No Place for Folk

While in Sweden I gave a lecture about contemporary jewellery in Aotearoa to the staff and students of Konstfack, the school of art, craft and design in Stockholm. After I had finished, one of the school’s lecturers asked me what I thought about the lack of references to Sami art and adornment in contemporary Swedish jewellery. (Part of my lecture was about the Bone Stone Shell movement, and the various reasons why New Zealand jewellers appealed to Maori and Pacific adornment in the 1980s.) Sami are the indigenous people of Sweden, but their lands stretch across Finland, Norway and part of Russia, defying modern national borders. A group of us discussed this, and I ventured that maybe it didn’t happen because Sweden didn’t really discuss the relationship, or the politics of it; and without that discussion, even if badly managed (as it is sometimes in Aotearoa), perhaps certain cultural or artistic things don’t take place. After all, if you keep quiet about the history of colonisation and negative race relations, cross-cultural art is not really likely to develop. (It is too dangerous, as its presence might necessitate a discussion.) I don’t really know much about the relationship between Sami and Swedish people, but from what people said during our conversation, it doesn’t seem to be entirely positive, or indeed very extensive.

A bit later, during lunch, we returned to this theme and another lecturer from Konstfack made the comment that one of the reasons for the lack of reference to indigenous or even folk art in Swedish contemporary jewellery was the ongoing effect of modernism. Having such a powerful engagement with a certain kind of Scandinavian modernism in the 1950s – form follows function; ornament is crime, etc – means that it is impossible to make reference to, or use, indigenous or folk art. This would be backwards, against the rules established so firmly by modernism.

I suppose the implications of this is that even though Swedish contemporary jewellery has overthrown Scandinavian modernism, and adopted the tenets of European jewellery (like the rest of the world), there are still aspects of modernist prohibitions active in the new rules of contemporary jewellery. Old (modernist) prejudices die hard.

There’s lot to think about here, and lots I don’t understand. And it raises some interesting questions in relation to Aotearoa, and our contemporary jewellery history and practice. Can New Zealand contemporary jewellers make reference to indigenous adornment because we had a different, or less powerful, form of modernism? Is New Zealand jewellery’s historical connection to Maori and Pacific adornment a kind of provincialism, a mark of our distance from the centre of contemporary jewellery power, and something that Swedish jewellery wouldn’t even consider because it reeks of parochialism? Is the difference explained by cultural and social factors, the story of Antipodean versus Nordic colonialism?

There is a coda to this story. A few days later I visited the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, which is dedicated to everything Swedish, as well as including examples of Sami art. As part of the display of Swedish folk art, they have a small gallery at the very beginning of the exhibition demonstrating how contemporary Swedish designers have appealed to folk art in their work – updating traditional forms and using traditional motifs in new objects. Which raises more questions. Why is it that designers can make use of folk art, and jewellers (or craftspeople) cannot? Is this a self-imposed restriction, or does it come from outside?

One obvious answer is that since design has shrugged off its old-fashioned connotations, it can go places that craft cannot. If craft used Swedish motifs, it would just be reinforcing its staid, conservative identity. Design, on the other hand, can do the same and have it imply irony, an updating of tradition, a new Nordic identity for the 21st century. But it makes you wonder why the strictures of modernism would have more force in craft than design, seeing as design played an even more central role within modernism, and took on its values to a much greater extent than craft.

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