B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Design has more often been defined by what it is not than by what it is. More than anything else, what design is not is art. It has at various times been referred to as commercial art, or decorative art. Deep down, design is understood as being useful, and therefore to be taken as having lesser significance than a work of art, which is unburdened by utility.

It’s a tension that has left artists largely unmoved, but designers, and those fascinated by design, continually try to explore the scar tissue that divides them from art. While there is no shortage of designers who wouldn’t mind presenting their work as if it were art, very few artists would have it the other way round. That does not mean that art fails to explore design as a source of subject matter. Nor that art and design lack shared interests and territory. Duchamp was intrigued by the ready-made; Richard Hamilton explored the sheen of industrial design; Damien Hirst’s work is on one level about the alchemy or snake-oil salesmanship of branding.

Like two magnetized needles impaled on pivots, simultaneously poised between attraction and repulsion, artists and architects warily circle each other. They are intrigued and suspicious, jealous and dismissive of each other. It’s a phenomenon reflected in the confrontation between the artist Robert Irwin and the architect Richard Meier over the Getty Museum’s garden, about which one of their mutually exclusive conceptions would predominate. The well-documented tension between Frank Gehry and Richard Serra reflected a similar lack of a shared view. They were once close friends, then Serra started to complain about Gehry, who, as Serra saw it, was invading his turf to posture as an artist.

The relationship between art and design can be equally tense. The continuing doubts in the art world about Isamu Noguchi can be traced to questions about his success as a designer of paper lampshades, coffee tables and even a mass-produced Bakelite case for the Radio Nurse baby alarm. These were not the kind of things that an artist could take on before the age of irony and still retain his or her credibility. But when Pharmacy, the restaurant designed by Damien Hirst, closed, the furniture, fittings and tableware - suitably augmented by replicas - were auctioned off as if they were artworks, even though they were mostly the work of Jasper Morrison.

The conflict between art and design is, at least in part, about control. When Matisse accepted a commission to take on the art, the stained-glass windows and the vestments for a new chapel in Saint Paul de Vence, he was offered the chance to work with Le Corbusier to design a building that would be an appropriate setting for his work. According to Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse, the offer from Père Marie-Alain Couturier, the Dominican intellectual who was trying to reinvigorate the cultural life of the Church, was rejected. Instead, Matisse chose to work with the elderly Auguste Perret, ‘because he will do what I say’. The result is great art, in a bland building. To suggest that great art inside a great piece of architecture would be a better combination is to beg a lot of questions.

Unlike art, design has its roots in usefulness. The questions about what art is, and what looks closely related to it but may or may not be art, continue to trouble us. We persist in treating art as some special hybrid of magic and religion, even while we are fascinated by its place in the market. This collision between money and the supernatural makes any discussion of significance difficult. Like popes, artists need to present an air of infallibility. Once a new art-world religion has been established, every further revelation of the faith needs only to show itself as belonging to the appropriate congregation to prove that it is among the elect. If art is a belief system, then each work, no matter by how minor an artist, is part of the same divine revelation. To question its value is to doubt the faith that underpins it. And, in the process, art and branding have converged. Julian Schnabel used to do a lot of canvasses that involved smashed plates. When he stopped making them, how could anybody know they had an authentic Schnabel? Damien Hirst was so convinced that he owned the exclusive rights to the artistic deployment of dots that he tried to sue a British airline when it painted the hulls of its Boeings with dots. Lucio Fontana found his work traduced by an advertising campaign for a cigarette brand called Silk Cut.

One theory to account for the regard in which art is held is that it does not compromise. Yet Rembrandt was ready to paint to order - his fee shared among all eighteen members of The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, otherwise known as The Night Watch - to a given size, and with specialist help from his studio assistants.

Another version of the meaning of art is that it has a relationship with time that is different from the transience of design. A washing machine or a typewriter, or even, to an extent, a chair, is the response to issues that emerge from precise moments in time, the outcome of particular technologies, social practices and methods of distribution. When those technologies and customs are no longer current, the objects that embody them lose much of their significance. Out of time, they are left naked and vulnerable, if not actually irrelevant. The same, or so we comfort ourselves by believing, is not true of art, which is portrayed as if it were capable of relevance in any context. If we did not believe this, we would lose the comfort that art offers, the sense that there is something of spiritual value in the midst of our compromised world. Let’s call that quality, just for a moment, beauty. It’s the kind of beauty that does more than seduce, but which seems to offer some kind of truth, some kind of lasting value or quality. Yet art is also mediated by fashion and the market, as the rise, fall and resurrection of the prices commanded by the Pre-Raphaelites demonstrates.

Paradoxically, there are times when becoming technologically redundant has the effect of turning design into something that starts to take on the aura of art. When Jean Prouvé was alive, he had a special place in the minds of a generation of British architects. His pragmatic approach to manufacturing and prefabricating buildings made him crucial to the development of high-tech architecture, which celebrated the aesthetics of engineering. But his designs never had the same reach as those of Charles Eames. Prouvé seemed to belong more to the 1930s than to the 1960s, and to be involved with a dustier version of modernity. But after his death, just as his production methods were beginning to look frankly outdated, something entirely unpredictable happened. Thanks to the diligent efforts of one or two Parisian dealers, his furniture, and even his architectural relics, turned into something else. They became collector’s pieces. Prouvé, a devout socialist, had designed robust, low-cost fixtures for schoolrooms and hostels as a thrifty way to civilize the public realm. Others may have given these objects a new meaning, but Prouvé never designed anything that was self-conscious, or intended to be understood as anything but utilitarian. With unbearable pathos, as they grew in value, the remaining Prouvé interiors were treated as pitilessly as an elephant reserve by an ivory poacher.

Carlo Mollino was primarily an architect, but one who was also responsible for some remarkable furniture that is much rarer than Prouvé’s and so even more valuable. In addition, he produced a racing car, and a rich stream of erotically charged photography, a combination that has given him an audience that is more rooted in the art world than that of design.

Most artists in Britain in the 1960s survived by teaching rather than by selling their work. To be a designer or an architect looked like a more secure career option. Art can seem a better bet now, when a significant number of artists make the kind of money that allowed the nineteenth-century academicians to build themselves prodigious studios in Kensington or Chelsea. Another generation of prodigious studio houses is rising in Hoxton and Shoreditch, with David Adjaye providing the architecture rather than George Aitchison in Holland Park.

Design, on the other hand, can support fewer individual successes. For most designers, their work is either a salaried job or a precarious hand-to-mouth question of survival. At the beginning of the 1980s, what are now called limited-edition designs, or even design art, were part of that survival strategy for designers. When there was no demand from manufacturers for designers to work on industrially produced objects, the only strategy that they had left was to make things themselves. A chair created in this way can be understood less as a chair than as a sculptural representation of a chair. When these pieces first appeared they were on the periphery of the design world. As the auction houses and the galleries have shown an increasing interest, they have commanded higher and higher prices and, for some, have moved from the edges to occupy the centre ground.

If there is one man who has danced on this fault line between the two mutually suspicious worlds of art and design, it is Ron Arad.

He got his first major show in 1987 in Paris at the Pompidou Centre, an institution which itself was originally conceived as attempting to abolish class distinctions in visual culture. The museum celebrated its tenth anniversary with ‘Nouvelle Tendences’, an exhibition supposedly based on a new generation of designers. Arad was allotted 300 square feet alongside Philippe Starck, Hans Hollein and Alessandro Mendini. At thirty-six, Arad was the youngest of the group, though in sharing the stage with Starck he wasn’t the only enfant terrible. Starck came up with a variation on the Smiley face, and used it to create a set of branded products. Arad chose to show an electric-powered metal compactor, made by a firm he had found in the telephone book, specializing in the needs of the waste-disposal community. When switched on, it made a fearsome noise. Hardly camouflaged by the message ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’, rendered in hand-cut foot-high metal letters tacked on to its extremities, the machine could not fail to make its presence felt. With its mechanical jaws equipped with crocodile teeth, it was capable of reducing mountains of junk into neat cubes of mesh-bound crushed metal within moments. Design, in the sense that it would once have been understood, it certainly wasn’t. Nor did the beast have much to do with craft, or decorative art.

Arad invited visitors to donate unwanted chairs to the museum. In exchange for a lender’s certificate, their contributions would be fed through Sticks and Stones, and the results used as building blocks to gradually create a wall stretching across the gallery. Part César Baldaccini, or John Chamberlain, who did something similar with squashed cars, part shameless provocation, it was also a sly suggestion that there were too many chairs in the world already.

Sticks and Stones was an early demonstration of Arad’s weakness for puns. He was already playing design by the rules of the art game, with some sophistication. So much so that there were some in the design world who didn’t get the point of what he was doing. His work in those early days was raw, and he took a stance that could only be called blunt. At times, he came across as a kind of punk. Arad inspired a TV commercial for designer beer in the 1980s that involved a stubbly chinned creative type moodily tossing postmodern chairs out of the window of his Wapping loft to make room for the product of his welding lance.

There were rumours at the Pompidou of the unauthorized feeding of chairs from the museum’s offices into the machine, and a row about the attempts of the exhibition sponsor, Louis Vuitton, to use the machine in a public destruction of a mountain of counterfeit bags.

Arad was back at the temporary gallery on the ground floor of the Pompidou two decades later with a no-less combative solo exhibition. It subsequently moved from Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and was scheduled to end up at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. This time there was a back catalogue to deal with, as well as new work. There was plenty of noise and spectacle. A huge hydraulic ramp sent a steel disc spinning from one end of the gallery to the other, while a massive model of a slice through one of his architectural projects had been executed at close to full size.

Since that first show in Paris, Arad has oscillated between art, architecture and design. He is represented now by a mainstream art dealer. He has shown at the London art fair Frieze. And he is one of the very few designers whose work has managed to command six-figure prices at auction. But he also works with Alessi and Kartell, Moroso, Vitra and other manufacturers to create mass-produced objects that demonstrate all the qualities of successful industrial design. A designer working in this way has to think about how something will be made in an economical way, as well as how it will be packaged, and sold. These are not issues that sit comfortably for those designers who attempt to present themselves as essentially concerned with creative self-expression. But over the years, Arad has been able to address both aspects of design: the emotional and intuitive, as well as the technical and the commercial.

With the opening of the new design museum at Holon in Israel in 2010, his most significant piece of architecture to date, he was also able to prove himself capable of successfully making the scale shift from object to building that has eluded so many designers.

Arad has had no shortage of turning points in his career. For one, there was the moment that he decided to come to London after leaving the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem without a diploma. Then there was the day that he decided not to return after lunch to his drawing board at the small practice in Hampstead where he got a job after graduating from the Architectural Association. The routine of preparing door schedules was not what he had come to London to be part of. Peter Cook, his tutor at the AA, had no interest in preparing him for that aspect of architectural practice.

As Arad tells the story, it was on the way home from the office that day that the idea of making a chair first came into his mind. Walking by a scrap yard, he saw the remains of a very solid, very reliable British car from the 1960s, the Rover 2000. He picked up a couple of leather seats from the rusting hulk of the car, which were to become the first Rover chair. They were red, which as he later discovered were remarkably rare. With the aid of some bent scaffolding, and a few Kee Klamp joints, originally intended for use on construction sites, he converted the seats into a plausible sofa.

Arad had already used Kee Klamp components, to form tables, beds and mezzanine platforms from scaffolding, but they were more like architectural installations than furniture. The Rover chair was an object in its own right - with a certain coincidental resemblance to an adjustable armchair that Jean Prouvé had produced decades earlier - rather than a fragment of a car.

Another turning point came one day in 1987 in Kassel, the small aristocratic town in what was still West Germany. As an experiment, the organizers of Documenta 8, the sprawling quinquennial art show, had asked the curator, Michael Erlhoff, to pick a range of designers to show their work alongside that of the artists. Arad was one of them. Alessandro Mendini and Andrea Branzi represented an older generation. And a range of the Berlin-based Germans provided an anxiously neurotic alternative to the more flamboyant work coming from Milan at the time. Predictably, there was trouble from some artists uncomfortable about the conjunction of design with their work. Ange Leccia’s installation took the form of buying a shiny new Mercedes Benz and mounting it on a plinth that rotated very slowly, in the name of art. He was unimpressed to have, as he saw it, his work diminished by the association with a car treated as a piece of design, tainted by a lingering hint of commercial utility, just across the corridor.

It was a confrontation that prefigured Arad’s later experiences at Frieze. Ernest Mourmans, the gallerist on whom he has often relied for support, was denied a space by the organizers. Instead Arad showed his work on the Jablonka booth, a name with enough art-world clout to overcome any questions about who qualifies as an artist in Frieze’s eyes and who does not.

In retrospect, perhaps Documenta was the point in Arad’s life at which he was confronted with the sharpest of all the choices that he has had to face over the years, even if he wasn’t necessarily aware of what was at stake at the time. It was a decision that eventually led him into industrial mass production, working with furniture makers such as Kartell, who extrude plastic by the kilometre to make Arad’s technically ingenious and functional shelving, with Magis to make rotationally moulded plastic armchairs, with Moroso, and with Vitra for café chairs. These projects were followed by an assortment of watches, wine racks and wine coolers, cutlery and spectacles. This was the kind of work that reflected the traditional role of the designer. It follows a path that originates in the middle of the eighteenth century, when mass production overtook the decorative arts, and industrial design filled the gap left by the demise of the craftsman. The designer was being asked to provide a service, to keep a factory busy, to build a brand and a range.

It was a trajectory that reflected only a part of Arad’s interests. His real motivation is the pursuit of a much more free-floating, uncategorizable form of creativity, one that was clearly signalled by the nature of the work that he showed in Kassel that year. He called it Full House. It was made from a thick slab of aluminium. It was raw to the point of brutality. He scored the metal with jagged cuts, gouged and wired it up with an array of cables, makeshift hinges and winches that could be pulled tight to convert a flat carpet into the semblance of a three-dimensional sofa. You could, just about, sit on it, and then when you had finished with it, you could make it disappear by winching it back down to floor level, completing the performance by folding back the winch handle into a position flush with the metal sheet. It had the same relationship to the conventional idea of what constituted design as Sid Vicious’s rendering of ‘My Way’ had to Frank Sinatra. And it was just as attention-grabbing, in that it suggested a new option for design at a moment when it seemed that design had run out of ideas.

On the day of the Documenta opening, Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman of Vitra, had come to see Arad, and asked him the price of the piece. Fehlbaum was fascinated by the new directions that design was taking. He saw Arad as offering a kind of research lab for the mainstream projects that would shape the future of his business.

He wanted to buy Arad’s slab for his own collection, and to talk about designing something for his factory. He left with a handshake, but without confirming a sale. Later that same day, the Swiss art dealer and gallerist Bruno Bischofberger also stopped at Arad’s exhibit. Was the piece for sale? Arad hesitated. ‘I told him that I had already had some interest in it.’ Bischofberger told him that he would pay the price that Arad was asking. Arad asked for time to call Fehlbaum to check that he was serious. Bischofberger told him it was a take-it-or-leave-it offer, and Arad said no sale.

It was a career-defining move. If he had sold to Bischofberger, he would have opted for the art world. To sell to Vitra was to definitively place himself in the design camp, although Arad being Arad, he always did things on his own terms.

When Fehlbaum asked him to work with Vitra, Arad ducked the chance of using industrial methods to make a piece that could be produced in tens of thousands. Instead he designed the Well Tempered Chair, a piece that might just as well have been made in his workshop in London as in Fehlbaum’s factory. It depended on cutting tempered steel sheet and bolting it together with wing nuts, not the most sophisticated production methods, although daring enough in the way that it attempted to stabilize highly unstable, flexible sheet metal.

In one sense, Arad has spent much of his career since then attempting to reverse what had happened that day. If he had gone with Bischofberger, it’s possible that he would never have been involved in design on an industrial scale - which would certainly have been a real loss to the history of contemporary design.

Arad has the agile and restless mind of a chess player, with a passion for material and the inventiveness that has given his mass-produced objects their distinctive character. But it is clear that they do not fully satisfy him. A different level of cultural ambition moves him.

And yet his design work has served Arad’s career well. He could be described as an artist whose subject matter happens to be design. It is a working definition for a man who is also a gifted architect - though perhaps still not entirely satisfactory, especially for someone who has Arad’s fascination for the workings of the art world, and a fencer’s skill in parrying any attempt to categorize him.

As with other artists, you can see a body of work emerging from his studio in which certain themes recur. It’s not that Arad is designing the same chair again and again. He uses certain formal archetypes in different ways, and different materials, and for different purposes.

Arad has kept coming back to the Big Easy, a form that he first made in the early 1980s, when he was still welding and cutting metal himself. It has subsequently been produced in a variety of materials and finishes, from mass-produced, blow-moulded plastic to carbon-fibre editions, some polished, some painted, and in a variety of scales. The first Big Easy and a late one are essentially the same form, but one is about rawness, and everything but finesse. The early versions are ‘badly’ welded and bent, and that was their charm. The later ones are much more polished in their execution.

The latest in the Big Easy series is a pair of chairs, in positive and negative versions. One is intricately cut full of holes like a lace tracery, the other a matching version, with spheres that precisely match the voids in the other chair, which is a kind of negative twin. The whole has the shimmering immaterial quality of a digital image, or a soap bubble about to vanish in a burst of air.

In the run-up to his second Pompidou show, Arad was working on a new shape. It’s a figure that he calls the Gomli, after the British artist Antony Gormley It was a new addition to his repertoire, a figure to be used in a range of ways. And it can also be seen as a response to his own reactions to a career in which he has worked on so many chairs. The point is not the shape of the chair, but the form of its occupant. ‘As a designer you are always working on doing a container for someone you don’t know. It could be Pavarotti, or it could be Twiggy, but it’s the same chair. You spend your life doing this for the invisible sitter. So you start to think, what does he look like, this invisible sitter? We made a figure designed not for beauty but for the imprint of the backside. It’s called the Gomli. I showed him the figure, and we discussed the project.’

This is not the first figurative piece that Arad has done. In the 1980s, there was a project that he worked on based on technology developed by Eric Victor known as the Transformer. Victor created a method of supporting broken bones - so that accident victims could be moved to hospital without making their injuries worse - that involved vacuum-formed bags of foam granules. Arad used it to produce seats moulded to the form of the user’s body. ‘In a way, the Gomli is the opposite of the foam vacuum. That was a kind of instant customization. What I learned was that you don’t really want to sit in your own body shape. It’s not a comfortable feeling for furniture. That was made-to-measure; the Gomli is prêt-à-porter.’

For Arad the pursuit of the ready-made has always been a potent theme. In the early days, he was appropriating objects: the Rover chair, the Kee Klamp scaffolding system. Then there were industrial meshes used for conveyer belts, and car aerials for desk lamps. Recently he has used the idea of the ready-made as a way of concentrating on the important decisions in a work, and being prepared to accept the aesthetic consequences of trusting in the nature of materials, and the dictates of geometry and detail.

‘I can do a complete computer rendering of an object which will show what the effect will be, but you can’t predict. You make the first decision and you see what happens. You know there will be six of the Gomli and 60,000 of a mass-produced chair. In those circumstances, success or failure is completely different. With the Gomli, I have freedom. I don’t have to do any persuading. The piece just has to be liked by someone who will like it enough to buy it. Even that is not necessary all of the time. You could say art and design are completely different. It depends on what sort of discussion you want to have. You can see that an artist who champions abstraction would say, “This is not a chair, it is a sculpture.” And sometimes it doesn’t matter what people say. If it is furniture then the back has to have a rake. It is not doing it because it has another agenda. It’s not an ideology, it’s a commercial issue.’

Rehearsing the overfamiliar arguments about the division between art and design makes Arad impatient. He compares it to previous tensions between disciplines.

‘There was a time when photography was not allowed into the art world. Then it was video that was not allowed. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Design art comes as a reaction to being refused by the other world of art. If the art world had no problem with things that may have some connection with furniture then we wouldn’t need this world of design art. Perhaps we still don’t need it. The market has shown that there is a different thing happening. There is a market for these objects, whatever we call them.’ For Arad the definitions are less important than the context. ‘It’s maybe not a question of what do we call it, but where do we show it? I feel less of a problem to show in the Downtown Gallery, with its tradition of selling Prouvé. I have an affinity with that world, though of course we don’t know what Prouvé and the others would do now. For me the trouble with design is that it was kidnapped by lifestyle. I don’t care about the sink, or the colour of curtains. I am not interested in taste and magazines.’

Arad has questions about art as well as design. ‘All those slogans may serve some people some of the time. There is not one true way of working; there is no right and wrong. There is exciting, interesting, engaging, charming, and there is boring, and tedious.’ It’s a view that makes him reluctant to be drawn on the criteria that might be applied to understanding the form-making that has transformed architecture. ‘What we grew up thinking is naughty has become normal. The computer-generated blobs are being done by the Game Boy/Nintendo generation, working for the old masters.’

Arad has adroitly managed to have it both ways. He is one of the handful of contemporary designers to have succeeded in creating a substantial market for his work at auction, and also in making successful mass-produced products. He plays by his own rules, and he has changed the nature of the game.