July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Off Track - Two Tribes
By Andrew Mackenzie
While recently in London for the London Design Festival, I read a newspaper article by the cross-dressing Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry. He described his attraction to the decorative qualities of an Aboriginal art exhibition he had recently seen but questioned this work’s status as contemporary art. The difference between contemporary art and Aboriginal art, he wrote, was a matter of tribes. Like all tribes the contemporary art tribe is bound together by customs; from the preening of private views, the hedonism of substance abuse and strutting at the world’s great art biennales, to the rather more serious customs of understanding and engaging with the work and ideas of contemporary art’s forefathers. Perry’s argument is that Aboriginal art does not significantly engage with the bloodline or pedigree of contemporary art, its narratives or discourses, debates or positions. Rather, he argues, Aboriginal art remains distanced, protected almost, from the anxieties and competing dynamics of contemporary art. Therefore, the mere fact of it having been painted in 2006 for instance, does not in itself qualify this work for the status of contemporary art.
This is a serious issue and raises genuine questions. But, wearing my hat as Editor of (Inside) Australia Design Review, and as I was about to embark on three days of London Design Festival overload, Perry’s article made me think about an altogether different tribal relationship; that of the tribes of contemporary art and contemporary design. While the two tribes aggressively defend their territories, each abusing the other in turn, for being either navel-gazers or consumer lackeys, it occurred to me that perhaps these two tribes did not in fact worship such different Gods.
This thought expanded in my mind as I wandered through the maze that is Designers Block, which each year takes up camp in disused industrial buildings in London’s East End. This year it commandeered an old brewery on Brick Lane and there were literally thousands of objects, products and prototypes on display. A surprising number of these were one-offs and seemed more in pursuit of material and cultural experimentation than the next mass market craze. I saw a room full of finely crafted surreal glass implements including one called til death do us apart, designed for two people to share one cigarette. There was an animation from a Japanese communications company that held a spellbound audience fixed to a flickering screen with its visual play and creative invention. There was wild obstreperous wallpaper by a Scottish design company with the unlikely name of Timorous Beasties. And there was one curated room full of ‘alternative ceramics’ that included a few cups that I would describe, in all seriousness, as provocative.
Beyond the London Design Festival, the thought expanded further to a range of designers who have recently started playing outside the conventional tribal parameters, of manufacturing and the consumer market. The Dutch designer Marcel Wanders has a line of creative activity which, alongside his highly profitable and outrageously prolific design business Moooi, has resulted in a series of objects he calls Wanders Wonders, including Haiku poems, experimental videos, primordial little sculptures called ‘one minute wonders’ (clay models formed by Wanders in one minute) and a flower vase line called Snot Vases. Careful who you give one of these to; it could send out the wrong message.
Last year Australian designer Marc Newson had a solo art exhibition at the prestigious New York Gagosian Gallery. Amongst the works on show was a huge single hunk of Carrera marble formed into a punctuated planar form, which makes its closest description as a ‘shelving unit’, sound churlish. Eight objects were exhibited, each loosely related to furniture, but their abstraction of form and mastery in their making make them so much more. Indeed recently his seminal one-off work the Lockheed sofa was sold at auction for over $1m. Not that money is an arbitrator here, but such prices are usually reserved for the salons of art not the showrooms of design.
There are many other examples. French designer Philip Starck’s machine gun lamps reference the iconoclastic disjunction of surrealist painting. The architect and designer Zaha Hadid spent most of her early career renowned as much for her constructivist paintings as her soaring architecture. The entire career of Dutch designer Gijs Bakker of Droog design is a provocation to the conventions of function and form so deeply entrenched in contemporary thinking about design. Meanwhile this October saw a visit to Australia from London designer Ron Arad, who started his career by opening a workshop/showroom in London’s Covent Garden called One-off. Since then his unique creations have always blurred the line between art and design, so much so that his work is often exhibited alongside artists, most recently alongside Richard Artschwager and Lothar Baumgarten at The Foundation Cartier, Paris.
So what are the issues here? The skill of the painter or sculptor clearly does not distinguish the artist from the designer, with many artists outsourcing the ‘making’ of their work, while Arad is a talented hands-on designer/maker. It would be a brave if slightly stupid person who would declare that designers do not work with ideas, using their intelligence. Sure, some churn out product, but hey, have you seen Koons’ recent shiny work? Is it to do with the capacity to provoke and comment on culture? While artists may have the lead on this, designers are moving in droves to change culture, when it comes to consumption and sustainability. True, design can be overly concerned with sensual matters such as touch, sound, smell and sight. They often care a little too much for that catch-all quality called ‘the finish’ of an object, but let’s not forget the immaculate finish of a Patricia Piccinnini car nugget, or a sculpture by Ricky Swallow.
Maarten van Houten, courtesy of Marcel Wanders Studio. These days, I am less convinced than ever that the categories we carry around in our head, distinguishing one creative discipline from another, make much sense. Artists and designers may have distinct tribal customs for marketing themselves, through galleries or showrooms, through different magazines and at different festivals and fairs, but the work of the individual – the artistic design or the highly designed artwork – is less clearly definable. As I left the Truman Brewery last month, my head swimming with ideas and sated with experiences, having talked to dozens of excited, enthusiastic, intelligent and creative designers, the old art school snobbery that I have never quite left behind, jarred. These tribes, I thought, are interbreeding.
Andrew Mackenzie is an art critic and Editor in Chief (inside) Australian Design Review and (AR) Architectural Review Australia.
