Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between design, craft and art

The introductory essay [co-authored] examines the background and current interconnections between design, craft and the fine arts. This Special Issue was able to expand the debate by showing how attitudes to materials – from 19C sculpture to current fashion – appropriate craftsmanship to reinvigorate notions of handmaking.

My essay, ‘Here Today, Gone Tomorrow’ argued that the identity of crafts has been based on material specificity, skills, and function. By the end of the twentieth century, however, this material essentialism could no longer be sustained as a new concern with the semiotics of materials became evident in the fine arts and design.

Rather than focusing on the collapse of genres as arising out of ideological positions, the article explored materiality in order to expose the common ground between design, craft and art as material expressions, and consider the possible genesis of the attention to the symbolic capital of materials. Beginning with a discussion of the historically contingent meanings of materiality, the article explored the shared theme of transience to be found in contemporary arts and crafts. The paradox of ‘rubbish’ becoming ‘durable’ in art and craft, and the transition to ‘endurable’ in the museum were examined within the context of the conservation issues arising out of the preservation of transience in a memorial culture, as signalled by Andreas Huyssen. The article drew on the work of sociologist Michael Thompson, literary critic Jonathan Culler, and anthropologist Mary Douglas, and Freud's work on transience and loss to consider the meaning and significance of materiality expressed as transience.

The focus on materiality has more recently been extended in the Introductory essay to Hans Stofer's Design Wilderness, Solothurn [Switzerland] : Galerie SO, 2006.