Relational craft and Australian fashionability in the 1970s–80s: Friends, pathways, ideas and aesthetics

Abstract

Five Australian interdisciplinary practitioners, working across fashion, craft, art and design, in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1970s-80s, shared friendships, aesthetic ideas and public presentation of their work.The ways they chose to make and disseminate their work were influenced by historically reclaimed visual conventions and craft discourses of the time, along with related circumstances of curatorship, collecting and dealing.All of this was foregrounded by contemporary interest in issues of identity and subjectivity as part of a postmodern re-orienting of 'what was what' in visual culture.The essay examines the multi-dimensional 'relationality' of these interconnections.In this paper I trace the work and influences of a group of young Australians whose creative practice in the 1970s and 1980s encompassed fashion, craft, art and design.They shared personal friendships and visual concerns but, importantly, the idea of relationality between people and creative ideas is integral to their work.Peter Tully, the Melbourne-born, Sydney-active, artist and craftsperson often remarked on the importance to his work of a network of creative friends and influences.With his trademark self-mocking irony, he named William Yang 'the court photographer', referring to Yang's photographic documentation of Tully's parties, shows and appearances, and those of fashionable Sydney generally (Yang, 1984).Tully was also in the habit of referring to his extended creative network as 'the family'.Like others discussed here, Tully had 'relationality' at the heart of his life and work in the seventies and eighties, well in advance of Nicolas Bourriaud's invitation for us to think of art's 'theoretical horizon' as being the 'realm of human interactions' and 'social context' (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14).The key relational players considered here are Peter Tully, David McDiarmid (1952-95), Linda Jackson (b.1950), Jenny Kee (b.1947) and Clarence Chai (b.1946).Although they also collaborated with many others, this group shares a range of relational concerns which are the subject of this essay.A fascinating confluence in Australian art and design history occurred when this group, and a wider circle of friends, met and interacted visually, socially and creatively.A set of visual and cultural ideas came together, incubating a hip, postcolonial Australian fashionability, from the early 1970s.Their work, collectively and individually, involved a language of playful colour and contrasts; an interest in the decorative, handcrafted, allegorical and historicist, and an engagement with questions of subjectivity and place.They collectively enjoyed a postmodern

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