Entries Tagged 'DÉCOR' ↓

Well here’s the story. Iconophilia has discovered the hideous petuniae are funded by Canberra’s organisation of property owners, CBD Ltd. Despite their self-congratulatory spin, somebody must be in charge, some arm of government must have thought, what a great idea! Let’s have four months of naff, eight months of empty rings. (Despite their assurance: “On completion of the project the Planter People will totally remove all installations.” Well they didn’t did they?)  So let ‘em at it! There are 1300 plastic potties in all. Money must be burning a hole in their pockets. And the public loves it, so they say. They’ve got one totally legitimate email to prove it…

In their own words:

“Each Year Canberra CBD Limited contracts the Planter People [it's like living in PhotoshopWorld] to festoon the City with flowers. There are 350 locations (1300 baskets) from Hobart Place, along Northbourne Avenue through City Walk, Petrie Plaza and Ainslie Avenue. The flowers are installed early November and stay in place until after the Canberra Festival in March.

“The public love this addition to the City and following email is an example of comments we have received:

“You mentioned your plans to beautify the CBD and I keep meaning to send this note telling you what a great job you are doing. The flower baskets are sensational.

Congratulations on the wonderful addition of flower planters to the inner city areas in Canberra. What a breath of fresh air it is to see these wonderful colours everywhere”.

This is not a commercial. This is. Your Iconophile has been techo-gazumped. Please explain. The invisible readymade below (Maquette for an Invisible Sculpture) was first exhibited in DECOR in Canberra, in August 1993, (in a show curated by Kevin Henderson).

The specific function of a watering-can seems to have stimulated designers to stretch the limits of plasticity. But how does it feel to water your plants with an award-winning icon? Especially one made of extruded plastic? Dutch-born Monika Mulder‘s award winning Vallö (2001) (above) is currently part of Democratic Design: IKEA at the International Design Museum in Munich.

The great Danish designer Erik Lehmann Hansen seems to have seen the humble watering can as an excuse for a playful exercise in style, echoing the geometric purism of his predecessors. But somehow he has exaggerated those characteristics to produce a postmodern object which seems to make fun of its origins: part oil-can, part Constructivism. I haven’t been able to discover the date for Lehmann’s watering can (Rosti #5173), but Lehmann was Rosti’s chief designer from the mid-70s. Although most of his classic designs were cast in melamine, his watering can is extruded silver thermo-plastic.

If the too-much-plastic thing is worrying all you 21st century readers, now check out this nifty award-winning recycliste design by French-born Swiss designer Nicolas Le Moigne seen here at designboom… His minimal use of plastic, part-recycled, maximises functionality, minimises consumption.

…how many April firsts do we have this year? How many Halloweens? The CT’s report last Sunday claims the Chief Minister chose this $90,000 beauty himself to enhance the “Latin American Quarter” which is, apparently, at the corner of Childers and Rudd Streets, to the west of Civic. Even the artist admits “it’s a tongue in cheek” work… And according to the lucky artist, our CM is demonstrating “just how pro-active Jon Stanhope has been”. He would, wouldn’t he? He’s probably already been paid once for the Sydney gig, and he’s already working on a commission across the Lake (we specialise in multiple commissions in this town). It’s a revealing article. Being unaware of a Latin American Quarter so close to his place of work, your Iconophile investigated the address as he drove home. He can now assure you the Quarter will be enhanced by many thousand percent by the addition of this symbol of public taste. Coming off a very low base. See the 360 degree view below to experience the compelling virtual ambience of The Quarter.

You don’t need to look far to find the most extravagantly wasteful design paradigm in contemporary architectural practice: the ecological aesthetic effect. Just like the fad for wings on the bums of suburban peoplemovers (limited by law to 110kph), in Canberra the contemporary office building sports flamboyant enhancements just for the sake of appearance. But worse, they pretend to be useful…

The ACT Magistrate’s Court (Cox Architects) sports a giant corrugated iron tank on its roof. What on earth was the architect thinking? This is how we harvest water? Answer: it’s a fence which hides all the messy bits. Or it’s a reference to suburban vernacular. Either way, surely this is no place for gratuitous humour. Or does it signal that all those who enter this place will take a bath? Bad humour.

Just down the road, the #7 London Circuit building (Woods Bagot) faces east. It sports a massive loggia that looks as if it might control the fall of sunlight into the upper floors of the building. Except it faces the wrong way, and, surprise, the sunlight falls on the rooftop service structure. It’s highly decorative, “designed to make a strong visual statement”, but worse, it give the impression that the building is designed to be solar-efficient.

“Passive design measures were central to the design concept in a strategy to minimise energy consumption and create a healthy workplace. A veil folds from the roof to the west façade and increases the insulation to the western aspect of the building as well as reducing the extent of glazing to this façade. The roof was conceived to act as a fly roof does on a tent. It is open at its lower end and its form encourages the passage of air beneath it resulting in a further cooling of the shaded roof deck below.”

Roof deck, aka smoking area. Or for executive drinkies on Friday afternoon. Awarded a Highly Commended.

Similarly the ANU’s UniLodge (architect unknown) is peppered with brightly coloured decorative elements which do no more than modulate the surface of the otherwise box-form building. Does it have any effect on the fall of sunlight on the western wall? Minimal. Again, it fakes solar-efficiency.

Am I alone in feeling overwhelmed by the proliferation of the Morandi effect/affect in contemporary art? Despite her own acknowledgement and admiration for Morandi – and there’s nothing wrong with acts of homage – the work of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott attracts the most attention. The current exhibition, at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, is in a small room raked by the bright light of a Canberra winter, with about 20 of GHP’s trademark still life ensembles, all encased in rather clinical plastic vitrines.  Unfortunately, in this display, it is as if the air, the space itself, has been sucked out of these plastic boxes, such that the potential of these forms to make music with each other has been vacuumed away into silence. Each grouping of beautifully formed and glazed ceramic wares, sometimes so clustered together that the virtual frame between them gets a bit fuzzy, now seems so arbitrary it has become more like the exercise of taste than some magical tension of forms in space. And there’s too many of them. You look and try to understand what is meaningful about the arrangements – which tend to occupy a flattened linear space along their shelves – and you can’t help but make the pictorial associations with the master. But I don’t arrive at any conclusion! Are the spatial arrangements meaningful in any particular way? How are the variations between sets to be understood? How critical is the space between the elements of a set? And how would you feel if you owned a set, and got them muddled?

If Rosalie Gascoigne achieved her breakthrough as an artist by working away from the delicate art of ikebana – assisted in no small part by the discovery of the modernist grid – then it seems that GHP has moved in the opposite direction. It is as if by aspiring to the pictorial paradigm of the still life – thus effecting a conceptual migration from fine craft to fine art – she ends up detracting from her original aspirations to perfect form. But the Morandi effect is unrepeatable, except perhaps in the white heat of her kiln. And certainly not in the rather medical ambience of this display. Am I alone?

Here’s the conventional account:

GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT

20 August–20 September

“Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is an internationally celebrated artist whose years of dedication to ceramics and her deep study of particularly the oriental traditions of pottery have produced highly refined surfaces and forms and delicately nuanced glaze colours. Her harmonious still life groups are beautiful in themselves, but they also work to subvert at a very sophisticated level the old art/function dichotomy that has traditionally so divided the visual arts community. She does this by creating sets that have great wholeness and yet are composed of individual vessels that are manifestly both useable and of the highest aesthetic quality.”

Key words: celebrated, dedication, deep study, highly refined, delicately nuanced, harmonious, beautiful in themselves, subvert, sophisticated, the old art/function dichotomy, great wholeness, highest aesthetic quality.

was the title of Dick Hebdige’s classic study way back in 1979. Is this the clue to understanding our collective urge to decorate our (culturally various) means of transport?

When we try to interpret the decorative elements in this Harley at CraftACT‘s current exhibition Custom Made, (see Hogs @ Craft below) how much attention do we give to the epithets “tribal” and “goth” as signifiers of the particular style of the modifications made to this machine? And yet this is not (on reflection) outsider art – if by “outsider art” we understand the creative products of isolates working beyond the influence of culture or fashion. By contrast, this is primal, first-world, derivative, sub-cultural style. Difficult to interrogate. Compare with other cultures, other times…

There are even Vespa choppers… See the Lambretta and Vespa Scooter Club site and be amazed.

Threads emerge on iconophilia in unpredictable ways. Trees as icons? Bear with me. This time I’m suggesting heroic iconic status for a poor little tree of a completely different character to my previous post. In this instance we witness the architectural trope of planting exotic trees in the most artificial environments, as if somehow they’re going to thrive and enhance their surroundings. Just as Raquel Ormella has been photographing Canberra’s European trees at the end of their lives, so your iconophiliac has been noticing how little we’ve learnt at this end of the timescale. The trees above are planted in a asphalt-sealed geometric plinth which seems designed to shed water. Not that water falls from the sky any more. Good luck tree. We’ll report on your progress. This new building is at 16 Marcus Clarke, Acton. No architects acknowledged. But to give credit where credit is due, the eucalypts in the planter box out the front look as if their future is much more promising.

The trees below have struggled ever since they were planted at right angles to the sloping lawns in the nightmarish Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia. Vertical shoots are not permitted – although some survivors are evident in this photograph. This Cabinet of Cliches was designed by Room 4.1.3 (Richard Weller and Vladimir Sitta). Want to learn more? You can read the latter here on anger management and incontinence – ah! the internet’s a wonderful place.

True to its acronym the GOAD is the epitome of landscape design arrogance. It’s a profoundly uncomfortable site full of lame jokes – see their “Blue Poles” in the background. The other sad consequence (at the expense of its desired effects) is that “The Garden” has had to be modified time and again for Health and Safety reasons… Yet when there were suggestions the whole thing might be scrapped and redesigned, as Matthew Rimmer reports: “one of the designers … Richard Weller threatened to bring an action for a breach of the new moral right of integrity…” As my mother used to say: “goo-ah” (god help us all).

Compromise and insult. Even the NMA’s own account gets it all wrong…

Iconophilia invites readers to contribute to this thread. Examples of both the best and worst of the relationships architects have to trees are invited. In the meantime, you can lift your spirits by following the links the previous “if trees could speak” post has generated.

Iconophilia asks: Is this craft, design, or a kind of outsider art? Whatever you may decide, just watch Craft ACT expand its audience with the current exhibition. Custom Made is curated by Jas Hugonnet and, as they say, “ventures into the territory of large scale crafted objects”. Which translates as: there are five very shiny modified Harley Davidson craftworks currently on show at Craft ACT. Even their names are downright sexy: there are three Softails, a V-Rod and a Deuce.  And that’s the Harleys, not the staff…

Last night we heard the curator Jas Hugonnet in conversation with the owners of these labours of love: Corey Allen, Geoff Noakes, Ralph Smith (above, from Chopperworks) and Jon Desprez, who Jas credits with the original idea of the show. For the audience the discussion provided insights into the world of fetish objects the likes of which you’ve never seen in an art gallery before.

Some background and some challenges: eighty-five years ago the world of art was cracked open by the inclusion of “industrial design” within the high temple of modern art: MoMA. In 1934 New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented the art world with Machine Art curated by the architectural modernist Philip Johnson. The exhibits included everyday domestic and industrial items from clocks to chairs to insulators, machinery and laboratory glassware, all presented in the same manner as works of art. Ever since, Design has been a core element in their collecting policy. Inclusion in the collection grants instant iconic status.

(Newsday/Bruce Gilbert/2004)

And yes, since the Museum re-opened, there is now a motorbike on show… But it’s not a Harley. The question for us is, why not? Iconophilia suggests it’s the absolute stylelessness of this other V-twin, Phil Irving’s legendary 1949 Vincent Black Shadow, which is in keeping with the Eurocentric and Purist sensibility that has been a part of the MoMA experience ever since the 1930s.

Was it chosen because of the black-on-black colour scheme, or is it because Steve McQueen rode one? Or (scoop) was it because it was designed by an Australian? Up there with Fred Williams, Sid Nolan and a handful of other Australians in the MoMA collection, it was Phil Irving who went on to design the  Formula One engines used in the Repco-Brabhams which won the world championships of 1966 and 1967. When seen in the Philip Johnson Gallery, the explicit machine aesthetic of Irving’s Vincent is set against that other icon of post-war European design, the super-chic 1946 Cisitalia, the inspiration of the Italian maestro Pinin Farina (read the backstory). With the absolutely purist slipperiness of its form, this first supercar was the precursor to all the other aerodynamic European exotica of the following decades.

In their different ways, both these examples are arguably more “purist” than any of the rather clunky American “streamliners” since the 1930s, as seen here in downtown Dickson and in Dick Marquis’ shed on steamy Whidbey Island.

So why is the Vincent in the MoMA, and not an Indian or a Harley – like Jon’s Dooce? It has a lot to do with the MoMA’s rejection of the 1930s American designers who saw styling as a marketing strategy, as opposed to MoMA’s commitment to the science of pure form. It’s just a coincidence that the Vincent is also a V-twin, like the Harleys @ Craft. Whereas V-twins have been around since WW1, in the years when Britain ruled the motorcycle world, the Vincent was simply the best. And it was also truly innovative – one of the first motorbikes to use the engine block as a part of the chassis – which is probably why it found its way into the MoMA collection – and why it has acquired the iconic status which follows. It epitomises the logical appeal of form following function, without embellishment or stylisation. Just as we are invited to admire the ultimate functionalism of the Bell Helicopter that hovers above the stairwell.

By contrast, the Harley evokes a kind of sub-cultural rejection of mainstream sensibilities at almost every level. It’s pure style. The chopper’s iconic status as a post-Vietnam symbol of alienation was first made popular by Easy Rider (1969) and particularly in the popular imagination as an icon of the underworld (“Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead”) in Pulp Fiction (1994) – and now it has been institutionalised by its inclusion in Vietnam commemorative marches along Anzac Parade. But subculture has no place at the MoMA – so the Harley Davidson has to make do with its own Museum in Milwaukee.

The way these examples have evolved around the original form of the Harley reflects the contemporary nexus between nostalgia and the consumer capacities of the Baby Boomer generation, and this historical conjunction has resulted in a new stage in the development of the Harley icon. The prosperity of the past decade has seen the Harley Davidson Company experience its own boom and bust. But if you’ve got deep pockets, you can still select from a myriad of variations off the showroom floor, and create your own unique version in a process called “factory customising”. Yet in technological terms, the Harley is an anachronism. Specialising in its own noisy and ecologically incorrect big V-twin motor, the formula is one of elaboration and variation rather than radical technological advance. Whereas the V-twin Ducati leads the way on the Grand Prix circuit, the Harley is more suited to the dragway. And even the stylisation of the 1998 Porsche designed V-Rod above (slinky replaces scratchy) owes more to Boulevard racing than the circuit. Although it is said to accelerate faster than you can imagine.

All of this has resulted in a particular kind of conventionalised creativity. There are so many options available, with such a huge industry supplying specialist variants, the Harley phenomenon has turned consumerism into DIY design. And like the universal influence of New York Subway graffiti (its spread to Australia boosted by the 1984 publication Subway Art), the Harley phenomenon has become a cultural export with a huge global impact.  As with all forms of cultural imperialism, in the search for perfection, local variants like the Chopperworks bikes emerge to challenge the center, with their hand-fab details and tribal effects…

In this exhibition we see a fascinating analogue of the parallel evolution of craft and design, plus the potential for individual expression on the part of the consumer/owner/maker. Where, you might ask, does creativity lie in this process? Is it the conception of all the bolt-together options, or the subtle modelling and painting of the parts that makes them unique? How do we measure innovation in this process? Is it how they look, or how they go? Or how they make their owners feel? So, is it craft, design, or a kind of outsider art? Here’s Ralph Smith, polishing his ninth Harley, complete with ostrich-skin saddle…

In 1998 the Guggenheim Museum hosted its most popular (and lucrative) exhibition ever – The Art of the Motorcycle. Let’s hope it works for CraftACT?