ARTS
Blurring the boundaries
Tanya Harrod on the innovative work of Ron Arad It is unusual for the V&A to honour a living designer with a major retrospective, and the museum has certainly never staged an exhibition which involves its historic col- lections quite so dramatically. Ron Arad's furniture is presented on a series of mir- rored ramps which snake from the muse- um's Cromwell Road entrance through the Mediaeval Treasury and out into the Pirelli Garden. Old and new collide to some effect — Arad's 'Infinity' bottle rack climbs like ivy over the case which houses the Elthenberg Reliquary. This may seem crass, and it has annoyed the kind of art critic who knows nothing about the applied arts but enjoys attacking the V&A. In fact the juxtaposition has the odd effect of refo- cusing attention on that extraordinary 12th- century work of art and craft, and on other objects of great beauty in the Treasury. Nonetheless, this is a tough exhibition to get to grips with. There is no catalogue and nothing is labelled, making interactivity with the new technology an imperative. Computer screens in each section provide important insights into the work and sug- gest some of the problems facing a creative designer in Britain today.
Famously, Arad started out making things himself, inhabiting a typically 1980s borderland emblematic of the collapse of British industrial production in the Thatch- er years. Some of the early work was a species of ad hoc-ism. Take the Rover chair made from salvaged leather seats from the Rover 2000 mounted on scaffold- ing tubing. This captivatingly narrative object manages to suggest both insouciant chic and, for the target audience born like Arad in 1951, childhood moments in the family car. Other chairs like 'Big Easy' and `Tinker' were literally hammered into shape by panel-beating and welding in Arad's workshop.
In the early 1980s Arad seemed to be part of a fashionable group — including furniture makers Tom Dixon, Andre Dubreuil and Danny Lane — creating neo- primitive objects, roughly factured using low-level industrial techniques. It was a reversion to low-tech which aptly reflected the unsteady, febrile mood of the time, in which the bubble of affluence always seemed about to burst. And Arad had a genius for creating an ambience for his work through his series of 'One-Off shops. The final one, in Shelton Street, Covent Garden, was a triumph of irrational design, being lined with pieces of sheet steel hap- hazardly collaged into a gleaming metal cave. It was filled with mocking critiques of good taste and good design — most memo- rably Arad's widely copied brutalist turntable and speakers embedded in concrete, a punk response to Bang & Olufsen.
Arad has come a long way since those early, inspired bricolage days. Today he bypasses British manufacturers' indiffer- ence and lack of flexibility by taking his designs to major firms all over Europe to Vitra, Kartell and Cassina — and by establishing a collaboration with Marzorati Ronchetti's family-run firm in Italy which now makes up his one-off pieces. (That Britain lacks the small, flexible family firms which made the European postwar design boom possible is one of the sad lessons of this exhibition.) Arad is clear-headed about how his work divides up and about the myriad processes currently available to designers. These are neatly summarised by Arad as wasting (i.e., cutting away material), moulding, forming, assembling and, less familiarly, growing — Bouncing Vase, 2000, by Ron Arad Arad's poetic way of describing processes like fusion deposition modelling or stereo lithography, in which a computer model on screen is translated into an actual object by a 3D printer. These are used as a matter of course in industry, but Arad manages to go beyond their use for rapid prototyping and employs 3D printing processes to create short runs of odd, magical lamps, bowls and vases in resins and polymides. They are, in Arad's own words, 'not made by hand, not made in China', and they suggest a new blurring of boundaries between art and production.
Is Arad a good designer? By all the stan- dards of early 20th-century design the answer must be no. But the values of mod- ernism mean little to consumers under 50 and, in any case, Arad manages to operate imaginatively as a quasi-surrealist on the borders of architecture, fine art and design. (His architectural practice, growing in interest, is not really covered in this exhibi- tion.) Thus Paparelle', a chair made from woven stainless steel held in tension, can seem wildly overblown or pleasingly sculp- tural, depending on whether the context is one of design or fine art. Only one object in Arad's body of work actually makes me angry. This is his 'Bookworm', which in both its tempered steel and plastic versions seems dedicated to breaking the spines of books — it is the ultimate 'bookshelf' for a non-reading culture and makes one ner- vous about his role as professor of design products at the Royal College of Art.
But there are plenty of remarkable, even haunting, objects in this exhibition. Often a one-off idea will translate into manufacture — like the foam-upholstered versions of his welded steel chairs. This ability to move between one-offs, short runs and mass pro- duction accounts for the freshness of Arad's designs. Some of the best designs are generated because here is a designer who plays constantly with materials and techniques. The FPE chair (standing for Fantastic Plastic Elastic) is made of a flexi- ble plastic sheet inserted into a pair of split aluminium tubes. When the tubing is bent it bites into the plastic, holding it firm, and lo! a chair is born. Then there are his extraordinary BOOPs (Blown Out Of Pro- portion) in which super-plastic aluminium is heated, inflated with air and subsequent- ly cut and joined to create organic low tables and upscaled vases. Here the process — blowing up metal like a balloon accounts for the visual strangeness of the object. Arad is also ingenious with more quotidian technology. Two wheels and ball- bearings, and we have his range of mobile storage units known as RTWs (Reinventing the Wheel). These look heavy and industri- al but can be rolled about with ease, the inner wheel and its shelving remaining sta- tionary.
In fact Reinventing the Wheel is an activity which Arad has made his own going over old ground, forgetting about functional perfectability and injecting poet- ry into every day objects. And sometimes he comes up with a design which would please the modernists too — like his flat stack chair for Kartell, which folds so thin that 200 stacked chairs stand only 1.6m tall. Indeed, everything about Arad's develop- ment suggests that the next ten years will be even more varied and creative.
Ron Arad: Before and After Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum runs until 1 October.
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