artist Nadín Ospina. Mangan recovers primitivism from its colonial gaze and re-directs it back on the viewer.

Mangan’s more recent work has been inspired by found objects that match his aesthetic. The crude pinnacles outside Nauru House in Melbourne stand as a Neolithic exception to the polished granite surfaces of the city. Mangan was inspired to travel to their source.

Nauru is one of the most extreme examples of the resource curse. ‘Thanks’ to its phosphate deposits, Nauru once boasted the highest per capita income in the world. Having squandered its wealth, the nation now seems a litany of failures. It has the highest level of diabetes, the highest road mortality (despite having only one intersection), and unsustainable debt. Mangan has mined this tragic story for a series of works that first featured in the Adelaide Biennial. Notes from a Cretaceous World includes a series of coffee tables made from slabs of coral limestone that remained after the strip-mining in Nauru. Their source was the pinnacles that once adorned Nauru House in Melbourne. These tables realise a dream of the past President of Nauru, Bernard Dowiyogo. It is unreliably reported that , as he lay dying of diabetes in the USA, before signing over the use of his land, Dowiyogo suggested that the nation’s fortunes might be stored by developing a furniture industry making table tops from coral rock.

Mangan’s work has none of the unexpected delights of William’s dioramas, but they do share a parallel logic. While Williams is recovering the plastic detritus of consumerism, Mangan is dealing in an older sedimentation of marine guano. Mangan too uses the complicity that connects Australia with Nauru to conjure a story closer to home. The ‘resource curse’ is a presage of Australia’s fate, living high on the profits of mining without adequately planning for its future.

Their work can be seen as part of a broader southern aesthetic. As an alternative to the ‘big pond’, Perera invokes the concept of ‘tidalectics’, which originated in the writing of Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tidalectics reflects an island aesthetics of iterative rhythms. For Perera, tidalectics is a counterpoint to the exclusive binary of land and water that typifies the colonial imagination. As Australia has pushed a tide of refugees back to places like Christmas Island and Nauru, Williams and Mangan have shown how it is possible to draw back new elements into Australia, both critical and enlivening.

There are moves afoot currently to engage more creatively with the region. There is clearly more to learn than the tourist spectacle of grass skirts and kava. The University of the South Pacific has been producing challenging scholarship of relevance to Australia, particularly in Indigenous studies. A good source for this is the Fijian education theorist Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, who has been publishing on the subject of knowledge practices in Fiji. She has proposed a Fijian Vanua Framework for Research (FVRF). As she writes, ‘Knowledge is seen as a gift by Fijians; hence within the frame of Vanua research the gift is sought for and derived accordingly.’ She also proposes a ‘cultural taxonomy of silence’ involving fifteen different expressions of silence in Fijian culture. Along with others, what is emerging is an epistemology that strays from enlightenment assumptions and is as much about sustaining boundaries of ignorance as it is about spreading knowledge. The Institute of Postcolonial Studies has embarked on a series Southern Perspectives that aims to explore such vectors of south-south that are emerging in Australian research and thinking.

And in Suva last November, the Pacific Craft Network was established as an organisation to promote craft practice within the context of the World Craft Council. Australia happens to share this with Fiji as members of the Pacific sub-region. As late as 1999, Australia was once able to host a regional meeting in Suva on this platform. The opportunity exists now to recover that relationship.

Australia was originally conceived as a sewer for the English class system. Pacific is increasingly a drain for the world’s crap. But this contains the magical potential of reversal, transforming rubbish into beauty. The moat may end up being what connect us, not what keeps us apart.

References

• John Connell ‘Nauru: The first failed Pacific State?’ The Round Table (2006) 95: 383, pp. 47-63
• Unaisi Nabobo-Baba ‘Decolonising Framings in Pacific Research: Indigenous Fijian Vanua Research Framework’ AlterNative (2008) 4: 2, pp. 140-154
• Unaisi Nabobo-Baba Knowing and Learning: An indigenous Fijian approach Suva: IPS Publications, 2006

Links

• Southern Perspectives www.southernperspectives.net
• Pacific Craft Network pacaaonline.ning.com

[i] Oakeshott goes on to say, “The very fact that you have to get in a boat to get to Australia means we have much less of an issue than most other countries in the world.” (5/7/2010 Port Macquarie News http://www.portnews.com.au/news/local/news/general/were-moat-people-says-mp/1875959.aspx)

[ii] Suvendrini Perera Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, And Bodies New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p.51

Originally published in Artlink  vol 30 no 4, 2010

Unlimited offers promising opportunities. The APT deals largely in the cultural reflections in our region, questioning stereotypes and familiarising ourselves with a contemporary Asia Pacific sensibility. Despite massive audience numbers in Brisbane, participation from the region is likely to be limited to those with the resources to engage in visual arts. Unlimited offers the possibility of partnership beyond the performance of cultural difference—it engages in the everyday life of the region.

Besides its relevance to our dialogue with the Asia Pacific, Unlimited coincides with the birth of the Australian Design Alliance as a lobbying group to promote design as a capacity across government. This design push takes aligns itself with the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, which has historically supported the crafts. It argues that ‘Australia should keep pace with the rest of the world in generating creative capital through innovative ideas, product differentiation and systems effectiveness.’

From a government perspective, support for design is seen a business-friendly initiative. The focus of the Queensland event reinforces the link to economic growth – the theme of the 2010 Unlimited festival is ‘opportunity’.

Yet the concerns are not purely profit-driven. There is much in the program that focuses on improving social condition in the region. One of the great successes of Unlimited was Bunker Roy, of Barefoot College, who received two standing ovations for his account of the south-south enterprise teaching grandmothers to become solar engineers. Cases studies of ‘Design in Action’ mostly focused on needs of poor communities in the Asia Pacific region.

But sometimes business and development combined uneasily. There’s a growing school of thought, reflected in C.K. Prahalad’s Bottom of the Pyramid, that a win-win scenario for global North and South can be created by harnessing informal economies in poor countries to the efficiencies of global capital. Mark Ingram from Millennium Business Development told the story of a village in the highlands of PNG, where responsible women farmers were contrasted with indulgent men wasting their time in body decoration and spear-sharpening.

While few today would argue for the interests of men above women, MBD can be seen as advocating a missionary approach. This kind of business development isolates the primitive elements of a culture off from its progressive capacities. It’s doubtful that MBD would overtly identify as imperialist, but critical discussion is important to clarify its aims.

Unlimited has some important issues to work through. Given the urgency of poverty, perhaps cultural identity is an unnecessary romance. Conversely, the prioritising of economy above culture may itself be specific to a Western world view that focuses more on the future than the past.

If it were to articulate such issues, Queensland’s Unlimited would not only position the state in this growing region but also play a leading role in a national conversation about our place in the world beyond. Figures like Noel Pearson have alerted us to these issues within Australia, now we are finding resonant voices from our neighbours outside.

Links

The Unlimited Asia Pacific website http://unlimitedap.com contains a full range of videos of presentations from the event; a visit is highly recommended.

Australian Design Alliance http://www.design.org.au

Originally published in Artlink vol 30 no 4, 2010

An evaluation of the role played by collectives in recent craft

It’s a great pleasure to be back in Chicago. I was shocked to realise that it has been ten years since I was here last, and delivered the paper that eventually became the chapter in the publication Object of Labor. So my presentation this evening provides me with an opportunity to reflect on the issues of that paper, and consider what has developed in the subsequent ten years.

But to develop the ideas, I want to jump ahead another ten years’ time.

500 years ago

In almost exactly ten years’ time we will be commemorating the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, nailed to a church door in Saxony. The impact of Luther’s hammer still reverberates. In 1960s Australia, when I was growing up, we took it for granted that the world was inexorably divided into two worlds, the Catholic and Protestant, the Micks and the Proddies. Each side would taunt the other with the same phrase ‘Catholic [or Protestant] dogs stink like frogs jumping off hollow logs.’ Since then, Australia has become a more multicultural society and this British fault line has been superseded by other differences, particularly the Muslim-Christian divide.

While the Reformation may seem a period of purely historical interest now, the broader issues that it concerns are as relevant as ever. For me, the critical question is not whether one religion is better than the other, but how they can coexist. In particular, how can we see Protestantism in dialogue with Catholicism, rather than its replacement? This is essentially a question of specialisation. Catholicism was criticised for investing ultimate spiritual authority in specially trained priests. Lay followers had simply to take the priests on their obscure Latin word. So Protestantism argued that faith was an individual responsibility, independent of the institution of the church. The broad question concerns the endeavour of human society—how do we balance the specialisation of knowledge in individuals against the common interests of the people?

This question goes beyond religion. It is critical in democracy, where the specialised task of government operates in a tenuous relationship with the broader appeal of politics. In this hemisphere, I am particularly interested in how it casts the difference between the north and the south as reflected in the dialogue between modernist and baroque, literacy and idolatry. And, more relevant to today’s discussion, the question of specialisation is now of critical relevance to the crafts, where the democratic energies driving the art world challenge the treasury of techniques that is our craft heritage.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago, I groped towards this by examining the question of collective creativity as expressed in the metaphor of the hive. Here, by targeting artists as priests who mystify and disenfranchise their audience, we can pose the question of collective creativity. We all know the romantic inheritance of western art. Henry James could claim that ‘the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.’

In my original argument, I posed the question of collective creativity. How can a work of art be created outside of the guiding impulse of individual expression? What kind of art emerges from a group of individuals operating freely, without any purposeful direction?

Taking a broad view of this question, I invoked the art of insects. Spiderwebs, hives and ant mounds are produced unconsciously through a series of repetitive actions. In 19^th century Christianity, this was taken as proof of divinity—a world whose beauty emerges spontaneously from the smallest of its creatures. But with industrialisation, as life became increasingly mechanised, the insect reversed its meaning and came to symbolise instead the demise of creativity. The final throes of this reaction can be seen last century in narratives such as Star Trek Next Generation, where individual Star Fleet officers are threatened with assimilation into the hive-like Borg colony.

But this individualism has gradually given way to an increasingly collective way of understanding the world. The paternal welfare state was transformed into a society of individual economic units existing in a free market. In science and technology, models became increasingly modular—the free exercise of parts exceeding their whole. Socially, phenomena emerged such as the Mexican wave, where a crowd flexes its collective muscle. The age of the individual seems to have given way to the era of the group —from I to we.

The challenge is understand how art can be produced collectively.

Artist as insect

Seen in these terms, I identified four models of artist as insect. The first was in the actual employment of insects to produce art, such as the French artist Hubert Duprat, who used the natural cocoon building capacity of Caddis larvae to create brooches of precious jewels. The second was artists who followed the insect method of using their own body substances to create works. Sue Saxon collected tears in lachrymatories to produce a tree of sorrow. The third model used the new medium of the Internet to create a matrix for collective action. So Persistent Data Confidante solicited confessions from visitors and then asked them to rate the disclosures of others—what emerges is an evolutionary sense of group curiosity. Finally, the last model was set aside for the romantic return, based on the re-emergence of individual consciousness. The example was Gwendolyn Zierdt’s Unabomber Manifesto, which used the binary machine logic of weaving to express a message of revolt against technology.

In retrospect, the romantic return may have been a little, well, romantic. If anything, the collective turn has accelerated in the 21^st century. In Australia, the epic Australian Idol has now evolved into the Singing Office, where divas of the shower can compete on the main stage. What is called Web 2.0 has brought us new ways of inter-relating. The institutions of the media were devolved to a sea of blogs. Social networking sites such as Facebook offer a new frontier for information exchange.

And in the art world, what has been called relational aesthetics has continued to provide creative challenges as they exchange the isolation of the studio for the conviviality of the café. French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud heralded relational aesthetics as an art for the network age, where the masterly production of precious beauty for the appreciation of elites is replaced by the construction of new possibilities of community.

So, for example, Felix Gonzales Torres’ work for the Sydney Biennale consisted of a room filled with candies wrapped in gold cellophane, which visitors were free to take. The work was not in the installation itself but the situation in which it placed the visitor—do we follow our appetites and destroy the work or save it for others to enjoy? The visitor is no longer a passive recipient of the work’s aura, but an active participant in its operations. From this perspective, the seeming innocent scene of an artist at his easel is a spectacle of proto-fascism, forcing viewers to submit to a privileged view of creativity.

Collective art has continued to grow around the work. Last year in the Russian village of Arkhstoyaniye, artists attempted to return to the medieval model of the anonymous artist involved in the construction of churches and icons.

In the textile arts, popular hobbyist crafts have become an important arena for creative action. The renegade craft movement advocated DIY crafts as an antidote to global consumerism, particularly through socialised media such as blogs and podcasting.

Towards our part of the world, it is particularly New Zealand artists who seem to have embraced collective action. Anie O’Neill developed a methodology under the title Buddy System to teach visitors a simple crochet technique for making flower forms. These contribute to an installation which grows during the course of the exhibition, and is eventually distributed as gifts.

In Melbourne, what’s called the ‘knitting revolution’ has led to many artists using the accessibility of knitting to bring people together. For the past five years at Craft Victoria, we have staged the Melbourne Scarf Festival, which uses the democratic nature of scarf making to explore different themes of textiles and identity.

Recently this spread to Canberra with a very clever exhibition at Craft ACT which used the extensive network of online knitters to produce works for an exhibition Knit1 Blog1.

Craft 2.0

These developments suggest a movement we might call Craft 2.0, where work is produced not by the master craftsperson but by the audience themselves. Rather than be intimidated by the virtuosity of the skilled master, the visitor is allowed to partake of the creative process directly. It is for visitors now to enjoy the plasticity of clay, the hardness of metal, the silky surface of timber, the viscosity of glass and the pliability of fibre. It seems a natural extension of the democratic processes that are advancing our societies.

But we know that this comes at a cost. Clearly, there’s a limit to what a newcomer can achieve when they pick up a material for the first time. In developing a work for popular production, the artist must lower the standards of execution. The years required to understand the inner qualities of one’s material are no longer valued. The life-long investment in making has been rendered as worthless as shares in Enron. As the sub-prime market in craft booms, we await the cultural crash that will come when our skill bank is finally emptied.

This paragraph no doubt leads some to feel a sense of loss in this democratic revolution. Indeed, there are reasons to question the enduring worth of this movement. Without the structure that skill provides, will we be left simply with the momentary sense of transgression?

For critic Hal Foster, the problem with relational art is that it conforms to the destructive processes of global capital, which dissolves tradition and culture into an atomised group of individuals. In arguing that art needs to take a stand, he finds relational art too compliant with existing forms of consumerism. So how might we radicalise relational art without reverting back to privileged notions of the avant-garde?

While the past ten years have witnessed the development of new democratic energies, at the same time there has been a decline in the reproduction of individual skills. You know this particularly in the states, where so much manufacturing has moved on to China. So the small town of Kannapolis in North Carolina, once known as the ‘City of Looms’ is a virtual ghost-town today since the closure of the century-old Cannon Mills complex two years ago, no longer able to compete with the flood of cheap Chinese textiles.Rather than learning to make things ourselves, we have taken the ‘smart’ option of outsourcing those specialised tasks to a largely invisible working class in Asia.

What’s left to Western countries like Australia and the US are the information industries, such as design, entertainment and business. These enable much greater interconnectivity than the specialisations required in manufacturing. However, this is only possible in the context of a greater global specialisation whereby whole countries are dedicated to particular kinds of production.

It is in this context that I’d like to introduce a modified form of collective creativity—a form of world craft based on collaboration.

The craft of collaboration

Last year, Craft Victoria staged an event called Common Goods that marked the 100^th anniversary of Gandhian non-violence, ironically founded in Johannesburg on September 11. Common Goods looked at the various concepts of hospitality found in different societies, particular the concept of Ubuntu—a person is a person through other persons—which was forged in the acts of forgiveness that occurred during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Apartheid. These concepts of humanism provide doors that connect cultures with each other. In the Indian case, Gandhi’s grandson Ramchandra nominated the concept of Sanmati, or reality mindedness, which assists tolerance between Muslims and Hindus.

To realise this concept, we brought out a couple of darners, or Rafoogars, from Najibabad in North India. While a lower caste activity, darning is an integral part of society. Pashmini shawls are revered as heirlooms. Worn everyday, these shawls have been passed down through generations. The techniques for carding and milling the wool have since been lost, so these shawls survive thanks only to the careful work of Rafoogars. Today, the amount of repair on these shawls is greater than the original fabric.

In Australia, we teamed these Rafoogars up with a textile artist Wendy Lugg, who has specialised in darning. It was very strange at first for these Rafoogars to be working with an artist. We set up a project involving the repair of a flag that had been damaged by a recent storm. The Eureka Flag is a revered symbol of Australia’s only republican battle, when gold miners rebelled against the heavy taxes they were force to pay. The Southern Cross design that was stitched into this flag has since become an important rallying symbol for worker’s rights and the fraught republican aspirations of this English colony. The original tattered flag is held in the gallery where the Rafoogars worked.

As soon as the local community learnt of their presence, they were besieged with interest. There were some who wanted to assist with the materials necessary to repair the flag. There were others who brought in precious family heirlooms that were in a state of disrepair. Consistent throughout was a sense of wonder at the nature of darning, a domestic art once so common and now so exotic. Darning seemed to provide audience with a way of connecting with a lost past.

In the meantime, the artists Wendy Lugg sourced and dyed various materials that the Rafoogars stitched together. Other local textile experts assisted with the sourcing of appropriate materials. Such was the demand that it seemed possible that they could have set up permanent residency in the gallery, repairing not only textiles but also memories.

The Rafoogars have since returned home to India, where their own craft is under threat with the inevitable flood of cheap textiles made in China. At the invitation of Intekhab, Wendy Lugg has recently visited the Rafoogers. As revealed by her blog, Wendy was careful to ensure that her visit was not commandeered by other interests. This new international contact is of considerable capital in his community. There continues to be potential that they might be able to sustain their revered craft through commissions from countries that have lost the art.

The worth of this kind of exercise is subject to question. The final products of these collaborations are not as important as the process of bringing cultures together. The skill of an artist like Wendy Lugg is as much in negotiating her role with the two darners as the actual work that she produced—which was itself extraordinary given there was only three weeks to create a new work.

Collaboration does represent an important frontier of craft production, as western artists and designers are increasingly commissioning work from traditional artisans. This genre of world craft certainly has its dangers, as it lends itself to a kind of exoticism that does not seriously value the contribution of makers. However, world craft does have the potential to sustain traditions and cultures. The challenge now is to strengthen this emergent genre with critical examination. To be sustained beyond fashion it needs to deal with the spectres of primitivism and missionary values. If it can proof itself to be a genuinely liberating practice, then world craft augers well for constructive dialogue between first and third worlds. This will not happen spontaneously. It requires much care and critical self-reflection.

Marcus Aurelius said ‘That which is not good for the hive, is not good for the bee.’ When it comes to the production of honey we might say, what is good for the beekeeper is good for the hive.

‘Between the wheel and the mobile phone: ceramics in a network age: Keynote address’ Verge Ceramics Conference  (2006)

Congratulations to the organisers on what’s been a most stimulating conference thus far. I am grateful to Garth Clark for laying out the dilemma in contemporary ceramics so eloquently in his keynote address, and to Gwynn Hanssen Pigott for her animated potter’s tale, which reminded us of the richness that ceramics can bring when reduced to its simple forms. Thanks also to Janet de Boos concept of the distributed studio and its rhizomic metaphors.

I’d like to position this paper in relation to what’s come before. Like others, I’d like to explore the paths leading out from Fortress Ceramica. Not that the fortress is necessarily a bad institution, but for the moment it seems to have been bypassed by modern society.

The image of Fortress Ceramica suggests a particular position for ceramics today. It conjures up the scene of a roundtable with knights sitting in worried discussion as the Normans are just about to scale the ramparts. What will they do? Some decide to join the Normans, with the hope one day they can make it to the glorious court of Paris. But I imagine one stubborn knight, Sir Bernard, who prefers to go underground for a while, in the hope that the ideals represented by Fortress Ceramica might be restored.

My talk considers how ceramics as a field might fare out of its familiar craft setting and in some of the new developments in the art world. The question to be asked through this journey is how these new opportunities advance the field of ceramics, a field which has developed techniques and traditions that enable us to give expression through clay to the things that are important to us.

Following the theme of medieval romance, our journey will take us to a region called ‘the green world’, in reference to the forests like Arden and Sherwood when heroes disappear into a mysterious other world of camaraderie and magic. In the green world, heroes leave beyond the royal power struggles for the utopian world of common folk.

You are wandering down the forest path and what do you find?

Kinki’s handbag

Welcome to Kinki’s handbag. What do we see there? You might notice a wallet, a digital camera, some tissues, candy, the inevitable iPod, keys, chewing gum, pocket PC and sundry other items. It’s hard to imagine ceramics in this sea of disposable items and gadgets. But that’s not what is most remarkable. It’s particularly interesting that we have this image in the first place. Why would someone share an image of the private contents of their handbag? It was taken from a photo-sharing site, Flickr, where users often share an image of ‘What’s in my bag’.

There’s been quite a remarkable opening out of inner experience in recent times. Though reality television programs like Big Brother and the Internet explosion of blogs, we are erasing the boundaries of public and private.

The ‘network age’, as some call it, reflects an increasing interconnectness between people, particularly in the affluent west. We see it in the street, with the rise of café society and the hegemony of the latte. The talking head of current affairs has been replaced by the panel format. A glimpse at any train or bus will find commuters busy texting and talking on their mobile phones. I link therefore I am.

So how goes our noble knight of clay? Rather perplexed, one might say. Ceramics as we know it seems best appreciated from the paradigm of the individual. We need a means to appreciate the investment of time and labour that has gone into the development of skills, embodied in the hands of the potter. We saw this with Gwynn Hanssen Pigott’s life story, involving long hours spent in isolation honing her skills.

Long hours of solitary labour are required to test the limits of the clay, experiment with glazes. We are talking about the moment of connoisseurship, where the collector holds the vessel and appreciates its rare colour and form, and covets private ownership.

Next in the forest, Sir Bernard comes across quite a strange gathering of people – a group of merry men, no less.

Relational aesthetics

In visual arts, the paradigm that many have adopted to respond to the convergences of our time is relational aesthetics. Defined in the writings of Nicholas Bourriaud, relational aesthetics moves the focus in art from the lone object to the relations between people that the art is seen to enable. This art creates fluid communities, which assert democratic values in resistance to the consumerism that hijacks social relations for brand identification and market penetration. As Bourriaud defines it, ‘relational art [is] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space).’[1] Here is art for the age of the mobile phone.

Relational art hardly seems like art at all. For instance, for a work in a previous Sydney Biennale the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres filled a gallery with candies wrapped in gold cellophane. Visitors were free to help themselves to this bounty. The meaning of the work was not in the installation at all, but in the position as a viewer that we find ourselves in having to weigh up individual desire against the collective responsibility to preserve an art work for public enjoyment.

Relational art might involve an artist cooking a dinner for a number of people. In 1993, the French artist Georgina Starr handed out sheets in a restaurant to customers dining alone, that spoke to them about the anxiety of solitary eating—anything to bring people together in unorthodox combinations.

Sir Bernard and Robin Hood seem unlikely companions. Relational aesthetics has a puritan disdain for art as a form of idol worshipping. Bourriaud rails against the ‘dead object crushed by contemplation.’ It may seem there is little prospect for an object-centric art in this movement, but there are new works which honour craft in ways that do not focus on the individually made object.

Let’s meet some of the merry men.

The Buddy System

In craft, an example of a work that fits within relational aesthetics is the Buddy System by Cook Island artist Ani O’Neill. Inspired by her Raratongan grandmother, O’Neill has devised a touring art work that recruits visitors to learn crochet and make a simple flower design. At the end of the installation, these flowers are sent to a person nominated by the maker. The work has been quite successful for O’Neill, featuring in many cultural festivals, including the first Auckland Triennial.

Textile art would seem a natural medium for gregarious uses as it lends itself to the social group. In Melbourne, we have witnessed the knitting revolution develop as younger people sought meaningful ways of coming together outside of the commodified spaces of entertainment.

Asian Field

How might be apply this paradigm to ceramics? A pertinent example may be found in a much publicised work on view at the current Sydney Biennale, Anthony Gormley’s Asian Field. Asian Field is part of a series of work produced by the British sculptor by recruiting people from communities to produce figurines with local clays. Previous works have come from Bristol, Mexico, Brazil and Sweden.

Asian Field was produced by 347 inhabitants of Xiangshan, aged between 7 to 70 years. Their brief was to produce clay figures that were the palm-sized, could stand upright, and have two holes for eyes. Originally planned to be a little over 100,000 figures, the total ended up being 192,000, made over a five day period.

The effect of standing before Asian Field is quite impressive. As one individual, you feel yourself subject of the gaze of nearly half a million eyes. There is an ambivalence of omnipotence and humility. There are also subtle variations in the clay evident across the installation, as the figures reflect the different qualities of clay distributed across the land.

For Gormley, the series has two motives. The first is to honour the primordial mission of sculpture, as witnessed in the first interventions into landscape which lifted horizontal rocks into vertical forms, reflecting the ascent of man from a four to a two legged beast. Thus Gormley transforms the resting nature of earth into the animated works of art. For his second interest, Gormley states ‘I want to democratise the space of art.’[2] Gormley gives over the privilege of making to the people, by no longer being the sole artist who creates the work, but by enabling others to express themselves. This reversal is parallel to the transformation of the gallery, from the crowd visiting the unique object to the multiple objects visiting the unique visitor: ‘you become the subject of art’s gaze rather than the other way round.’

By situating a work about democracy in a Chinese context, Gormley provokes a critical response. An Englishman comes into a Chinese town and recruits villagers to mould pieces of clay. The installation contains photographs of these individuals with their names and one of their pieces. Is there any way of distinguishing their figures from one made in Mexico or England?

Xiangshan

Let’s think about Xiangshan for a minute. In Chinese history, Xiangshan is the revered home town of the nation’s father, Sun Yat Sen. Today, it is one of Guangdong’s ‘four little tigers’, specialising in hardware, appliances, casual wear and mahogany furniture industries. Many of us are probably wearing clothes made in Xiangshan, or use their devices in our kitchens. It’s part of the revolution in consumerism that has made inflation history and has given us all access to low-cost goods. Someone else often pays the price. In a famous case, workers in a Xiangshan factory were found working for as little as $22 a month making handbags for Wal-Mart. They were forced to hand over identity documents under pain of arrest, denied overtime pay and fined if spent too long in the bathroom.

Gormley’s work was part of a campaign called Think UK, it was first exhibited in the Imperial Palace next to Tiananmen Square. He can be seen to be following a similar path to that other Western visitor, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch aimed to introduce STAR TV into the Chinese market, which he considered the fastest growing into the world. As Murdoch said to the Asia Society:

Today, hundreds of millions of Chinese not only dare to dream but have confidence that their dreams will become reality.

Like Murdoch, Gormley is presenting China as a sea of individuals, each with their own unique aspirations. But alas, there is nothing in what they produce that connects with the traditions that inform Chinese history, from the ceramics of the Ming Dynasty to the communist ideologies of the post-imperial era. These are placeless Chinese, ready to enlist in the Hollywood dreams of Foxtel. This Robin Hood turns out to be a undercover agent of King John.

Asian Field raises broader concerns about an infantalisation of ceramics, where clay is seen as a form of spontaneous expression innocent of skill and virtuosity. A museum in Melbourne is developing a touring exhibition of ceramic horses made by children. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it would be a shame if audiences forgot the power of clay as a form of artistic expression.

Ai Weiwei

Let’s compare Asian Field to other ways in which the tradition of Chinese ceramics engages with the west. Also in the Sydney Biennale is the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. His signature piece is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), which is photographic documentation of the artist doing just that. Ai Weiwei comments bluntly: ‘China is a factory of the world. So boring porcelain stay same 2,000 years: break.’ Naturally, our first response is to recoil with horror. Here is modernism at its most brutal—the destruction of tradition for sensational effect.

But in a way, there’s also something refreshing about this honesty. Ai Weiwei is being open about the unspoken neo-colonial agenda in work by Anthony Gormley. His recent work Ghost Valley Coming Down the Mountain (Museum für Moderne Kunst) featured 96 vases from the Yuan period reproduced from the original workshop. These filter ceramic tradition through a modernist lens, reducing the singular masterpiece into a grid of reproductions. This Asian Field has more to say to ceramics than Gormley’s installation.

Ah Xian

In Australia, we have some notable examples of dialogue with China. Of great success recently in Australian galleries is Ah Xian, a refugee from Tiananmen Square. Human Human is a life-sized figure finely ornamented by the traditional craftsmen at the Jingdong Cloisonné Factory in Hebei Province, east of Beijing. The principal motif is the lotus, the traditional sign of hope on the journey to enlightenment. While incorporating a very traditional form of Chinese ornament, Ah Xian has made quite a radical shift in substituting the body for the vessel. For Ah Xian, this places the human body at the source of life, rather than nature.

Ah Xian can be compared to Gormley as someone who brings a humanism to China. Though his is something that engages more with the traditions of Chinese ceramics.

Writing a Painting

Such a path is followed by Robin Best, in work for the exhibition curated by Vivonne Thwaites, Writing a Painting, which was presented at the University of South Australia School of Art gallery at this year’s Adelaide Festival. The exhibition featured works by Robin Best in collaboration with the Chinese ceramic painter Huang Xiuqian and the Ernabella artist Nyukala Baker. Best’s methodology is similar to Ah Xian’s, though she herself creates the forms that are then ornamented by specialist artists. Like these artists, she introduces a modernist aesthetic that abstracts traditional form. But hers is a more aesthetic interest in the formal beauty of spaces created by these shapes. In flattening the traditional vase, she has heightened the painterly quality of their work.

After meeting the false Robin Hood, there is still much to offer Sir Bernard and the Anglo-Oriental Company in possibilities of cultural exchange with China through the medium of clay.

While I’ve dwelt mostly on China, allow me to mention briefly a few other less familiar terrains in which ceramic practice might flourish.

There are some opportunities in relational aesthetics, but there may be more prospect for ceramics in cultural collaboration, in what might be understood alongside world music as part of the genre of world craft.

Handshake

Ceramics as a means of bringing people together achieved its most literal expression in a recent series of events staged by Karen Casey, titled Let’s Shake. These reconciliation events involved indigenous and non-indigenous people shaking hands—the dental filling placed between the two hands slowly forms a solid impression. During the celebrations of NAIDOC last week,

While celebrating the humanism of clay, this event highlights the seeming opposition between specialised skill and shared meaning.

But perhaps we can tread a different path in looking at ceramics. Rather that look at its role in bringing strangers together, there is a strong theme in the way it serves to acknowledge existing relations.

David Ray

In Melbourne, David Ray is one of a school of merry men, including his St Kilda studio brothers Stephen Benwell and Vipoo Sviralasa.

Coming from the far flung suburb of Ringwood, David has an interest in the emancipatory potential of clay. For his Open Bench residency at Craft Victoria, David created a ceramic BBQ. At the performance that culminated this, David invited audience to make pinch pots that finished the installation. While his work remained the centrepiece, the audience could experience for themselves the plasticity of the materials.

For the Commonwealth Games, David participated as host in an exhibition Common Goods. Common Goods was under the umbrella of the South Project, which looks to possible exchanges between artists from across the south. There are many untapped connections for Australian ceramicists with the traditions of our southern cousins in Africa and Latin America. This was just a taste of that.

His guest was the Sri Lankan artist Chandragupta Thenuwara. Thenuwara has invented his own genre of art—barrelism. Barrelism is the appropriation of the military paraphernalia of Colombo as art rather than sedimented violence. Thus Thenuwara explores camouflage as a form in itself and took advantage of this residency to start to develop a three dimensional camouflage. David responded to this militaristic theme with a ceramic gun position as though building of a city-scape. The pervasive military nature of Sri Lankan life as evidenced in Thenuwara’s barrels provided Ray with an opportunity to pull out the stops in Melbourne.

Poor Craft

…

Reflecting the knitting revolution in textiles, the recent genre of poor craft reflects an attempt to renew craft with the use of common materials. In ceramics, Nicole Lister has employed her skills in porcelain to ennoble the humble packaging that normally accompanies ceramics. Beyond the object, Honor Freeman places porcelain in the public domain in the production of fake power points. Poor craft is a definite guerrilla movement of the Fortress Ceramica, determined to maintain the ideals of object making in a world dominated by hyper-consumption.

The new labour movement

An alternative path is to focus on the way the object embodies the time spent in making it.

A work by Christian Capurro has some quite interesting relevance to ceramics. There are reports of a shortage of kaolin affecting porcelain production. One of the main uses of kaolin is the production of glossy magazines. Capurro is one of a new generation of artists that turn labour into art. His work Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette commissioned a number of people to erase a page each from the male fashion magazine Vogue Hommes. They were asked to record how many hours it took to rub out the page, and what their normal hourly rate was. The work was thus calculated at $11,349.18.

While this kind of perverse conceptualism seems far from the ideals of the craft movement, it does suggest other paths for ceramicists, who might make a feature of their labour. Rather than selling a pot, one might sell the equivalent labour…

Blogs

Finally, a new realm of underground action has developed recently in the production of blogs, daily web diaries. Blogs not only enable individuals to upload images and writing about their day’s concerns, but importantly it is a means of connecting people together based on shared interests. The blog becomes an informal project that solicits a mobile audience. The Danish ceramicist Karinne Erikson reflects not only on her challenges in the studio but also her involvement in a choir and occasional purchases. She adopts a popular method of dividing the week up into colours, so Red Friday includes images of Galerie La Fayette and an English stove. Part of new network includes Queensland ceramicist Shannon Garson, who used a bird theme for one week and encouraged visitors to submit works accordingly. Ceramic blogs

Already there

To a degree, one could say that a theory like a field like ceramics already embodies many of the values in relational aesthetics. At an everyday level, ceramics is used as structure for the relationships between people, from the consistency of plates on which people dine to the range of quality in cups that represent the specialness of the occasion.

It may be tempting to stop at this point and say that’s enough. We don’t need to worry about this new theory.

However, we need to acknowledge that there has been a change, which is probably reflected in the greater fluidity of human relations, the absence of the ‘special guest’ whose presence demands opening up the porcelain cabinet. The formality and ritual of social life has declined.

We need to explore other paths.

In one element, the field of ceramics is likely to differ from other forms of conceptual visual art. Ceramics takes longer. There is more work involved.

[1] Nicholas Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002 (orig. 1998), p. 14

[2] http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,921159,00.html

At this moment, Australia plays host to an international gathering of glass artists. It would seem remiss, then, not to mention one of Australia’s most noticeable contributions to the international world of glass art. The Peter Carey novel Oscar and Lucinda used glass blowing as a key narrative element. The film, starring Kate Blanchett and Ralph Feines, presented Australian glass-blowing to the world—albeit as a historical recreation. Though historical fiction, it is a promising platform for some burning issues in contemporary glass art.

Lucinda in the glass factory

If we look at the actual content of Oscar and Lucinda, we find quite an interesting question about the business of what it is to be a glass artist. The story revolves around the acquisition of a glass factory by a young recent arrival to colonial Sydney.

For Carey, glass is where reality and fantasy intersect. Unlike the down to earth male world of glass-blowing, tied to the market for utilitarian objects, Lucinda Lepastrier dreamily engages with the fantastic world of glass. Her attention is drawn to the purely useless item—Prince Rupert’s drop. Lucinda believes that ‘glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all.[1] Glass is conducive to the realm of the fantastic that figures so strongly in Carey’s fiction.

Contrary to expectations, Lucinda takes a great interest in the business of how glass is made. She insists on being part of factory life. It is here that she encounters the pre-eminent senior blower, Arthur Phelps.

But Lucinda’s presence at the glassworks is not welcome. A delicate, and maybe even interfering female, is not a familiar presence. Phelps fears that she might distract the men from their labour. When Lucinda protests that she is the proprietor of the glassworks, Arthur Phelps complains, ‘I know, mum, but it be our craft, mum, you see. It be our craft.’[2] The male technical pursuit proves surprisingly vulnerable to womanly presence.

Josiah McElheny

One artist who seems to have overcome this barrier between glass and mainstream art is the American artist Josiah McElheny. McElheny has served his apprenticeship in glass-blowing and spent his time at the feet of the Venetian masters. While being beholden to the world of glass, McElheny has managed to break through into the contemporary art circuit, including the prestigious White Cube gallery in Hoxton Square, London.

Most of my reference to McElheny comes from the substantial catalogue to a retrospective at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostella.[3] The exhibition contains a formidable range of work. It expresses not only technical excellence but also conceptual sophistication..

In the interview that has been published in the catalogue, McElheny does not disavow the craft basis of his work: ‘The subject matter of my work assumes that the anonymous, artisanal, industrial activity of specific glass-factory cultures could be viewed as a complex, creative and meaning-generating activity.’[4] This seems an honest avowal of skill by contrast with the celebration of ‘cleverness’ by conceptual artists like Jeff Koons.

We can see here a new interest in skill that is emerging in the contemporary visual art scene. While celebrating conceptual play, it could be argued that visual art has always had a place for an unquestioned point of certainty. In recent times, this has been often what is considered indigenous, including customary forms of knowledge. We can see in McElheny’s career the possibilities that skill itself could become a quasi-sacred element in the visual art arena.

Here McElheny promises to take craft to a new level. There have been a few craftspersons in the visual art world. In many cases, they fail to pave the way for others of their medium. The Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry uses his status as a potter as evidence of his idiosyncrasy. Would McElheny be any different?

Despite an extraordinary corpus of work, blessed by both skill and intellect, McElheny misses the chance to take craft seriously in its own terms. We can begin with cover of the catalogue. Rather than a glass work, it depicts a nostalgic image of an elegant woman walking through the factory. The text within identifies her as Ginette Gagneous, the wife of the master glass-blower Venini. According to the story, the Dior outfits worn by the boss’s wife became an object of fascination for the blowers and led to new designs in glass, which McElheny reproduces in his exhibition.

Maureen Williams

At this point, it is possible to select any number of Australian female glass artists, many of whom are forging a new language for landscape in glass. I chose the Victorian artist Maureen Williams as someone whose work is the closest to a traditional painting practice.

In a series of images over the past ten years, we can see a steady journey in glass through landscape. Beginning in 1996 with the Transition Series, Williams creates a cylindrical white canvas on which she paints vertical rock-like shapes. There is relatively little sign of landscape, though the forms are clearly drawn from nature. The accompanying empty shapes lend the work a formalist quality that emphasizes their status as drawings.

It is tempting to ascribe a linear development to Williams work. Certainly there seems to be a development from literal representation of landscape to the thing itself with the rock-like forms. But the disappearance and re-appearance of the figure in her landscapes seems like a continual play that she engages in. This oscillation highlights the fragility of self in land, particularly a land as archaic as Australia.

Painterliness is an interesting quality to associate with glass. The allusion to the brush seems contrary to the essence of hot glass, being a medium that resists the organic. Painterliness suggests an opacity that is the opposite of the glowing transparency of glass.

The brush is something we associate closely with the hand of the individual artist. It is the instrument that elects the painter into the fine arts, alongside the pen of the writer and the baton of the conductor. Henry James could thus write about ‘his brother of the brush.’

The material arts are more haptic in nature, involving the body as a whole. Blowing glass, throwing ceramic vessels, weaving a tapestry or hammering out a ring—these activities require the weight of the body to be successful.

In the case of Maureen Williams, painterliness draws our attention to the differences between her work and painting. Rather than render the world on a flat linear plane, she adopts a cylindrical format. Williams claims that her choice is medium is more from a deficit on her part. She says:

I find it hard to paint two-dimensionally because I don’t know what to do with the edges. I’m used to going around. When I hit the edge, I don’t know how to deal with it.

While this might explain the choice to work on a circular medium, the choice of glass rather than ceramics or metal still remains a mystery.

To understand more fully what is happening in Williams’ work, we need to consider the basic elements of the pictorial frame. In the case of painting, the frame gives its content a clear sense of beginning and end. Beginning and end are the basics elements of any narrative structure. It is what Frank Kermode calls ‘that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions’

As a framed structure, painting is very much a window onto the world, one which is contained by our own needs. This window has metamorphosed into today’s screen, which with the growing popularity of plasma technology is increasingly replacing the window that once looked out on our now non-existent gardens.

Williams’ journey as an artist harkens back to the romantic quests of painters to capture the essence of their world. By taking this journey into the radiant three-dimensional world of glass, she grants this quest a relevance that is otherwise missing. Glass is the future of painting.

Notes

This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Australian artist Neil Roberts. The full version is available online at www.craftculture.org.

[1] Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,

1988, p. 135

[2] Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,

1988, p. 329

[3] Josiah McElheny Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea; 18 April –

17 June 2002