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Museum Anthropology Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 133–139, ISSN 0892-8339, online ISSN 1548-1379. Copyright ©2006 AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

In Transformations: The Language of Craft, theNational Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberraset out to show contemporary Australian “studio

craft” in the context of the international craft scene.1

This major craft overview featured craft by practi-tioners from the USA, Japan, New Zealand andEurope; Denmark, Norway, Italy, Germany, Finland,Spain, Norway, Czech Republic and England, allareas broadly linked by the dissemination of craftand design publications, according to the show’scurator Robert Bell. One premise for the show waslocating contemporary craft within wider art prac-tice and theory. Although the title of the showalluded to discursive tropes and the catalog refersto the “language of materials,” I will argue that amaterial approach to contemporary craft is moreilluminating. Contemporary craft, by its very nature,draws attention to the slippery relations existingbetween subjects and objects, that is,between humansand non-humans, things and persons. I draw hereon material culture theory in anthropology as ameans of attempting to understand theTransformations exhibition, as well as Inspired!, thenew permanent decorative arts exhibition at thePowerhouse Museum in Sydney.

Transformations was a difficult exhibitionbecause its focus was not craft in the sense thatmost gallery visitors might have expected. As thecurator pointed out, audiences are increasinglyunaware of the history of craft and decorative artsand this show did not look like the received view ofcraft, but instead deliberately set out to challengethis. A color catalog accompanied Transformations(Bell 2005).

In the gallery, the objects were arranged spatiallyin three themes; narrative, material and structural,

but craft is surely all about materiality. The objectsare, more or less, born out of the constraints and pos-sibilities, the expressive potential offered by mate-rial media–ceramics, textiles, wood, stone, metal,plastics and so on–and the performative relationbetween the maker’s body and the materials she hasworked. In contrast, the wider western contemporaryart scene is propelled by imagery and the materialexpression of these is secondary, often a mere vehi-cle and the making of such things may even be bysomeone other than the artist.Think, for example, ofprint makers or the work of Mike Smith in the UnitedKingdom who made, among other things, DamienHirst’s “Pharmacy” (Craig 2003). Art historianNorman Bryson illuminated this erasure of theartist’s labors in western art (1983). This differencein approaches to materiality is really what makessomething art or craft now, not the old definitionsof craft as functional and art as not. Most of theobjects exhibited in Transformations are not overtly“useful” anyway, although functionality was fre-quently stressed by exhibiting artists during theirtalks at the one-day symposium following the open-ing of the show. (For example, an artist might empha-size the satisfaction of making a tea pot that stillreally pours well however far deconstructed it isfrom conventional teapot-ness.)

The animation and agency of much of the workexhibited in Transformations was palpable.The firstsection of the show particularly, with its “narrative”label, had many objects that contained explicit over-tones of violence. Gerd Rothmann’s gold necklace“Ten Fingers at the Neck,” comprises gold squareseach containing a life-size fingerprint and, opposite,Beth Hatton’s “rag” woven rug was displayed. It isa work in which the rags are of kangaroo skin, which

Review Essay: On Materiality—A Review of Two Australian Exhibitions

Diana Young

imparted the enlarged finger prints woven into therug with a nasty “coming out of the skin” feeling asone viewed it, while at once transferring the humanprints onto the hapless skinned kangaroo. DavidRegan’s “Eagle 2004,” a USA-themed soup tureentakes a domestic, even feminine social object, andgives it the form of an eagle with outstretched wingsand two heads as the lid. The tureen has been cov-ered, using sgraffito cutting through the black over-glaze to reveal the white porcelain beneath, in hideousbattle scenes, tanks and parking lots full of cars.These depictions are framed across the eagle’sbody like a wide screen TV evoking the banalityof TV dinners spent watching the news. It is notjust the very vivid representation of pain in thedepictions of impaled bodies but pain is inherentin the creation of the tureen with the scarificationof the body of the pot, implying the objectificationof awareness of pain and its nexus with U.S.military power.

Ceramicist Kimpei Nakamura’s three works areall called “An Exploration of Japanese Taste” and areamalgams of casts of Japanese industrial rubbish instoneware glazed in metallic gold, reds greysmauves, a palette that the label told us is the “garishpalette” of Kabuki theatre. These objects, literallydeconstructed so that there remains little in the wayof the figurative to recognize are, the catalog tellsus, about the link between Japanese popular cultureand Zen aesthetics and parody the complexity ofJapanese visual culture. They also look like some-thing or someone, perhaps a car, which has beenthrough a crushing machine and compressed intoan easier-to-organise, but harder-to-recognise, chunkof matter.

The allusion to hidden “functions” of many exhib-ited works rendered some downright threatening.Like Nakamura’s, some of the objects in the showwere curiously ambiguous and strange, unnervingeven, and one wondered what sort of a thing (whatsort of an animal) was this? If some art critics findthis a weakness–the pointlessness of form–in fact,when seen from the perspective of material cultureanalysis it is a strength.2 Rather we are forced toimagine how, when and where things might be used,although this is often frustrating since the objects areso resistant. This is their material “punch line,” likethe huge bladed construction forks made of glass byKirstie Rea, which cantilevered out from the gallerywall. Such deliberate subversion of materials occur

in Albert Paley’s work making steel behave like cloth,draping it, folding it in a kind of tactile trick akin totrompe d’oeil but in another sensory mode. For thisto work one has to be able to suspend one’s disbeliefthat the table with its granite top, is swaged in rib-bons and cloth, not the steel sheets that one imaginesmight uncoil disastrously and viciously at anymoment.

The whole show, with is black walls and spot litexhibits, was rather oppressive and portentous, theblack making a statement of seriousness, weighti-ness (compare the black uniform of contemporaryprofessional urban chic favored by many curators).Black scrambles the gallery space with the objectsspot-lit and staged. Sometimes this setting workedfor the objects, but often it worked against them.Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s subtle ceramic arrangementand coloration was lost here. Pigott creates Morandi-esque assemblages of vessels, almost tableau mort,each one subtly different from its neighbour in color,glaze or shape.Groups of related objects, often slightlytransformed versions of one another, evoke socialrelationships through their formal analogies as pla-tonic shapes.There is a stillness and quietude abouther work that is sometimes enlivened by strongercolor often on the interior surface of bowls.Incidentally, this important Australian ceramicistwas the subject of a retrospective survey at the newlyrefurbished National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)where the same kind of groupings were shown off togood effect in the newly refurbished galleries byItalian architect Mario Bellini.At the NGV, her workwas in a gallery up the new spiral ramp from theextensive Chinese and Korean ceramic collection ofthe NGV, from which her work takes its cue. Pigottrepresents a more conventional sense of what craftis, or used to be, elegant, beautifully made, learnedin its allusions to Chinese ceramics, something manypeople might want to have in their home. Or to putit another way, her works reinforce a benign reas-suring relationship between creator/maker and, say,gallery visitor, in that, if the vessels appear sentient,they are well mannered, humane, prototypes of use-fulness, potential extensions of the human body, evenif one might never actually use them.

Although we were invited in the Transformationscatalog to consider the objects as “mediators of space”and the blackness and spotlighting of the galleryevokes a theatrical setting, most works were rammedagainst walls or into cases and were treated as two

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dimensional objects, their performative aspectrather nullified. Two freestanding works that com-manded the space around them were KristinaRiska’s architectural “White Pavilion” and AdrianSaxe’s “Nirvanarrhea.” Riska, who is Finnish, pro-duced a two meter high spiral of white, piercedstoneware “bricks” that appears so lightweight thatit might instead have been made of paper. Saxe’scandelabra-like work had a plinth-mounted base ofheavy looking labyrinthine dark glazed ceramic, per-haps female or fungal topped with gold porcelaingourd-like vessels.These vessels feature elongationsof all sorts of sizes, which are studied with gems thatwinked back at you in the gallery lights and madethe whole object animated. Erotic, witty and won-derfully vulgar, Saxe’s work is also, as I learned whilehearing him speak and watching his array of accom-panying images, replete with references to classicalChinese ceramics, with its levels of meaning. Thelabyrinthine spirals are a reference to cloud patternsin Chinese porcelain and this piece materializes thevitality of desire for the novelty of Chinoiserie thatgripped Europe, and the material reconfiguration ofEuropean material culture that followed.

Whether objects are born bigger or smaller wasanother theme running through the show.While theformat of the catalog reproduces the mug shot ofeach exhibited object at the same image size, oblit-erating scale, there was another layer in the showabout scale and size, and the position and distanceof viewing of the objects within the gallery. Lia Cooktakes 1950s color pictures of a child on a beach andrenders them huge in woven cotton, so that whenclose to the image, it dissolved into the coloredstitches of the weaving. Only from a certain distancedid the image resolve itself into a figure evoking allsorts of resonances. The work re-materializes thephotographic image on the one hand, as a sort ofskin, a projection of the body in the snapshot and,on the other hand, conveys a fragmentation of it.Tetsuo Fujimoto, through his piece “Work ‘03,” alsoinsists that the viewing subject engage bodily withits dense over-sewing of machined buttonhole stitch-ing almost drawing on cloth that glitters close upand becomes landscape-like when it was viewedfrom further away. Martin Smith’s work is in earth-enware and glass and might almost be a maquettefor a building, although we can only apprehend itsoscillating movement because it is 50 cm in diameter,the drum of polished terracotta colored earthenware,

lined with platinum leaf, on a polished blue glassdish. The contrasting tactile surface of the materi-als, the matte terracotta, the cool metal leaf andthe shiny glass give it vitality; its precision belyingits hand-made production.

David Watkins’ spare stainless steel bangle“Gardens of Arqua Petrarca” projects the landscapeback onto the body inverting the scale of a body ina place and shrinking it to encircle the wrist. AliceWhish does the opposite with her three dimensionaldoughnut made of laser cut steel star shapes, whichdespite the impression of intricate labor, appearsalmost immaterial.

It seems strange, at first glance, given the hugeamount of work being produced by indigenousAustralians, that more of it did not make it into thisshow. As it was, there were two such works, one byKen Thaiday, Sr, “Hammerhead Shark Mask” and ahollow log funeral pole called “Garak the Universe”by Gulumbu Yunupingu. The undulating surface ofYunupingu’s eucalyptus pole is covered with smallstars painted in ochres. In 2004 she won the TelstraNational Art Award, (the most prestigious indige-nous art award in Australia) with three such hollowlog coffins. She is also one of eight Australian indige-nous artists contributing work as part of the build-ing of architect Jean Nouvel’s Musee du quai Branlyin Paris.

Thaiday’s dance mask, with its aggressive,meaty presence was hampered in the exhibition bybeing placed against a wall so that one could notwalk around it.This piece was a relief in the contextof Transformations; it was accessible, a visuallywhole figure, un-fractured, beguiling. Thaiday is aTorres Strait Islander who has been making masksfor some years as part of his dance practice. Thetwo tiered mask, the upper a whole shark, the lower,its jaws only represented in painted plywood with ahalo of white feathers evoking salt spray, are con-nected by a pulley system so that the dancer canimitate the shark’s movements. It was easy here tosee the body in the object, doubly so if one knew thatthe shark is Thaiday’s family totem and thatThaiday is both maker and potential performerwearing the mask. Both works are, in differentways, potential replacements of the human bodyand are not riven with the anxiety inherent in manyof the other works. Both imply an easy relationshipwith an animated world.The boundary between per-sons and things is fluid and easy.

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Both these works by indigenous Australians are,within Australia at least, more able to move acrossthe old classifications that James Clifford enumer-ated, than the other objects in Transformations(Clifford 1988). Thaiday’s and Yunupingu’s work canbe both modern and authentic. A choice between thetwo does not have to be made (McClean 2003).Cliffordhas also pointed to the fluidity of these categories. Infact, both are hyper mobile in the sense that they canbe exhibited as “art”and yet were inserted into a showthat is explicitly about “craft.” Both works gently sub-vert the “traditional”within their own cultural frame-work and thus could just about be said to haveresonated with the bulk of the other works inTransformations that are post-modern.

The work by both Thaidday and Yunupinguchosen for Transformations had, as its passport, tonegotiate such mobility through an explicit link tospirituality, a dimension that has been a factor inelevating Aboriginal art to the status of fine artwithin the cross-cultural framework of “art”(Morphy 1995). If these items are “craft” though, oneinevitably wonders what it is that makes it so, for,say, a basket made from local spinifex grass and oversewn with colored raffia, by an artist living now inthe Western Desert? Craft, by indigenous artists inAustralia remains largely unwritten about and un-theorised (although see Hamby and Young 2001;Hamby 2005), unlike the vast industry growing uparound paintings. This is the case despite the factthat the same individuals often make both sorts ofobjects, as Nyukana Baker does in the northwest ofSouth Australia. Baker has recently collaboratedwith potter Robin Best, painting one of her bowls(Nicholls 2005), and her work across all her mediamanages to elevate the objects to another level. LikeYunupingu, who has made fiber work baskets andmats and bark paintings for many years, Baker isan art practitioner with many skills, one of which ismaking spinifex baskets. I am choosing this mediumas an example since it is traditional and modern atthe same time and the Telstra Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islander Art award was won in 2005 by analmost full size Toyota four-wheel drive vehiclemade from spinifex grass, but there were no spinifexworks in Transformations. Clifford’s (1988) famousexhortation to find “indigestible objects,” meaningobjects that resist and disrupt classification in thewestern framework of categories, might have beenput to good use in Transformations. There is still a

paucity of galleries that show indigenous crafttogether with that by non-indigenous artists,Object: The Australian Centre for Craft and Designbeing one example, with its recent show of basketsWoven Forms, which is now touring Australia. Thisshow also had both indigenous and non-indigenouscurators.

So, why were there not more indigenous artistsin the Transformations show, given the plethora ofwork in many different media that become classedas craft in the settler art system? As just noted, the2005 Telstra Art Award was won by KantjupaiBenson and Angalina Mitchell’s Toyota made fromspinifex grass.This is a witty incarnation of the four-wheel drive vehicle, an object that is a crucial media-tor of Western Desert societies, becoming humanised,gendered and a part of the country it traverses(Young 2001). The spinifex Toyota reconfigures thecountry into the car rather than car graduallybecoming more like country as it moves along, rein-forcing the fluidity of entities as in Thaiday’s andYunupingu’s work. Working spinifex to make bas-kets is not “traditional” in Western Desert indige-nous cultures, but has been developed in the lastdecade by women and there is a body of work to ref-erence, mostly of baskets that might be hats ormight be breasts just as the Toyota might be alsolarge mobile basket. At any rate my point is thatsuch work is contemporary and dynamic, so whyweren’t its “leading practitioners” included inTransformations?

In the case of Transformations perhaps theanswer is that without a passport of explicit spir-ituality such “craft” work cannot be post-modernenough; it is not, in short, informed by the samecontemporary theory that the catalog quotes, andwith which the other contributors are surely famil-iar. Indeed the premise for the exhibition was thelink between Australian craft and contemporarycraft elsewhere that has been enabled by the finan-cial assistance available to overseas artists to visitAustralia during the last 30 years. The partici-pants are leading practitioners in their fields ofpractice at the turn of the 21st century. Many ofthem now hold leading academic positions, DavidWatkins, for example, is a professor at the RoyalCollege of Art in London, as is also Martin Smithin ceramics and glass. Saxe is a professor at theUniversity of California. The work in this showcould be called post-modern, in that much of it is

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eclectic in its references to things from other timesand cultures and wilfully contrary to conventionalassumptions about what constitutes craft. Transfor-mations might well be construed as an attempt bya leading cultural institution, with some author-ity in Australia, to revalue contemporary craft inthe mainstream.

The refashioning of the self through shoppingfor industrially produced goods, assembling andappropriating them, the things themselves actingas mediators of relationships and actors in the cre-ation of personhood has been theorised by DanielMiller (1998) among others. Miller has shown thatconsumption is not the amoral project that it is oftencharged to be. The curator makes a plea for theuniqueness and authenticity, the sensual immedi-acy of craft objects in a world increasingly domi-nated by “global industrial manufacture.” Yetironically, many of the examples in Transformationsare, as I have discussed, rather alienating andresistant and have the reverse effect. What is thefate of these objects to be? Some of them look likeillustration of theory, text converted into thingsrather than the other way around. Handmadethings now look so exotic, rather like anyone whocan actually draw rather than use computer-aideddrafting, that perhaps the latent aggression in manyof the objects is needed for them to achieve agencyto carve themselves a space in the 21st century.When W.J.T. Mitchell suggested that we ask pictures“what they really want?” rather than asking whatthey can do for us, we might substitute for picturesthese contemporary craft objects that appear soreluctant to do what we really want but rather seemto have an agenda about their use that is hard todetermine (Pinney 2006; Mitchell 1996).This obfus-cation of use is also at odds with the increasing focuson the user by many design companies in develop-ing their products and the role of applied anthro-pology in mediating this process.

The weight of theory embodied in the work fromthis exhibition does not then always make for beau-tiful, useful objects. Rather it makes hybrid, ungainly,resistant ones, which indicates much about mate-rial culture and society now. Indeed the things areprobably much more “eloquent” as the curatorwrites, than their theoretical underpinnings. Withits roots in materiality, craft can deliberately createthe impression of collapsed time, with patina forexample as in Robert Marsden’s opaquely blank

patinaed brass box or Bill Samuels’ work of fusedgravel with a stoneware glaze that had a specificityof place in terms of the Australian landscape whilealluding in its low table form to the Japanese teaceremony, the materials metamorphosing duringthe firing, producing a tactile living rock that mightbe a table. Samuels’ work is as much about processas product.

Several artists at the symposium mentioned theinfluence of contemporary “folk traditions” on theirwork, with this dimension constituting an extralayer, a relooping of influences, often derived fromthe UK, with artists looking for the strange in thefamiliar. Merran Esson for example talked of seeinga ceremony in Scotland that added to her coppergreen glazed stoneware pieces, which looked liketwo bullet-pocked, patina-stained metal vesselswelded together.

While Bell (2005) makes the point that, increas-ingly, audiences are ignorant of a design history thatinforms decorative art, the new permanent displayat the Powerhouse perhaps aims to fill this gap.Although not explicitly billed as such, Inspired! isan account of empire, and of Australia’s place in it,told through objects. It is a settler culture’s narra-tive, of course. The exhibits are arranged sequen-tially, in a conventional social narrative, placingobjects inside a pre-existing history of design. Itseems an impossibly wide remit. This is, though, inmany ways a wonderful collection of over 800 objectsthat has taken ten years to come to fruition and was,I believe, made for this exhibition.

Each of Inspired!’s exhibition sections has a listof historical events presented beside it that appearrather random. Sometimes they are international,sometimes Australian and in the section called“Australia adapting to a new world” there are threeevents that concern Aboriginal peoples. Once again,as in the NGA exhibition, the objects are construedas reflecting a period rather than constituting it.Wemight rather ask “what things make possible” i.e. theeffect that things had on persons, the mediation ofsocial relations by things in “the birth of Europe’sfirst modern consumer societies” as the Powerhousebills 18th century Europe (Keane 2005). Indigenousobjects apparently continue to remain outsidethis history.

There are only a few works by indigenous artistsand these are grouped together in the “making theirmark” craft section, and include two woodcarvings

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branded with hot wire patterns purchased throughMaruku Arts and Crafts in central Australia. One ofthese is a perentie lizard (a large dinosaur-likelizard that can reach up to ten feet in length) byBilly Wara. Wara has been making perentie, hisDreaming, like this for many years, in the same wayusing the same materials, and it would be wonder-ful if a curator finally assembled a group of them,seeing them as multiples. Here Wara’s lizard ispaired with a painted wood carving by Billy Petyarrefrom Utopia. The paucity of indigenous presence inthe exhibition does seem strange given the Powerhouses’excellent collection of objects by indigenous design-ers/makers/craftspeople, who find that the thingsthat they produce enter the marketplace filed in thewestern category of decorative art.

Kaltjiti Arts and Crafts in South Australia hasformed a collaboration with Kashmiri papier-mâchéworkers, who copy the paintings of artists such asInawinytji Williamson and Kathy Maringka ontosmall boxes. These really are cross-cultural prod-ucts.The Kaltjiti project raises many complex issuesabout contemporary craft production and, since thecollaborative partner is outside the modernist west-ern art apparatus, lends it some breathing spacebefore the objects are re-launched into Australianmuseum shops and commercial galleries, wherethey sell well. Given the interesting nexus of craft/design/manufacture, it is a missed opportunity notto have included them in the Powerhouse show.Elsewhere in the show, there are one-off craft objectsthat have subsequently become manufactured suchas Lucy Rie’s ceramics and the colored polyesterresin containers and jewellery of Australian com-pany Dinosaur Designs. The Kaltjiti work wouldprovide a counterpoise to these.

Like the NGA show, the Powerhouse one failsto engage with Aboriginal art or design or craft, callit what you will, as part of, and a major part of,Australian art and design past and present. What,for example, about the legions of objects in museumcollections within Australia, and elsewhere, thatAboriginal people across the many varied indige-nous societies in Australia made using new materi-als derived from contact with the settlers’ materialgoods? We are not yet in a space suggested byAustralian artist Imants Tillers’ term “post Aboriginalart” where the shocking otherness, then recogni-tion and engagement with Aboriginal art is no longerrelevant.

One of the first cases in the Inspiration! exhibi-tion is a grouping of work by Australia’s biggestdesigner superstar export, Marc Newson. Newson’schaise longue, “Lockheed lounger,” made from curvyfiberglass, clad in sheets of glossy riveted aluminium,while exceeding them in glamor, has become the pro-totype for, and indeed, is indexical of his later work.Its fetishised, unyielding shiny surface makes it theantithesis of anything the human body could com-fortably lounge upon, rather it is a sports car or asports car seat or, of course, a piece of an aeroplane.There are other “design classics” such as GerritReitveld’s “Red Blue Chair” and newer ones like the“Wiggle Chair” designed by Frank Gehry in 1972, butmade by Vitra in 2002.

The exhibition becomes more like a cabinet ofcuriosity as it gets historically deeper and movesaway from personal oeuvres. The most enthrallingthings here are the ones that came from the folk artor popular culture end of the spectrum.The 19th cen-tury “Aunt Clara’s quilt” embroidered by guests andstitched together by the owner of the boarding houseechoes the rich vivacity and vulgarity of folk art inJeremy Deller’s show in the Barbican gallery inLondon in 2005. Deller, together with Alan Kane,collected contemporary popular art from the UKranging from videos of various regional folk per-formances—the straw bear of Whittlesea to Loyalistand Republican Street murals in Belfast to a rangeof bollards transformed into penguins for April FoolsDay (April 1st) in Kent. This attempt to blow openthe stuffy space of modernism and trite generaliza-tions about globalism and material things seems sud-denly prescient and welcome. Similar sentiments areaddressed by “qube” and other graphic artists in theirpromotional DVDs for various products in thePowerhouse exhibition.

A selection of 20th century beachwear, mostlyanonymously displayed on manikins, together withmid-century brochures and photographs act as ademonstration of social history and loose most oftheir material power in the process. In the 19th cen-tury section “Australia adapting to a new world” cos-tumes, tableware and furniture serve to evoke thepossible circulation of objects from Europe toAustralia and the challenge of working new mate-rials in Australia.The Meissen white glazed life-sizeporcelain bust of “Baron” Schmeidel the court jester,we are told, to the King of Poland and Elector ofSaxony, a mouse dangling from his lips, placed on

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the edge of the show spatially in the Enlightenmentsection is one of the few three dimensional repre-sentation of an actual body in the exhibition and onelongs to mix the objects up a little, to placeSchmeidel next to Newson’s couch and release themfrom their careful timeline sequencing. In manyinstances the meaning of things in the Powerhouseexhibition is overdetermined by the construction ofcontext, in contrast to the NGA show where themateriality of the objects takes the stage. Surely itis time to give objects back their power in museumand gallery contexts, to reconfigure them in waysthat do not imitate their cultural and period set-ting and “social life” but pay attention to the waysin which they have become so desirable throughtheir “irreducible materiality” rather than, say, theircommodity value (Spyer 1998). In this, the NGAshow succeeds even while the objects themselvesare, in conventional art world formal terms, far lesssuccessful than those in Inspired!

Notes

1. The two exhibitions examined in this essay are:Transformations: The Language of Craft, which was pre-sented at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberrabetween November 11, 2005 and January 29, 2006 andInspired! Design Across Time, an ongoing exhibition atthe Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. As of the date thisessay went into production (June 2006), the works fromTransformations that are described in this essay couldbe viewed online as part of the project’s website at:http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/Transformations/.

2. For an art criticism perspective see, for example, Smee(2006).

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Diana Young is a research fellow in the Centre forCross-Cultural Research at the Australian NationalUniversity. An anthropologist, her work focuses onmaterial culture studies.