This is the third and final post based on a panel discussion that I joined at the Pacific Design Center a little over a decade ago.
The panelists were artist Justin Beal (JB), Bay Area conceptual artists/musicians Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons of the Muistardeaux Collective (TB/EG), curator Christopher Mount (CM), and I (PMZ.)
You can read parts 1 here and 2 here.
Next month, I will be posting another take on this conversation, examining art as an extension of design practice.
I will be taking a few weeks off to work on a few new essays. Look out for those in late June and July, plus interviews with Koenig Eisenberg and Michael Rotondi.
Thanks again for your continued readership and support. If you are new to the Horizontal Fault, you can find my 30 earlier posts here.
Design as an Extension of Art Practice | Part 3 of 3
JB: (Gaetano) Pesce is a particularly good example in every way because his practice was designed to undermine fundamental things you take for granted in design, like creating serial editions of objects that are each unique. He’s constantly trying to undermine the confines of design. Pesce will make a series of one hundred vases, but each one will be different because they are extruded plastic, denying the serialized production that you associate with design.
PMZ: If you look at something like Roxy Paine’s work, those SCUMAK drippy things, or Greg Lynn’s architectural investigations [some made in collaboration with artists], and then you look at Pesce’s work as a designer in the 70s, you’ll find very interesting alignments, formally. I enjoy making those sorts of connections across disciplines.
CM: I wouldn’t want to live with Pesce’s work. I could have one chair to look at, but you wouldn’t want to sit in it. I have furniture at home, and my wife is always saying, “Why do we have that chair?” And I just say that I just like to look at it. When I was at MOMA, many years ago, we had this Braun toaster by Reinhold Weiss, and it was just beautiful, just all steel. A lady wrote a letter to Arthur Drexler, the Director of the Architecture and Design Department, and it said: “Dear Mr. Drexler, I saw that toaster, I loved it, I bought it, but it burns my toast!!!! Every damn time it burns my toast! What should I do???” And he wrote her back and said: “Dear Madam, I suggest you take the toaster, put it in the living room and look at it. Buy yourself a GE to make your toast!”
PMZ: That’s a funny story. There are a lot of design objects that actually fail from a functional perspective. I have a Frank Gehry Superlight chair that is part of an edition. Mine is number 96 of 500. He did this very special chair for Emeco, which is the aluminum chair company that made those really remarkable and very lightweight chairs for the Navy and now the very fashionable, the Phillipe Starck versions of the same chair. Anyway, Gehry did his own aluminum chair, and if you were to describe it, it is the most delicate idea of a chair that you could imagine. It is literally just a sheet of aluminum that bends up and over and is folded at the corners. Then it is supported by two very slender bent U-shaped rods, just two, and those have a sleeve on them, and the sleeve is actually glued to the interior fold of the aluminum sheet. I tried to sit in it, and it broke. Now, I glued it back, but I don’t sit in it; I just like to look at it.
TB/EG: It is sold as a chair?
PMZ: It is sold as a Frank Gehry edition of 500 chairs. Like a print. It is Frank Gehry’s idea of what you can do to a chair to reduce its presence almost to nothing.
CM: It’s about minimalism. It’s about the idea of a chair as opposed to an actual chair you can use.
PMZ: It’s a beautiful chair.
TB/EG: You were pretty bummed that you sat in it.
PMZ: Yeah, I felt like I just ruined my investment. I mean, it can be fixed, but I think if you look at a lot of Gehry’s design work, there is a part of it that is non-functional or semi-functional, basically.
TB/EG: Do you think that when you then take a step into architecture, you can get away with a lot less?
PMZ: No, not really. Usually, that’s how you can get sued.
TB/EG: Right!