A Candy-Coated Alternative
The second Design Triennial shows us a world more vivid and energetic than the real one.
By Karrie Jacobs
August/September 2003
The word that comes to mind is vivid . At first glance everything
at the Cooper Hewitt's second National Design Triennial is pulsing, energetic,
saturated with color and light. The world as interpreted by the curators
of this exhibition is so different than the one we've been reading about
in newspapers and seeing on TV lately. It's not the world we've been experiencing
but some candy-coated alternative. Here within the confines of the
museum, the innovations promised by the technology revolution have inspired
creativity rather than greed. Here designers take unbridled pleasure in
old-fashioned commodities like ornament and decoration without slipping
decisively into reverse gear. Here architects and builders approach the
quotidian realities of housing migrant workers or suburbanites in entirely
unexpected ways. The world of the triennial is the optimistic, upbeat place
we thought we left behind around the turn of the millennium. It's a version
of the twenty-first century we've yet to actually experience.
The 80 designers whose work makes up the triennial, representing every imaginable
discipline and working in every conceivable medium, were selected by curators
Ellen Lupton and Donald Albrecht together with the museum's former assistant
director for public programs Susan Yelavich and interior-design writer Mitchell
Owens. The exhibition's expansive quality--the product of four curatorial
minds--could be targeted as its weakness or celebrated as its strength.
The show is willfully nondoctrinaire. It privileges no one aesthetic, no
single movement. Yes, there are examples of smooth-skinned Modernism as
embodied by the furniture of the Streng brothers and the computer-driven
architectural projects of Asymptote. But bright biomorphic forms don't dominate
the show. In fact, the layout of the exhibition seems calculated to highlight
oddities, pieces that hew to no obvious aesthetic or movement. Smack in
the center of the Cooper-Hewitt's grand second-floor hallway, for example,
are Jim Zivic's unclassifiable soft translucent rubber stools in the
shape of primitive Xs. Nearby is the (A)way Station, an installation
by architects Mabel O. Wilson and Paul Kariouk that grapples with the idea
of domesticity in a world of transients, more a social studies project than
architecture.
Historical time is a slippery commodity in this show. A first-floor
hallway has been lushly carpeted, wallpapered, and upholstered by the distinctively
anti-Modern interior-design firm Diamond + Baratta. Their style is
traditional, but with a whiff of irony that seems very of the moment. The
hallway features decorative vignettes from three centuries, including the
twentieth, and overtly modern lamp shades hanging from the ceiling show
silhouetted scenes from each of those historic periods.
Upstairs there's a wall of streetscape photos shot in Prospect, a Longmont,
Colorado, subdivision where the quaint New Urbanist formula has been retooled
to include houses inspired by both historical styles and idiosyncratically
modern ones. What the world within the museum walls has in common with the
world outside, then, is a kind of jolting sensation: old and new methods
and ideas rub against each other like unstable tectonic plates.
The work on display often seems to intentionally exaggerate or amplify the
quirks of the designers. Graphic designer and Pentagram partner Paula Scher
was asked to make something specifically for the triennial that would
illustrate her obsession with type. She obliged by supplying densely lettered
carpets that, in theory, direct visitors to the elevator, which is similarly
laden with text. Graphic designer Geoff McFetridge, best known for his snowboard
designs, is represented by giant sheets of wallpaper pattern, dense and
goofy, that could be the symbols of the show: colorful, richly detailed,
but in no way nostalgic. The weakest moments in the exhibition are the most
literal ones, where a designer supplied whatever was lying around the office.
Peter Eisenman's models of the City of Culture, in Galicia, Spain makes
a dead spot on the gallery wall, and the cellular phones designed by Frank
Nuovo look unremarkable in their little vitrine.
Of course, it's impossible to generalize about an exhibit featuring the
works of 80 disparate designers. But the one clear signal I get strolling
the galleries is that practitioners who a few years ago plunged headlong
into the disembodied universe inside the computer screen have emerged and
rediscovered the pleasures of tactility and materiality. Many of the best
works in the 2000 triennial were made on and for the computer screen. Although
the love affair with the computer is by no means over, it has reached a
new level of sophistication. The period in which the thrill was in showing
what could be designed within the confines of a screen--in the virtual
world--has given way to one in which designers are using the computer's
powers to make and do things in the real world.
The most eloquent and extreme example of a design that is computer dependent
for its particulars but marvelously sensual in its execution is the Wave
Garden, by Yusuke Obuchi, a student at Princeton's School of Architecture.
When I saw the hundreds of little fishing weights hanging in close
formation from a crazily complex arrangement of fishing line, I thought
I was looking at art. And at the press preview Obuchi didn't do much to
dissuade me. He politely answered my questions about installing the piece
and getting the hundreds of little weights to hang properly, and told me
about the motor inside the wall that makes the weights sway ever so slightly.
I was about to walk away when he mentioned that the Wave Garden is
a model of a power plant designed to float on the surface of the Pacific
Ocean off Southern California and generate clean energy by using the motion
of the sea. He explained that when Californians are using less energy--on
the weekends, for example--the power plant rises to the surface and becomes
a floating park. The combination of sensuality and symbolic form, theory
and function was mind-boggling but refreshing, a reminder of what the twenty-first
century is supposed to be about.
Likewise it was pleasing to see Amy Franceschini, of the San Francisco-based
digital-design firm Future Farmers, try to work out her admittedly
silly concept for a backpack theater--entertainment for hikers--in three
dimensions and real materials, using wood instead of pixels. In the MIT
Media Lab's Cyberflora installation, Cynthia Breazeal featured
electromechanical flowers programmed to respond to motion. "They're
girl robots," curator Lupton exclaimed.
Sometimes the tactility of the show manifested itself as beauty, as with
Ted Muehling's exquisite earrings or Michele Oka Doner's Burning Bush candelabra,
a cast-bronze network of branches with platforms for candles. Other times
the groundedness played out as near parody: Demeter Fragrance Library's
array of fragrances, such as Earthworm, Dirt, and Snow. But there is something
telling about a fragrance company that has invented a market for scents
that evoke not glamour but, literally, the salt of the earth.
A survey show like this one can pare the aesthetic moment down to a single
narrative or it can attempt to reflect the moment in all its messy
glory. The curators have clearly gone for the latter approach. If you attend
the triennial expecting an exhibition that will give you aesthetic guidance
for the coming years, a trend, or a catchphrase, you will come away disappointed.
But right now the best thing a show like this can do is offer up the notion
of endless possibility, to broaden the aesthetic universe rather than narrow
it, and take risks with the unfamiliar rather than reinforce the hegemony
of the iconic. Elsewhere the world once again is filling up with barriers,
boundaries, and limitations. But in the Cooper-Hewitt a colorful, riotous,
unrestrained assemblage of ideas is on display. Right now vivid feels pretty
good. |
 |
 |
Yuske Obuchi's Wave Garden is a model of a power plant that would
generate energy from the motion of the sea.
Anthony Hamboussi |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Jim Zivik's Leather Link Stool.
David Sundberg |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
The Demeter Fragrance Library features nontraditional scents like "Dirt."
Sharon Pincus |
|
|
BACK TO TOP;MM_showHideLayers('navdepts','','hide')){kind=small}
;MM_showHideLayers('navfeats','','hide')){kind=small}
;MM_showHideLayers('navcolumns','','hide')){kind=small}
