ENTITY & IDENTITY

Given that STURTmittagong is currently undertaking a review of its operation it is useful to use that review as a way of reimagining such organisations, institutions, and operations in a 21st C context. It is standard practice to map what exists and then, speculatively MINDmap the CULTURALlandscape that is being aspired to. We all do this when planning to create a new HOMEplace or reconfigure our current 'home'.

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Nevertheless, when it is an entity that involves a layered Community of Ownership and Interest, all too often the imperative is to tweak the status quo as somehow that seems the least risky way forward. Curiously that seems to be the case even when the status quo has been seen to be totally unsustainable or flawed. So, in order to develop a new and more comprehensive view of making's CULTURALlandscape it makes sense to look beyond the status quo in order to garner better understandings of current CULTURALrealities.

Here a sense of history is useful in gaining a perspective on what happened when, and why. In Australia, in the education and training of artists and trades people alike 'history' was paid scant attention. Generally by the 1950s the history one was exposed to in your secondary education was seen as being sufficient albeit that informally students and apprentices did satisfy their curiosities in piecemeal ways.

As an aside, it is worth noting here that in Australia there remains a relatively large cohort of people who learnt at school  that it was explorers like James Cook, Abel Tasman and Dirk Hartog  who discovered 'Australia' – AKA The Great South Land – and the consequences of that has been something more than unfortunate.

In THEarts in the 1960s/1970s that changed somewhat with the advent colleges of technical and further education – AKA Art Schools – later to transition into 'university programs' but the focus was on the Fine Arts. Enter STAGEleft the ART CRAFT debate.  

All too often these stouches end in unedifying name calling – Fine Arts vs Thick Crafts for example. However, the 'history' for the most part focused on painting and sculpture and with 'painting' claiming the high ground and ‘Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ – Ad Reinhardt

In any event, the 15th C English poet, Chaucer, noted that "There is nothing new except what has become antiquated," And, 500 years on Marie-Antoinette is reported as saying "Nothing is new but what has been forgotten" and a great deal has been.

Suffice to say that currently there is a lack of a meaningful understanding of the DEEPhistories that by-and-large subliminally inform contemporaneous cultural production. Moreover, the critical discourses that came out of the Western World's so-called International Crafts Movement, in retrospect it was relatively shallow and homogenising. There were CULTURALlandscapes that are given scant attention – for example, those behind the IRONcurtain, Indigenous cultural realities and China.

In the late1970s/1980 the World Crafts Council and UNESCO (?) sponsored a conference in Sydney tasked to define a universal apprenticeship model. A somewhat heroic enterprise!  

Fiji Still

It was a contentious event given the diversity of CULTURALrealities represented ithe room. At one point one group of delegates, all  from the Eurocentric West, became quite distressed at a proposition proffered by the PNG delegate. He was a traditional carver and at the time was he was Director of PNG's National Museum. – his name 'Geofery'(?) seems to have vanished from the records. When he said that his 'apprenticeship' commenced when he was a baby and when his father "whispered in his ear", the conference was incredulous, albeit that his purpose for being there was simply to make that very point. He had a university education but that hadn't diminished his cultural sensibilities or his CULTURALreality one bit. 

In FIRSTnations communities 'making practices' are passed on in what has been coined as the EIGHTways of learning which describes the following processes:
• Learning through narrative
• Planning and visualising explicit processes
• Working non-verbally with self-reflective, hands-on methods
• Learning through images, symbols and metaphors
• Learning through place-responsive, environmental practice
• Using indirect, innovative and interdisciplinary approaches
• Modelling and scaffolding by working from wholes to parts
• Connecting learning to local values, needs and knowledge

While vestiges of this linger in 'modern' enlightened CULTURALrealities far too much has been blighted by the CULTURALarrogance of the Eurocentric colonisers whose sensibilities pervade the CULTURALlandscapes that followed on in the wake of their exploits in nfar away places.

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