To see or not to see: is that the question?
by Dr Ray Tyndale

I stood and gazed into the glass-topped depths of old-fashioned museum cases, the sort that used to contain five hundred different butterflies found in one square mile of Papuan Highlands, or varieties of toiletries fashioned from tortoiseshell or copper or finely wrought precious metals worn by early settlers anywhere in the colonized world.  I stood for over an hour on two occasions and no-one, not one single interested museum-goer, joined me in my gazing.

Tooling Up!  is the third part of this year’s ‘Inside SAM’s Place’, a collaborative project between the South Australian Museum and Craftsouth that connects craftspeople and visual artists with the museum.  An important aspect of the project is adequate time for the artists to research their areas of interest within the museum collections and develop high quality exhibition work for display in the museum

John Hayward’s Tooling Up! ison display in the North foyer. Obviously well researched, meticulously crafted, carefully collated and clearly presented, why was nobody interested?  My visits were during the soporific quiet mid-week mid-afternoon, when the school excursions had returned to the classroom and the comfortable cafe at the other end of the foyer was crammed full.  But nevertheless, people walked past heading purposefully to one or another collection within the museum and barely turned their heads towards this interesting and thought-provoking exhibition.   And I wondered why.

In a glass cabinet are suspended four items labelled Nets and Baskets. One of the nets and one of the baskets were selected from the museum’s Aboriginal Material Culture Collection – a vasiform grass basket from Maningrida and a small rectangular fishing net from Aurukun.  Each of these could have been in use decades ago, or centuries ago, or indeed, could have been purely for ceremonial purposes: there’s a sense of timelessness about them.  Obviously each item was hand-crafted using materials found or traded and equally obviously, each item was no longer useful as to be in a museum renders any article no longer usable as anything other than to be seen. 

Displayed alongside the museum items Hayward has crafted a Two-Handed Wire Net and an Electric Wire Basket from recycled materials (galvanized wire, branch wood and multi-coloured electrical wire). Looking rather like old chip baskets, they accentuate the skill and practicality of the original tools that we would normally dismiss as primitive.

John Hayward has spent many hours in the Aboriginal and Pacific Cultures collections of the museum, and worked closely with curator Keryn Walshe to explore how these cultures used local materials and traditional knowledge to fashion tools to exactly suit the required function. His response to these artifacts, nets, baskets, adzes, hammers, knives and spoons, is to use reject and throwaway electronic and other hi-tech wizardry that look similar to the originals but on close examination are seen to be almost laughably useless.  An adze handle carved to exactly the same design as an original from New Zealand has – blink – yes, there as the adze head is a past-its-use-by remote, with a piece of CD disc as its cutting edge.  A kangaroo scapular bone with computer mouse stuck on the end sits alongside a ‘scapular bone knife’ from Arnhem Land.  A used Olympus camera (seeing eye?) attached to a piece of scrubwood mirrors a hafted hatchet from North Central Australia. Hayward makes us look and (see?) and think about the duality of found / discarded objects; hi-tech and lo-tech; theoretical function and actual function, then and now, maintaining all the while a fascination for human ingenuity and a respect for the object (old or new) and the technology that produced it.

The artists who participate in Inside SAM’s Place are well aware that young people are a key focus of the program and they are required to develop interactive and educative activities for young people visiting the museum.  As I have said, there were no young people engaged with this exhibition when I visited, but I would have liked to watch and gauge their interest and grasp of Hayward’s ideas. Contemporary museums tend towards interactive, button-pushing, video-clip displays in a hands-on learning environment, and I wonder how primary school children viewed these reject-hi-tech humorous pieces laid out under their gaze in glass cases, as if they were in the sort of museum I remember being bored by in my own youth. Again, I would have liked to see this exhibition closer to the context of the original artefacts, where it might have been easier for young visitors to see the point.

In these times where most young people have access to computers at home or at school or both, they would easily identify with Hayward’s display of ‘dual tools’, particularly  “Cut and Paste 1 and 2”, two thick branching twigs with  paintbrush and paint scraper on one and brush and knife on the other. Provoking and funny, ordinary tools set up in this way look ‘primitive’ and yet ‘cut and paste’ is such a modern concept that these seemingly innocent pieces are confronting in their duality.

Hayward has subtly changed the context of objects to jog us out of the complacency of our hi-tech world. Sadly, placing this exhibition in old-style cases, away from the Collections they reflect, has down-played the impact it might otherwise have had. This exhibition needs to be ‘seen’, to be carefully looked at,
rather than walked past on the way to somewhere else.

cutting edge

just take a look at the technology
sophistication from every angle
handle the haft
feel its delicate balance
blade sharp as steel but
cut from the rock
the wood the blade the kangaroo skin
binding the whole
made to last countless canoes
softest possum skins
cutting edge tooling up
the artist apes the craftsman
poise of the haft
curve of the wood
bits of cutting edge technology
from our throwaway society
remotes mobiles cd’s
outdated chucked dumped and re-found
fashioned with the same care
as tribal man
but useless
who is primitive
and who civilized?

Dr Ray Tyndale is an Adelaide poet whose fourth collection, Sappho at Sixty, was published earlier this year by Picaro Press.

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