Art and Industry

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 8

Art and Industry

HE divorce be-. tween Beauty and Utility is a scandal that is two centuries old. Before the sudden onrush of the machine age demoralised the two partners and caused their unhappy separation, , there was never any difficulty in the minds of men as to the relationship be-. tween "aesthetic" and " practical " activities. There were masons, carpenters, wheelwrights and craftsmen of many other kinds; the "painter" and the "sculptor" were not considered to belong to a different order. The Industrial Revolution brought about a fictitious separation between the "fine arts" and the "useful arts," as they came to be called. For at least a century it has been recognised, by the few men with minds sensitive enough to perceive it, that this implied a complete break with tradition, and set a problem that appeared

to Mave no easy solution. In the 19th Century William Morris and others tried to bring the divorced couple together again. But it is only during the past thirty or forty years that real headway has been made. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and one of the leaders in the new movement, has expressed its aims concisely: "As our struggle with the prevailing ideas proceeded, the Bauhaus was able to clarify its own aims in the process of getting to grips with the problem of design from every angle and formulating its periodic discoveries. Our’ guiding principle was that artistic design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life. Further, that the revolution in aesthetics has given us fresh insight into the meaning of design, just as the mechanisation of industry has provided new tools for its realisation. Our ambition was to rouse the creative artist from his other-worldliness and reintegrate him into the workaday world of realities; and at the same time to broaden and humanise the rigid, almost exclusively material, mind of the business man. Thus our informing conception of the basic unity of all design in relation to life was in diametrical opposition to that of ‘art for art’s sake,’ and to the even more dangerous philosophy it sprang from: business as an end in itself." * * * HE "revolution in aesthetics," and the resolute attempt to bring Beauty and Utility together again, have been going on in Britain and: America as well as on the Continent. And we in New Zealand are fortunate in having just been paid a visit by one of the leaders in the movement, In the field ‘of industrial design, Milner Gray is probably the most distinguished figure in Britain to-day. He has

designed an extraordinary range of manufactured goods, from precision incubators and hammock-chairs to the Ascot Gold Cup. Kitchen utensils, commercial packages, pottery and chinaware, furniture, watch-cases, passenger-plane interiors, posters, trademarks--these are only a few of the things he has tackled. A list of Milner Gray’s appointments, and of the positions he holds, would fill a Listener column. During the war he was_head of the Exhibitions Branch of the Ministry of Information. In 1948 he acted as chief designer of the "Design at Work" Exhibition at the Royal Academy. With Herbert Read and several others as his fellow-directors he runs the Design Research Unit, a co-operative partnership of architects, designers and engineers, the most important group of its kind in Britain to-day. He has done more, perhaps, than any other man to _taise the profession of industrial designing to its present high status; and his fellow-workers have acknowledged their debt to him by making him President of ee Society of Industrial Artists. ilner Gray is modest, and inclined to * self-effacing. He disclaims any pretensions to be a lecturer. Yet the four lectures he gave in Auckland and Wellington during the hurried fortnight he has just spent in New Zealand were models of clear thinking and of lucid presentation. The problem of industrial design has not yet been faced squarely in New Zealand. Standards are low, and we have much to learn. For this reason the British Council is to be congratulated on bringing to New Zealand the man who, above all others, is qualified to give us help and guidance, * * * E first thing to be realised, says Milner Gray (and his visit will have served its purpose if he has managed

to get this one idea into. circulation) is that design is nota luxury, a decoration that may be added to an industrial product for purposes of ostentation, or left out for reasons of economy. The industrial designer stands-or should stand-at the very heart of things. He is the man who conters with engineers, business executors, salesmen, and otner specialists, and draws their activities together into one pattern. "ine process of industrial designing," says Muiner Gray, "calls for an assessment of such things as the materials to be used, the process of manutacture, the system of distribution, the use to which the article is to be put, and the method of servicing. All these factors, and any others that may be relevant in a particular case, ought to play their part in the control of the final form of the things we make by the industrial processes that have replaced the making of goods by hand. "You know, there used to be people who imagined that an architect was a man who was employed to give a building an attractive elevation in this style or that. But a good elevation grows out of a good plan. You can’t separate them. The architect’s proper function is to gtasp all the needs of a client-needs that the client may not be able to express freely-and to crystallise them into a workable plan that’s economical to build end that will be pleasant to live in. It’s the same with the industrial designer. If you like, he’s another kind of architect-the co-ordinator in a team of specialists. A co-ordinator must necessarily be in the centre of things, you'll agree." * * Pa "TO what extent has this point of view been absorbed in Britain?" I asked. "T’m not going to pretend that the Golden Age of industrial design has already come into existence in Britain,"

Milner Gray replied. "But a great deal of progress has been made, and the prospects are bright. As you know, we have a big export problem. The pressure of that emergency is helping to push things along. It’s realised fully in official quarters now that our success in increasing exports will depend, among other things, on the element of industrial design. The Government takes the matter very seriously. In 1944 it set up the Council of Industrial Design. The President of the Board of Trade was responsible for that. In the Board’s own journal the President said this the other day: ‘I urge manufacturers to make it a specific function of management to bring the designer into his right place in the industrial organisation; to give him the status that will enable him to co-operate as an equal with the production engineers on the one hand and the sales staffs on the other. This is something that needs attention from the top, and it will pay handsomely.’ " "And are the manufacturers listening?" "Many of them are. But there’s a lot of ground to be made yet before British industry in general can claim to be solidly based on good design." I .asked Milner Gray about the Society of Industrial Artists-having heard of several fruitless attempts to establish something of the kind in New Zealand. : "The Society was founded in 1930," he said. "In 1944 it disbanded its membership, and began a process of recruiting all over again-this time with a rigid qualitative test for election to membership. There are three gradesLicentiates, Members, and _ Fellows. There are expert selection committees to. examine the work and experience, and the bona fides, of applicants for membership. Unless he’s reached a high standard of technical competence | and (continued on next page)