Lost craft
By Hamish Coney,
A quick rebranding sees New Zealand at the forefront of a new art movement
[Art]
Ever heard of the Neue Sachlichkeit? That’s German for New Objectivity, one of those nanosecond-long but excruciatingly seminal art movements like Dada or Futurism.
Back in the 1920s New Objectivist artists with scary names like George Grosz and Otto Dix were kicking some serious art butt in downtown Berlin. Today it’s a long-forgotten historical footnote along with the equally seminal but short-lived Tachism, Der Blaue Reiter and Art Brut.
These art movements always sound a bit more important in German or French. It’s a bit like advertising when the slogan is far more interesting than the product. ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’, as the inspired copywriter at Audi so aptly put it, sounds far sexier in a Teutonic way than the rough translation: ‘progress through technology’.
The point, as any good adperson will tell you, is that it’s crucial to have a memorable brand name.
It was this thought that came to me at an auction recently as I watched a stunning example of Ann Robinson’s peerless cast glass sculpture sell for a tidy $30,000. Robinson is the grand dame of New Zealand’s own new object art scene.
Object art is an example of the wonders a bit of rebranding can do. If it’s good enough for our formerly buff-coloured capital to pull off one of the great rebranding jobs of the 20th century with Absolutely Positively Wellington, then why can’t our assembled battalions of weavers, potters, glassblowers and jewellers get jiggy and call themselves object artists?
Lo and behold, look what happened. Today Wellywood is so cool it hurts and New Zealand’s object art scene is arguably more happening than our ‘proper’ art scene.
For many years the painters, sculptors and curators of the mainstream art world looked down their noses at the mudslingers, glassblowers and stone and bone carvers who made up what was always a pretty funky ‘craft’ scene. If you don’t believe me just google Barry Brickell.
But when branded as ‘craft’ even the coolest practitioner (like, say, potter—sorry, ceramicist—Len Castle) won’t get a look in when it came to getting a bit of art cred.
Things started to look up a bit when ‘craft’ morphed into ‘Applied Art’ in the mid 80s in a classic case of transitional branding. The momentum really picked up in the 1990s when the phrase ‘Object Art’ entered the art lexicon.
What this has meant is that at the same time as Object Art has, to continue the marketing metaphor, established a clearly-defined niche between design and fine art, it has also built a bridge to a sector of the art buying public who wouldn’t be seen dead buying a bowl or a vase.
Rebranding—or to use the art world term, recontextualisation—has unleashed the native genius of Aotearoa. I use the term native advisedly because the grunt and conceptual heft that informs so much of New Zealand object art is indigenous and flows like the mighty Waikato directly from Maori beliefs about taonga or sacred objects.
Most New Zealanders know a waka huia is much more than a carrier of feathers. It is a vehicle for genealogical narrative and a symbol of tribal mana. Every cut and incision on a waka huia is dedicated to telling a story. Like all great design the form truly follows the function. You or I might not know the detail in the way the owner’s iwi will but we certainly get the gist of it.
And, judging by the success of so many of our object artists, so do art and object collectors from all over the world. It’s a classic Kiwi success story. By keeping it real artists such as Warwick Freeman, John Edgar, Ann Robinson, John Parker, Valerie Parkes, Chris Charteris, Rangi Kipa, Jason Hall, Len Castle, Emily Siddell, Layla Walter and many others have created this unique form of New Zealand object art. And unlike Neue Sachlichkeit, this movement will be around for a long time.
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