Vicky Richardson
So welcome to this session in the culture thread, which is called “But Is It Art?” I think it could equally be called “But Is It Design?” Obviously the debate goes either way depending on your background. We’ve just come out of Frieze Art Week and the London Design Festival events which are increasingly colliding and running into each other, and I think that the headline news from Frieze Art Week as far as designers were concerned was that two pieces by Zaha Hahid and Amanda Levete sold at the inaugural auction at Philips de Pury for something £360,000, a sum of money which is going towards funding next year’s London Design Festival, so there’s a sort of beautiful symmetry to the whole question of design art, which has just been played out.
I think in this session we don’t want to dwell too much on the price tags of design art; I think we’re all familiar with the phenomenon and the ever increasing prices that things are selling at auction and in the galleries, and there’s a sort of lurid fascination that we all have for the amount of money involved here, but I think it would be useful to consider in brief the difference between art and design, but not dwell on that too much. Also to look at the impact that all this is having on the new generation of designers and the future for both art and design.
We’ve got a really amazing panel here, and it’s going to be difficult to shut this lot up and allow you to have your say, but I’m also really fascinated to hear what they’ve all got to say.
First of all, on my far right, we’ve got Peter Saville, who is a legend in the graphic design world, and is currently Consultant Creative Director in Manchester and we were discussing his work there last night, and that’s an ongoing process and a very interesting one. Peter’s got the Peter Saville Estate, which is going to be published later this year, which is a book, or a catalogue…
Peter Saville
A catalogue.
Vicky Richardson
OK great. Then we’ve got Matthew Collings, who’s an artist and writer, and probably best known for his TV programmes about art which include presenting the Turner Prize for several years. He’s written a book about Ron Arad, conversations with Ron Arad, and probably the latest thing to mention is that he’s done a remake of the 1969 TV series Civilisation, which is going to be screened starting this month?
Matthew Collings
Next month.
Vicky Richardson
Next month, OK. So, Matthew’s taken part in quite a few discussions about design art, as far as I’m aware, and I’ve heard he’s got a really interesting take on this, so I’ll be fascinated to hear how the art world perspective meets with our perspective from the design world.
On my left is Allan Chochinov, who is editor in chief at Core 77. He’s from New York and you probably all know Core 77 is a website, but it’s also a sort of network, and currently includes 72,000 portfolios and they also organise parties and events for designers in New York and the States.
And there’s Richard Shed, who is a product furniture designer, other types of spatial interaction design, long list of impressive clients, and Richard was telling me straight after this session he’s going to get a train to Heathrow, catch a plane over to China to spend a week going round B&Q factories - which sounds fascinating!
Richard Shed
It's a very glamorous time, isn’t it?
Vicky Richardson
Yeah, and I’ve offered to publish his diary in Blueprint as that sounds like it’s going to be really interesting.
Anyway, without further ado, let’s get the ball rolling. The speakers are just going to introduce briefly their thoughts on the subject for three to four minutes, and then we’re going to open up for discussion. So, Peter, is it OK if we start with you?
Peter Saville
I knew you were going to say that! Yes, OK, three to four minutes – I will read this very quickly. I went to Manchester Polytechnic in 1974, and I was in the faculty of Art & Design so that was a bit of a kind of misleading one right from the start. It led me to believe and to feel that there was an intrinsic relationship between the two, and that the two were to some extent one and the same, and that was definitely misleading. When I was at college, I saw a particular work by Richard Hamilton called Toaster and it was a piece of pop art but without the irony usually associated with pop art; it seemed to me to be more of a tribute to the possibility within mass production, rather than any kind of critique or ironic statement. It seemed to be in a way an outcome of art theory, but in mass production and within the public domain, and I think that Toaster set for me a kind of idealised convergence point of what was possible in the relationship between art and design. But obviously the toaster in question was created by Dieter Ramms for Braun and Dieter was obviously somebody that Hamilton had enormous respect for, and as we think we know, Deiter Ramms had remarkable primacy within the operational functions at Braun, and this is a situation which doesn’t often happen.
Leading to a state of affairs that we have at the moment, of designers producing limited edition pieces within a gallery context, but which to my way of looking at things, through its avoidance of reality, isn’t actually contemporary, so therefore to a great extent fails as design in our times now.
The work that they’re doing isn’t generally advancing and understanding of aesthetics either, so it’s not really functioning as design in our contemporary social culture; it’s not really functioning as art either, in that it’s not advancing – for the most part, the design pieces that we see in the limited edition context – are not really advancing our understanding of aesthetics either. So some of this kind of hybrid work which is appearing at the moment for me fails in both camps: it’s not really contemporary design, nor is it contemporary art. And with regard to art, it is actually that enquiry into aesthetics which is the point behind the work. It’s actually questioning our understanding of an aesthetic or beauty – it’s questioning it rather than providing an answer, which design normally does.
It’s the way design or art functions that makes it important, so a limited edition design piece is not an important piece of design, and something which doesn’t function in the enquiry of aesthetics as art isn’t an important piece of art either. I think that in looking at this debate in a detached way, we have to summarise the importance behind a piece of work.
Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale was bought by Francois Pinot, one of three existing examples of the Maison Tropicale, which was a house designed for French people living in the French colonies in 1940 or between the wars. Francois Pinot bought one of the three existing examples of that for, I think, three or four million Euros recently. That’s considered as an important piece of design, and I don’t have any problem at all with an important piece of design fetching a very high price in the institutional or collecting market, and to have to qualify it as art, or say “is it art?” because it’s fetching a high price I think is to some extent denigrating to the understanding of design.
In concluding, back to Toaster, it was of course actually – and I realise this a bit better now – Hamilton’s declaration of it as “art” in 1965 or whenever it was that made that piece, I think 1966; it was his declaration of it as art in 1966 which in a way made it art at that time, rather than necessarily the aesthetics that Dieter Ramms was quoting within the work.
One last point: this kind of quotation of aesthetics and this exploration of aesthetics – there is a fundamental difference in design practice and art practice. Designers tend to make things look good, there is usually a quest to appeal or to seduce an audience, and of course to make things look good, we use recognised visual codes, and those visual codes are normally and usually brokered by art, so art tends to broker our understanding of aesthetics, which then designers employ those aesthetics to appeal to us.
A good example of this is Martin Creed’s work at the Tate, when he was up for the Turner prize, of the lights going on and off. That was a good challenging question as to our understanding of aesthetics and, if that is the primary intent in the work, then there’s no need for you to be able to sit on it or propose it as a design of some sort, and I think this is a critical thought to take on board.
Vicky Richardson
Great, thank you.
Peter Saville
Sorry it was longer than four minutes.
Vicky Richardson
No, that’s very enlightening. Matthew?
Matthew Collings
Well, I so agree with everything Peter said. I almost think we should pass on some…
Peter Saville
Thank you.
Matthew Collings
Broadly, and in so far as one thing helping or aiding the other by some sort of Ruskinian law of help, at the moment I believe that a design – if you think of it in terms of it makes things look good – is of help to art; whereas in the other direction, it’s all radioactive toxic poison, and the worst thing I can possibly imagine are these hybrid things at the moment, where a designer pathetically presents a bit of design and then writes on it, like Tracey Emin. These things that you see in art fairs, sad little struggling “me too”, wannabe art, by a design.
The reason for this is timely, it has to do with the time that we’re in, that art at the moment is this rather sort of nondescript, unvisual thing which every now and then, by accident, might look quite nice or by some genetic accident an artist still has some interest in some aesthetic connection to art of the past, but on the whole it’s sort of a comedy, cerebral moment where reality, which Peter mentioned, is not memorialised or celebrated or monumentalised, or applauded, but conceptualised. And that’s why those sort of bits of bric-a-brac upstairs on the third floor which every now and then are less completely idiotic, but never really, are up to about .05 out of a 100 in terms of visual pleasure have to be explained by very good-hearted young people, diarrhoeaing away a load of utter codswallop which the poor person that they’re taking round knows expresses merely the anxiety of the young person, and which is pretty much what you hear on the radio or on the front row or on the TV all the time about art, what you read in the papers at the moment.
The thing that you’re presented with with art at the moment is very very small amounts of visual pleasure or uplift or feeling that life is worth having, and very great amounts of something which roughly is bullshit, but within the bullshit there’s maybe some thoughts. Peter’s quite right to speak respectfully about art’s engagement traditionally at least in our tradition of modernism that we’re still in, our phase of post-modernism, of testing aesthetics and art being experimental, but the kind of playful testings that are going on now are not really contributing much to any discussion about aesthetics, whereas a broad idea of design could be, so I sit here as an absolute novice about design and in fact I didn’t really write that book with Ron Arad – it’s a series of interviews which I did from the position of a fan of something which I thought could be a kind of medicine to the sickness of art, which is – there’s a visual discipline out there concerned with things looking marvellous.
Of course, design isn’t entirely concerned with that, it has all sorts of other purposes, but certainly it has to look good on some level, it can’t really be offputting exactly, whereas no such law applies in art at the moment. But I think that what people haven’t noticed is that, whereas the offputting in Goya is always on some kind of high level, up a very high mountain peak, the clash between the offputting and the visually fabulous, whereas the offputting at the moment is in a whole different area of more or less prank silliness. I think Martin Creed is a very good artist, and a very good example, but I think just to get to the end of this but to use some of the references that you brought up, when Richard Hamilton points Duchampianly at the Toaster, and says “this could be art”, it’s not be accident that the toaster is rather nicely designed.
Peter Saville
Absolutely.
Matthew Collings
…and the same with Duchamp, it’s not be accident, as we see retrospectively with Duchamp, he’s rather an aesthetic fellow. He’s tuned into the other camp that he’s supposed to be against.
Peter Saville
The urinal’s quite beautiful actually.
Matthew Collings
He knows a good Picasso from a bad Picasso, but the area of art that he supposedly dismissed – he’s actually a connoisseur in that. So they are still dealing with aesthetics. Aesthetics is really a discussion of pleasure in art, how does it work? They are dealing with profound issues of this pleasure domain, which seems to somehow, culturally we say, this type of pleasure can connect to something really important, why we live and what it’s for, and it is really worth the suffering? – no. Art seems to play a role in that, so the gist of what I’m singing on about is down with art, and up with design, but not design pathetically that wants to be like art.
Vicky Richardson
OK, thank you very much. Alan?
Allan Chochinov
I actually wrote a review of that book.
Matthew Collings
I haven’t read it I’m afraid!
Allan Chochinov
A positive review.
Matthew Collings
Thank you very much.
Allan Chochinov
I have to ask you what “codswallop” means?
Matthew Collings
A sort of formless miasma of nonsense.
Allan Chochinov
I’m getting it from the context, I needed it like accurate, you know? I’ll look it up.
I’m very happy to be here, because yesterday I lost my voice and – do you have the expression “leaving it on the field”? in sports?
Matthew Collings
No.
Allan Chochinov
It’s sort of like going back to the locker room without anything left, so I’m going to leave it on the field today if I can talk for five minutes, or if I can make it more, then I’ll not be able to talk for the rest of the week, I’m leaving it on the field, and if I’ve nothing intelligent to say, then I’ll just go! So that’ll be my out.
When Kevin first asked me about participating on this, and he only talked about design art, it was a very narrow field that’s been expanded in the description in the programme now. I talked to some of my friends and colleagues about the topic, and the response was fully down the middle – half of the people had said, well, who gives a damn about $900,000 chair? – and the other half of the people said, who gives a damn about a $900,000 chair, for Christ’s sake?
So I found it a little bit limiting. I’m not sure if I give a damn about it myself, but I think there’s perhaps a bit of an elephant in the room here today, and we’re probably just going to espouse – I wanted to ask if you wanted to dispense of this in 10 seconds or 10 minutes for the rest of the session, but probably through all these opening remarks we’ll be done with it.
I think it really matters to the media, obviously magazines and websites, and even our own a little bit, care about this phenomenon, but the topic of design and art I think is actually a very interesting topic that I care a lot about, and one of the reasons I do is because I really feel it’s an opportunity to recouple our artistic intent, intention frankly at all, with design, because I think that design, for all of its lip service to solving problems, has very little intention to it, and I blame that squarely on designers. I think that designers don’t even think about intention when they rush to a problem solution, and so the idea of actually creating something that’s editorial or discursive for its own sake, as let’s say a piece of art, or even with an art approach to it, to me is a very positive development in what I would consider a relatively mindless practice of design.
I’m actually an industrial designer myself, so I can let the insults fly, or I feel I can. This is a drum I’ve been beating for a while, but I think what we’re seeing now, with some of the other topics that have come up, this incredible intersection of an increase in the speed and power of the tools of creation, coupled with an awesome power of the tools of dissemination, ie the internet, or allowing all sorts of design thinkers, design practitioners, design dabblers, design students and maybe even some credential designers, whatever that means, to actually create gestures of design and put them out for people to share and comment on and gang up on for some of these collaborative sites, like Flickr and Crowd Spirit and some of these other sites where you actually enter design contests.
I think this is actually an amazing thing, because a lot of these design gestures are intended as ideas, as stories of design, and not as producable mass consumable and therefore mass garbagable, disposable artefacts at all. So the thing takes place in an abstract level as ideas of design, it’s consumed as ideas of design and is thrown away as ideas of design. Not that the internet doesn’t have a carbon footprint; far from it actually, but at least there isn’t the sort of plastic that our great-grandchildren are going to be turning over in the landfills.
The other thing that I want to mention is, I think there are a lot of artists who are using the matter, metier, of design in their work, and coupled with photographers and in particular Edward Burtynsky, who takes these large scale photographs of industrial incursions on nature, and plays – you know, you get what you get out of them, but I’ve actually interviewed him and said, what can we possibly get from this photograph, other than the fact that we’re making a shitness of the place? And he didn’t really have an answer for that.
And then Chris Jordan, who did this very popular series, he’s done several, but very popular America by the Numbers where he takes pictures of things like disposable plastic bags, cell phones and sort of scales them up to the tune of Americans alone throwing out it’s something like I think 435,000 cell phones a day, retiring almost half a million cell phones a day, and showing it visually. So here, he’s an artist, but he’s using some of the material designed, and then I probably have to keep going but I also want to talk about other kinds of movements, like Device Art and Steam Punk, where you are mixing these kinds of materials.
And then while I still have the talking stick, and a little bit of voice, I want to talk very quickly about a sort of visceral experience I had with design art. I guess in 2001 – 02 at the New Museum in New York, there is an artist, Wim Delvoye, who did this infamous project called Cloaca, where he recreated the digestive system of animals in a laboratory. It was probably twice the length of this room, set up with these extruded ruminant armatures, and early Myelin flasks and beakers and drums and hoses and tubes, and through this great ceremony, these famous New York chefs would walk down Broadway of Soho with their dishes and feel this machine their gourmet meals, and then over a series of hours or maybe a day and a half or so the machine would digest this food, and then poop! I thought this was absolutely fascinating and I read about it and heard about it, and it was a comment on consumerism, because the artist had actually logotised this project and used a lot of consumer logos in the graphics of it. The day that I actually got to see it, Cloaca had an upset stomach and literally when I walked in there was a big garbage bag and elastic bands tied around its behind and it was having diarrhoea. I thought, well this is it! You’ve maybe heard that expression when an artist runs out of ideas, he shows his genitals? And so, I thought I have seen the last artwork! A machine, an industrial designed machine that makes poop that’s having a bad day. So there, I’ve used up my voice on a pooping machine.
Richard Shed
I’m not sure I’ll be quite as eloquent.
Allan Chochinov
Tough to follow! Set that bar very high there!
Richard Shed
I’ve got no bodily fluids to talk about or anything. What I wanted to start by doing is really by defining what I see design art to be, as that also seems to be something that’s being debated here, what actually is design art? And for me, I feel design art is artefacts that are being produced that are selling through auctioneers, galleries, and they’re being produced by practitioners now, so contemporary practitioners, who are designers or who are classified as designers, or call themselves designers or architects, and I think there’s a big difference from design collectables. So I think as Peter mentioned, the Jean Provés, the Marcel Breuer. So that’s what I see design art as.
I also see it as something that galleries and auctioneers are commissioning these people, the designers or the architects, and there’s a turnaround of six months maybe from when an idea is conceived for a show, to when it’s actually produced, so a six month turnaround. I was saying to someone earlier, that’s quite quick and quite easy for something to then sell for five or six figures. That’s what I think it is. What I wanted to do was hopefully come up with some sort of relevant points and parallels as well, because that’s kind of the nature of how I work.
My first point or parallel that I wanted to refer to was design art and, I was looking for other movements or trends if you like in design that could be parallel with design art, and I went back to Memphis, because there are a lot of similarities between what’s happening now with design art and I feel with the Memphis movement. They’re both accessible only to a minority percentage of the country, and they’re quite controversial as well. They raised this debate that we’re having now, and which has happened and which I imagine will continue to happen as to whether it’s art, whether it’s design. But there’s one big difference that I found with Memphis, and it’s quite relevant to the nature of this conference, because Memphis was a coming together of artisans, of theorists, of architects, designers, and it had a really strong ethos theory and rationalisation behind it. Whether or not you liked the outcomes or not, there was a really strong justification for Memphis being there and it had this wonderful knock on effect and influenced many people.
I guess that comes to my first point, really what is the message that art design is trying to convey? I’m not 100% sure whether it needs a message, or what’s it actually saying? What are these people saying? Memphis had a story and a message. As I was looking at this, I found quite a nice quote from Ettore Sottsass which might give us some insight into what that message might be, and Memphis was in his words a “pent up reaction to the black box of design,” which was happening in the late 70s, and that got me to thinking, well potentially now design art could be a pent up reaction to the white box of design, which is happening now. And everyone else has mentioned I think in every talk so far the Apple and iPod. Whether this is a conscious thing or sub-conscious thing, perhaps this is why it’s happening; perhaps this is why it’s such a feature at the moment.
The other point I wanted to make was I wanted to draw parallels with the fashion industry as well, and design art and fashion, and I think what design art is, in my eyes it’s the couture of design. Again, it’s lusted after, it’s aspirational, and hugely influential as well. There are particular practitioners in the fashion industry who use couture really as a research tool and as a way to break new ground in an industry, so people like Yohji Yamamoto and Hussein Chalayan, Issey Miyake, all use couture, all use this opportunity that they have, being leaders in that field, to really break grounds with new materials, new ways of working and new design. I don’t really see this happening with design art, even though there’s the potential and the opportunity to do that in design art.
Which brings me onto the final point I’d like to say, it’s really about the responsibility of the designer, and I won’t talk too much about this because it could be slightly controversial, but I’m not saying in any way that, if you call yourself a designer or an architect you have an obligation to produce aesthetically pleasing, functionally successful objects. What I’m saying is that I think that there are large issues in design at the moment and not all of us have to address all of these issues, but they are there, so issues of sustainability, inclusive design – these are all sort of big design issues at the moment, and again, coming back to the fashion link perhaps, people are addressing certain issues. I’m not saying that Ross Lovegrove should be an eco-warrior, but it would be nice if on one hand you had this designer, but they also used their super-hero powers for good not evil perhaps! So those are my points.
Vicky Richardson
Thank you, some great introductions there, loads of questions in my head. Can I have a rough idea of who wants to say something, or ask a question? Because then we’ll know how much time to talk from the panel. OK, I just wanted to kick off with a question of my own, which is really, it’s interesting how the art from the artist’s point of view you’re kind of down on art, and then from the designer’s point of view, we’re kind of a bit more down on design, I suppose there’s always an element of self-emoliation with every discipline. I wanted to really ask, what’s driving all this, because it seems to me that on the one hand you’ve got the art market, which is rampant at the moment and sucking more and more in, and obviously there’s a whole section of practitioners out there who are feeding the market, but then there’s also what you’ve been talking about, which is this interest in social issues coming from designers really wanting to play the role of commentators almost, and producing work that contains some element of social critique within it, and that being seen as a really positive development. I wonder, what does the panel think? Where is all this really coming from?
Richard Shed
When you say “all this”, you mean hybridisation?
Vicky Richardson
Yes, I mean designer…
Richard Shed
Or do you mean this discussion itself?
Vicky Richardson
Yes, design art as a phenomenon really.
Richard Shed
Well art has been shockingly successful in the last 15 years, especially in this country. In fact, more so in this country than anywhere else in the world, although it’s a global phenomenon, but the art has gone from being socially hateful or neglected or on the margins, to being at the centre of society, even though in a rather hollow way. I don’t think that the fascination with it at the moment is informed at all, but it’s a fascination on the level of scandal and love/hate and wanting to be appalled by stories coming out of the art world of money and sex and wildness. Possibly design, which certainly talking to Ron you certainly sense there’s a resentment on the part of design about art’s traditional glamour in the past, compared to design’s relative obscurity at even existing at all; people think that the Army makes things, being looked like that, or the Queen – they think some kind of hidden authority does it, whereas art is done by geniuses, very delineated geniuses called things like Picasso, have lives, and children, and designers say…we want that, certainly Ron does, and I think he probably speaks for a whole load of disgruntled people.
Peter Saville
The Army made that bridge out there, you know.
Richard Shed
Well they did a very good job, they had a very good designer.
Matthew Collings
Well you know a person who’s an incredibly good designer is Picasso and a load of people who are really good designers are Renaissance artists. Why those things have such power – it’s not because of realism, in the case of Renaissance art, or because of “I am Mr Freedom” in the case of Picasso, but because they’ve come up with really fabulous design ideas that are incredibly effective in which to put their nutty art ideas, which are pretty ephemeral really.
Peter Saville
Donald Judd’s a good designer.
Matthew Collings
Well, he’s a symbolic figure now, as the crossover, but of course the crossover is there all the time.
Peter Saville
Warhol’s a good graphic artist. Damien’s a good designer, actually.
Matthew Collings
His spot paintings always seem to be successful.
Peter Saville
The tanks though, the tanks are great.
Allan Chochinov
Or if you look at the pharmaceutical packaging? The best design there is.
Vicky Richardson
In a way, this is kind of nothing new in a sense, we’ve got the decorative arts in a way you could say, craft as a design.
Matthew Collings
The new thing is the sudden contrast between obscurity, which is what art used to be in in this country, and lurid visibility, as opposed to a sort of traditional thing, traditional heirarchy of art being visible and design not. And so socially in terms of money and success and bigging up yourself, art now seems the way to go.
Peter Saville
It is a phenomenon particularly in this country, we’re experiencing something quite extreme in this country, but that’s because other countries have not yet joined the party, the French haven’t really. Other countries were having the party before, so the US and Germany for example were far more fluent in the issues pertaining to contemporary art for their own socio-historic reasons. Germany had to dump its relationship with history and tradition after the Second World War and embraced contemporary culture more fervently than we did for example. Also, I think that there are certain national psyches that lend themselves to particular idioms. The Germans get on quite well I think with the logical notions of modernism in a way that the British never did. That’s why they are quite good at building BMW’s and things like that. I think in this country we can see that it’s the result of what I call post war socio cultural democratisation. It is in the last 60 years the post war period that our cultural heritage, formerly the domain of the privileged, has been distributed and shared increasingly amongst the many. With pop in the form of music and then fashion and then design being the primary, in a way, vehicles of dissemination. So you have an audience in the UK who are pretty much now arriving at the doorstep of further education in culture and the further education course is called fine art. Frieze was on last week and if you’d stood outside Frieze and offered tickets for a Vivien Westwood fashion show or tickets for the Frieze Art Fair, I reckon you would probably have a nine out of ten, eight out of ten take up on the art fair. Whereas if we went back a decade, well there wasn’t an art fair in London a decade ago and there wasn’t the possibility for one. I’ve tended to see design recently as entry-level art, and so it’s funny that it’s taken…
Vicky Richardson
Can I just ask what you mean by that? Are you talking about the type of design that is not just dealing with function, it’s trying to deal in motion and…
Peter Saville
Yeah, record covers, furniture, people wanted to have an Eames chair. It’s interesting, it’s taken them a good 50 years but now they want an Eames chair or a Gucci table. Actually, it’s the vehicles of pop have been the first sort of… record covers have been a great entry-level for adolescence to an engagement with cultural issues which their background didn’t necessarily introduce them to.
Matthew Collings
And they express the high adjoining with the low.
Peter Saville
Absolutely, and provide this conduit through which people can pass to an interest in other things or higher things, not higher but what is the next level of engagement. Pop culture is incredibly effective in that because it reaches people at a formative period in their life. So they see something at the age of 14 or 15 and it has a profound influence upon them. So it’s actually pop culture’s articulation of cultural history which has actually introduced it to young people. If I tried to get a youngster in 1983 to be interested in Fantan-Latour it wouldn’t have worked, but by putting Fantan-Latour on a New Order cover, through association, the young person was interested suddenly in the work.
Allan Chochinov
It’s a gateway drug.
Peter Saville
Yes, exactly. It is, that is exactly what it is.
Vicky Richardson
There’s lots of people waving at me, so lets take some questions and comments. So, right at the back the lady over there.
Audience member 1
I didn’t know about this phenomena, sorry, but I am completely horrified. The wonderful thing for design for me is that it’s not about making aesthetically beautiful things, although that’s an aspect, it’s about how we live, it’s the context. We interact with it everyday and it can be critical and it can be aesthetic and it can be lots of things, but we interact with it everyday, something art would love to be. If we put it into the gallery what are we doing? It terrifies me.
Peter Saville
Well, Vicky and the person in the audience. My thought about what Richard raised about why are designers wanting to use the vehicle of the gallery or the medium of the gallery. To me, it’s actually not necessarily a reaction to white boxes as opposed to black boxes; it’s a reaction to the domination of design now by marketing. Part and parcel of socio-cultural democratisation is the fact that the marketing people now understand or see the value of design codes or culturalising codes in the positioning of consumer goods. So, whereas a designer used to, once upon a time, work to a certain extent in a vacuum away from business people who did not understand what they were doing, that is now impossible. The design brief is set by the marketing department.
Richard Shed
I want to pick up on that.
Peter Saville
Yeah. Richard, I had a chat with Dieter Ramms a year or so ago and it was my girlfriend who’s German act as interpreter, but obviously he’d left Braun some years ago and Braun is now owned by Gillette, the best a man can get, and it is very easy to see that there is a marked difference between a Braun product now and the Braun product with Dieter Ramms. Dieter Ramms’s comment there was that when he designed a Braun, the external form of what he was designing was determined by the internal mechanism of how it worked. He said but because most of it now works on a chip the external form is now determined by the marketing department’s research analysis of what is ticking people’s boxes. So ergonomic, ok, so people think that something should look ergonomic. So this is a marketing determined design exercise.
Vicky Richardson
That’s a good place to pause, another point at the back there.
Audience member 2
Hello, Paul Stickley, Glasgow School of Art; undergraduate fine art, and a post graduate research with RCA visual communications. So a strange fish I suppose, and on the subject of fish, my mum told me codswallop was the intestine of the cod.
Allan Chochinov
It’s clearer now. Now I can take it home.
Audience member 2
I’m kind of shocked by your profoundly modernist and class orientated perception of design and the status of fine art. Given that I’ve been in education for the last 24 years, am two years younger than you I think, and went to the same institutions that alluded to this crossover, and the crossover I think has been a very positive thing between art and design. And although everybody says it was collaboration, and we still do in educational institutions which is total codswallop. But we are aiming for in this conference if I can say is that we are really going to start making an effort to work together. I found it curious that you still see fine art as being that intellectually dominant, somehow monarchic position where the lonely designer who the origins I suppose have a printmaking background. So if you look at the role of Flattmann and people like William Blake and the way that those roles changed that the artist was always dominant, and then you have the artist who was making the picture, it seems to me that you are talking about that situation still. What I think has happened is that the dearth of ideas in fine art and the prevalence of self-referencing has turned a mass audience away. The elite audience will always be there because they’ll always want the investment, but the mass audience has turned towards something else and I think that what is actually the dominant force is something which has a much broader, not mass appeal in popular, but something which is integral to our social progression.
Vicky Richardson
Ok. I just want to bring in a few more people really briefly because we are running out of time, so try to keep your comments brief.
Audience member 3
Michael Schultz from Amsterdam. I just have a comment that sounds a bit defensive. Whether you have to be for design or against, or for art or against, what I think is more interesting to start at the crossover area and see whether… Obviously to crossovers and trying to understand whether there is something interesting in itself and then – of course if it is, it will also reflect on what it does to what is art, or what we used to call art, or what’s design, or what we used to call design. A reference may be the debate about you having an interesting essay and John Berger reflecting on things is it literature or is it journalism? If you go back to the 60s and 70s, Tom Wolfe put together an anthology called New Journalism. This was at the crossover area and now of course, we accept that there is literature and there is journalism and on the extremes, we can really immediately see this is clearly a piece of journalism, this is literature. But there’s fields in between that is very interesting and that influence both literature and journalism, so my plea would be to look at this design art, in the same way and not be attracted by whether it’s in a gallery or not. I am partly involved in the Design Academy Eindhoven which in the last 10 years, these are individual designers with individual design pieces that suddenly then you need to sell for $50,000 each and it’s an interesting phenomena and they borrow from art and it goes the other way. I think just to finalise with our plea, there are things in this crossover area that we can ask the right question. In fact I listened to Peter Higgins this morning which was very much a design story, but he talks about narratives and I think that’s an interesting thing. The narrative for the artist is different from the narrative for the designer so I think we should be on the middle ground and ask some questions.
Vicky Richardson
Ok, sorry can I stop you there because, right…
Audience member 4
I just want to come back to what Peter was saying originally about art schools and this pigeon holing that happens. They are art and design schools. A lot of the design courses will talk to each other, but god help anyone that moves into a fine art studio. There is this barrier, at foundation they are all together and then suddenly they move into another room and there’s this barrier. Is it surely not a sliding scale or should it… is that where we need to go back? Look at what is actually happening with these kids really early on so maybe it isn’t so compartmentalised and the fine artist need a good dose of design and the designers need a dose of fine art, sort of, or at least cross, you know…
Vicky Richardson
OK. I can hear people coming out of their sessions but I think it would be nice to just carry on a little bit, so I’m just going to let it go. Yeah, just very briefly.
Audience member 5
Can I just alert everybody, I am probably the only person here from secondary education and whereas you’ve all done art at Key Stage 3, even if you didn’t opt for it as a subject, Key Stage 3 now has been reduced to two years and for an awful lot of schools now, art isn’t even existing as part of Key Stage 3. It’s part of project-based learning. So you’re not even having art. I just think that’s something to be aware of for the future.
Audience member 6
I think a lot of this conference has got slightly bogged down in naming things with what is design and art, and I think we really need to concentrate on what it’s offering us and I think the educational model on this might be interesting in that as practitioners, you are expected to do some sort of research and therefore frame that research. I think we have just pointed out what couture does in this area and all the good bits about what couture does and it is to frame the projects as research and you say “well, what am I actually investigating?” So if we look at some of the bits of so called design art that are coming out, I think we can try and judge them as that. I heard Ross Lovegrove speak a couple of weeks ago with Matthew in fact, and he was justifying this work as research and saying “I’ve been doing it for 15 years”. Well I would really like to hear an explanation of what the question was because I think maybe there was a fantastically interesting question, but we need to look at the objects, you really have difficulty seeing what that is.
Allan Chochinov
Some objects might work both ways. I was talking with Fukasawa last week in San Francisco and apparently the – I guess this was very predictable – the Suitcase Chair may be going into limited production. More production than limited production. I guess it would be a very handy thing to travel with. You can just sit down, but there’s an object that’s just begging to cross back over into mass production.
Peter Saville
Can I just say one thing?
Vicky Richardson
Ok, but, wait, because we do have to wrap up now because I’ve heard everybody coming out of the other sessions, so we are going to back to the panel now and ask them to just kind of make one more comment very briefly. So this is where we have to somehow try to bring it all together. I do think that there’s an element of what’s going on which is a phenomenon. That word has come up several times, but I think what we have to try to do is somehow look into the future and think what impact is this phenomenon of design art as a separate discipline. I think we have to recognise we are not just talking about prototypes which come onto the market; we’re talking about pieces specifically being produced with this tag design art. Where is this going, what’s going to remain of it in the future that’s good and what are the dangers for design and art practice? If the panel can try and address those it would be great, Richard.
Richard Shed
Two points from the audience actually, Tim’s and I’m sorry I’ve forgot your name.
Audience member 3
Michael.
Richard Shed
Michael. I think that’s what it comes down to for me. It comes down to what’s responsible, what’s good design art and what’s bad design art. But I think it’s absolutely valid the work that’s coming out of the design academy in Eindhoven, because it’s a good example of design art because it does responsibly combine the two and it’s critiqued and validated throughout the whole process and I think those things are really worthy of sitting in that design art category because they’re examples of good art and good design I think. It’s probably through that educational process and that research process that it gets its rigour.
Allan Chochinov
The discussion makes me think about the classic combination or contract between artist and patron and I think maybe there is a revisiting of that, the patron of the designer typically would be a manufacturer or now defined as the market which tells the manufacturer what to fund. With design art you are going maybe back to an older model where you have this artist in the form of a designer, and a patron in the form of a collector. I guess the bottom line is somebody is always paying for this thing. It seems like not so interesting. It’s actually very interesting when you think that there is this contract of what’s sort of promised and delivered and maybe that’s an interesting way to try and think about why does this fascinate us and where may it lead.
Matthew Collings
I think the lure of art and the glamour that surrounds art is false. At the moment there’s a traditional sort of deep routed feeling of division or hierarchy, but at the moment there’s a different issue happening in the last sort of 20 years and when you say, the dearth of ideas in art, it’s not a dearth, there’s too many ideas in art. So they’re rubbish, it’s idiotic, stoner ideas. What there’s a dearth of is visual ideas and formal ideas which might have a chance of having something more substantial and lasting and worthwhile about that. So that’s why design suddenly seems interesting, it’s by default. So that’s why I agree with Peter why it seems a slightly false road to think that if you only could squeeze more design into art galleries life would get better. What’s going into art galleries from design? It’s not design so much as artified design. And it’s the art that’s got the illness at the moment.
Vicky Richardson
Peter, you’ve got the final word.
Peter Saville
Oh god. These are unconnected words because people have raised all sorts of interesting points. My girlfriend has a good term for the art gallery as the last bastion of free speech and I think that’s a thing worth thinking about. What are galleries for these days? What purpose they serve for us? I believe it’s markets that define these labels. Yes, there is a preoccupation with labels but where do they come from and I think it’s actually the markets that consolidate these labels and perpetually or perpetuate this notion of labels where you do a piece of work, determine whether it’s art or design, or journalism or literature, whichever way you want to put it. There’s lots of great writing which has been done in the form of journalism. I didn’t want to upset people, I believe there is important design and there’s important art. Neither of which are usually very popular at the time. I actually never think the public have never been that interested in art. They’ve usually taken some time to get round to liking it. Even the impressionists were despised and rejected and actually with a lot of what we now think of as great design or important design, it’s usually taken some time for the public to get round to embracing it and feeling comfortable or familiar with it. And seeing that this is a design conference I will reiterate the point that I don’t believe that good design can be anachronistic.
Vicky Richardson
Great. Ok. Well that was brilliant. Thank you very much for all your comments.