This is the first of three posts based on a panel discussion held at the Pacific Design Center on January 28, 2011. Curator Helen Varola organized Design as an Extension of Art Practice as a part of the 2011 Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair. The panelists were artist Justin Beal, Bay Area conceptual artists/musicians Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons of the Muistardeaux Collective, curator Christopher Mount and I.
Looking back at the discussion last weekend, I was surprised to find recurrent themes that still preoccupy me as well as concepts I touched on in earlier writings. For instance, in this review of the Ettore Sottsass retrospective at LACMA, I explored the notion that art, like design and architecture, must not simply entertain. Above all, it instructs. Design, like art, can help us to understand ourselves, how to live, and, most importantly, how to be with others.
Another concept that I began to address last week is erasing the divisions between creative fields, to invite different ways of working and being into the world. This is crucial, especially when so much of the current culture drives us towards aestheticized sameness and borrowed imagery. Instead of images upon images of things that are craftily promoted, hash-tagged, and sponsored to within an inch of their lives, art and design can reject the reductive, mercantile idea that a search engine has the best answer to a creative or cultural undertaking. There are still forms of the social imaginary that can confound the current urge to commodify every aspect of life itself.
Something that also puzzles me about the conversation was a tendency I found, on re-reading the transcript, to discuss the value of design in terms of practicality or the value of art in terms of investment or profit. One recent development that highlights how the marketplace has once again hijacked creativity is the emergence of NFT (Non-Fungible Token) trading. The hyped-up NFT market is now driving the sale of digitally generated art, architecture, and design objects. If this seems like a contemporary matter, I suspect it is an age-old dilemma.
Around 1530, when Antwerp opened the first stock exchange, Titian painted Bacchus and Ariadne for the art patron Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara and Andrea Palladio designed the Villa Piovene for the ambitious Venetian noble Battista Piovene. Three hundred years later, Paul Durand-Ruel, a “capitalist visionary,” become the first modern art dealer, staging solo exhibitions and providing his stable of artists with monthly stipends around the same time that architecture was professionalized in the United States, to "promote the scientific and practical perfection of its members." It is no secret that modern art, design, architecture, taste-making, and arbitrage all developed in parallel, with each system feeding off the other. Like the broader trend towards design thinking, a form of recipe-making for businesses, the newness of NFT art thinly disguises a very conservative impulse: treating the creative act as nothing more than gift wrapping for something very established, in this instance wild financial speculation. And, like the 17th-century Dutch tulip bulb craze, it seems bound to collapse.
What is left when markets collapse is what is durable and what carries meaning. Everything else, per Marx, melts into air. Therefore, artistic creativity—conceptual, digital, or real— needs to be evaluated independently if it is to carry meaning and value beyond monetization. If there is a bridge to build between art and design, it should place societal needs and human interrelationships, in other words socio-political relationships, above profits and marketing.
Design as an Extension of Art Practice | Part 1 of 3
Eric Gibbons and Tom Borden (TB/EG): We would like to welcome you to the round table “Design as an Extension of Art Practice,” a discussion on the relative successes and failures in the cross over or the grey zone between art and design– the way the two are thought of and executed. Let’s first introduce our speakers. Justin?
Justin Beal (JB): My name is Justin Beal, and I am a sculptor based in Los Angeles.
Christopher Mount (CM): I’m Christopher Mount. I’ve been a museum director and curator. I worked at MOMA for fifteen years as a Curator of Architecture and Design, and I was, until recently, the Director of the Pasadena Museum of California Art. I’ve also been the Editor in Chief of ID Magazine, which no longer exists. I’m basically a design historian.
TB/EG: We’re the Muistardeaux Collective from San Francisco, California, and this is Peter Martinez Zellner (PMZ), based here in Los Angeles. So we can probably just jump into it, but after having the discussion on our earlier conference call, it sounds like it would be interesting to hear you describe your definition of what design encompasses.
CM: Well, design is really, very simple. I don’t know why it becomes such a big deal. Design is really anything you can use, anything that has a function. That’s a Marxist way of looking at it, but basically, a piece of art is something that doesn’t necessarily have a function. That’s a definition of fine art. It’s pleasing, and it’s wonderful to look at and so on, but you don’t tend to use it as a tray; you don’t get in it and drive to work like you do a piece of design. That’s not to say that design can’t be as beautiful as a work of art. It’s just that you also can use it. There are cross-overs nowadays, and there are a lot of people, particularly artists, using design as a jumping-off point for something else, for instance, making tables that you can’t necessarily use. Frank Gehry is a good example of somebody who is on the other side of that approach because he’s an architect who makes roofs that look like sculptures.
JB: It’s hard to argue with that definition.
CM: Thank you! Finally, someone agrees with me! I teach a lot, and I have students who argue with me about this issue of what is design and what is art all the time. I have to tell them, “no, you don’t serve drinks on a Picasso painting. That’s not a tray; even if you put drinks on, it’s still not a tray.”
JB: I think, at least with my own work, where I engage design is in using the expectation of design’s functionality in the art context– the way a functional object or an object that has some kind of purpose. Something that has a different kind of set of associations or expectations than that of a traditional fine art object interests me. How you can employ that presence that it has in the direction of art making to change the expectations of an art object is compelling. But it’s important to still appreciate a clear distinction between the two realms. What happens when you drag one thing into the other? Or deny the functionality of it by calling a sculpture a chair, then it’s no longer a…
CM: You can’t sit on it. I had a friend who had a Robert Wilson chair that was made out of chicken wire, and he had a big party, and somebody thought they could sit on it, they sat on it, and they destroyed it. It looked like a chair, but it wasn’t meant to be sat on, so it wasn’t really a chair. Right? I mean, it’s evocative of a chair, but it’s not a chair.
TB/EG: Right. So, where does that leave us in terms of design as an extension of conceptual art practice? What about pre-designed materials used in sculpture?
JB: What do you mean by pre-designed?
TB/EG: Like something from Home Depot that has a function, but you’re rendering it nonfunctional by calling it fine art, but it’s loaded with prescribed content.
JB: Even more than prescribed content, I think there is some kind of physical relationship there then. If you walk into a room and there is a chair in the middle of the room, you have a very different kind of haptic response to that chair than a similarly sized object. So somehow, you establish a sort of sense of scale and a sense of physicality with a chair that you might not attribute to a stone or a sculpture in its simplest form. What is interesting to me is how that can contribute to work somehow. You feel differently standing in front of a table than you do standing in front of a sculpture in a traditional sense because we have a whole pre-programmed physical relationship to tables because we deal with them constantly. That, to me, is interesting. That changes the nature of an object because you understand it as having functionality.
CM: It also depends on where you put something, where it is placed, and the context of where something is. I think of somebody like Jeff Koons who put vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas boxes. You know, those are works of art, sort of Post Pop or whatever you want to call them. They’re works of art, but they are also really just vacuum cleaners. I used to work at MOMA, and MOMA was the first museum to place an automobile on a pedestal and say, “Look at this, not as an automobile but look at its lines look at its shape, enjoy it.” When I was there, I acquired a Jaguar E type, something John Elderfield, Head of the Painting and Sculpture Department at MOMA, said was the most beautiful thing at the museum. He was absolutely convinced that the XKE was the most beautiful thing at the museum; it still didn’t make it a piece of art, but you know, they are beautiful cars.
TB/EG: Do you think in a way that goes a step beyond or transcends the question of whether that was intended in the design or not? For example, Walt Disney World is a classic example of grandiose and very elaborate design but also with an inherent element to it that in some ways makes all other art meaningless. The scope of it.
CM: A great example is beauty is not always the designer’s intention is what you’re saying. There are some things like the Stealth Fighter that I would argue are beautiful. Those planes really are amazing objects, but they’re not designed to be beautiful. They’re designed to avoid radar signals. A Formula One race car is one of those things that ends up being kind of beautiful in the way a dolphin is beautiful, or a submarine is beautiful because the shapes work with hydrodynamics.
TB/EG: Well, where would you- in that mindset- put symphonic composition?
CM: You mean about beauty?
TB/EG:: Well, in terms of having structural integrity to design? You’re following a form even if you are Sun Ra or Frank Zappa. You’re definitely following the form, but you’re also stepping beyond pure function and giving it something that’s intangible.
CM: Well, music is hard. I don’t know if music has the same structure. There is a little more variety in what is beautiful or what people enjoy musically. We could all sit down and agree that something, more or less a work of art, is beautiful. If we had a Rothko here, most people would say, “Yeah, that’s beautiful, even if they didn’t like Abstract Expressionism. A piece of music, Beethoven, Iron Maiden…that’s harder to judge or agree about.
TB/EG: Peter, we just jumped right into the question of design as an extension of art practice but also conceptual art practice. The first thing that led us there was the definition of design. What is your definition?
PMZ: I think at this moment, design also has something to do with the monetization of the design act. It is important now to separate the act of design, which is often conceptual or creative or sometimes disciplinary, from the commercialization of design acts. I say this because, in the context of the art world, it seems to me that design is being marketed as a commodity, an investment-grade commodity, which, just like art, can be evaluated and collected as something that delivers a return on investment. This definition of design is very different from how the Bauhaus or the Soviet Avant-Garde conceptualized design as a populist activity. They thought of design for the people, or rather they believed that the design act brought some value to society. I think that if you look at things like the Milan Furniture Fair, you see that really it’s a very big business these days and far more about pleasing elites than serving a broader public.
CM: Well, that’s a whole other question. I still think that a piece of something that you use is a piece of design. But the market has become more widespread. People are looking to collect more and more things. Watch the Antiques Roadshow; everybody thinks that they have something worth a million dollars. Contemporary art has become so expensive that the next thing for people to look at is contemporary design.
PMZ: Yes, but if you look at something like Shaker furniture, you find examples of design objects that are designed within a community or a social setting that have absolutely nothing to do with marketing. Some of it really just emerged out of a culture that had needs. Those necessities were addressed through a communal discussion about what a chair was or what a table was, or what a mirror stand was. Some of those Shaker objects are really beautiful, but they were evolved in a culture that was largely religious and very particular about its practices, not as part of a secular marketing campaign. So, design is also a cultural practice, and I think it can be a social or even a political practice.
TB/EG: And then it ultimately gets exoticized, and thus the resistance to that kind of crossover.
PMZ: Well, again, I think first you have to separate out the idea of design as an activity versus design as the creation of an artifact. The artifact basically is the commodity object, but the activity of design itself doesn’t have to produce anything.
TB/EG: Right.