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 Beauty, brilliance, and self-indulgence: it's all part of the Aspen design conference tradition. November 2001
The evening's first speaker was graphic designer April Greiman, whose bleached hair rose from her head in appropriately alpine clumps. The center of her presentation was an opaque self-made digital film of her work--a first stab at moviemaking, she said. Admitting that she felt nearly paralyzed by nerves, Greiman had all kinds of trouble translating her remarkable design skills into words. Following her to the podium was Li Edelkoort, a tall, stylish Dutch woman who runs a forecasting firm in Paris called Trend Union. Her problem was the opposite of Greiman's: she was entirely too sure of herself. She presented a slide show that was full of highly stylized images of clothes and residential interiors, marked by a high-end minimalism. There was no analysis in Edelkoort's presentation, no attempt to tease out meaning. (In her universe, there is only the Trend.) The overall effect of her talk, especially as it continued past ten o'clock, was a kind of retail hypnosis: You are getting sleepy. Your eyelids are feeling heavy. You are beginning to feel a craving for a $4,500 chaise longue and some cute little Japanese sandals.
The good news about this year's IDCA is how often it avoided those two pitfalls. Overwhelmingly, the speakers who stood behind the podium in the tent or led discussions in smaller venues were both surprisingly articulate and compelled by ideas for their own sake. As anyone who's familiar with the conference knows, the organizers of the IDCA have always had to worry more about the second trap than the first. After all, the conference began in 1951 as a weeklong seminar on the value of good design for big business, existing for several years primarily as a neutral meeting ground for representatives of art and money. Among its founders were Bayer, a Bauhaus veteran and consultant for the Chicago-based Container Corporation of America (CCA), and Egbert Jacobsen, the company's design director. They picked Aspen because the CEO of CCA, Walter Paepcke, was in the process of trying to turn the town--which had enjoyed a brief but glitzy heyday in the late nineteenth century as a silver-mining center--into a high-altitude cultural center, an American Salzburg. (He also helped start Aspen's ski resort.) Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, also IDCA founders, underwrote a 1949 Goethe centennial (for which Saarinen designed that first tent), which helped to kick-start Aspen's revival. Two years later the design conference was born, with a lineup of speakers that included Louis Kahn, Charles Eames, George Nelson, and Josef Albers. Paepcke's idea was to bring corporate leaders to green Aspen in June and make the case, in the 1956 words of IBM's Thomas Watson, that "good design is good business." But the Paepckes and other leaders of the conference made a point from the start of attracting some of the design world's least corporate-ready figures, including Buckminster Fuller, who first visited in 1952. Over the years a number of important and often radical thinkers from outside the design disciplines have made the trip to Aspen, including the former Black Panther Bobby Seale, Betty Friedan, Tom Wolfe, Steve Jobs, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The IDCA's theme this year was "The More Things Change," shorthand for a nineteenth-century French journalist's now famous observation that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." But the most successful speakers were those who felt loosely constrained by that guideline. On the first night Ralph Caplan gave a remarkable keynote address. As microprocessors shrink to such a tiny size that the products containing them can take virtually any shape, he noted, designers have been confronted with an overwhelming freedom. These days, Kaplan said, "form can't even find function, let alone follow it." That was by far the best line of the whole conference. It also strikes me as a catchy summation of the changes that have upended the design world in the last five years or so. Indeed it would have made a good theme for the whole conference. I've already mentioned a couple of low points and alluded to another: the deadly roller-blading video. The responsible party was Dre Wapenaar, a Dutch artist who designs tents and became known in U.S. design circles after his work was included in the recent MoMA show Workspheres. He gave a talk about his tent art that was compelling, and funny in parts, but then inexplicably moved to the piano to accompany (with music by a Dutch composer for whom he'd designed a tent) a video of a knit-capped roller-blader gliding through the Dutch countryside past the inevitable windmills. I suppose it was meant to be contemplative, but it came across as maddeningly self-indulgent. As Wapenaar continued to pound away at the keyboard like a high-brow John Tesh, the audience began to flee in quiet groups, looking back when they reached the top of the steps to see if the video and skater were still rolling. They were. Happily, most of my memories involve the conference's high points: a great talk by Peter Beinart, the 30-year-old editor of the New Republic (and son of architect Julian Beinart, an IDCA veteran), who without any rhetorical strain made his analysis of the antiglobalization protests now shaking Western capitals relevant to an audience of designers; a discussion of the Bauhaus led by Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe with Jane Thompson, Moshe Safdie, and MoMA's Paola Antonelli, in which Antonelli made an offhand yet moving defense of Modernism, saying that the movement "allows us to abstract ourselves for a moment and reach a higher plane" and "still brings me to tears sometimes"; and a sharp, no-nonsense presentation by Gadi Geiger, a cognitive scientist at MIT, who suggested that by teaching children to read on computer screens, which develop a wider field of vision, we may be promoting dyslexia. So, despite Greiman and Edelkoort and the roller-blader, the conference moved gracefully through its four days. Its missteps were part of its charm; without them, we might have been tempted--like the urban obsessives most of the participants are in their working lives--to attend every single session and missed a quick steep hike before dinner or a glass of beer on the patio of one of the listing chalet-style hotels from the 1950s at the overgrown base of Aspen Mountain. It's this time to wander around and take in the beauty of the place that gives IDCA visitors at least the illusion of escaping civilization, even in a town where it takes only five minutes to walk from a trailhead to the front door of the Fendi boutique. |
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