A new gallery dedicated to the exhibition of New Zealand design (and craft) has recently opened on Ponsonby Rd, Auckland. Objectspace is, in the words of its inaugural director Philip Clarke, “a hub” from which “to champion and connect up New Zealand’s object makers, collectors and their supporters”. Previously, Objectspace has operated cuckoo-like in spaces belonging to other institutions, presenting the Handy Crafts: At Home with Textiles at Te Tuhi in Manukau, and In the Drawer at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, both of which have since gone on to be seen in other “sympathetic” venues around New Zealand.
I’ll say right here and now that I sit on the board of trustees that oversees Objectspace, so be warned – some of what follows might just be spin.
Earlier this year, the discovery of an empty heritage building and a dose of well-timed funding from Creative New Zealand provided Objectspace with two permanent galleries, in what was once the Newton branch of the Auckland Savings Bank. As soon as Objectspace opened its doors, it illustrated a remarkable agility and intercepted a survey exhibition of local glass on its way to Denmark, grabbing the opportunity to present Southern Exposures, if only for a few days.
This coup was followed by a series of work-in-progress installations organised by Clarke and featuring ceramic artists John and Richard Parker, jewellers Jo Campbell and Octavia Cook and studio mates Katy Wallace and Emily Siddell. All this made for an impressive debut by an organisation that has yet to be opened officially – a prime ministerial visitation is scheduled this month.
For a city of its size, Auckland is only sparsely populated with public gallery and museum spaces. The appearance of Objectspace not far from Artspace, across from the smaller and more democratic Art Station, and on the same street as the long-established Masterworks Gallery, means that the Karangahape/Ponsonby Rd nexus is beginning to look a lot like a bone-fide big-city cultural precinct. Add in the new dealer galleries on Karangahape Rd and over an afternoon you can progress from innovative local craft dealer through contemporary design to difficult conceptual art and expect to find a sustaining coffee or a glass of wine at each stop in between.
Objectspace, then, with its generously proportioned spaces, ornate Art Deco ceilings and authentic bank vault, seems positioned to slot seamlessly into the centre of Auckland’s cultural walkway. Yet, just how easy is it to occupy the ground halfway between the private “for profit” craft dealer and the “institutional” conceptual art space? What should we expect from a gallery devoted to innovative design and craft?
We are little used to design and craft venues, at least not at the upper, more challenging end of the spectrum. Objectspace grew out of a need, expressed by craftspeople, for a place in which makers of objects could exhibit experimental work, away from the pressure placed upon them by the commercial outlets that sell their day to day work. In short, they wanted access to a public gallery with national reach. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the exhibition of the tougher end of craft and design might have been comfortably accommodated within the structure of the country’s existing publicly funded art galleries and museums. However, ask yourself this: when did you last see a pot in the Auckland Art Gallery or an exhibition of weaving on the walls of the City Gallery in Wellington?
Most of the leading art galleries here are just that, art galleries. They typically lump design and craft together in a category of its own called – “the things we don’t show”. In part, this is because craft exhibitions are popular rather than prestigious. A few years back, the threat of gallery funding based on visitor numbers gave craftspeople some hope, but, in the end, the corporate sponsors stepped in and the prestige of the lightly populated contemporary art exhibition has again won out.
It may come as a surprise to many that such emphatic divisions still operate in the fields of art, craft and design. If there has been an overused phrase in the art media over the past couple of decades it has been “breaking down boundaries”. In that time, some boundaries have gone, but the dissolution has been very much a one-way process in which fine artists have picked and chosen elements of design or craft practice and incorporated them into their one-off art works. Take Michael Stevenson’s work around the Trekka for last year’s Venice Biennale or Ani O’Neil’s use of crochet in her artworks. Stevenson is not a designer nor is his Trekka work about design. Neither is O’Neil a crafts-person – although, just to complicate matters, her work is often about craft, but we’ll leave that one for another day.
For the past decade, craftspeople and designers have been rightly envious of the access that artists have had to prestige exhibition venues. Now that they have one of their own, the question remains: who will fill it?
Open a gallery and it makes complete sense that the first people to come knocking will be artists. Open a smart-looking design and craft gallery and the first on the doorstep will be the artists who specialise in breaking down boundaries. Accommodate them and you’re in danger of creating a generic art gallery just like all the others, one from which the legitimate crafts-person becomes excluded.
A warning of the rocky road ahead for Objectspace lies in the problem facing New Zealand’s schools of design, many of which are losing their distinctive characteristics and becoming generic schools of art. Because fine artists across the country require jobs, other than the pursuit of their art, in order to sustain themselves, design schools have become popular targets for artists looking for job security.
The result is that future generations of designers are being taught by artists with minimal design training and little sympathy or awareness of the unique requirements of design and craft culture. In this environment, design’s connections to industry are allowed to lapse, its connections to art theory strengthened and the idea promoted that any problem a designer might encounter can be solved, if only the designer behaves a little more like an artist. The end result is the conceptually dense but unstable chair, the printed brochure, the type size of which is too small to read, or a host of household objects that look great, give great attitude, but don’t function, at least not efficiently.
Definitions and boundaries might be deeply unfashionable in the age of cross-disciplinary multi-media experiences. However, whereas breaking down boundaries might liberate art, it has the potential to suffocate good local design. This at a time when the newly emerging notion of the creative industries grinds towards recognising the importance of properly trained designers to the future of New Zealand business.
Design and Art are different. Stevenson and O’Neil are fine artists. They make one- off works that provide commentary on contemporary society. They may receive commissions, but they essentially provide their own motivation for the process of making. Designers operate in quite a different way. Without a client, ie, without a problem to solve, the designer is essentially unemployed.
Design and art are two separate and distinct cultures, with their own set of rules and expectations. Design is a form of creative problem-solving. You go to an artist for some perspective on life, whereas you go to a designer when you have a problem. The best design might provide a little perspective, even something close to spiritual enlightenment, but the basic problem of a chair is to hold you 400mm off the ground.
What we’ve seen in the past decade is a process whereby the culture of design, smaller and somewhat less well resourced than fine art, has been overrun and thoroughly colonised. The challenge facing Objectspace is to nurture a distinctive design and craft culture created by design and craft thinkers. If they get this right, Objectspace will become one of the weirder and quirkier exhibition spaces on the Ponsonby Rd strip, but it should at the same time be one of the more accessible.