This is the second 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 (JB), Bay Area conceptual artists/musicians Tom Borden and Eric Gibbons of the Muistardeaux Collective (TB/EG) curator Christopher Mount (CM) and I (PMZ)
Design as an Extension of Art Practice | Part 2 of 3
TB/EG: As far as contemporary artists go, do you see many artists employing design in the fine arts?
JB: I would argue that it’s not even a select group at this point. It’s just something that has become taken for granted.
Essentially, there was a moment at the beginning of Modernist sculpture when the sculpture came off the pedestal. At that point in the conversation, any object was open to being a sculptural object, and in the forty years since then, there have been different actions taken in directions that conflated the two realms, sculpture and design.
There are artists making design objects and marketing them as art- this goes to the idea of monetization that Peter is addressing. The way an object is sold is an important way of understanding how design is essentially a commercial undertaking. How we understand how these objects position themselves in relation to commercialism within the art world is important.
For instance, consider how Franz West chairs are bought and sold and used as furniture objects in galleries or how Jean Prouve’s is work being brought into the art world as art.
All these things were made in series but are being sold in galleries as if they were singular one-off objects. The way this work has been bought and sold informs this discussion more so than the way those artists are addressing design or art.
PMZ: Roy McMakin is a great artist who basically makes furniture as art that also passes as furniture. It’s very good, well-crafted functional furniture that also seems to be situated within an art practice.
CM: You could also spend hours talking about craft. That’s something in between.
TB/EG: So you consider that to be a different beast altogether or somehow…
CM: A vase is not a vase. There are plenty of craft vases. What is it Littleton? Littleton makes great vases, but you can’t get a flower in them. It’s a piece of glass. Tom Patti sells his glass pieces for seventy to eighty thousand dollars. They’re gorgeous. He blows them using a window glass that’s kind of green. But, you wouldn’t put a flower in a tiny eighty thousand dollar vase.
Another example is Shepard Fairey. I think he is totally uninteresting as a graphic designer, totally mediocre. Yet he has a career in something in between, but no one is really willing to admit that he is just a mediocre graphic designer. I don’t know what he is, really. He’s a poster artist, but he’s I don’t know what he is.
TB/EG: He’s persistent.
PMZ: I think there are a lot of individuals who pass or who cross and move from one discipline into another and somehow avoid the usual scrutiny. I could name a number of artists who make architecture that is deplorable.
If I were to submit that architecture to a community of architects, it would not do so well. But in the context of the art world, it passes. I could also suggest that there are a number of architects who make art that’s also not so great, seen from the art world perspective.
You know, Frank Gehry makes jewelry, but do I know if is it good jewelry? I really don’t know, but because of his aura and reputation, I would say I like it. The reputation of the designer precedes the work. And if the reputation is good, you are predisposed to like the work. So the jewelry he did for Tiffany has the aura of Frank Gehry all over it, and so you don’t look at it with the same lens that you might look at more generic jewelry design.
This is the issue; when you start crossing over, you start changing the lenses you use to view art or design. It is actually very interesting because suddenly you look at something and you realize that it has multiple readings.
TB/EG: So, would you say the same thing about John Waters and his paintings?
PMZ: I don’t actually know them.
CM: Neither do I.
TB/EG: Well, you can just imagine a John Waters painting.
TB/EG: I would imagine it would be cute. And his reputation would precede him?
PMZ: Yes, for sure.
TB/EG: And the idea that maybe design happens to be a pretty big part of the fact that anything crossing over into art starts to land on uncertain ground. Why is that?
PMZ: A lot of artists have successfully transitioned to making films. Who made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?
TB/EG: Julian Schnabel.
PMZ: That was a great film. So Schnabel passes as a really good filmmaker. I also think that some architects, for instance, Tony Smith, make better artists. Smith was not a very good architect, but he found his voice as a sculptor. Ironically, I find his sculpture very inspiring architecturally.
TB/EG: I think that’s a good place to investigate. So why don’t we talk about people that you get excited about when you think about this question because they make you see it in a different way?
CM: This is off the point, but it’s important for me because I just wrote a book on this Ted Norioka. He is a Japanese artist, but he was really a poster designer. Norioka was most prevalent in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. He was friends with Yoko Ono, friends with the Beatles- a major figure in Japan, a major cultural figure. What he created were posters, but they were not advertisements. They are things that sell in galleries. They are brilliant- he is like Murakami before Murakami.
TB/EG: Right.
PMZ: I like Andrea Zittel’s work a lot. If I were to submit her work to the standards by which I would judge furniture design by a furniture designer, maybe it would not hit home for me. However, if I look at it within the context of her practice as an artist, and again I have to shift my perspective, then I can appreciate it. Then I think it is remarkable.
So, one of the standards by which designers and architects judge things usually has something to do with the degree of virtuosity or accomplishment associated with the, let’s say, the eloquence of the object. Is it a beautiful chair? Is it well finished? Is it a well-made building? I think designers and architects have fairly conservative standards, I certainly do, about what a refined or eloquent object or space actually is.
In general, if you make uncomfortably unresolved work like Frank Gehry did in the ’70s, you get attacked, and it is controversial. Gehry crossed the line into art with his architecture, but then the artists yelled at him and said, “Get back into your camp; you’re an architect!” That was the whole Richard Serra-Frank Gehry dispute. That said, if I look at design by artists or architecture by artists, I am usually comfortable allowing my standards to slip. Standards, that’s a judgmental word right there, that’s a pejorative.
I will admit that I’m rather inspired by Gaetano Pesce. He was prominent in the ’70s less well known in the States now.
He made really sloppy work, but it was really exciting. You look at that work now, especially in the context of some of the things that Frank Gehry or Greg Lynn are pursuing, then Pecse seems way ahead of the curve.
This is largely because he was an artist who came at things like making chairs without any of the hang-ups that professional designers, industrial designers, or architects would struggle with to get that sloppy.
So that sort of freedom, I guess, is a part of art that is harder to capture in design or architecture.