Wistfully pushing the boundaries of design and art
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GENEVA: What frightens you? By that, I mean what really frightens you? Not everyday mishaps like scraping the car, or losing your job, but your darkest fears. Dying in a nuclear explosion? Abduction by aliens?
Designers generally address our practical needs, not dreads. That's why the London-based trio, Tony Dunne, Fiona Raby and Michael Anastassiades, decided to investigate how design can help us to conquer our neuroses in their collection of Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times.
Some of the results - such as the Huggable Atomic Mushroom that you can cuddle (like fungic worry beads) if you're worried about a nuclear attack, and Hideaway Furniture, a series of wooden boxes in which you can hide hoping to evade nasty aliens - are featured in "Wouldn't it be nice. . .," an exhibition exploring the blurred boundaries between art and design at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva. Marking the merger of Geneva's old art and design schools into the Haute École d'Art et de Design, it breaks with curatorial convention by showing art alongside design without categorizing any of the work, all of which was chosen because it critiques design and its impact on our lives.
"Wouldn't it be nice. . ." consists of mostly new work by 11 artists and designers, including the live production of an issue of the graphic design magazine Dot Dot Dot and a collection of furniture made in the gallery by the Spanish-born designer Martino Gamper from material found in nearby Dumpsters. It is less lavish in scale than the current design blockbuster, Design Contre Design - the disappointingly predictable A-to-Z of furniture design at the Grand Palais in Paris - but is more thoughtful, and incisive. The Geneva exhibition doesn't make grandiose claims to redefine the roles of art and design, but makes a useful contribution to the debate at a time when design and art seem closer than ever, yet their relationship is clouded by the rocketing value of a particular type of design - limited edition furniture - in the commercial art market.
"Wouldn't it be nice. . ." is concerned not with design's commercial possibilities, but with its cultural role as a medium for analysis and experimentation. The artists in the show have addressed this by creating artworks with practical applications, like the sculpture-cum-fireplace made by the German artist Tobias Rehberger and the carpet by his British counterpart, Ryan Gander. Whereas most of the designers - with the exception of the "live" producers - have developed purely conceptual pieces that are intended as research exercises and to stimulate debate, rather than to fulfill specific functions.
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There is a wistful optimism in the exhibition's title - "Wouldn't it be nice. . ." is the opening line of the 1966 Beach Boys' song about teenagers yearning for sexual fulfillment - and its subtitle, "Wishful thinking in art and design." In the catalogue, the show's curators, the British design historian Emily King and the director of Centre d'Art Contemporain, Katya García-Anton, trace this spirit back to the origins of the modern movement in 1920s Germany, when students at the Bauhaus were encouraged to imbue art with social and political purpose by applying its values to designs for industry.
The relationship between artists and designers has fluctuated ever since. When Bauhaus teachers, like Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, sought refuge in the United States during the 1930s, they found themselves and their students applying their design skills in the corporate sector. Design was cast in this pragmatic, commercial role throughout the postwar era, while art was seen increasingly as a culturally superior medium of intuitive self-expression.
But by the late 1950s, pop artists were celebrating design as part of popular culture. The British artist Richard Hamilton claimed that Dieter Rams's electrical products for Braun were as inspiring to him as Montagne Sainte-Victoire was to Cézanne. And by the turn of the 1970s, both artists and designers were exploring political concerns, often anti-consumerism, in their work as members of the Arte Povera and Anti-Design movements, respectively.
In the last decade, artists like Rehberger and Gander, but also Jorge Pardo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija, have interrogated design as an important theme in their work. Take Rehberger's sculpture-cum-fireplace. Visitors to the exhibition can buy a certificate that authorizes them to copy it, and identifies the result as an original work by Rehberger. Does its dual role as a fireplace diminish the sculpture's artistic value? Does its status an artwork make it less likely to be used for the practical purpose of heating a room? How will people copy it, especially as there aren't any instructions? And does a copy of an artist's work have any value at all?
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