19 Nov 2009Less and More, Dieter Rams at the Design Museum
It’s not an overstatement to say Dieter Rams is perhaps the most influential living industrial designer of modern times. His 500-strong output of electronic designs for Braun, between 1955 and 1995 changed the language of appliance design as we know it today and his ‘Ten Principles’ of good design have become a mantra – a checklist and a rule book – for industrial designers the world over. With the same reductive efficiency he applied to his own designs, in ten simple commandments, Rams succinctly defined what design for a post-war modern world should be.
Simplifying and humanising Bauhaus principles, marrying them with the electronic and engineering advances born from the Second World War, Rams’ appliances are lean and clean. Switches are small and ordered, different components are arranged geometrically, colour-coded in a muted palette and finished with a combination of wood veneer and the pioneering plastics he developed. You didn’t have to be part of a financial or cultural elite to own or appreciate a Rams-designed appliance.
His design legacy continues today apace, most stringently in the work of the super-normalists Naoto Fukasawa, Jasper Morrison and Industrial Facility and most widespread in the work of Jonathan Ive whose i-products are arguably the closest anyone has come to achieving ten ticks against Rams’ ten principles.
A retrospective of Rams’ seminal designs are on show at the Design Museum together with archive footage, models, sketches and film interviews with Ive, Morrison, Hecht and Fukasawa. The exhibition isn't just a chronological survey of his work for Braun and furniture for Vitsoe, it provides comprehensive insight into the man behind the designs, how his work evolved and how widespread his influence, both details and overall, has been.
Given his status is the design world it was only fitting that Rams was one of our inaugural guest editors of issue W*103 – for which Matthew Donaldson, as the centrepiece of Rams’ edited section, brought to life the ‘Ten Principles’ in a photographic essay. In addition to Rams’ retrospective we've resurrected Donaldson’s shoot here, which captures perfectly the quiet magnanimity of Rams’ designs, from principle to product in ten photographs.
www.designmuseum.org
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16 Nov 2009James Turrell show, Wolfsburg
James Turrell is one of the most important artists in the world dealing in light and space. He looks like a well-combed cross between Grizzly Adams and Karl Marx and has an aura of a man who has found his place in the fabric of things. He is in the German town of Wolfsburg (home to the Volkswagen car and an hour’s train ride from Berlin) for the opening of a new exhibition of his work.
Born in Los Angeles in 1943, Turrell studied mathematics, psychology and sensory synesthesia as well as art at university. He flies around the desert in little planes and has devoted the best part his working life to turning a volcano into a piece of land art.
As a pilot, Turrell has witnessed some of nature’s greatest artworks in the sky and says they were his inspiration for his art: ‘The spaces you encounter during flight can be amazing: meeting the dawn or watching the Aurora Borealis' he says and describes an experience of taking off once at dawn and seeing the sunlight trapped between ground fog below and cloud cover above. ‘Everything was completely orange’ he remembers, ‘and there was a trail from a jet taking off that cast a shadow in blues and greens. I thought: “That’s nice, I’d like to make that”’.
Turrell is best known for his two main categories of installation work. His ‘skyscapes’ are where he creates or manipulates spaces from which to observe sections of sky. They can be quite disorientating or transcendental, depending on weather or time of day.
The largest and most famous of these is his vast ongoing project in an extinct volcano, the size of Manhattan island, in the Arizona desert called ‘Roden crater’. Turrell’s other main type of work are his interior light tunnels, projections and Ganzfeld (whole field) pieces which saturate interior space with light in such a way as to make the viewer feel they are immersed in it.
‘Usually we just use light to illuminate things, but I like the “thingness” of light’, he says by way of explanation. ‘This idea of the luminous filling emptiness, like there is something there to touch is also something I like to work with’.
The high point of the Wolfsburg exhibition is a huge new installation – the largest Turrell has even built inside a museum. Entitled ‘Bridget’s Bardo’, it is a Ganzfeld piece but relates directly to the Roden crater in that it is intended to be an inversion of it. It deals with inner rather than outer space as well as artificial rather than celestial light.
Bridget’s Bardo occupies 700 sq m of floor space and is 11m high. The result of some highly complex technical wizardry with the help of Austrian lighting company Zumtobel, it has two interlocking spaces: a ‘viewing space’ and a ‘sensing space’, both entirely empty yet saturated with a diffused, slowly shifting spectrum of coloured light.
The viewer, (participant is perhaps a better term) enters the installation from above via a steep slope and walks down into a palpable bath of light. It is an extraordinary experience, something between sensory deprivation and a kind of LED-induced Nirvana. The colour, shifting from blue to grey to orange, pink and then red is defined within the space but seems infinite at the same time. Other figures within the space become silhouettes floating within it and perspectives become strangely distorted.
Bridget’s Bardo is a subtle play of light and space that comes pretty close to Turrell’s ambitious aim of calling down the sky from the heavens. For a quite reasonable fee you can also rent the space for an hour at a time from the museum and experience what must be the best ‘chillout’ zone this side of the Northern Lights.
www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de
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15 Nov 2009Warhol and Doig do it again - Dollars, cents and sensibility
This week in New York, the post-war and contemporary art market had its bi-annual check up. Christie’s went first, selling 39 of 46 lots for a total of $74.1m on November 10th. It was less than a quarter of their $325m total exactly two years ago, but still a respectable outcome given the difficulty of obtaining consignments. No one wants to sell their art during a recession unless they have to. Remarkably, few collectors seem to be in that position and, if they are, they feel safer off-loading behind the scenes than at public auction.
Sotheby’s evening sale was much more robust, selling 53 of 55 lots for a total of $134.4m. That sell-through rate—96% by lot, 98% by value—hadn't been seen since 2004. An astounding result given the times. The estate of Mary and Louis Myers, Ohio arts patrons, provided the first 20 lots of the evening, but the chief earner was Andy Warhol.
The most talked about work of the week was Warhol's “200 One Dollar Bills”, an historically important, hand-drawn silkscreen painting from 1962. Until the day before the sale, the identity of the consignor, described in the catalogue as having a “distinguished private collection”, had been a well-kept secret. Then word slipped out that it had belonged to Pauline Karpidas, a London-based collector. Back in 1986 Mr and Mrs Karpidas had paid $385,000 for the picture, the highest price ever paid for a Warhol at auction during the artist's lifetime.
Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's chief auctioneer, opened the bidding at $6m whereupon Alex Rotter, a Sotheby's specialist on the phone with a client, immediately doubled the bid. The price escalated in million-dollar increments so quickly that it was hard to tell where the bids were coming from. Philippe Ségalot, an art advisor, Jose Mugrabi, a dealer who owns some 800 Warhols, Abdallah Chatila, a Lebanese collector, and two other Sotheby's staff members, Loic Gouzer and Bruno Vinciguerra, together nodded and waved the lot all the way up to its $39m hammer price. In the end, Mr Vinciguerra won the picture for his anonymous buyer for $43.7m with fees. It was the second-highest price ever paid for a Warhol at auction, exceeded only by “Green Car Crash”, which sold in May 2007 to Philippe Niarchos for $71.7m.
The price proves the adage that real masterpieces retain their value in almost any economic climate. As Mr Ségalot affirmed, “The date, subject matter, composition and condition are all fantastic. The painting probably sold for the same price as it would have two years ago.”
Christie'sChristie's also enjoyed a runaway lot that provided auction-room drama. “Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like)”, an exquisitely rendered, psychologically complex painting from 1996 by Peter Doig, a British artist, was consigned by César Reyes, a Puerto Rican psychiatrist who owns a number of the artist’s works. Seven bidders pitched for the painting and four of them were still in the game at $8.8m, well over the high estimate of $6m. After that, the lot bore witness to a duel between Jay Jopling, a British dealer (who is thought to have been bidding for Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian collector), and Marc Porter, Christie's president, who had an insistent client on the phone. In the end Christie's chief auctioneer awarded “Reflection” to Mr Porter's telephone bidder for $10.2m, even though Mr Jopling offered a bid just as the hammer was coming down. The dealer did not look happy. It was a shame as another few increments could have led to a world-record price for the artist.
Francis Outred, Christie's European head of post-war and contemporary art who brought in the Doig consignment with his New York-based colleague, Andy Massad, said: “Some people saw ‘White Canoe’, which commanded £5.7m ($11.2m) in February 2007, as a symbol of the art market bubble, but three of the four highest prices for Doig have been made this year. Doig's market has continued to grow throughout the recession. It's a reflection of quality and a testament to the way Peter has moved forward the boundaries of painting.” Many assume that Russians have made the Doig market, but Mr Outred asserts that the four main contestants for the work included an American, an Asian and a European (which could include those from the former Soviet Union).
It's rare to see artists at an auction, but Mr Doig was seated with the consignor of the painting, which suggests that Mr Reyes might have offered a cut of the proceeds to the artist. However, Mr Doig admitted to “no more than curiosity”. With them was Gavin Brown, a New York dealer who has been exhibiting Doig's work since 1994 and sold “Reflection” to Reyes for $24,000 in 1996. After the sale, Mr Brown was jubilant. “This result, if nothing else, suggests the landscape has been readjusted to something based on truth and beauty. The cynical age of Damien Hirst, et al, might well have passed. Now we all have to use our eyes!”
Source: The Economist
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