Ten years after Max Bruinsma’s controversial piece 'Every Artist is a Designer' in this magazine declaring that henceforth designers would set the norms and artists only had to follow, Louise Schouwenberg takes stock again. It turns out that the roles have reversed in the meantime.
In recent decades, the design world has brimmed over with self-confidence. In the well-to-do world, design has increasingly become part of a visual culture with almost no demarcated domains. Beyond functionality, beyond comfort and even beyond lifestyle and taste – where design seemed to hold primacy – designers emphasized the added value of their products: metaphoric value, symbolic value, and their social and cultural significance. It was an approach on the part of design that flawlessly connected with the ambitions of visual artists and which brought the designers the artistic recognition they had long coveted.
That the design disciplines began showing greater and greater kinship to the fine arts was an international phenomenon, but there was a striking number of designers from the Netherlands who played a role in this. This can to a large degree be explained by the professional practice of Dutch designers, who as far back as the 1970s demonstrated major similarities to the professional practices of visual artists, as a result of several typically Dutch factors. A shortage of industries in which designers could collaborate, a favourable environment of grants and subsidies, as well as design education affiliated with education in the fine arts, meant that Dutch product designers, sooner than their international counterparts, began designing on their own initiative and with that, basing their work on issues that personally fascinated them. Jewellery design took the lead back in the 1960s, followed by graphic design, where 'authored design' became a familiar concept in the 1970s, followed by fashion design in the 1980s. In product design, it took a little longer for a comparable attitude to gain ground. When that finally happened in the late 1980s, however, the impact was at least as great. By the beginning of the new millennium, conceptual design by Dutch designers was internationally acknowledged as one of the most important innovations in design. It is no coincidence that there are a remarkable number of new concepts and phrases in Dutch to describe the atypical approach of a field that had hitherto, since its inception, been in the service of function. They include auteurdesign (‘authored design’), autonoom design (‘autonomous design’), vrije vormgeving (‘free design’) and beeldende vormgeving (‘visual design’). In the English-speaking world, the only commonly used new term is 'design art', which became popular around 2004.
The fact that Dutch design received high scores in the international media and exhibition circuit also worked its way into the politics of The Hague. In 1999, when Rick van der Ploeg, then Secretary of State for culture and media, declared ‘cultural entrepreneurship' to be the cornerstone of his policy, that seemed to mesh perfectly with the professional profile of designers – a wondrous mix of cultural aspirations and willingness to serve – but far less well with the profile of the autonomous fine artist.[1]
It is in this context that we should place an article written just over ten years ago for METROPOLIS M (N°1 – 2000) by design critic Max Bruinsma, entitled 'Every Artist Is a Designer: A Plea for Design-Critical Practice'.[2] Although Bruinsma took his examples from graphic design, he also argued that product designers were those holding the best credentials in the visual culture of the day: ‘The designed environment of the consumer culture, including the art made within that culture, is at this moment probably the highest (i.e. most complex) cultural expression of Western man. Designers appear, perhaps from a stimulating rear-guard position, to understand the new condition more often and better than artists or art critics. They use the images, metaphors and media available to them in a well-substantiated relationship to the context within which they must operate.’ Bruinsma spoke about the integration of the art and design disciplines, whereby every artist was inevitably transformed into a designer, albeit a designer who did not understand the art of the craft as well as would a designer specifically trained for the task.
Cultural Entrepreneur
Bruinsma did have a point. At the beginning of the new millennium, the changing visual culture had consequences for artists, who could no longer allow themselves to sit back contentedly and congratulate themselves on their autonomous position in a museum culture. As a result, many artists rightly looked to the strategies employed by designers and their visions on the contexts in which products functioned. They took a lesson from that, as one might expect from people working in creative disciplines. It was not only the spirit of the times that challenged them to do this. In the Netherlands, one also felt the pressure from government authorities, who applied a very specific notion to the challenge of engaging context in one's work. Until the late 1990s, funding organizations had primarily supported 'artistic innovation'. However, once the term 'cultural entrepreneur' became the buzzword, artists would be out singing for their suppers if they could not demonstrate that their artistic efforts were backed by solid sales and exhibitions of their work.
A new concept was added to this in 2002, which would likewise assume mythic proportions, notably for cultural policymakers, when the American economist Richard Florida proclaimed to the world that the creative class, or creative industry, was responsible for economic progress.[3] Part of the art world embraced these ideas, while others attacked them. The functional art disciplines, which fit better into the ideal profile that government was imposing on the arts, were greeted with some reluctance. That is shown, amongst other things, in the ensuing acceptance policies of international art fairs, which to date only sparingly accepted contemporary design or did so in the form of smaller satellite fairs. Object Rotterdam, for example, is on a greatly reduced scale, in the shadow of its big brother, Art Rotterdam.
On the other hand, designers took advantage of every possible opportunity to present themselves on the platforms of the arts and collaborate with artists. With the statement, 'every artist is a designer,' Bruinsma polemically employed a clever twist, a well-tested method of throwing a fox into the henhouse, or trying to push forward a desired development, just as such concepts as 'cultural entrepreneur' and 'creative industry' were intended to generate a specific development in the art world. For the government, these concepts were not only key to cultural policy, but also to urban development and professional education. It was not art by the hand of the Dutch artist, nor the clever technical inventions of hard-core industrial designers that was pushed as prototypical for a successful cultural expression from Dutch soil, but rather the Dutch design that so closely approximated art.
Artistic Recognition
But are these assumptions true? Can the success of a few, which moreover primarily took place in the media, be attributed to the entire discipline? Is Dutch design now truly the wunderkind that has successfully created a fruitful relationship between culture and economy, while moreover productively addressing the themes of our times? And is a 'design-critical practice' the most desirable practice, for artists as well as designers? The notes in the margins, the comments, the clauses following the statements say a great deal. In the final sentence of his essay, Bruinsma wrote, ‘[Even if] every artist has at heart become a designer, not every designer makes art.’ This reservation is crucial, because it implicitly underscores the independent value of art. Ten years later, we now find Bruinsma’s reserve rather mildly formulated. In these ten years, it has not been the artists who have revealed themselves as designers, but the product designers who developed increasingly autonomous ambitions and preferred to perform on the stages of the fine arts – the media, the museums and the art fairs – rather than at the venues where functional objects were expected to pursue their usual existence.
What designers sought in the art world was not just artistic recognition for their own professions. They also sought freedom, autonomy, the reflection and discourse that were so sorely missed in the design world. Eventually, a percentage of them sought – and not without result – the wealth generated by art dealers, and they in turn motivated the upcoming designers being produced by the design schools. The recognition initially came primarily from the media, but it was followed by the museums, where presentations of the vanguard of the design world became a fixed part of museum programming. In the new decade, the developments followed in rapid succession as art dealers took interest in unusual design products, the so-called limited editions, later also referred to as design art. Initially, this trend concerned existing designs, prototypes by (preferably deceased) designers of undisputed stature, such as the Eames couple or Marc Newson. Then experimental advance studies by top international designers began attracting attention. Finally, more and more product designers began developing their objects specifically for the art trade, sometimes even as the sole focus of their professional practices.
Design consequently became attractive for speculative deals, something that was enthusiastically received by designers, including – or perhaps we should say even – Dutch designers. The critical self-reflection of the first generation of conceptual designers was silenced as their products were – without a peep – being absorbed into the greedy world of lifestyle products. In the 1990s, conceptual designs were revealing the dilemmas of a field that was being caught in the grip of commercialization and media representation. After a decade of this, the pressure on every new product to give a meaningful answer to the legitimacy question ‘What is design?’ (inspired by conceptual art) gave way to a lust for form that also characterized design art by non-Dutch designers: eccentric sculptural objects made from exceedingly expensive materials and sold in limited editions, which guaranteed high prices.[4] How autonomous, how devoid of context can design become?
This is of course a rather charged depiction. Dutch designers have contributed many new insights into the changing relationships between artisanship and design, and the distinctive characteristics of handcrafted and industrial production. Even today, countless designs, which as yet are produced in limited editions, can be cited as important advance studies that subject design-related subjects to profound investigation and scrutiny. Hella Jongerius's 2009 Frog Table, for example, exemplifies research that reaches far deeper than that iconic object at first might seem to suggest. The frog leaps almost completely free of the table, but is unmistakably doomed to remain a decorative element. In the same way that decorative patterns from the past did, the frog mediates between us and the table, thereby touching on Jongerius’s ongoing investigation into the relationship between man and the things with which we surround ourselves each and every day.[5] The work of other designers who likewise work from their own investigative issues, including Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken and Anna Lindgren of the Swedish design studio Front and the Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, known for their striking artistic installations, and the Dutch designers Jurgen Bey, Bertjan Pot, Maarten Baas and Joris Laarman, are done an injustice if we refer to their work simply as design art. Their experimental journeys always respond to questions that are important to design and, sooner or later, they seek industrial manufacturers able to expand the distribution of their work. There are also those designers who are indeed less concerned with wide-scale production, but whose design choices nonetheless explicitly remain related to the world of functional objects, such as Nacho Carbonell and Julia Lohmann. Only when (often young) designers exclusively follow aesthetic fascinations, with no concern whatsoever for the relevance of their work in the wider world or for their profession as a whole, can we speak of a commercial and no longer a cultural phenomenon. The thought that art and design had become mutually interchangeable quantities belongs to the overestimation of their own artistic powers on the part of such designers, who have only been brought back down to earth by the recent economic crisis and the collapse of the art and design boom.
Fruitful Frictions
In recent years, it is primarily at the design schools where the true artistic or innovative value of design art is being subjected to far-reaching debate. The crisis has generated two separate movements. One group of designers still hopes for a speedy economic recovery, so they can follow in the footsteps of their illustrious design art predecessors (Jaime Hayón, Studio Job, Demakersvan, Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny). Diametrically opposed to these desires are the ambitions of primarily young designers who have embraced the crisis in order to think about the opportunities and challenges of their field, which in their eyes has lost touch with its true principles. In their opinion, design art has not led to fruitful collaborative practice that reaches beyond their discipline. They feel that by flirting with autonomous art, designers forget where their primary strength lies, namely in their ability to reflect on the context in which things evolve and in which they will function, their insight into the identity and meaning of the media, the materials, the techniques with which products are produced, and their insights into the needs and themes of the world for which creative solutions must be sought (including ecologically and psychologically sustainable production methods). Designers need to substantiate complex social processes. Some even believe that modernist democratic ideals have to be brought back to the forefront. For them, insights from other fields (the fine arts, architecture, social sciences, hard-core technical sciences, etc.) are an inspiration, certainly not a reason to change their discipline or their craft.
This vision brings subtlety and nuance to the debate on the cross-disciplined, horizon-expanding practices that have been the subject of so much fervent debate in the last ten years, primarily because it was all expected to lead to cultural innovation. Working in multi-disciplined fashion is indeed not served by a melting together of different domains, but by awareness of the differences between them. The friction of ‘rubbing up against the arts’ presupposes clarity about the barrier one is rubbing up against, the frontier that people are attempting to push back. It is precisely this friction that makes exploring the frontiers so meaningful. It is therefore not even relevant whether the creations of fine artists or designers are visually distinguishable from one another. The question of whether they generate meaning and clarity about the context in which those meanings take on significance is what really counts. The perspective from which we are observing things is always what guides the way we receive them, and how we experience and appreciate them.
One good example is the Merry-Go-Round Coat Rack (2008) designed by Studio Wieki Somers for the foyer of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. It was inspired by an old miner's coat rack, an anonymous and ingenious design (based on a mundane problem) that has since fallen out of use. The museum’s 'cloakroom' literally stands like a carousel in the entrance. On its ropes are coat hangers on which visitors can hang their coats and subsequently hoist them up in the air. The coats hang in full view of everyone, but clean and out of harm’s way (as was also the case for the mineworkers' jackets). Thanks to this interaction with the public, the carousel of jackets constantly changes form and colour and thereby becomes a reflection of the museum itself. Coincidentally or otherwise, since 2008, there has been a similar installation in the foyer of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Tief Unten Tag Hell (2008), created by artist Benjamin Bergmann (interestingly enough, ‘bergmann’ happens to be the German word for mine worker). The major difference from Somers’s installation is the way it is used. Bergmann's jackets hang high in the air. They are from unknown owners, not from coincidental visitors to the museum. In their complete lack of function, the empty articles of clothing seem to remind us of people who have died, who perhaps suffered terrible experiences. Raised up from the catacombs of the mine shafts, they refer to death, while the jackets at the Boijmans Van Beuningen refer to life.
Is one of these installations more successful, more beautiful or interesting than the other? Both primarily present unusual, and therefore especially captivating, meanings and interpretations, which could only evolve in their own specific professional disciplines. Where the meaning of the installation by Studio Wieki Somers rises beyond its functionality, Bergmann's literal interpretation of the old miners' coat rack finds its very meaning in its uselessness, there in the twilight zone between the museum entryway and its galleries.
Autonomy and Design
Artists are freer in showing dilemmas in their work than designers are. They ask open and direct questions. For this reason, artists can make more powerful fundamental statements, reflect more extreme visions and inspire others with these visions, undoubtedly in the (not so unhappy) awareness that they will have to make do with the satisfaction that their efforts won’t generate broader social effect. Designers seek solutions, answers to questions. It is here that the strength of their profession lies, a profession that consequently concerns itself with both the most essential and the most trivial issues of life.
With their answers, sometimes designers (also) arrive at the venues of the fine arts, because of the added value of the work, and sometimes they function (exclusively) on the platforms intended for design. Sometimes designers are asked to present their vision on major social issues, but far more often, it is all about smaller questions, or questions to which we might expect answers to function almost invisibly in seemingly indistinct environments. From artists, they can learn to base those questions on personal fascinations and to look beyond self-evident solutions. Autonomy and the issues of a functional discipline are superbly able to be mutually supportive, as long as they know where they are starting from and where they will ultimately land.
Louise Schouwenberg is a design critic and curator. Since April 2010, she is associate professor design theory at the Design Academy in Eindhoven
Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields
Notes
- In 1999, Van der Ploeg presented his policy brief, Cultuur als confrontatie: Uitgangspunten voor het cultuurbeleid 2001–2004 (Culture as Confrontation: Principles for Cultural Policy 2001–2004) in which he argued on behalf of the artist as entrepreneur, who ensured his own public distribution and ultimately his own upkeep.
- Max Bruimsma's article can be found at www.maxbruinsma.nl
- Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
- The term 'design art' was primarily propagated by galleries and auction houses in order to avoid the confrontation with functional art or handicraft, terms that were somewhat outdated and could be expected to generate less success and less money.
- Frog Table can be seen at the retrospective exhibition Hella Jongerius: Misfit, to be held from 13 November 2010 through 13 February 2011 at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.
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