Paua Dreams

Considering Kevin Murray’s Theory of Rich and Poor Craft in Contemporary Jewellery from Aotearoa

 

In his keynote address at the JMGA conference in Adelaide, Kevin Murray located the recent trend towards jewellery of the forest in Australian culture within a much larger binary or dialectic that he calls Rich Craft and Poor Craft. (To read Kevin Murray’s talk, click here.)

As described in his book Craft Unbound: Make the Common Precious, Poor Craft works with commonplace, traditionally worthless materials – ‘whatever is at hand’ – in order to reform and revolutionise craft practice.1 Unlike the jewellery of the forest, which traffics in the enchanted world of the fairytale, Poor Craft is located in, and committed to, this world. That, ultimately, is its guiding quality rather than a specific materiality, since we know that, for Murray, it is Marian Hosking who best represents the spirit of Poor Craft. As he writes elsewhere, her ‘fine works in silver constitute a life of acute care for the world.’2 That is what Poor Craft does.

In opposition to this encounter with our immediate reality is what Murray calls Rich Craft. Here Robert Baines is ringmaster extraordinaire. It is a practice filled with dizzying excess, baroque rhetorical moves, lavish materials and techniques. Rich Craft links the high art of Baines and the more commercial jewellery of the forest in a commitment to what Murray describes in his keynote address as ‘the art of enchantment as a methodology for enhancing our reality, rather than reflecting it.’3 Murray concludes:

Between rich and poor craft we find a dialogue between baroque and modernist methodologies. The baroque seeks to build on what’s given to create an alternative reality that enriches this world. The modernist attempts to discover this world anew and open our eyes to the mysteries at hand.

New Zealand enters the scene as part of Murray’s dialectical method, a similar but different location in which his binary of Rich and Poor Craft might be clarified, its nature more visible. Murray draws the following conclusion from this encounter:

New Zealand jewellery can be understood as a dialogue between inauthentic and indigenous materials. By contrast, in Australia our place is rendered into adornment within a dialogue between the real world and its other – the simple at hand and the complex in the imagination. Both Australian and New Zealand scenes reflect a dialogue between truth and fiction, though in Australia there isn’t as coherent a body of Indigenous jewellery to set the agenda for its non-Indigenous visitors.

Let me tease out the implications of Murray’s statement. Indigenous materials, which must mean natural materials, have authenticity in Murray’s formulation, whereas introduced materials and subjects are inauthentic – and often used by jewellers for exactly this reason. (He notes Lisa Walker’s use of sheep, Warwick Freeman’s use of corian, and Jason Hall’s use of wrought iron gates as examples that allow settler jewellers to argue a kind of complicated belonging amidst the complexities of colonisation.)

One of the limitations of Murray’s model in terms of New Zealand jewellery is that our binary is material based, whereas Australian jewellery is organised around a conceptual dialectic. By implication, Poor Craft in New Zealand jewellery must be made out of natural materials and have some relationship to indigenous adornment if it is to claim the ground of truth, whereas Rich Craft will use inauthentic or introduced materials in order to claim its ground of fiction and invention.

In contrast, Australian jewellers can draw on a range of materials and still locate themselves in either camp. As an example, Marian Hosking works in silver, a metal with a parallel history to Baines’s goldsmithing, yet she is Poor Craft through her commitment to the natural world of the here and now, truth rather than fiction. As Murray writes in his keynote address, ‘Hosking’s jewellery of the forest is the result of a modernist aversion to tradition and strong commitment to make things real.’

Why can’t the same leeway be provided for New Zealand jewellers? I would argue that it has to be, that the dialectic of materials breaks down too quickly when it is subject to analysis. Let me show you what I mean.

One of the aspects of Baines’s jewellery that cements his practice in the Rich Craft camp is his commitment to a game of ‘what if?’. Imagine if the Portuguese empire had reached Australia, and brought its baroque traditions of gold jewellery with it.  What objects would this meeting have produced? And that is the launching pad for Baines’s investigation of ancient techniques, fictitious worlds, fake histories undone with elements that disrupt the illusion – but not to bring us back to this world.

What’s the difference between this and the recent work of Alan Preston using muka, kōwhai seeds and gold, where he asks what would have happened if Pacific adornment had discovered precious metals and started using them in their work? (In fact, this is a game that Preston started in the 1980s with a series of vau bangles fastened with silver coils – the idea being that an archaeological dig of the future, or one of the past if Pacific adornment had discovered precious metals, would only discover the silver element, the vau having rotted away.) One might argue it is a difference of extent, of orientation – that such works play a relatively small role within Preston’s oeuvre, that their fictional histories are much more modest than the elaborate fantasies of Baines. In other words, one might want to claim Preston for Poor Craft rather than Rich Craft. But looking only at materials is a poor way to think about what a jeweller might be doing, and how their work fits within dialectic of truth and fiction.

And then we could refer to the Bone Stone Shell movement, which is the most obvious candidate for the truth that Murray’s dialectic finds in natural materials. We all know the outlines of this story, and the way in which Bone Stone Shell jewellery made a number of extravagant claims to engaging with reality, with the truth of the natural, cultural and political environment in which settlers – Pākehā – were living in the 1980s. As John Edgar wrote in the catalogue for Bone Stone Shell (1988):

This exhibition then is about awareness – of our heritage of Western civilisation and our cultural environment in the South Pacific; of our place in the twentieth century and the values necessary to survive the nuclear age; of the delicate fragility of our ecology and our relationship to the natural materials and the non-renewable resources of our region; of the celebration of the forces that formed these materials and the life within them; and, of the ability to communicate in objects of beauty, spirit and power.4

A search, then, for authenticity and truth of the very kind that animates Poor Craft. But as we also know, from a contemporary perspective, there is a kind of deep inauthenticity at the heart of the Bone Stone Shell movement, and on some level a desire to deny colonial history in its construction of a new urban tribal identity. With its natural materials and aesthetics borrowed from Pacific adornment, Bone Stone Shell jewellery works hard to deny the past, offering a nice fiction of belonging instead. This has been called the myth of Natural Occupancy, in which our origins in Europe are buried in the soil, along with all the evidence that other people lived here first. In this neatly cleared landscape, we can tell stories about how we really belong here – about how we are, in fact, natives. This is the work that Bone Stone Shell jewellery does better than anything else, and depending on where you stand, it can seem deeply inauthentic, an obscuring of the truth.

Let’s turn our attention to silver, one of the materials that must be, in Murray’s dialectic, inauthentic because it is not native, and thus a vehicle for Rich Craft’s work of fiction. Silver has, in fact, been a material of honesty within New Zealand contemporary jewellery. One of its most important and overlooked functions has been to anchor the objects of the Bone Stone Shell movement, to ensure their status as contemporary jewellery rather than elaborate ethnographic fakes. Silver is in some ways a better marker of truth than the natural materials jewellers explored in the 1980s.

Silver has also played an important role in critiquing settler society and the formation of identity that the Bone Stone Shell movement constructed. Warwick Freeman’s Fern, Fish, Feather, Rose (1987) is fabricated in silver, framing and distancing the natural materials that are the subject of the series. In so doing, Freeman invites us to understand them as representations rather than examples of the values and identities that natural materials like shell had assumed in the 1980s.

Or we might look at Kobi Bosshard’s Description of a Greenstone Pebble. The Bone Stone Shell movement was prone to myth making, and it is easy to ignore the important role that signs of European jewellery – materials such as silver, or the conceptual and technical processes of modernism – played within the most successful work of the period. Yet rhetorically the work staked a claim for a new identity in which European heritage was downplayed. Invited to be a selector of the Bone Stone Shell exhibition, it was clear that Bosshard could not be included within it.

Description of a Greenstone Pebble is part of Bosshard’s response to this situation. In the terms of contemporary theory, Description of a Greenstone Pebble is an example of the supplement. As articulated by Jacques Derrida, the supplement is one of the contradictory philosophical concepts of western thought. A supplement as traditionally defined is something that is inessential added to something that is complete. Yet, as Derrida points out, if the thing is complete in itself, why does it require, or long for, the supplement? It cannot be whole after all. Rather than being an unnecessary appendage, added later, the supplement is in fact critical or necessary for completion.

The sophistication of Description of a Greenstone Pebble lies in exactly this relationship. The pebble appears complete in itself, the silver descriptions as supplements completed after the fact. This is indeed the truth of the work’s chronology: the pebble came first and Bosshard’s silver elements after. Without the pebble, the work is incomplete. Yet once we have seen it in its entirety, the pebble cannot be complete without the silver descriptions. To remove them is to reveal the lack in the original, a state of incompletion that awaits the silver descriptions before wholeness can be achieved. Again, silver performs a kind of honesty check, and becomes part of an accounting of history that balances the mythologies of natural materials.

In this sense, natural materials are about escapism, whereas silver and other inauthentic materials actually speak to a more grounded and nuanced sense of place – equivalent to the role of Poor Craft in Australian jewellery.

Of course, I should be fair and say that the model is complicated in New Zealand by a strong indigenous/settler dynamic, and this is what Murray is trying to account for in his writing. This binary introduces another kind of authenticity into the picture which isn’t present in the same way in Australia. Poor Craft can be authentic there without competition, unlike Poor Craft in New Zealand, whose claim to the territory of authenticity is challenged by Indigenous Craft. And the good thing about Murray’s reference to indigenous/inauthentic materials is that it emphasises the cultural charge that natural materials have in this context, and that is something quite peculiar to jewellery in this country.

While Murray’s dialectic of Australian and New Zealand jewellery is somewhat troubling, his theory is an interesting one, and can be as richly applied to New Zealand jewellery practice as its cousins across the Tasman. In Craft Unbound, Murray articulates six methods of approaching the ordinary, which together make up the strategies of Poor Craft:

Gatherers draw from the Australian land to produce work, while Fossickers discover materials in manufactured environments. Gleaners use what gets left behind, such as packaging, and Alchemists look at the physical transformation of materials. Dissectors expose beauty through the act of destruction, but Liberators take the precious out of the gallery and onto the street.5

Like me, you will be able to think of various New Zealand jewellers whose work fits into these categories. It is an attractive way to negotiate a complex practice, to sort out common preoccupations along new lines that don’t necessarily map onto existing critical strategies for thinking about, and writing about, local jewellery. It seems to come without the baggage that other critical strategies carry in this country. Yet there is one other way I think Murray’s theory of Rich Craft and Poor Craft is actually quite controversial in the New Zealand context.

Underpinning his vision of Poor Craft’s value and function is an awareness of Australia as a settler country, part of the South. Poor Craft, which I suspect is ultimately the practice Murray finds more interesting, is about addressing legacies of colonial interaction – European and Aboriginal in the first instance, but also the cultural and economic colonialism that countries in the Northern Hemisphere exercise over the countries of the South. Rich Craft is, within such a scheme, impoverished since it relies heavily on the cultural and imaginative motifs of Europe, and does not leave itself open, in the manner of Poor Craft, to thinking about the ethics and politics of living in the South. When Murray writes that his book Craft Unbound is intended to ‘help bring readers into the world of the makers, to glimpse the radical mystery at work and the adventure at the heart of the crafts practice’, he is talking about Poor Craft as a specific model that reaches out, in his phrase, ‘beyond the white fortress’.6

In some ways these are novel issues in Australian craft practice. Writing about Gatherers, Murray states:

While the Australian landscape has been an enduring subject for artists, the stuff of the land itself has been relatively overlooked. Materials for creative expression tend to be found elsewhere, in pigments imported from Italy or fine Scandinavian timber. A new generation of artists is beginning to explore the poetry that lies in the land itself. From the common fruits of the land, these artists are creating works of very particular meaning.7

The same is not true here, where people express frustration with the song of nature, especially in the form in which it received its most strident airing (the Bone Stone Shell movement). If anything, the pendulum swung so far away from our European heritage that using silver and other traditional jewellery materials came to be seen as almost radical. Well, that is not quite true, but you know what I mean.

Many people in New Zealand are over this particular vision of identity and place, finding it reactionary, something that was given voice and authority in the 1980s, and rightly overthrown in the 1990s. Now, the argument goes, the issues of colonialism and settler society are only one of many issues that jewellers can turn their attention to, and these questions are certainly not ones that should be prioritised over other investigations. How much can Murray’s theoretical framework be divorced from the particular cultural politics in Australia that generated it? Should we treat it as a local debate with not much relevance to the novelty of our own situation? (Another example of Australian culture being well behind the eight ball.) Should it encourage us to look again at something we have dismissed from view, provide another way into old questions so that we get new answers?

Whatever we determine, it is also clear that New Zealand jewellery is a kind of limit for Murray’s theory, a test case that could push the idea of Rich Craft and Poor Craft in new directions – which might prove to be the responsibility we have to it, should we choose to take it on.