RON ARAD – IN REVERSE AT DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON / ISRAEL
June 19th 2013 – October 19th 2013
Curated by Lydia Yee
RON ARAD – IN REVERSE AT DESIGN MUSEUM HOLON / ISRAEL
June 19th 2013 – October 19th 2013
Curated by Lydia Yee
At the 2009 opening of this survey exhibition at The Museum of
Modern Art in New York, Ron Arad wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the image of Ed
Ruscha’ s famous painting ‘’ I don’t Want No retrospektive 1979 ‘’, featuring
the artist’s eponymous quote. Arad, who always been forward looking, does not
take pleasure in the exercise of looking back at his past work, as
retrospektive exhibitions are won’t to do. Thus, it may seem paradoxical that
his exhibition at Design Museum Holon is titled ‘’ In Reverse ‘’ does suggest
various relationships to the past – looking at one’s earlier work for
inspiration, going in the opposite direction, or the metaphor of a vehicle
moving backwards – which are all fitting in this case.
In Reverse focuses on three decades of Arad’s work in metal, his
favorite material, and culminates in a major new project, exploring through
physical experiments and digital simulations how automobile bodies,
specifically the Fiat 500, behave under compression. On clean white walls in
the upper gallery, Arad has installed six crushed Fiat 500s, each flattened in
a manner that resembles the outcome of an accident in a carton or a child’s
drawing that lacks a sense of depth. The crushed vehicles surround a bulbous
wooden forming buck, a mould that was used to shape and fit the metal panels of
the 500, which is on loan from the Centro Storico Fiat. Nearby is Arad’s Roddy
Giacosa (2013), a new sculpture created by painstakingly positioning hundreds
of polished stainless stell rods on a metal armature in the shape of a Fiat
500. Eachcoutured section takes the shape of one of the vehicle’s panels and
the parts fit together to form the body of the car.
Behind the walls displaying the crushed Fiat is a group of Arad’s
designs, primarily chairs made from steel, tracing his experimentation with the
medium from his earliest works in the 1980s to more recent pieces that share
some of the same properties as their forebears. Additionally, Arad displays a
group of crushed artifacts, such as a toy police car that he found forty years
ago in the street in Tel
Aviv, as well as other objects that were studies and tests, including a bottle
rack that he had flattened by a steamroller. The lower gallery features Arad’s
digital simulation of the crushing process, using the most recent model of the
500, as well as a sculpture made by a 3D printing technique, which is based on
a single frame from a related film. Digital prints on paper capture the results
of simulated digital compressions of the Roddy Giacosa. Also on view is a selection
of Arad’s recent work, sculptural forms that were designed with the aid of 3D
modeling software.
Arad’s crushed Fiats
trace their line age back to his earliest design, The Rover Chair 1981, a
leather Rover car seat salvaged from a London scrapyard and mounted onto a
frame made from steel tubing and keyclamp fittings.
A
Both works depend on relics from the post-war automobile boom and
its cycle of planned obsolescence. They also owe a debt to Marcel Duchamp’s
concept of the readymade, ordinary industrial objects such as a urinal, bottle
rack or bicycle wheel - which the artist selected, signed and presented as art
with little or no modification. Arad’s Aerial Light 1981, a halogen lamp
attached to a car aerial which can be adjusted by remote control, is also a
readymade, albeit one with a more significant intervention. When he made these
works in the early 1980s, Arad was among a handful of young designers in
London, including Tom Dixon, Andre Dubreil and Danny Lane, tagged with the
label ‘’ creative salvage ‘’ for making furniture out of found materials and a
do-it-yourself, punk attitude. Arad, however, did not fully embrace this label.
He saw his practice as a response to the Duchampion strategy of appropriating
found objects, with affinities in both the worlds of art and design: Picasso’s
Tete de Taureau (1942), a bicycle seat and handlebars mounted on the wall to
resemble a bull’s head, and Achille Castiglion’s Mezzadro Stool (1957), a metal
seat attached to a leaf spring, both from a tractor. Duchamp, according to
Arad, made everyday objects useless by calling them art. By contrast, Arad has
taken obsolete objects and gave them another life. Throughout the 1980s, he
continued to make Rover chairs one at a time as he found discarded seats, but
eventually the supply dwindled and he stopped producing them. Two decades
later, Arad, working with the manufacturer Vitra, revisited the chair in a
limited edition titled Moreover (2007), produced in rusted and chromed steel
versions.
In recent years, Arad has been described as an architect, artist
and designer; he Works between these three disciplines, defying easy
categorization. Although he is arguably best known as a designer, he did not
set out to become one. Today, his designs are equally at home in large public
spaces and exclusive private collections. He trained as an architect, but it
has only been in the past decade that he has been receiving significant
commissions, most notably Design Museum Holon.
The son of artists, Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and came of
age in an era when ideas and ideals counted more than the mastery of technical skills.
He enrolled in environmantal and industrial design courses at the Bezalel
Academy of Art in Jerusalem before relocating to London in 1974 to study at the
Architectural Association (AA). Esther Peretz Arad wanted her son to become a
respectable architect rather than a struggling artist. In the highly
experimental programme at the AA, where he studied under Peter Cook and Bernard
Tschumi. After graduating, Arad came to realize that in order to pursue a
career in architecture, he would have to work for an established architect and
pay his dues by turning out countless, highly detailed and tedious technical
drawings.
The rebellious young
Arad opened One Off, a studio, workshop and showroom, in London’s Covent Garden
neighbourhood in 1981. His training in architecture enabled him to design his
own spaces. Much of the construction, however, was improvised and experimental,
and the same skills used to make his early pieces-scavenging material, pouring
concrete and cutting, welding and bashing metal – were put to use in fabricating the walls, floors, work
surfaces, seating, and signage. Not merely functional, the One off spaces were
adorned with artistic flourishes, including an entrance made of reclaimed bus
doors at the initial location on Short Gardens, a sculptural metal balustrade
at Neal Street and ‘’ light tattoos ‘’ made by burning holes in the steel wall
with a cutting torch at Shelton Street.
Arad does not make a clear distinction between the disciplines of
art and design. As a design student at Bezalel, he spent much of his time
hanging out in the fine art department, learning about the work of leading
contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. He thought the AA,
with its emphasis on architecture as ideas, looked like an art school. There
was, in fact, a strong dialogue between architecture and other artistic
disciplines at the school. Tschumi, who was a unit master at the AA, and
RoseLee Goldberg, director of the gallery at the Royal College of Art,
initiated an exchange of ideas about architecture and art, focusing on
conceptual approaches to space and performance. In an essay published in the
exhibition catalogue, A Space : A Thousand Words, Goldberg writes, ‘’ It is in
space that ideas are materialized, experienced. Space consequently becomes the
essential element in the notion of practice. ’’
Arad’s work is rooted in ideas, yet it springs from materials as
much as concepts, and there is a performative quality to much of his output.
One off afforded him a theatrical space in which to experiment and give
material form to his practice. Its improvised interior of found materials and
welded metal had the look of a Nouvenau Realiste ( New Realist ) sculpture.
The French New Realists and American Neo – Dadaist – whose work in
the 1950s and 1960s built on the legay of Duchamp and Dada and was largely
comprised of detritus – offered an irreverent critique of consumer culture.
Arad had first encountered the work of Jean
Tinguely, who was part of the New realist group, at the Israel museum, where
his sculpture Eos XK 3 (1965) graces the garden. Tinguely’s 1982 retrospective
at the Tate – featuring noisy, welded metal machines, such as the sound
sculpture Meta – Harmonie II (1979) - also
impresses Arad. His New Descending Staircase (1984), for example, installed in
One Off’s Neal Street location, had a playful Tinguely-esque quality,
periodically emitting brief tunes as staff and visitors ascended and descended
the stairs, formed from cantilever railway sleepers and wired to a synthesizer
to trigger sounds when stepped on. Fort he exhibition Nouvelles Tendances: Les
Avant – garden de la fin de XXeme siecle (1987) at the Centre Pompidou, Arad
made a sculpture machine out of rough metal titled Sticks and Stones (1987).
This contraption was constructed from a conveyor belt and a powerfull baling
machine.
The words ‘’ Sticks
& Stones may break my bones but names will never harm me ‘’ were cut into
the metal panels on the two sides of the conveyor belt. Visitors were invited
to place their chairs, old and new, onto the belt and to watch as he baler
compacted them into cubes. Over the course of the exhibition, these blocks of
mangled metal, wood, upholstery and plastic were stacked to form a wall around
the machine. Recognising the
connection to the 1960s crushed car sculptures of the French New realist Cesar,
Arad also referred to this project as the ‘’ Cesarian Operation. ‘’
While the crushed objects have the appearance of small sculptures
by Cesar, the machine and its actions looked and behaved more like one of
Tinguely’s destructive devices, such as Rotozaza II (1967) – an apparatus, made
of welded iron, a bicycle chain and a motor, designed to smash glass bottles.
For many artists, destruction can be a potent, liberating force
that clears the way fort he future. Arad recalls his thinking behind Stick and
Stones : ‘’ I wasn’t interested in the future. All I could do was make it come
a little faster. And the only way I could do that was by destroying some of
the past… I said the most
important machine in the car industry is really the machine that destroys cars,
because it makes room for new ones.’’ Arad’s outlook has its roots in the Dada
movement, and his view on destruction echoed that of the avant – garde poet and
writer Tristan Tzara, who was one of the founders of Dada. More than four
decades after its instigation in the aftermath of the first World War, Tzara
reflected on the aims of the movement: ‘’ The Dada program was, despite what
some think, collective destruction, it was the creation of new values,
overthrowing existing values and of course, to overthrow them, we had to
destroy the commonly accepted values, which were more or less academic… Of
course, we can’t create if we don’t destroy what existed before. ‘’ Beginning
in the late 1950s, Neo-Dadaists and New Realists sparked a renewed interested
in the anti – establishment attitude of Dada, which resonated with artists from subsequent
generations. For example, Gordon Matta – Clark, who was known for cutting open
abandoned buildings in the early 1970s, felt an affinity with the early
twentieth-century movement: ‘’ Dada’s devotion to the imaginative disruption of
convention is an essential liberation force. I can’t imagine how Dada relates
stylistically to my work, but in spirit it is fundamental. ‘’ Matta-Clark’s
oeuvre includes a performance documented in the film Fresh Kill (1972), in
which he destroyed his truck with a bulldozer at Fresh Kills landfill in New
York.
After crushing chairs, including purportedly one designed by Renzo
Piano and Richard Rogers for the offices of the Centre Pompidou, Arad moved
into a particularly productive phase of his career, at times approaching the
creative act with aggressive, if not destructive, tendencies. He defines design
as ‘’ the act of one imposing one’s will on materials to perform a function.’’
Arad’s definition, minus the function, is similar to how the American sculptor
Richard Serra describes his approach to materials : ‘’ In 1967 and 1968, I
wrote down a verb list as a way of applying various activities to unspecified
materials. To roll, to fold, to bend, to shorten, to shave, to tear, to chip,
to split, to sever… The language structured my relationship to materials which
had the same function as transitive verbs.’’ Arad’s aphorism is best exemplified
by his Tinker Chair (1988), made by beating sheet steel with a rubber mallet
until it felt like a confortable seat, or in the words of Arad, ‘’ until it
confessed to being a chair. ‘’ Then the two sides are welded on, fixing its
shape. After making five Tinker Chairs, Arad continued to work with sheet steel
for his series Volumes, improvising the shapes by drawing on the surface and
cutting out the forms to be welded together and then polished.
The early versions had the quality of a rough sketch, but as his
workshop team became more skilled, the chairs became more refined, with cleaner
welds and a lustrous finish.
A
Arad experimented with a variety of forms – including an
overstuffed club chair, Big Easy (1988), and several rocking chairs, such as
Rolling Volume (1989). The latter was weighted at the back to shift the point
of balance.
Throughout the 1980s, Arad focused on unique pieces and limited
editions made by hand, aligning him more closely with artists than designers
who work primarily with manufacturers to fabricate products on a mass scale. In
addition to serving as a studio and workshop, One Off was also a showroom and
enabled Arad to build an audience for his work and that of his peers. He sold
pieces directly to the public and organized exhibitions and parties to bring
potential clients through the door. Unlike industrial designers, he could not
rely on manufacturers to invest in the necessary tooling to produce his designs
and in marketing them to both retailers and consumers. According to architecture
and design critic Dejan Sudjic, he had to ‘’ assume responsibility for every
aspect of the design, manufacture and marketing of a piece of furniture… It
carried with it not just freedom, but a whole range of distractions and
difficulties.’’
Arad received his first commission to design a piece for
manufacture in 1986, when Rolf Fehlbaum, the owner of Vitra, approached him to
create a piece for Vitra Editions. Ironically, the design that Arad came up
with could have been realized in his studio. Well Tempered Chair (1986), a
deceptively simple chair, is made from four sheets of sprung steel, looped and
held together by wing nuts. The essential quality of this surprisingly
comfortable chair, its tautly curved, springy surface, is the result of the
tempering process, which gives the steel a memory, so it wants to snap back to
its original flattened form. Shortly after its inauguration in 1989, the Vitra
Design Museum invited Arad to run a workshop. He asked to work again with
tempered steel, but it was only available in widhts if 30 cm. After conducting
various experiments with the material, he created prototypes for seats that
further exploited the properties of tempered steel, including Bucking Bronco
(1990), and Beware of the Dog (1990), some of which were produced in limited
editions by One Off. Twenty years later, Arad went back to sprung steel,
looping and connecting thin strips to create a new type of bicycle Wheel that
gives his Two Nuns (2011) a gentle, bouncy ride. Since the early days of One
Off, Arad has documented his work in photographs and videos – not only the
finished products, but also the experimentation and process of making his work.
During the Vitra workshop, Arad shot video footage of one of the experiments,
in which he and a couple
students roll and bounce a large loop of tempered steel across a tented work
space. This short film is not unlike those made by Bruce Nauman of his studio
performances, such as Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with
Changing Rhythms or Playing A note on the Violin While.
I walk Around the Studio (both 1967 – 1968), in which he carries
out the rather straightforward tasks described in the title. Arad’s footage is
not, however,a performance or an artwork per se, but as with Nauman’s films, it reveals a
dedication to the process and act of making art. Nauman always appears as the
solo protagonist in his films, where as Arad is often with assistants,
fabricators, technicians and other collaborators. In contrast to most visual
artists who work in a solitary studio setting, Arad thrives in a lively and
challenging enviroment with other creative people, who bring different ideas
and skills to the mix. He has likened his working enviroment to a kindergarten,
where play and social interaction are essential to developing skills and
knowledge.
Over the past
two decades, Arad has taken full advantage of opportunities to work with
manufacturers as well as highly-skilled artisans and technicians. The Italian
furniture manufacturer Moroso was the first to mass produce his designs,
creating the Spring Collection (1990), upholstered pieces based on Works
originally executed in steel. Arad also made new prototypes in painted steel,
some of which were put into production. Collaboration with specialist
fabrication firms has enabled Arad to take innovative forms he desiged
digitally and translate them into beautiful objects, composed of new material
alloys with exacting finishes. His Southern Hemisphere and Afterthought (both
2007), produced in collaboration with Ernest Mourmans, adopt a material used in
the aircraft industry, superplastic aluminium; the latter is created from a
pair of untrimmed blanks used to maket he former. For his series
Bodyguards (2008), Arad inflated superplastic aluminium onto a four-part mould
and welded the sections together, creating a curvaceous form that resembles a
human torso. He then cut away sections to give each one a unique shape, then
patinated or polished the surface an deven introduce color to some of them.
When Arad
First conceived the idea of crushing a vintage Fiat 500, he envisaged how it
should be done – a huge hydraulic press would crush the car as if it were a
toy. A test with a small press and a toy version of the car confirmed his
intuition. His collaborator Roberto Travaglia at Realize helped him crush an actual
Fiat 500 by manually compressing the car between metal plates with a makeshift
vice and weights, and then further flattening it under a metal plate with a
small digger. The process took more than two days, and although it came close
to achieving the desired flatness, Arad preferred a more dramatic and immediate
solution- crushing the cars using a – ton press used in shipbuilding. The Fiat
also has personal significance for Arad. An earlier model, the Giardiniera, was
the family car when he was growing up in Tel Aviv and his father survived a
serious accident while driving it. Of this early days in London, he recalls ‘’
I always enjoyed watching a demolition ball in action. ‘’ Arad understands that
the process is sometimes as important as the end results. Critics have called
him a showman, but Arad appreciates that strong images and a good story can go
a lot farther than a conventional photograph of an object displayed in a
gallery setting. In an image with one of his Squashed Vipps (2008), which he
mad efor a charity auction.
Arad’s Fiats will inevitably be compared to the crushed metal sculptures of John Chamberlain and Cesar from the 1960s. Although Chamberlain is best known for his use of car parts, he also used discarded household appliances and other scrap meta to create his compositions: ‘’ I’m basically a collagist. I saw all this material just lying around against buildings and it was in color, so I felt I was ahead on two counts there.’’ Cesar is also recognized for his sculptures made of crushed automobile bodies. Which he called ‘’ compressions ’’. His approach was more akin to Duchamp’s found objects than Chamberlain’s collage technique and involved choosing objects from a scrapyard that have been compressed by a large hydraulic press. Although Arad shares Cesar’s interest in industrial machinery and the found object, his concerns have expanded; issues of form, process and narrative are equally important.
There are also affinities between Arad’s Fiat Project and Works by his immediate peers. His friend Cornelia Parker employd a steamholder to flattened more than a thousand silverplate objects, including cutlery, candle holders, plates, and instruments. The title of her work, Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-1089), describes the arrangement of objects into thirty groups and refers to the biblical story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot. Richard Wilson’s Butterfly (2003) is another recentantecedent to the crushed Fiat Project. After destroying a small Cessna with two bulldozers, Wilson then reconstructed and suspended the plane, before allowing it to crash to the floor.
In any given Project, Arad expands his ideas around a central core and then allows further experiments, new materials and techniques to take his work in new directions. Here, he has conducted virtual experiments using digital simulations of the process of crushinh cars, in collaboration with a firm specialising in crash and safety design and a post-production company for film and advertising. In the resulting film Slow Outburst (2013), the effects of the crushing process slowly appear on the body of a red Fiat 500, but without any visual force acting on the material, and then the procedure is reversed and the crumpled panels and shattered glass are slowly restored. Like the interwined processes of going forward and reversing in Arad’s new film, this exhibition looks at his work from both directions. An deven though Arad does not want a retrospective, he acknowledges that ‘’ he biggest source of raw material that you have…
It’s really your own previous work. When you work you choose to do something one way, and there are lots of other ways you could have done it, but you just think, well, maybe next time. And then later you do actually come back to it. ‘’
Lydia Yee
PRESSED FLOWER PETROL BLUE 2013
STUDY FOR PRESSED FLOWERS 2012
RODDY GIACOSA 2013
TINKER CHAIRS 1988
AFTER THOUGHT 2007
ROCKING BIG EASY 1991
FAKE STAMPED GENUINE 2013
WRINKLY FISH 1991
PROTOTYPE FOR D – SOFA 1994
PRESSED FLOWER YELLOW 2013
PRESSED FLOWER WHITE 2013
VIEWS OF THE BODYGUARD 2008
DIGITAL COLLAGE OF CRUSHED SCALE MODEL OF FIAT 500 – 2012
RON ARAD
Born in Tel Aviv in 1951, educated at the Jerusalem Academy
of Art and later at the Architectural Association in London, Ron Arad
co-founded with Caroline Thorman the design and production studio One Off in
1981 and later, in 1989, Ron Arad Associates architecture and design practice.
In 2008 Ron Arad Architects was established alongside Ron Arad Associates.
From 1994 to 1999 he established the Ron Arad Studio, design
and production unit in Como, Italy. He was Professor of Design Product at the
Royal College of Art in London up until 2009. Ron Arad was awarded the 2011
London Design Week Medal for design excellence and was became a Royal
Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2013.
Ron Arad’s constant experimentation with the possibilities
of materials such as steel, aluminium or polyamide and his radical
re-conception of the form and structure of furniture has put him at the
forefront of contemporary design and architecture.
Alongside his limited edition studio work, Arad designs for
many leading international companies including Kartell, Vitra, Moroso, Fiam,
Driade, Alessi, Cappellini, Cassina, WMF and Magis among many others.
Ron Arad has designed a number of Public Art pieces, most
recently the Vortext in Seoul, Korea, and the Kesher Sculpture at Tel Aviv
University.
http://www.ronarad.co.uk/press/biography/
