Why Destroy?

Prologue

This is a timely and thought provoking exhibition. Through objects from Europe and America, it addresses issues important to the life of modern Taiwan where economic transformation through manufacturing, while immensely important, is no longer sufficient. We are reluctantly forced into an area of cultural innovation which is quite uncomfortable for most. This exhibition uses the domestic environment as a prism for encountering the creative ‘othernesses of domesticity. It ‘deconstructs’ our most private and intimate spatial realm touching on areas of interior and furniture design that we are all too familiar. Yet, the presentation of the seemingly familiar and the violent disruption of the familiar (disassembling Eames Lounge Chair) force us to rethink what is commonly known as the ‘art of living’, for it is precisely that—an art form. It has its own set of history and aesthetics. It is not at the whim of personal taste and it goes beyond mere issues of style, decoration, the procurement of ‘branded’ (mostly Italian) furniture, and the randomness of this year’s color combination. It focuses on the relationship between interior design and artistic creation. We are able to see how closely the history of modern interior design is connected to modern art. And more specifically the objects on display address the history of Post WWII American art and its influence on interior design.

In order to properly address this relationship of modern art and design, I propose three vignettes. The first discusses the lyricism and materiality of Jackson Pollack’s paintings and Donald Judd’s ‘specific object’. After WWII, there was a fundamental break with previous generation of modern painting. Abstraction Expressionism was a radical recognition that the sheer materiality of paint could be the 'subject-matter', in and of itself, of painting. The mere texture of paint on a Pollack canvas, like an explosive colored landscape, is sufficient to be identified as 'artistic'. A new way of producing art thus ensued. This reaction to the rawness of paint pigment solicited a response from Donald Judd in the rawness of steel plate and plywood panels. These two artists differ formally, but they are connected in their shared sense of materiality. Pieces in this exhibition by Peiro Gilardi, Walead Besthy, and the iconic Toio lamp by Castiglioni speak to this tradition. The second vignette is concern with the ‘re-contextualization’ in art. One of the most famous examples is Duchamp’s Readymade. In a combination of linguistic and conceptual operations, he transformed industrial waste into art. Whereas Pollack’s rethinking of art was achieved through 'doing', the physical act of splashing paint on canvas, Duchamp’s proposal was a metaphysical act of questioning the fundamental difference between art and junk. This led to a series of furniture designs from the 1950’s-1970’s by Castiglioni that can aptly be termed Readymade. The third vignette discusses the relationship between modern art and graphic design. The similarity between an Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall, 1951, and a color study by Joseph Albers tends to blur the distinction between art and graphic. Kelly’s work represents ‘high art’ and Albers’ a kind of popular art. Here is a discussion of issues of monetary and aesthetic values, the appropriation of art in the service of advertisement and other form of consumerism, and finally issues of art and utility. This relates directly to the exhibition at hand.

The Pollack Syndrome - Raw Materiality

One of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the 20th Century has to be Jackson Pollack. His drip paintings of 1953's shattered completely the idea of pictorial composition. The process of drip painting was to 'throw' paint often with sticks onto canvases that were laid horizontally. The final painting acquired an 'all-over' pictorial effect. It is non-hierarchical, completely non-figural and rejects the ‘picture window’ analogy of painting. In the best of Pollack's paintings during this period, the layering of paint, in the form of dots, threads, splash, drips, and dapples resembles an explosion. It was a new kind of painterly landscape where thick dabs of paint take on 'mountainous' significance.

The position of the canvas is critical to the way Pollack painted. It represented a new bodily relationship between painter and canvas. One did not need to paint of a hung surface where the implied verticality of the pictorial plane is always present. Pollack engaged the canvas as if a weaver on a carpet. The pace and rhythm with which he painted resembled a dancer. There is no hint of directionality within the pictorial plane. This annihilation of the bodily effect as well as the use of 'raw' paint as the building block of painting has profound consequences.

The painters who came after responded to Pollack in at least two opposite camp . One lineage begun with Frank Stella's The marriage of Reason who developed a painterly surface that was graphic and flat. Stella even called his painting 'negative Pollackism' (1). On the other end of the spectrum are artists such as Donald Judd, Larry Bell, and the so-called 'Minimalists' who offer another response to Pollock's raw paint. What Judd understood to be the key breakthrough in Pollack's art is the most obvious feature, the presence of paint on canvas, no more and no less. The raw ingredient of art making, the banality of paint, elevated to the status of art itself. Judd concluded that the work of painting, after Pollack, was done. He thus conducted a different set of artistic experiment through the use of steel plates and plywood panels. The seemingly rigid and abstract ‘boxes’ that he produced, referred to as ‘specific objects’ are particularly interesting as they refuse to be abstract. The clearly defined edges of these objects revealed at once their materiality, that of steel plates and the industrial processes from which these plates were made, through bending, cutting, bolting and welding. Even the colors are applied in automotive body shops with automotive paint processes. The deliberately detached, extremely mechanical, method of producing his art is in direct opposition to the lyrical, highly personal approach of Pollack. Finally I would mention that in 1958, artist Allan Kaprow published an essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock". In it he demands a "concrete art" made of everyday materials such as "paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies." He stated that craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art.

The series of furniture, both in steel and plywood, ‘designed’ by Judd during the 1980’s is a direct extension of the ‘specific objects’ of his early research. Peiro Gilardi’s pieces in this exhibition descend from Judd’s tradition. Of special interest is Walead Besthy’s (Fedex). It is an extremely complex piece distilling fifty years of post WWII art history. The glass box is a direct quote of Larry Bell’s glass work, Untitled, 1968. The Fedex box recalls Andy Warhol’s Stacked Brillio Boxes of the 1960's. And the assemblage of both further acts as a kind of Duchamp Readymade. The marriage of disparate aesthetic and conceptual tradition is fascinating. One of my personal favorite is Castiglioni’s Toio lamp produced by the Italian manufacturer Flos. The vertical lamp incorporates two ‘raw’ industrial components, a head light used in automobiles and an off-the-shelf transformer. No attempt was made to camouflage these components. On the contrary, every attempt was made to present them as the ‘design’. These ‘raw’ components are thus analogous to Judd’s steel plates or Pollock’s paint. The actual ‘designed’ elements seem to disappear. The delicate bent steel rod that hold the light bulb in place, the steel frame that acts as a base, and the exposed cables all act as backdrops.

In contrast, one can view a range of furniture by Panton, Mourgue, Colombo, as well as Eames, Sarinaan, and Jacobson (who are not represented in this exhibition) as having a unique relationship to the human body. The anthropomorphic contours of the furniture not only resemble that of the human body, but the furniture also rotate, swivel and rock, transforming our body’s relationship to the furniture and the furniture’s relationship to its environment. The lyricism and bodily movement in Pollack almost becomes a backdrop to these pieces. Let us not forget that Pollack’s painting inspired a whole body of artistic endeavor that involved the human body and movements. Action paintings and Happenings of the 60’s are examples. Richard Sierra’s early work of tossing molten lead in the air also came from this tradition. It reflected a sense of liberalization of societal norms that was very much the backdrop of the mid 1960’s.

Finally in an act of Post modernist twist, Barbara Visser subverts all the modern icons. The disembodiment of the venerable Eames Lounge Chair, the bending backwards of a Harry Bertoia wire frame chair, and the slicing of a Panton chair act to disrupt again the bodily connection to these furniture pieces. Her photograph/objects negates and rejects the modern dictum of 'form follows function' which the original Eames', Bertoia, and Panton designs represented. A generation of furniture designers , beginning in the 1980's , rejected the functionalist/rationalist approach of the moderns. Designers

Re-contextualization

The Mexican Poet Octavio Paz made an interesting analogy between Duchamp's Readymade and traditional Chinese scholar/poet’s practice of rock collecting (2). Duchamp in an act of re-naming discarded industrial parts transformed it into an art object. Chinese scholar/poet searched for ‘worthless’ natural artifact, rock and elevated them into artistic artifacts . Both operations require a transformation of the objects' respective 'natural' contexts into some other realm. Industrial object such as bicycle wheels and wood stools serve different human needs. A wheel is associated with movement, while a stool with rest. When the two are held in a vertical composition with the wheel on top of the stool, completely different associations are formed. On the most basic level, the utilities of the two objects are placed in contradiction. A wheel turned upside down is rendered functionally impotent, while a stool that cannot be seated is useless. The uselessness of the combination is obviously a message that the maker, Duchamp, wished to send. The use of two circular elements forms certain symmetry. The swivel of the wheel seemly plunging into the receptor of the stool in a sexual manner. The Bicycle_Wheel becomes an erotic ‘sex machine’. This is very much in the Duchamp tradition, culminating in his masterpiece, The Large Glass.

The removal of an object from its ‘natural’ environment and transplanting it into a foreign terrain in order to ignite new meaning from it is in essence the conceptual operation of a Readymade. It is the creating of a new context with which to view the object. This is what I mean by re-contextualization. There is also a linguistic analogy. We can see it in the working of metaphors in our language (3). Words do not operate in isolation. They are always used in a particular context to describe and organize a web of our experiences. The words 'cold' and ‘hot’ are use to organize our bodily/sensory experiences. This is their ‘natural’ or literal usage or context. However, both words can also be used to describe color sensation. We describe the color red as hot while the color blue as cold. We describe shades of grey as being hot or cold. These words are used metaphorically in cases of color descriptions. We often describe environments in which we are uncomfortable as ‘cold’. Here again ‘cold’ is used metaphorically. Metaphoric usage in language allows words to organize experiences that are out of their natural or literal settings. And in this way new associations and meanings are created.

Something similar occurs when Duchamp named a urinal a 'Fountain'. A utilitarian objects is transformed and invited into an art historic context. The 'Fountain’ acts as a metaphor to the original object. Similarly Chinese rock collectors displace rock from their natural setting and turn them into a lexicon of patterns and tonal variations that we associate with traditional landscape paintings. The rock, as an art object, begins to reorganize our experiences very differently. Through our re-interpretation of its texture, pattern, tonality, shape, and weightiness, it begins to create for us new associations, new visions from which to view other artistic objects. The rock becomes a tapestry visual association, allegories, and inspirations. The power of Duchamp’s ready-mades, I believe, is that they work both on the level visual allegory and the linguistic metaphors. Their power to transform our perception not only of art but our culture comes from the fact that they operate on multiple levels.

If we now turn to the objects in this exhibition, clearly the group of chairs by Castiglioni for the Italian manufacturer Zanotta descends from the Readymade tradition. The Primate, Sella, and Mezzadro chairs are essentially furniture composed of two elements, each with a clear illustration of the ‘natural’ context from which they were appropriated. The Primate is derived from the front seat of an automobile and The Sella from a bicycle saddle (a nod to Duchamp?)

Joe Colombo’s Fauiteuil Tubo resembling sections of water piping is yet another example. It is with Colombo that we can talk not just of Readymade as an inspiration of furniture making, but a whole body of interior designs projects that provided a conceptual framework to the discipline. He executed a series of design during the late 1960's/early 1970's that brought forth issues of compactness and interchangeability into interior space making. In 1972 he design a 'Total Furnishing Unit' for an exhibition presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The unit consists of four autonomous parts, 'Kitchen', 'Cupboard', 'Bed and Privacy', and 'bathroom'. Each parts could be placed in isolation in any interior setting, or combined to form a self contained object. These mobile units, like mini-Readymades, challenged our perception interior space making. The design, for me, a re-contextualization of the modern interior.

Art and Graphic

The close relationship between art and graphic is written into the very fabric of modernism. There are the collage/paintings of Braque and Kurt Schwitters where fragments of the popular world become integral with the artistic composition; there are paintings such as Matisse's Dance series which are appropriated and popularize through poster images; and one can appreciates the blurred boundary between an art work by Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951, and a graphic study, Homage to the Square in Wide Light, 1953, by Josef Albers. And one can trace the connection of Albers to Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus where he established a rigorous program for the study of color and composition as early as 1910's. Albers in turn brought the Bauhaus pedagogue to the U.S. where he became the head at the Department of Graphic Design at Yale. The interconnectedness of the modern art and graphics has also allowed designers to appropriate artistic visions for commercial use. Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's 1965 Fall collection was inspired by the abstract paintings of Mondrian. The clothing from that collection became known as the 'Mondrian Dress'. It is no accident that this cross-fertilization has tended to call into question the value of art or conversely the usefulness of design.

The history of art and graphic came to a critical juncture during the 1960's. The incorporation of repetitive popular images (Campbell soup cans) took on ideological significance. Art, through graphics, incorporated irony, satire, humor and wit into its realm. And this in turn could be appreciated in the design of furniture. One of the most interesting of this period is the infamous Sacco, the Bean Bag, by Gatti, Paolini, and Teodoro. It resembles a garbage bag stuffed full of refuse from the consumer society; or it can be interpreted as a rural wheat sack, transformed into a modern house decor. In either guise, It is a piece of furniture that is without a definitive form or shape, a kind of non-object. It's graphic quality comes precisely from its formlessness. An industrial innovation full of humor and wit. Another piece that fall into the category of graphic art furniture is Andree Putnam's rarely seen mirror/mural. Made from stainless steel and glass in a checkered pattern, it resemble the Ellsworth Kelly paint but white washed into black and white.

Final Thoughts

It is essential to appreciate the objects in this exhibition not simply as industrial/furniture designs. I believe that the rules that govern their designs are not restricted to ergonomics, functionality, and industrial processes. On the contrary, the creative motivation behind many of the pieces on display could be considered quite 'bad' examples of industrial design. As I hoped to have shown in this article, the web of creative connections that these objects belong cuts through many boundaries. To fully appreciate the novelty, the sophistication and the sheer boldness of some of the designs, one has to understand the artistic dimension. The dialogue between the design master Castiglioni and Duchamp is as important in the design process as the rational assemblage of components

I believe that this exhibition is timely in the sense that it widens the horizon of furniture design and interior design for our Taiwanese audiences. What is most important is to reposition the field of furniture and interior design within a cultural/artistic context. The creative motivation behind the pieces are presented not merely as 'mechanical' or functional, but as a repository of cultural memories and aesthetic considerations. It reminds us that we need to move beyond our manufacturing roots and embrace the more complex and ultimately more rewarding area of cultural innovation. A good portion of the furniture pieces in the exhibition are still in production. Some of the pieces have been with us for over half a century. The fact that they continue to inspire and be desired is a testament to their originality. They should be regarded not merely as 'products', but as the expression of our modern life. It is my hope that our Taiwanese audience can appreciate them as such. And our design profession will be able comprehension their significance and allow them to become our inspiration

Notes
1. For an in depth discussion of Pollack's influence, see Kirk Vernedoe's Pictures of Nothing, Princeton University Press.
2. The image of Chinese rock collecting comes from Paz's brilliant presentation of Duchamp's The Large Glass in a collection of essay in Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, Arcade Publishing.
3. This is an extremely simplified presentation of the linguistic operations of metaphors. A complete discussion can be found in Harvard professor Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Hackett Publishing Company.