'Artisanship' is a term coined by Mark McClelland in his 2023 White Paper 'Cultural Placemaking'. He sites the New South Wales town, Braidwood and talks about the most recognisable vernacular building material there as being granite taken from the local landscape. In so many ways granite defines the town's placedness.
Other places have other materials to underpin their placedness: sandstone in Sydney, Brisbane’s distinctive volcanic tuff plus its 'tin and timber', bluestones in Melbourne and Adelaide and Launceston's brick and lace iron and so on.
The 'materiality' of local materials and the built forms that reflect this materiality quite simply belongs in its CULLTURALlandscape. That builders might develop placedness in their buildings is unsurprising. This 'placedness' is magnified as builders adapt to the materials' placedness and their characteristics, all of which can become deeply embedded in their artisanship.
Artisanal 'making' fundamentally needs the considered application of a holistic relationship between hands, head and heart. The investment that makers making in their making, in their labour, in their skill sets is all-pervading and it takes on cultural expressions that play a large part in the evolution of placedness and the creation of CULTURALcapital.
That’s why we value real artisanal products, as quite simply they reveal something of the collaboration that humans invest in the places they understand to be 'home'. The work of artisan builders absorbs us in an urban CULTURALlandscape where human expression can be felt over time.
We might look for and see the distinctive marks of an individual artisan. Or to put it another way the marks of the 'maker' and the maker's marks. It is not just the imprints of their tools in the materials they have shaped something with, it is something more than that – something almost inexplicable. This type of lets say 'architectural artisanship' has become lost, as 'building' has increasingly been industrialised as much 'making' has since the Industrial Revolution.
The demise of artisanship, craftsmanship cum material sensibility plus the mythologies and their methodologies in 'the making' of things somehow turns out to be more than impoverishing. The missing innate nurturing and celebration of material, the honouring of their realities, the observance of innate spiritual values, the honour paid to their cultural meaningfulness in physical infrastructure and the 'things' that are manifested within, come loaded with stories. The loss of any of this within our 'made things' is quite simply lamentable. More than that it underpins the TROWaway mindset that gives us floating PLASTICislands in the Pacific
We are diminished by their loss, diminished by their apparent absence, somehow weakened by the lack of visual language invested in something and the lack of shared 'ownership' of the sensibilities invested in the things that in the end contributes to the CULTURALcapital we have invested in our places. The loss of all that ultimately disempowers us – and sadly so.
The 19th C 'Arts and Crafts Movement' [LINK] (ACM) was an international but essentially a British cum British Empire reaction to the increased mechanisation of the making of things as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and at the same time it reflected British 'colonial dominance'. Likewise, 'the movement' was initiated in a reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions under which they were produced. The movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920.
The Anti-Industrialisation idealists within the ACM movement disliked the increasingly power of the industrial world in Victorian Britain. The mass-produced, machine-made 'things' were intrinsically linked to the nation's social, moral and artistic decline in their 'world view'.
It is significant that the ACM movement campaigned for a new social order in which the worker was freed from factory working conditions and could take pride in 'his' craftsmanship and skills in a way akin to the way the Medieval Guild System had worked. In a way that system protected and fostered a place's, a nation's, a city's, CULTURALcapital albeit not expressed in such a way.
The WCM also aimed to promote the human values of 'the crafts' and a sense of fellowship among the craftspeople around the world.The World Crafts Council is the only body setup to support the aspiration of the world’s craftspeople, whether in maintaining honorable inherited traditions, or in extending frontiers by experiment and innovation.
However, it turns out that all things are never 'equal' and for the WCM somewhat poignantly this is the case. Keeping in mind that in 1964 the 'Cold War' (1947- 1991) was in full swing and that just two years earlier the world watched on, fearfully, as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded. In the world at the time nothing was in any way 'equal'.
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Consequent to the narratives embedded in the DEEPhistories here it is unsurprising that there are subterranean narratives in play in support various idealogical positions. These narratives evolve outside the apparent benign 'norms' that in large part are subjective, speculative and contestable. For instance 'cold war warriors' had inclinations to advance the perception of freedom in subliminal ways. So, it is unsurprising that the so-called World Crafts Movement might find its 'values' contested and moreover by cold war commentators.
Interestingly, there were 'cold war warriors' contesting the value of 'abstract expressionism' and the notions of 'freedom' that were often deemed to be a fundamental 'value'. There was an argument advanced that was, perhaps paraphrased, "there is golden road between Moscow and Paris paved by writings in support of the art craft debate, abstract expressionism etc. etc." [Pers Com Prof James McAuley circa 1975/6] McAuley also advanced the idea that the work of many international CRAFTheroes was "neither fish nor fowl" . He was a 'foodie' and he knew about such things. Interestingly McAuley's biographer, Peter Pierce, noted that "McAuley was a bold and bitter jester. More droll than the Ern Malley hoax was his projection of Poets' Anonymous, wherein bad poets would be encouraged to discuss their affliction and be paid by the government not to write."
By way of context here, McAuley was living inTasmania at the time and it was often boasted that the state had more paid up members of the Australian Crafts Council than any other state. And somewhat ironically many Australian poets proffered the idea that Ern Malley poetry was his best work. [Pers Com Tim Thorne circa 1990 and noteably Thorne was a McAuley student]
What relevance has any of this to the realities being contested relative to housing and HOMEmaking in the 21st C?
Well, if we look around us and we explore our literature, rather the somewhat subliminal literature and storytelling that informs us in subtle ways almost daily there is much to be found. And, in doing so we might well bring to the surface Ella Wheeler Wilcox. and find that she tells us about "TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE"
She says ...." There are two kinds of people on earth to-day; Just two kinds of people, no more I say. ........... Not the sinner and saint, for it's well understood The good are half bad and the bad are half good. ........... Not the rich and the poor, for to rate a man's wealth, You must first know the state of his conscience and health. ........... Not the humble and proud, for in life's little span, Who puts on vain airs, is not counted a man. ........... Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years Bring each man his laughter end each man his tears. ........... No; the two kinds of people on earth I mean Are the people who lift and the people who lean. ........... Wherever you go you will find the earth's masses Are always divided in just these two classes. ........... And oddly enough, you will find, too, I ween, There's only one lifter to twenty who lean. ........... In which class are you? Are you easing the load Of overtaxed lifters who toil down the road? Or are you a leaner who lets others bear Your portion of labor and worry and care? "
Looking to Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 'lifters and leaners' it is not a huge stretch to tie the 'artisanship' that Mark McClelland invokes his 2023 White Paper 'Cultural Placemaking into the binary he implies is there. Then comes the 'art craft binary' that lingers on in the imaginings all too many, albeit bound up in the 'World Crafts Movement' such as it is/was.
In their own ways there are two or three Australian commentators who speak loudly of our CULTURALlandscapes and the CULTURALcapital that is invested in them.
There are no real surprises when one delves into the messy business of politics in Australia to gather a gleaning from Rhodes scholar and Prime Minister Tony Abbott in his Election night victory speech, Sydney, 7 September 2013 he said ... “I give you all this assurance – we will not let you down. A good government is one that governs for all Australians, including those who haven’t voted for it. A good government is one with a duty to help everyone to maximise his or her potential, indigenous people, people with disabilities, and our forgotten families, as well as those who Menzies described as ‘lifters, not leaners’. We will not leave anyone behind.”
AND, when we might look here to Judith Brett in her 1993 book Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Menzies’ middle class was a moral rather than an economic category (Brett 1993). Brett tells us that almost anyone could be 'middle class' if they identified with middle class values like ambition, effort, independence, and readiness to serve. Menzies said the only true classes in Australian society ‘are the active and the idle’ (Menzies 1954). This was the point he made in his 1942 speech ‘The forgotten people’ where he distinguished between society’s ‘lifters’ and ‘leaners’ and warned against those who wanted to benefit from government help but were reluctant to make any contribution in return (Menzies 1942a). As a moral category, ‘leaners’ included only those who chose not to contribute. Menzies acknowledged that there was group in society who were neither lifters nor leaners—those who could not work because of sickness or disability. He saw this group as deserving of compassion and support. AND, it is not for nothing that we might mine Joe Hockey's and Peter Costello's speechmaking looking for this class of POLITICALmorality being called upon.
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All that said, and front and centre on the table, we might more profitably visit Mark McClelland's 2023 White Paper 'Cultural Placemaking' where he talks about 'artisanship' in the context of CULTURALcapital.
Seemingly decision makers are disinclined to take on board in such ideas within planning processes. If we think about McClelland's 'artisans' as 'makers' and/or 'designer makers' we can extrapolate that making stuff is also 'placemaking' and that makers can be quite safely be imagined as 'lifters'.
As Ella Wheeler Wilcox. tell us "oddly enough, you will find, too, I ween, There's only one lifter to twenty who lean." That might be the case, but Mark McClelland makes a good case for the makers in communities being the real builders when it comes to investing in CULTURALcapital.
Thinking upon all this in the Antipodes and imaging 'colonisers' loading their 'social misfits' on ships and one way or another dumping them a long way away in a 'terra nullius place' kind of resonates in discourses to do with landfill given that it has turned the way it has. Those colonisers of convenience's legacy is the sure and certain knowledge that there is no "away" albeit that their peri-colonial descendants still imagine that they can 'chuck stuff away' – spent plastics and dispossessed people somewhat alike.
At the risk of firing up the Cold War defenders of the status quo, the vacuous ART/CRAFTdebate, THEenlightenment, the AWAYNESSsensibility and the PROPERway we might well look at CULTURALcapital in the context of there being "lifters and leaners" – bankers and users.
Haptically, and experientially, makers bring sensibilities and sensitivities to DECISIONmaking cum PLACEmaking in ways that Mark McClelland et al alert us to when they invoke ideas like artisanship, craftsmanship, workmanship, artistry, masterfulness etc.
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