As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto said in his best selling popular history book 'Millennium', dates divisible by ten do, in practice, command enormous power to direct attention', but strictly speaking the new millennium or century begins every day.

Now it is the time of the CMC TAFE to celebrate either the end of a hundred years of art and design education or the beginning of another hundred years.  Whichever way you look at it it is an occasion to celebrate.  The institution has celebrated with a huge and visually diverse exhibition currently being held at PICA which is accompanied by an equally huge and apparently exhaustive catalogue.  There is also a shorter, snappier, more didactic catalogue by David Bromfield.

This is a remarkable collection of material but it also presents a rather confusing series of mini exhibitions and illustrations of different attitudes to art and design education.  It is a very worthy endeavour and one which has involved a significant number of people in an exhaustive amount of work.  In one sense this is almost a metaphor for the whole process of technical art education for as Bromfield correctly points out the students would always have worked very hard at developing their craft skills.  It is a very rich vein of art world history that has been plumbed.

A view expressed in the catalogue is that the ethos of Perth Technical College was powerfully Ruskinian which is partly true.  The history and methodology of the professional training of artists in Britain was exported wholesale to the United States and the Empire during the latter years of the 19th century.  It was the result of a much earlier art and industry collaboration which had its origins in the trade wars between Britain, France and Germany.

As with all colonising endeavours early art education in Australia had two separate functions, a liberalising and civilising programme for the greater good of the community and perhaps its control and on the other hand hand and eye training for artisans, trades people and engineers.  The origins of this second purpose were to be found in the so called South Kensington system.

The liberalising purpose was closely linked with the establishment of art galleries, museums and libraries but the thread which linked all the various levels and purposes of 19th century and early 20th century art education was drawing.  Drawing was essentially the copyist art, but it was also viewed as the language of the industrialised world.

Ruskin and Morris both attacked the dehumanising influences of the machine which Ruskin saw as degrading and enslaving the human race whereas craft activities signified the dignity of human labour and human presence.  The craft tradition is very well illustrated in a splendidly presented shrine-like exhibition dedicated to the work and influences of J.W.R. Linton.  Linton was a key figure in the history of the art of this stage and his often quoted comments about luxury and usefulness in the arts showed that he had his feet firmly on West Australian soil.  He laid the groundwork for a well established craft tradition.  Western Australia's development of an institutionalised art world was relatively tardy for by 1900 the other states had very well established government funded art and design schools.  South Australian School of Art had been in place for 40 years and during the 1880s, H.P. Gill of South Australia established and examined the art and design drawing work at centres in Western Australia.  Even then Perth was in thrall to the other states.

The huge catalogue could have been a more academically sourced work and it would have been very interesting to see it handled as a series of thematic research projects as it is an important area of study into the issues of identity.  As it is, the major text tends to read with all the fascination of a telephone directory.  Hopefully, however, the material is accurate as I have no doubt it will provide a resource for future study.  Having said that, I must compliment everyone involved in what is obviously a hugely demanding amount of work.

Much of the historical work exhibited upstairs provides us with interesting examples of the whole issue of provincialism and metropolitanism, with only a few brief candles shedding flickering light on Perth's hesitant relationship with contemporary art ideas.  From the mid 80s the collaborative group 'Media Space' became totally involved in contemporary art making, for the first time, the possibility of a socio-political element to the artistic life of this state.  Much of the contemporary stature of art as a viable activity in Perth has its antecedents in that important, if short lived collaboration.

The visual arts are thriving world-wide.  Creative Studies no longer have the doubtful reputation as either training cultural guerrillas or dilettante amateurs.  Indeed I am told that in Singapore that shiny shrine of commercialism, parents are cueing up to enrol their children in private schools which have strong arts programme in the belief that in a rapidly changing world an art and design education will provide them with the skills that they will need to cope with change in the future.  We need our art and design schools more now than ever before.

What the future role of CMC TAFE art courses will be will depend more on economic, political and social imperatives, than on artistic objectives but what is certain from this exhibition is that the role of the old Perth Tech has been essential to the creation of an art world in Perth and that it has now been recorded and treated with the respect it deserves.

Professor Neville Weston
Head of School,                                            ( Read another opinion of this exhibition )
WA School of Visual Arts