7 Why design is not – and should never be confused with – art
There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.
— Bruno Munari1
Every so often, artworks are accidentally damaged while being shipped from place to place, which is what happened to a piece by Richard Hamilton when it was returned to his London studio in 1968 from an exhibition in Germany. By the time it arrived, it had been smashed to bits. Luckily, the work was insured, but when the German insurance company was informed, it refused to pay up, insisting that the debris – scratched fragments of aluminium and Perspex, tied together with string – could not possibly belong to a work of art.2
Perhaps the knowledge that the piece was called Toaster, and that its remains were originally used to create a partial replica of a Braun HT 2 single-split toaster, contributed to the insurers’ scorn. Hamilton had made it as an homage to the beautifully resolved electrical products developed for Braun by Dieter Rams.3 He admired Rams greatly, once claiming: ‘his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that the Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.’ Eventually the insurance company relented, and Hamilton remade the piece.4
The saga of Toaster and its sceptical insurers serves as a cautionary tale for the traditional view of the relationship between art and design, one that Richard Hamilton and Dieter Rams were anxious to dispel, but which persists to this day. Countless texts have been written on the subject, but most of their content can be summed up in six words and two symbols: art = good, design = not so good.
Art, or so the traditional argument goes, is intellectually superior to design, because artists are free to express whatever they wish in whichever form they choose, often, but not always, in work they make themselves. Whereas designers are encumbered by numerous constraints – from the need to meet their clients’ demands and to ensure that their work fulfils a specific function, to their decision to forfeit control of the outcome by delegating production elsewhere – all of which is generally interpreted as serving them right for sullying themselves with grubby commerce.
This is, of course, a simplification, but there is some truth to it. Many designers are inhibited by those very constraints, and the weaker ones fail to overcome them, while gifted artists exercise their right to self-expression by articulating ideas and emotions that the rest of us would struggle to voice. Talentless artists do nothing of the sort, though that is another story, as is the readiness of mediocre artists to pander to the commercial demands of the market.
Flawed and over-simplified though it is, the ‘art = good …’ argument has proved infuriatingly robust, and design is routinely treated like a ‘poor relation’ by the art establishment. A design curator at a museum of art and design recalled a colleague from the art department suggesting that they should acquire some of Donald Judd’s furniture for the design collection. The design specialist replied that as Judd was considerably more accomplished as an artist than as a designer, surely his work belonged in the art collection and should be paid for from its budget. After all, if a gifted designer had made uninspired paintings, would the art department be willing to buy them? Of course not. So why should the work of an artist automatically be deemed to have greater cultural value than a designer’s?
Why indeed, especially as the historical rapport between art and design was considerably more complex and fluid than the ‘art = good …’ stereotype suggests, and is even more so now.
Originally there was no distinction between art and design. In ancient Greece, the same word techn
was applied to both disciplines as well as to the mastery of all other crafts, plus medicine and music – though it would
be wrong to interpret this as implying that the ancient Greeks held design in as high esteem as we now do art, because the
reverse was true. Painting and sculpture were dismissed as lowly occupations, as were all theoretical forms of techn, including the process we now identify as design. The only reputable applications were considered to be the practical ones, which is why Plato repeatedly praises craftsmen over artists in The Republic.5
During the Renaissance, artists elevated their status within society but still engaged in other disciplines, as Giorgio Vasari discovered when visiting Leonardo da Vinci’s studio in mid sixteenth-century Florence. Vasari noted the ‘many architectural drawings’, ‘models and plans showing how to excavate and tunnel through mountains without difficulty, so as to pass from one level to another’ and drawings of contraptions ‘to lift and draw great weights by means of levers, hoists and winches’. ‘His brain was always busy on such devices,’ he wrote, ‘and one can find drawings of his ideas and experiments scattered among our craftsmen today.’6 Leonardo was exceptionally eclectic, even for the time, although his contemporaries’ interests also extended beyond painting and sculpture. Andrea del Verrocchio, the artist to whom he was apprenticed, was renowned for his work in architecture, goldsmithery and carpentry.7
Yet when the first art and design schools opened in Italy in the late sixteenth century, art and design were often taught separately. The students at the very first one, the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, which was founded in Florence in 1563, largely thanks to Vasari’s championship, studied art in one branch and design in another. The Accademia di San Luca went further after opening in Rome in 1577 by according higher status to the arts than to craftsmanship.8 When other art academies emerged across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, they did the same.9 As well as educating young artists and architects, these schools acted as forums where practitioners could discuss important issues and express collective concerns. By doing so, artists and architects became progressively more influential within society, especially when compared to craftsmen, who continued to train and work in the traditional way, often isolated within their workshops.
Immediately after the Industrial Revolution, the concept of design was still evolving, as was its relationship to art. Prominent artists and art historians shared the general fascination with dynamic enterprises like Josiah Wedgwood’s. This was an era when factory machinery was praised for its power and sophistication, with prizes awarded for the most impressive examples, which were exhibited in ‘practical displays’ where the public could scrutinize them.10 Industrial design was by no means deemed to be on an equal footing with fine art as it was then called, but was considered at its best to have intellectual depth and its own allure.
Decades later, industry had not only lost its early cachet but found itself being demonized. The Arts and Crafts Movement’s revival of pre-industrial craftsmanship had a lasting influence, especially in Britain and the United States. The organizers of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London hoped that the public would be seduced by the industrial marvels displayed inside the Crystal Palace. But when the future Arts and Crafts evangelist William Morris was taken there in his teens by his parents, he refused to enter, convinced that he would hate its contents.11
Conservative though it was, the Arts and Crafts Movement did at least set an encouraging precedent of embracing different disciplines, even if it rejected anything with a whiff of industrialization. The late nineteenth-century movements of art nouveau in France and Belgium, Jugendstil in Germany and the Vienna Secession in Austria were equally eclectic and less hostile to industry, if far from enthusiastic about it. But by the early twentieth century, attitudes had changed dramatically. In Eastern Europe, avant-garde artists, designers and architects united under the banner of Constructivism. And in Germany, the formation of the Deutsche Werkbund represented a concerted effort both to raise standards of industrial design and to generate intellectual debate about it.
The influence of Constructivism and the Werkbund paved the way for the foundation of the Bauhaus, which opened in the German city of Weimar in 1919, a year after the end of the First World War. Billing itself as a new type of art and design school, the Bauhaus promised to ‘embrace architecture, sculpture and painting in a new unity’ in the ‘manifesto’ written by its founding director, the architect Walter Gropius.12 It is now seen as a progressive institution which championed design, performance and photography, as well as the disciplines cited in the manifesto, and encouraged its students to work together to build a fairer, more dynamic society. But in reality, it took time for that ethos to emerge. Gropius was a gifted publicist, and thanks to his efforts we now think of his school as having been visionary, egalitarian and technocratic from the start. But the early years of the Bauhaus were characterized by what the textile designer Anni Albers, who arrived there in 1922, was to describe as ‘a great muddle’.13
Many of the students and teachers, including Gropius himself, had fought in the German army during the First World War and had yet to recover from the trauma, physically or emotionally. Few of the original staff survived the first two years of the school’s existence. Women students protested against being confined to the weaving and ceramics workshops. Gropius faced constant complaints from local residents about the students’ rowdiness, as well as accusations by the increasingly powerful Nazi Party that the Bauhaus was a hotbed of Bolshevik subversion. But his biggest problem was the growing influence of a teacher, the Swiss artist Johannes Itten, a charismatic member of the Mazdaznan religious sect. Clad in flowing robes with a shaven head and smelling strongly of garlic, Itten preached the merits of vegetarianism to the students and urged them to begin each class with breathing exercises. He also imbued his charges with his own vision of art, which was instinctive, visceral, laced with spirituality and far closer to the Arts and Crafts Movement than to Constructivism.14
A power struggle ensued, and it was only after Itten’s departure in 1923 that Gropius was able to reorientate the school, helped by a new recruit, the overalls-clad László Moholy-Nagy, who fired his charges with his passion for technology. Female students were given a wider choice of courses. The Bauhaus adopted a new slogan, ‘Art and technology: a new unity’, and the teachers were encouraged to prepare their charges to design for industry.15 Two years later, the school moved to purpose-built premises in Dessau, designed by Gropius in the modernist style. After his departure in 1928, the architect Hannes Meyer took over as director, followed by Mies van der Rohe in 1930, but continued opposition from the Nazi Party forced the school to close in 1933. By then, many of the greatest names in twentieth-century art, architecture and design had taught or studied there: Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee in painting; Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl in textiles; Herbert Bayer and Moholy-Nagy in communications; Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in product and furniture design; Oskar Schlemmer in performance; Mies van der Rohe and Gropius in architecture. Many of them collaborated with fellow Bauhaüslers from different disciplines at the school, and forged firm friendships. Some, like the Alberses, even married.
The inclusive, collaborative vision of visual culture taught at the Bauhaus, at least during the ‘Art and technology’ era, had a profound influence, not only on the teaching of art and design but also on public perceptions of them, in Germany and elsewhere. Not for nothing had Gropius and his colleagues participated in international conferences and welcomed visitors to the school from all over the world. Among them was an American architecture student, Philip Johnson, who visited the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1930 at the suggestion of Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Johnson wrote excitedly to his mother that the Bauhaus was: ‘magnificent … the most beautiful building we have ever seen.’16 After returning to the United States, he agreed to join Barr at the museum, where he was charged with setting up an architecture department. Once in place, he took the bold step of adding design exhibitions to the programme, including the 1934 show ‘Machine Art’, which celebrated the utilitarian beauty of ball bearings, gears, pistons, springs, wire rope, propellers, furnaces, pots, pans and other industrial artefacts. Barr began the catalogue with a quote from Plato, and Johnson appointed a panel of ‘experts’, including the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, to select the most impressive exhibits. A section of a spring, the propeller of an outboard motor and a self-aligning ball bearing took first, second and third place respectively.17 Art lovers, even those with modern sensibilities, were not accustomed to seeing such things in museums, and the New York critics were snooty about the show. Undeterred, Johnson acquired a hundred of the exhibits as the core of what would become the museum’s design collection.
The unsung design ingenuity of the customized tricycles in Beijing used as trucks and mobile workshops
Across the Atlantic, the German curator Alexander Dorner was experimenting with a different approach to exploring the relationship between art, design and architecture as director of the Landesmuseum in Hanover. Since the mid 1920s he had used pieces from its archive to depict the cultural history of particular eras by creating what he called ‘Atmosphere Rooms’. The grand finale was the Raum der Gegenwart, or Room of Today, for which Dorner commissioned Moholy-Nagy to create an immersive sequence of images depicting glimpses of contemporary art, architecture, design, theatre and sport with screenings of experimental Soviet films including Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.18
Dorner also contributed to a radical programme of art and design exhibitions in London organized by Herbert Read at the London Gallery during the 1930s. The subjects ranged from Herbert Bayer’s graphics to the work of leading Constructivist artists, including Moholy-Nagy. As a curator and critic, Read, who wrote the influential 1934 book Art and Industry, treated design with the same intellectual rigour as painting and sculpture, and commissioned eminent colleagues to contribute catalogue essays in that spirit. Dorner summed up Bayer’s work in the catalogue for his 1937 show with: ‘Combining photographs, typography and draughtsmanship in his new space and tension, he seizes the eye of the spectator and stimulates his imagination, developing influences, which have never been possible before. All this is only possible, both as a painter and a commercial artist, because we have here an active person who is really widening our world concept.’19
By the late 1930s, many of the Bauhaüslers who had fled Germany to escape Nazi oppression were founding art and design schools in their new countries, or teaching at them. Some of the most famous Bauhaus teachers took up powerful positions in the United States. Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, and Josef Albers settled at Yale, after he and Anni had taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Mies and Moholy both ended up in Chicago. The former took a plum post as director of the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology, while Moholy struggled to found two new progressive institutions, the New Bauhaus followed by the School of Design.
Once in the United States, both he and the Alberses remained true to the eclectic spirit of the mid 1920s Bauhaus. Sadly, Moholy died in 1946, too soon to realize his ambitions, although his experimental approach to design was sustained by his students and colleagues, notably György Kepes. The Alberses helped to create a laboratorial environment at Black Mountain, where artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell and Elaine and Willem de Kooning worked alongside the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Buckminster Fuller constructed the first geodesic dome there in 1948 as a summer-school project. Other prominent Bauhaüslers focused increasingly on their own disciplines over the years: graphics for Bayer; and architecture in the case of Gropius, Mies and Breuer.
Even so, the inclusive ethos of the Bauhaus may have proved more enduring had design not been characterized so definitively as a commercial medium after the Second World War. The die was cast by the tagline of Time magazine’s 1949 cover story on Raymond Loewy: ‘He streamlines the sales curve.’20 And post-war perceptions of design were crystallized in Thomas Watson Jnr’s aphorism ‘good design is good business’. There was nothing wrong with the phrase, not least because Watson’s company IBM had proved that good design could, indeed, be good for business, after he succeeded his father as its president in 1952. Back then, Watson Jnr was a design agnostic, or so he claimed. The turning point came in 1955, when he received a letter from an IBM executive in the Netherlands saying: ‘Tom, we’re going into the electronic era and I think IBM’s designs and architecture are really lousy.’ Shortly afterwards, Watson Jnr visited the New York showroom of IBM’s Italian rival, Olivetti, and was so struck by the contrast between its sleekly modern interior and the mahogany-panelled walls of his own company’s offices that he went to see the Italian company’s Milan headquarters. Realizing that his colleague was right, he recruited a fellow Second World War fighter pilot, the architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes, and gave him a brief to modernize design at IBM.21
In 1956, Noyes commissioned the graphic designer Paul Rand to develop a new corporate identity: the stripy I, B and M letters that have symbolized IBM ever since. He also charged Charles and Ray Eames with enthusing the public about science, technology and mathematics by designing exhibitions for IBM, including a pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and a series of films.22 IBM emerged as a role model of an enlightened post-war corporation. Some of its design projects were of such exceptional quality that they achieved far more than their immediate commercial objectives. Rand’s corporate identity is a formally beautiful piece of typography, and the Eameses’ films were remarkable exercises in design research and communication. Their 1977 film Powers of Ten, which seeks to demonstrate the power of a single number and the relative size of the universe in less than ten minutes, is still praised for its clarity by scientists and mathematicians as well as by fellow designers.23
Yet those five words from Thomas Watson Jnr continued to define perceptions not only of IBM’s approach to design, but design in general, by reinforcing its stereotype as a commercial tool, whose purpose, spirit and impact were very different from the purity and expressiveness of art. Hence the assumption that art = good, design = not so good. Though, as the Eameses had demonstrated in their work for IBM, there were exceptions: designers who, in one way or another, had broken free of the commercial constraints that bound so many of their peers and treated design as a medium of intellectual enquiry and self-expression, much as modernist artists did art.
Moholy-Nagy set a dazzling precedent in the first half of the twentieth century by putting his Constructivist principles into practice by pursuing whichever challenges engaged him in a seamless fusion of art, design, science and technology. ‘There is no hierarchy of the arts, painting, photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design,’ he wrote. ‘They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in “design”.’24 His experiments have had an enduring influence through Kepes’s pioneering work on the construction of digital imagery25 and were introduced to the mass market not only by Saul Bass’s film titles, but those of one of their Chicago students, Robert Brownjohn, who devised thrilling opening sequences for the 1960s James Bond movies From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. Both films begin with Moholyesque montages of images. For Goldfinger, Brownjohn projected scenes from the movie on to a woman’s gold-painted naked body, with a golf ball sliding down her cleavage, and Sean Connery’s Bond running across her thighs.26
Among the stars of Italy’s post-war design scene, the Castiglioni brothers – Achille, Pier Giacomo and, initially, Livio – developed a succession of thoughtful, humorous and elegant products for mass manufacture from their studio in Milan.27 They used a tractor seat to make one chair and a bicycle seat for another. Eighty miles away in Turin, Carlo Mollino worked with the local artisans to produce deeply idiosyncratic furniture and interiors that reflected his love of the baroque, art nouveau, futurism, modernism, biomorphism, surrealism and the vernacular architecture of the desolate Aosta Valley high up in the Alps, as well as his passions for sex, skiing, cars, aircraft, cinema and the occult. Unlike the Castiglionis, who were willing to fulfil the commercial demands of their clients, albeit with work of such quality that it transcended them, the privately wealthy Mollino had the freedom to work solely on his own terms, and never treated design as anything other than a medium of self-expression.28
All four of them, together with Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Joe Colombo and Enzo Mari, conformed to the neo-Constructivist principles of Bruno Munari, who believed that the challenge of designing for daily life was too important to be relegated to a commercial role, and should be imbued with the values of art. Munari aired his views in his regular columns for the Italian daily newspaper Il Giorno, and published a collection of them in his 1966 book Design as Art. By then, the pop art movement was engaging with design as part of consumer culture, but the art world’s attitude to it remained deeply ambivalent. For every artist who was critically engaged by design, such as Richard Hamilton, and Andy Warhol, to whom Yves Saint Laurent dedicated his pop art haute couture collection,29 there were others who were deeply sceptical about it, like the car-crushing American sculptor John Chamberlain. During his 1971 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he exhibited an expensive sofa, designed by Verner Panton, in faux-reverential style in the lobby to parody what he saw as the pretentiousness of contemporary furniture design.30
Chamberlain’s cynicism was shared by an emerging group of artists who rejected consumerism and were fiercely critical of what they saw as the shallow optimism of pop culture. In the forefront were Alighiero Boetti, Lucio Fontana, Michelangelo Pistoletto and other Italian members of the arte povera movement, who symbolized their contempt for the art market by using found or cheap materials in deliberately fragile, sometimes perishable work. Their ideals were shared by avant-garde architecture groups such as Archigram in Britain, Ant Farm in the United States and Italy’s Archizoom and Superstudio, as well as by designers like Mendini, who translated the arte povera spirit into his 1974 Lassù project. Having mounted a simple wooden chair, like one a child might draw, on a pedestal, he poured petrol over it and set it alight on a derelict industrial site.31 Mendini recorded the chair’s destruction on film and in photographs: the work was the imagery, not the object.
Together with Archizoom and Superstudio, he was part of the rapidly expanding postmodernist movement, which critiqued what it saw as the intellectual turgidity of modernism by embracing its taboos, including kitsch and nihilism.32 By the late 1970s, Mendini was producing flamboyantly stylized furniture whose role was primarily conceptual rather than functional or commercial, and had founded a new design group with Sottsass, Studio Alchimia. For his 1978 Redesign series of chairs, he created pastiches of classical modernist pieces, including a replica of the Wassily chair developed by Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus in the mid 1920s with ‘clouds’ hovering above the back.33 Many of Alchimia’s defining themes were introduced to the mass market in a blaze of media coverage during the early 1980s by Sottsass and the younger designers with whom he formed the Memphis group. To mark its launch in 1981, Sottsass posed with his young collaborators for a team portrait in the Tawaraya, a ‘conversation pit’ built in the shape of a pastel-coloured boxing ring by the Japanese designer Masanori Umeda.34 Eventually, a Tawaraya took pride of place in the Monaco home of the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, which was furnished mostly with Memphis pieces.
Like Lagerfeld’s early fashion collections for Chanel, Memphis furniture reflected the postmodernist sense of irony, pastiche and theatricality which was evident in the work of artists like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Robert Longo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cindy Sherman. So too did graphic design, starting with the cover of one of the most important early postmodernist texts, Learning from Las Vegas, the 1972 book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour which was designed by Muriel Cooper before her Damascene conversion from print to computing.35 By the early 1980s, postmodernist graphics were introduced to a mainstream audience in Neville Brody’s artwork for magazines like The Face and the formally elegant, richly symbolic record covers designed by Peter Saville for the Manchester bands Joy Division and New Order, which came to mean as much to some of the people who owned them as the music.36 As a teenager in 1984, the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans found ‘a strange record with undecipherable digital type on a light pinkish grey’ in the bargain bin of a Hamburg record shop. It was New Order’s single ‘Confusion’, which had been released the previous year with a sleeve designed by Saville. After taping the record to listen to it on his Walkman, Tillmans displayed it ‘as a “work of art”’ in his bedroom. ‘It was the obscurity of Peter’s design, the fact that it didn’t do what design was expected to do, that drew my attention,’ he explained. ‘And sitting on display in my room, it continued to hold my fascination. It took on a life on its own, in a co-existence with New Order’s broken-up sound.’37
Even so, public perceptions of design were still dominated by its ‘expected’ commercial role, so much so that the word ‘design’ was omitted from both the 1975 first edition and 1983 revision of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, written by the influential British political scientist Raymond Williams. Despite billing itself as ‘neither a defining dictionary nor a specialist glossary’, Keywords is a reliable guide to the concepts which were considered to be culturally significant during the 1970s and early 1980s. When Williams published an expanded edition in 1983, he deemed it necessary to add words like ‘anarchism’, ‘anthropology’, ‘ecology’, ‘ethnic’, ‘liberation’, ‘sex’, ‘technology’ and ‘under-privileged’, but not ‘design’.38
By the turn of the twenty-first century, design was a central concern for the artists in the Relational Aesthetics movement identified by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija and other members of the group approached art as a social exercise in which other people could participate, rather than as a finished work produced privately and controlled by the artist. Many of the issues addressed in their projects, including the functional environments devised by Tiravanija, embraced elements of design and its impact on our lives.39
Other artists have followed suit, either by exploring the legacy of twentieth-century modernist designers, as Nairy Baghramian, Ryan Gander and Simon Starling have done, or by interrogating the impact of mass-market design on contemporary life, like Isa Genzken, Christoph Büchel, Ai Weiwei and Mark Leckey. Often powerful and moving, their work has helped to foster a more nuanced understanding of design history, and stimulated debate on current design issues. Ai Weiwei, in particular, made a useful contribution to the long-running discussion on the changing definition of design in his role as artistic co-director of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale in South Korea.40 The debate continued the following year in the thirteenth edition of the Documenta exhibition in the German city of Kassel, whose artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, questioned the continuing relevance of the concepts of ‘art’ and of the ‘artist’, suggesting that they may be reaching the end of their historical legitimacy and could be replaced by something different.41
All of this would have augured well for a constructive redefinition of the relationship between art and design, if not for an irritating distraction that distorted the art world’s perception of design almost as effectively as ‘good design is good business’ had done half a century before: ‘design-art’.
Like Watson Jnr’s mantra, design-art was a commercial phenomenon. The term was invented in 1999 by Alexander Payne, director of design at the auction house Phillips, to describe the contemporary design lots in a sale.42 His intention was clear: to persuade art collectors that design, particularly recently designed furniture, had many of the same qualities as the paintings and sculpture they were accustomed to buying at auction. Financially, it made perfect sense, especially for an auction house like Phillips. Up until then, design collectors had focused on furniture by twentieth-century modernists such as Jean Prouvé, Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, with the exception of a small cadre of devotees who bought new work by contemporary designers. All of that changed in the early 2000s, when art collectors began buying contemporary furniture. Commercial art galleries, such as Gagosian in New York and Franco Noero in Turin, started to represent designers alongside artists, and specialist contemporary design galleries opened in cities all over the world.
By ‘design’, most of them meant furniture, some of which was genuinely interesting – original and accomplished, whether formally, conceptually or technically – while other pieces were impractical and bombastic. As the art market soared, so did the price of ‘design-art’, but when recession struck after the 2008 banking crisis, many ingénu design collectors disappeared and the market promptly collapsed. The nadir was a sale at Phillips in New York in May 2010 of the art and design collection acquired by the American technology entrepreneur Halsey Minor in the heady days before he went bankrupt. All of the lots were being auctioned by his creditors, including one of the Lockheed Lounge aluminium chaises longues made by the Australian designer Marc Newson shortly after leaving art school in Sydney in the late 1980s. Two years before, it had set a record for a work by a living furniture designer when Minor bought it privately for $2.25 million. This time, it raised just $2 million while two other pieces by Newson were unsold, and a fourth went to a lone bidder, reportedly his gallerist Larry Gagosian.43
Rollercoaster prices notwithstanding, the principal problem with design-art was that by dominating the art world’s perceptions of design, it came to be seen as the area of design which was closest to art, not least as many of its practitioners spoke at length about the ‘sculptural’ and ‘artistic’ qualities of their work. Commercially this was the case, but not culturally. Design-art may have been bought and sold like paintings and sculpture, but much of it was of questionable cultural value and not nearly as formally resolved, technologically innovative or intellectually provocative as thoughtful examples of industrial design. There is a similar tension between commercial and critical values in the art world, where the most expensive works are not necessarily those of the greatest cultural import. But the market for art is so much larger and more mature than it is for design-art that the nuances are more apparent. Design-art also seemed so ubiquitous that it obscured other arguably deeper, more demanding areas of design, thereby perpetuating the misperception of design as a shallow medium with none of the rigour or complexity of critically engaging art. With luck, the design-art bubble will turn out to have been a fleeting diversion, because during its rise and fall other areas of design had changed dramatically, particularly with regard to their intellectual weight and nuance.
Traditionally, an important distinction between art and design was that artists made their work themselves, whereas designers delegated production to other people, generally to specialists in particular industrial or artisanal processes. Artists had deviated from this stereotype since Marcel Duchamp’s early twentieth-century experiments with industrial production.44 By the 1960s, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman and Sol LeWitt regularly outsourced the making of their sculpture to specialist workshops, such as Treitel-Gratz Co in Manhattan, which was previously best known as the American manufacturer of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair.
By the early 2000s, more and more artists were outsourcing production. Some followed Judd, Newman and LeWitt by using the same specialist manufacturers as designers, as the American sculptor Richard Serra did by working with Bethlehem Steel in the United States and later Pickhan in Germany. Others turned to the rapidly expanding cottage industry of art fabricators, including Carlson & Co in San Fernando, California, and the Mike Smith Studio in London. As well as making all or part of artists’ work, these workshops helped them to research and develop specialized materials and technologies. Some artists, including Olafur Eliasson, transformed their studios into multidisciplinary research and development units staffed by architects, engineers and computer programmers as well as artists. Fabrication became so prevalent that Artforum magazine devoted a special issue to it in October 2007 entitled ‘The Art of Production’.
At the same time, digital technology was enabling designers to exercise closer control over the development of their work and, if they wished, its production. Traditionally, industrial designers had sent sketches and technical drawings of their products to manufacturers, who then made models based on their specifications before engineering prototypes for production. As computer-aided design software advanced, they were able to take charge of the development process up until the final stage of prototyping, thereby reducing the risk of deviations being introduced during modelling and prototyping. At least, this is the theory of what might happen. In practice, the designer’s intentions could still be compromised by the manufacturers’ demands, which weaker designers gave in to. But, in principle, designers have been able to develop work which is more expressive and complex, in terms of its form and the messages it communicates. There is a parallel with film-making in that digital technology has empowered the designer to become, not an artist, but what the director and critic François Truffaut defined in the 1950s as an auteur, by ensuring that the finished piece reflects his or her vision.45
The auteur phenomenon has been most dynamic in graphic design. Back in 1986, the American designer April Greiman was asked to design a poster for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She decided to produce a life-size nude self-portrait on her Macintosh computer, which had been introduced two years before, but the process turned out to be tougher than she had expected. When Greiman finally printed the image, the files absorbed so much of her computer’s memory that the laser printer nearly died. Those printer-crushing files were two hundred and eighty-nine kilobytes in size, just big enough to store a fuzzy photograph snapped by a phone.46 Intrepid though the exercise seemed at the time, it is now the type of thing that anyone (even those of us who are neither graphic designers nor programmers) can do on a cheap computer.
Graphic designers have since broadened their roles to become authors, producers, publishers, curators, bloggers and entrepreneurs. The British critic and curator Rick Poynor explored the impact of digital technology on the graphic design process and its role in encouraging designers to produce more self-expressive work in his 2003 book No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism.47 And the Walker Art Center analysed the role of social media, mobile devices, print-on-demand systems, rapid prototyping and web-based distribution in enabling them to experiment with new forms of production and distribution, and to develop their own design tools, in a 2011 exhibition ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’.48
One consequence is that graphic design has become more formally sophisticated, in terms of both its visual appeal and its structural complexity. The designer of this book, Irma Boom, has produced a succession of remarkable books in which she has combined different scents, textures, hidden motifs, colour codes, unusual bindings and papers with typefaces that become progressively smaller – or larger – as the text continues. Having printed one book on coffee filter paper to achieve the desired effect, she hacked at the edges of another with a circular saw. Designing and editing a particularly ambitious book, a history of the Dutch conglomerate SHV, absorbed five years of Boom’s working life. The page edges are designed to reveal a line of poetry from one angle, and an image of tulips from another. The title only becomes visible on the cover after regular use. There are two thousand, one hundred and thirty-six pages in the book, but Boom insisted on publishing it without page numbers or an index to encourage readers to dip in and out, rather than to read it in sequence.49
Other graphic designers have used their new-found freedom to treat the design process as a medium of intellectual enquiry. Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, co-founders of Metahaven in Amsterdam, have dubbed this practice ‘speculative design’. Rather than waiting for commercial clients to set a brief, they identify an issue that intrigues them, such as a political or economic phenomenon, and conduct an unsolicited design exercise, for example by taking it upon themselves to design a visual identity for a country or new form of currency. Dismissive though the Metahaven duo are of the intellectual limitations of commercial design practice, they use its processes as their primary tools and adhere to its rituals in their work.50
A similar approach is evident in other fields. The British designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby have played decisive roles in the evolution of what they dubbed ‘critical design’ through their own practice and as teachers at the Royal College of Art in London.51 Much of their work is devoted to developing conceptual design projects which critique design and consumer culture, thereby occupying similar terrain to conceptual artists and cultural historians. Often they address issues that have long been taboo within design, including negative emotions, such as our fears and neuroses. In one project with the self-explanatory title ‘Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times’, Dunne and Raby designed pieces of furniture that are intended as defences against such horrors as alien invasion and nuclear disasters.52
Other designers have applied the principles of critical design in a commercial context, as Martí Guixé did by producing a series of carrier bags for the Spanish shoe retailer Camper bearing the handwritten slogan ‘Don’t buy it if you don’t need it’.53 More often, they are applied on a smaller scale to conceptual projects intended as provocations rather than destined for mass production. The German designer Julia Lohmann modelled her Cow benches on the shapes of particular cows’ backs and upholstered them in cow hide, thereby making them impossible to sit on – or even look at –without thinking of the animals they were made from. Each bench has been given a name, as if it were a pet, such as ‘Waltraud’, named after Lohmann’s mother, thereby illustrating our hypocrisy in pampering individual animals, yet slaughtering anonymous cattle en masse.54 Our ambiguity towards animal politics is also the theme of a project by the Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, who produced a book, Pig 05049, in which she traces all the products made from a single pig: cigarettes, heart valves, ice cream, injectable collagen, crayons, beer, bullets, antifreeze, cellular concrete, a tambourine, chewing gum, toothpaste and even the glue used to bind the book as well as steaks, chops, ribs and sausages. While the French designer Mathieu Lehanneur has analysed the insecurities and inconsistencies of human nature in his work in health care.55
Not only are the processes of producing art and design aligning, but by casting themselves as auteurs and activists, designers are exercising their right to use their work as a medium of self-expression and research, as artists have traditionally done, free from the restrictions imposed by the demands of commercial design briefs. Does this mean that the end result is the same as art, or that it should be defined as art rather than design?
I would say no on both counts. Firstly, design always has a designated function, regardless of whether it is determined by the commercial objectives of a corporate client or by the designer’s intellectual curiosity. Nor does that function necessarily need to have a practical purpose or to be of commercial value; it could be to communicate a political message, or to enable the designer to embark on a research exercise. Deconstructing the social, cultural and political identity of a nation may seem very different to finessing a corporate symbol for a multinational like IBM, but each exercise fulfils the required function. Works of art can, of course, be functional too, but need not necessarily be so, unlike design: a critical distinction between the disciplines. Remember Donald Judd: ‘If a chair … is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous.’56
Another distinguishing factor is that every design project – commercial, conceptual or critical – is defined by design culture, at least to some degree. Perhaps the design process was applied to its development, or the finished work incorporates design techniques and design references. Alternatively, it might explore an aspect of design’s history or its impact on contemporary life. Again, works of art can do the same, but they can also choose not to do so, which gives them a freedom and intensity of expression that design is denied. Anthony Dunne has likened the relationship between art and design to that of science and engineering, with the former being devoted to pure research and the latter to applied research, though in design’s case that research will always be applied to daily life.57
Thanks to his and Fiona Raby’s work, as well as that of Ai Weiwei, Metahaven, April Greiman, Julia Lohmann, Christien Meindertsma, Mathieu Lehanneur, Alessandro Mendini, Bruno Munari, György Kepes, László Moholy-Nagy and all the other practitioners who have pushed against the traditional boundaries of the field, it is now possible for designers to fulfil many of the roles of artists without needing to define the outcome as art. Even so, many of the most complex and eloquent examples of design are entirely conventional in concept and execution, yet can still play Mont Sainte-Victoire to a contemporary artist’s Cézanne, as Dieter Rams’s mass-manufactured electronic products for Braun once did to Richard Hamilton.
Of all the many thousands of words devoted to untangling the tortuous relationship between art and design, my favourites are those of Charles Eames, who, when asked if design was ‘an expression of art’, said: ‘I would rather say that it is an expression of purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art.’58