09/02/2015

Konstantin Grcic: The Future Landscape for Design

Konstantin Grcic is one of the most influential designers of our time. Serious and functional, unwieldy and occasionally disconcerting, his works combine an industrial aesthetic with experimental, artistic elements. Many of Grcic’s creations, such as Chair_One (2004) or the Mayday lamp (1999), are widely acclaimed as design classics. Opened this Sunday at Z33, “Konstantin Grcic – Panorama”, developed in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum, is the largest solo exhibition on Grcic and his work to date.

Specifically for this exhibition, Grcic has developed several largescale installations rendering his personal visions for life in the future: a home interior, a design studio and an urban environment. These spaces stage fictional scenarios confronting the viewer with the designer’s inspirations, challenges and questions, as well as placing Grcic’s works in a greater social context. The highlight of these presentations is a 30-metre long panorama that depicts an architectural landscape of the future. A fourth area of the exhibition takes a focused look at Grcic’s daily work. This section presents many of his finished objects, but also prototypes, drawings and background information along with artefacts that have inspired Grcic – from an old teapot and an early Apple computer to works by Marcel Duchamp, Gerrit Rietveld and Enzo Mari. In the shift of perspectives between larger and smaller scales, the exhibition demonstrates how design is more than mere problem solving for Grcic, but a highly complex process that integrates coincidences, ruptures, chance discoveries and a profound engagement with the visual culture of our time.

With “Panorama”, Grcic enters new territory. Never before has he so fundamentally reflected on his own work and so thoroughly disclosed his own understanding of design in general. The exhibition is based on an extensive analysis of current technological shifts, innovations and upheavals in contemporary design. It was developed over three years of close collaboration between Grcic, Vitra Design Museum and Z33. The result is a striking presentation of narrative and visual intensity, situated on the cusp between present and future, reality and fiction.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Vitra Design Museum 
06/02/2015

Is Haute Couture being lost?

Haute Couture has been the heart of the fashion world since C.F. Worth made his designs known to the world. From then on, the artistry of Haute Couture have evolved, yet it is still today regarded as the highest form of fashion. It is all about tailoring to perfection and creating the magical substance that fuels the abstract dream that fashion may sometimes be. Just last week couturiers showcased their creations for the fashion world to see.

Viktor & Rolf: The fashion duo presented pieces that seemed to come from a surreal floral dream. The flower embellished dresses in voluminous A-line shapes induced the effect as if they were drawn on, emphasizing the feeling of surrealism. Adding different oversized straw hats and daydreaming of spring was given a more visual shape.

Stéphane Rolland: Transparency might make difficult colors not only beautiful but also thought provoking: a lesson learned at Stéphane Rolland. The first looks were reminiscent of an alien ballet dancer echoing the runway. A long sleeve leather top referencing a futuristic look was balanced with the softness of a see-through full ballet skirt adorned with, what from a far looked like, coral or branches.

Dior & Chanel: Karl Lagerfeld and Raf Simons stayed true to the essence of their design house’s aesthetic. Chanel showcased different takes on the Chanel suit but it was their final piece that truly stopped the show. A long flowy, yet stiff, white layered dress paired with an over the top hat made the model stand out as a chic cupcake. Dior paired 1950s glamour with the 1960s mood. Simons showed a surprising look, that paired a black spattered raincoat with purple latex stockings. Playing with both colors and adding unexpected elements of sex appeal to an otherwise modest look.

Haute Couture is to be admired for its impeccable craftsmanship and pushing the limits of fashion. It’s the essence that keeps things fresh. The past couple of seasons it seemed to have rendered into a bit of a slump, something that is partially now changing tune. Couture is engrained in fashion and isn’t going anywhere. It is likely that focus on minimalism and prêt à porter will generate more creative ways, finding outlet in the Haute Couture of tomorrow.

Victoria Edman 
05/02/2015

Lamija Suljevic: Bosnian Craft Meets Modern Technology

Lamija Suljevic is an upcoming Swedish designer with roots in Sarajevo. The mix of the two cultures has inspired her design in different ways as she tries to unite the two cultures with the ambition of creating something unexpected and new. By Suljevic’s talented hands, traditional costumes from Sarajevo and modern fabrics which she relates to Sweden, merge, resulting in the strongest collection showed during Stockholm fashion week.

Suljevic’s A/W 2015 collection, as well as her previous work, carries a depth that not all designers menage to express. Her unique pieces, from laser cut out dresses to traditionally decorated but modern slitted pants, are all highly executed and decorated by hand. The time and effort put into the collection shows in every single piece sent down the runway. Suljevic really knows her craft and you can’t help but feel a vibe of haute couture even though we are far from Paris, both geographically and ideologically.

This collection is great in so many levels – the craft, the pieces and the personal inspiration behind the collection – it embraces the mix of cultural references and shows how she successfully united them. Her work is a proof of how fashion can unite and bring people and cultures together resulting in something more interesting and innovative than it otherwise would have become. The combination of the personal sources of inspiration and the dark and in the same time beautiful pieces, all created with amazing craft, makes this collection a story about life’s deepest and greatest moments. The sparkly and black pieces seem to be a reflection of the fine line between them both, and how fast it all can change. In other words, it is a collection about life.

Hanna Cronsjö 
05/02/2015

The Stage and the Actors: Fashion Mix at Palais de la Porte Dorée

Italo Calvino, in his book The Invisible Cities, states that the delight one can have from a town lays not in its wonders, but in the answers it can give to the questions the person asks to the city itself. In many cases, these answers are so unforeseen and, still, glaring that they immediately get to the core, shaping thoughts, feelings and, of course, practices. Among all the mythical places of fashion, Paris surely holds a privileged position, and this has been true since the very beginning of the modern concept of fashion itself. The stories of fashion with Paris as its main scenery are many; perhaps, any fashion story has something to say about the city. Still, if we read them carefully, it becomes clear that most of the time, Paris is not only the setting, but an actual character, actively interacting with other actors on the scene. Fashion Mix, the exhibition now on view at Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, showcases the many stories of the fascination – love stories, we would dare to say – that foreign designers have had and continue to have with Paris, confirming its legendary role as the main stage of the global history of fashion.

A mutual relationship, that between international designers and the city, established a style so diverse and declinable, but always ascribable to the ‘Parisian Flair’ – the so-called Allure Parisienne. The exhibition wants to be a journey between all the ramblings that have brought designers from all over the world from being foreigners to become part – and sometimes symbols – of the city and its established imaginary. The exhibition, curated by Olivier Saillard, stages nearly a hundred objects, between clothes and accessories, most of them coming from an almost entirely renovated archive of the Palais Galliera, drawing an imaginary line between Charles Frederick Worth to Martin Margiela, Cristobal Balenciaga to Riccardo Tisci, passing through Schiaparelli, Galliano, Miyake, Yamamoto and many others. It also counts many unseen materials, such as registration documents, official files, naturalisation applications, coming from both private and public archives, gathered by the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration.

Fashion Mix stands as a manifesto of the enormous value of cross-pollination and influences within design practice, which becomes complex, and thus more interesting, when peppered with the clash of habits and cultures. Paris comes out from the exhibition as the active host of these movements, convoluted and simple, and the real enhancer of their effects: in the late 1880s, the city saw the dawning of the Couture by hand of an Englishman, as if the city had somehow called for it. The city still is home to the most established and awaited of the fashion weeks, calling up designers from all over the world to show their own collections, but above all to design for its historical fashion houses. Clothes, with their object nature, have the power to hold together as many references and memories as the person who designed them has been able to instil. Here, clothes are the material witnesses of the inevitable influence of Paris upon creative minds with the most different backgrounds, education, tastes, tempers. A prove that the city has given incredible responses to all of their questions.

Marta Franceschini 
04/02/2015

Reframing History: Bouroullec for Artek

A myriad of de-contextualised references, historical re-appropriations and insufferable, outright arrogant replicas characterize the sphere of product design today, blatantly pointing to the practice’s complex relation with its history. In fact, historical contextualisation and awareness is one design’s greatest challenges today. Can contemporary design – especially furniture and interior design – propose an authentic vision for the future of the practice? Or is everything we see just a re-interpretation of modernist canons, re-packaged and re-vamped for a contemporary audience, oblivious to the discipline’s past? Can these questions even be addressed through practice, rather than through theoretical discourse?

Rather than plainly ignoring or subverting design history, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s new project for Artek, the Finnish company founded by Alvar Aalto that has shaped design history, claims to acknowledge historical influence and Aalto’s insurmountable legacy. Kaari Collection comprises a series of products that emerge as a direct result of the company’s history: “Both wood and steel banding are traditional materials and a fundamental part of the Artek heritage – however, they have never before been combined in this way,” Ronan and Erwan state. A well-coordinated series of everyday objects – a table, a shelving system and working desks – supposedly follows Artek’s tradition of bent metal and laminated wood, re-proposing it for contemporary aesthetic sensibility and, above all, commercial viability.

The Bouroullec’s deliberate use of historical references does not, in any way, reform contemporary design’s position towards history. On the contrary, seen within a broader context of Artek’s recent evolution – the company was acquired by Vitra in 2013 – it says more about design’s commercial strategy rather than constructively contributing to its debated relationship with the past. In this specific case, design history is used as a means of validating projects that, in an over-saturated market, might not have any success or even reason to exist. Moreover, it poses a critical question about sustainability: if, as the Bouroullecs say, the table as typology of object has only undergone minor alterations over the past 100 years, is there really anything left to add? Perhaps a more thorough reading of design history might be the right antidote to such superficial appropriations, and just what contemporary design practice desperately needs.

Rujana Rebernjak 
03/02/2015

Daily Tips: PJ Harvey at Somerset House

Recording in Progress is a project conceived by PJ Harvey, in collaboration with Artangel and Somerset House, for the Inland Revenue’s former staff gymnasium and rifle range in the recently opened New Wing at Somerset House. Harvey has chosen to record her ninth album inside an architectural installation designed by Somerset House-based Something & Son. The structure, a recording studio in the form of an enclosed box, has one-way glazing, displaying PJ Harvey, her band, producers and engineers as a mutating, multi-dimensional sound sculpture. Visitors experience exactly what is happening at a particular moment in the studio, as Harvey and musicians, together with her longstanding producers Flood and John Parish, go through the creative process of recording an album of songs.

The Blogazine 
03/02/2015

Roger Steffens’ Countercultural Compendium

The Family Acid is an exciting new book, published by SUN and presented at this year’s LA Art Book Fair, that collects an extensive series of photographs taken by Roger Steffens throughout his life. Steffens started making photographs while serving in the Psychological Operations division in Vietnam, a time in which he began a journalistic record of his surroundings marked by an increasingly psychedelic lens. Spanning 40 years of Steffens’ life and culled from over 40,000 chrome photographs, The Family Acid presents his often transcendent vision and life as a psychedelic pioneer on the order of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson beginning with his work in Vietnam and moving through his ever revolving circle of friends and characters made up of rastas, beatniks, musicians, artists, gonzo journalists, his family, and himself. The portraits, scenes, and freewheeling experimentation with the medium of photography coalesce into a body of work that both parallels and defines the countercultural ethos of Steffens’ generation.

The Blogazine – Images courtesy of SUN 
02/02/2015

Making Fleeting Art

Making art is a process; therefore it involves considerations and choices, besides a dose of good instinct and mere talent. An essential part of this process is reflecting about materials used to create an artwork, whose properties can affect and often determine the way it is conceived and physically built, as well as how it eventually looks. Handling any material requires a specific know-how and every material owns a distinctive semantics and language that contribute to express the artist’s poetics. Stones, marbles, bronzes are all intended to endure forever and recall concepts of stability and strength. Most of the time we think about art as something thought to last as much as possible in order to get its intrinsic value recognised, but that’s not true for some modern and contemporary artists, who focus their research on the transience and deterioration.

With a great originality in choosing the constituents destined to be destroyed, transformed or simply vanish, such as perfume, gunpowder, chemical elements, animals, food and other organic matters, these artists challenge the established art world – actually their works are difficult to preserve and store, therefore being theoretically difficult to sell – to emphasize the ephemeral nature of life and the fragility of living beings. As already done by the Dada followed by European and American artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s, as well as the by now world famous movement of Arte Povera (literally poor art) and the Relational Art/Aesthetic of the ‘90s, these artists look into the concepts of Vanitas and Entropy reflecting on the instability and change through spiritual, religious and socially connoted acts and symbols exploited to result in more or less temporary creations. Here is the primordial energy of Joseph Beuys’ (b. 1921-1986, Germany) fat and eggs and artist’s shit by the brilliant Piero Manzoni (b.1933-1963, Italy); the carefully arranged explosions of Roman Signer (b. 1938, Switzerland) and the voltmeter-linked potatoes by Victor Grippo (1936-2002, Argentina).

The food is very often a key factor in this type of art and we experienced it in several, original ways, which could be appealing or disgusting. There are many examples of food oriented artworks, like the case of the Bed made with slices of white bread by Antony Gormley (b. 1950, UK), or the most recent Chocolate Crucifixes by Egle Rakauskaite (b. 1967, Lithuania) both somewhat related to the Eucharist; or again the candies by Félix Gonzáles-Torres (b.1957, Cuba – 1996, US) and the chocolate used by Jana Sterbak (b. 1955, Czech Republic) to transform the only heavy-duty elements of human body – the bones – into something fleeting. Alchemy-inspired experiments, which avail themselves of chemical processes and natural elements like combustion, evaporation, oxidation, fire, water, wind and earth, mix up with leaves, branches, insects, spices or perfumes, guide the research of artists like Dennis Openheim (b. 1938-2011, US), Gilberto Zorio (b. 1944, Italy), Pier Paolo Calzolari (b. 1943, Italy) and younger Anya Galloccio (b.1963, UK) with her sweeps of roses under glass, Damien Hirst (1965, UK) and his animals in formaldehyde, Wim Delvoye (b.1965, Belgium) and his excrement machine, Tom Friedman (b.1965, US) and Urs Fischer (b. 1973, CH) with their figures of sugar, toothpaste and wax up to the scented metal by Roger Hiorns (1975, UK). The list could be much longer.

The flow of time, randomness, growth and consumption are some of the numerous meanings behind the act of making perishable art: constantly explored issues that hold their deep interest and seem not to use up their expressive solutions.

Monica Lombardi 
30/01/2015

Maison&Objet 2015: From Crafting to Making

“Birthday cakes meet birthday plates” is the unusual claim that Maison&Objet has chosen to celebrate its twenty years of activity. The anniversary represents the culmination of an acknowledgment: not only the Parisian kermesse is the major symbol of French Touch in the domestic fields of design and decoration, but it has also gained the status of a not-to-be-missed rendez vous for the international design community (we are indeed speaking about the most hardened competitor of the Salone del Mobile, aren’t we?).

Two indicators measure its state of health. First, in 2015 the tradeshow expands its foreign presence and inaugurates the first edition of its American brand-extension, Maison&Objet Americas, which follows the opening of the Maison&Objet Asia branch in Singapore last year. Secondly, previews stop to be a monopoly of the Milan Design Week, and get more and more numerous at Parc Villepeint: De La Espada inaugurates the personal brands of Autoban and Luca Nichetto, La Chance presents the new pieces of the Art Decò star Jacques Emiles Ruhlman, Matali Crasset unveils her concrete furniture collection, Multifacet by Concrete LCDA, Ligne Roset re-edits 1953 Daybed by Pierre Paulin, while Jean Louis Iratzoki launches bio plastic chair Chair Kuskoa Bi, just to mention the most accomplished results.

Beside this host of proposals, a stimulating contribution is offered by the exhibition that the fair forecasting department, Maison&Objet Observatory, has organized to enlighten the emerging trends that are having a wider impact on design culture. The show’s title – “Make”, further declined in three sections “Nature Made”, “Human Made” and “Techno Made” – seems at first sight a delayed proposal if compared to the multiple initiatives that have already introduced the wider public to fab culture (“Open Design Arcipelago” in Palazzo Clerici still remains unequalled). Nevertheless, this approach à la français is an effective attempt to trace a red line between the world of Makers and that of Crafters. Often confused with one another, these two domains have different roots – notably engineering and handcraftsmanship -, but show an increasing continuity as they all conceive design as the open outcome of a conceptual and material process rather than the search of a finished, given product. The works of Erik Klarenbeek, Lex Pott, Sebastian Cox, Seraina Lareina clearly disclose a common tension toward aesthetic uncertainty and, thus far, seem to burst with the most vital and inspiring energy spotted at the fair.

Giulia Zappa 
30/01/2015

The Talented: Ximon Lee

Ximon Lee is this year’s winner of the prestigious H&M Design Award which granted him a unique runway show during Stockholm Fashion Week where he displayed his AW 2015 collection. For Lee, a recent graduate of Parsons New School for Design in New York, this must be a dream come true. The link between this recently announced collaboration with the Swedish brand and Lee’s academic background is particularly interesting, as the collection for H&M partly draws upon his graduation collection at Parsons: they shares the same ambitious desire to make a statement through design. However, the references it displays are actually much broader and rich. A Polish documentary from 2005, “The Children of Leningradsky”, is translated into garments through a process of recollection and reconstruction from the designer’s own childhood. The memory of his earlier life – the grey architecture typical of the Soviet cities and colorless winters pictured in the documentary – form both a romance and a fascination, while oversized pieces and complex layers portrayed in the movie, left clear traces on his design aesthetics.

Nevertheless, it would be reductive to define Lee’s collection only in terms of oversized shapes, as it is far more experimental – especially considering the commercially demanding client. Lee’s work consciously abolishes the dynamics of H&M’s widespread and often flattening fashion machine, by introducing peaces that are unlikely and challenging, full of refreshing architectural references and over-shaped, boxy silhouettes with sweet messages softening some pieces. Lee himself says the whole collection is very personal and lays him close to heart, and such an emotional involvement stands out and makes his work authentic. Seen within a fashion week that has been much about showing clothes and less about telling stories and ideas, it is hopeful to see there is still hope for an alternative view of fashion.

Hanna Cronsjö 
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