Article
Flatness Packed
Artlink, Vol. 24 no. 2, pp. 22-25
Shopping is often a selfish pleasure. But the social construction of the self through fashion includes a much wider range of retail pursuits than just clothing. Something called lifestyle has come to signify all the bits of living (or should I say, Vogue Living) that come with a price tag, encompassing behaviours of consumption ranging from what we wear to what we eat. Described through magazines and television, lifestyle might present choce as its central tenet, but its version of individualism is closely guarded by the makers of taste - above all, it is about inconspicuous conformity. Nowhere is this more true than in the stuff of domestic life. Both homes and homewares - the latter itself a recently created category - are central to the dizzying cycle of novelty that has become the lifestyle industry.
As other have pointed out, the pursuit of newness is also central to art, especially in the history of that thing called modernism. While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern of contemporary lifestyles (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending.
But their motivations are, of course, related - the idea of the contemporary has become, for both the art and lifestyle industries, simply any style trend in full swing - the aesthetic equivalent to the Vanity Fair 'in' list. In the same way, that the notion of the avant garde so comfortably becomes sales-speak for the up-to-date-ness of everything from cars to stereos demonstrates the accuracy of Paul Valery's statement that 'Everything changes but the avant garde.’ As a quality, newness might be in constant flux, but as a phenomenon it is truly timeless.
By drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration, recent works by Ben Morieson and Pat Foster dissect the curious (and sometimes related) aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms.
Until they became an essential part of the interior decoration repertoire, and as a result often outrageously expensive, many artists haunted op shops for inspiration and materials. But it is not only for reasons of economy that IKEA holds such interest for artists, as a powerful (and global) visual presence in everyday life: its mass produced, flat-packed and self-assemble objects are a cultural force difficult to ignore.
When everyone understands that to speak of one's Lack is not a moment of self-analysis but a coffee table, and when people don't think it at all odd to call your bookcase Billy, the cultural currency of IKEA can't be overstated. Design innovation at IKEA is driven by relentless novelty, their products are, from the outlet, conceived as disposable. Their furniture might. as a result, be the cause for wholesale scorn among both contemporary tastemakers and critics of globalised brands, but one suspects that Le Corbusier would at least approve of its replicability.
No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Forster and Jen Berean's installation as BUS Gallery, documented six mis-assembled items of IKEA furniture. Each sculptural recombination was visually represented in two ways - as a photograph on the gallery wall, and below this, as a hand-drawn diagrammatic line drawing on a stack of product flysheets (mimicking the look of the IKEA original) that gallery visitors could take as a souvenir. The forms are suggestive of modernist sculpture - two distinctly anthropomorphic and suggestively interlocked Ringo stools are a tad David Smith-ish, while a stack of three Artur trestles balance like beams and girders in an Anthony Caro.
It is difficult to read their stacked Svala children’s furniture suite as anything other than a caricature of a Sol Le Witt. Lack coffee tables already add a touch of Sol Le Witt style to thousands of lounge rooms around the world, but here are transformed into an optically twisting monolith. Professionally photographed, the combination of white-cube lighting and austere blond timber finishes, would have these oh-so-significant looking sculptures not out of place in a museum, or for that matter, in an important art magazine. As well as undermining ‘contemporary’ furniture design and modernist sculpture, the installation also points to recently ‘rediscovered’ of mid-century modern design. Van Der Rohe, Eames, Jacobsen (surnames only please!) have become design’s answer to painting’s Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning.
And just as artists have taken aim at the portentous mysticism of abstract expressionism and the narrow formalism with which it was explained, so too modernist architecture and design. Peter Blake’s characterisation in Form Follows Fiasco is especially memorable:
"Illegible but impeccable typography; unintelligible but impeccable timepieces and calendars; unsittable but impeccable chairs; uncleanable but impeccable spoons; intolerable but impeccable sound and light; untouchable but impeccable glass, plastic, marble, and chrome. …the problem that the Modern Movement really wants to solve, judging by its performance to date, is the infuriating anatomy of the human race."
Callum Morton has been looking at the relationship between people and some of modernism’s most dehumanising achievements for a decade or so, but modernist furniture design (though often equally uncomfortable) seems to have had less attention from Australian visual artists. The installation also plays to the horror of tackling a pile of birch with a tiny Allen key, and the potential for this task to descend into a folding beach chair slapstick routine – surely a collective DIY experience.
Additionally, a combination of Billy bookcases installed with their Masonite backs removed (ironic, for those of us who have one – and one only buys one – because these back panels have an uncontrollable habit of popping off) dramatically lit from the rear, suggests a sculptural form half Mondrian, half Donald Judd.
By exhibiting receipts as a narrative of their IKEA expeditions, Foster and Berean quietly reveal the cleverness of their challenge to retail consumption. It becomes clear that each mis-assembled piece was returned to the store once photographed, and exchanged for the next item.
Given that IKEA returns are only accepted if they are returned to their flat-packed state, each object had to be repacked into the dense tangram of cardboard and plastic wrap from which it emerged – no small feat. In fact, it turns out that the whole exhibit was made at a net cost of nothing, for even the Billy bookcase sculpture was returned to the store at the conclusion of the exhibition. The seemingly illogical succession of purchases comically circumvents the shopping mantra that one can’t get something for nothing.
In an earlier work, Foster cast a modernist eye on that storage staple of poor students everywhere, the milk crate. If Lyndal Walker’s mid-nineties work on the aesthetics of the share house celebrated grunge décor at the same time as mourning its watered-down-absorption by mass culture, this work hopes for brave new (minimalist) world of budget furniture. The result, spray painted white and with the added comfort of an upholstered seat, looks like this season’s witty design essential from Space furniture. If Foster’s IKEA works take furniture and turn it into something quite useless (i.e. art), this work resolutely redesignates an object of varied use (and thus vague functionality) as furniture.
Foster and Berean are not alone in using Ikea to stand for the conflicted relation that modern furniture has to the natural world of landscape and the body. Rosemary Laing’s photographs in her 2003 exhibition one dozen natural disasters in the Australian landscape (part 1) show the defined edges of Ikea furniture swallowed by powdery red dirt, so that the candy-coloured forms we remember from our annually-delivered catalogue, are reclaimed by the land. When Laing sets the sculptural forms alight it is surely more than a formal exercise: it suggests a dramatic victory of nature over modernism that is entirely more Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire than Tim Storrier.
Even more explicitly than these works using IKEA, recent work by Ben Morieson produced under the guise of Rational Building Products (2003) dismantle the commercial discourse of lifestyle, blending the similarly hyped discourses of art and DIY home renovation. Home Show-style displays of three mock ‘tiling’ products were first installed in a corner shop on Gertrude and Smith Streets, among one of Melbourne’s gallery clusters.
Its second exhibition was as part of Home Loan, a 2003 group show curated by Larissa Hjorth and Kate Shaw, held in the surreal context of recently completed faux warehouse conversions in outer-Melbourne housing development Caroline Springs, visited by bus loads of gallery types as well as display home inspectors whose radar for irony was slightly lower.
That the work has not yet been shown in a gallery space is appropriate, for as with his Burnout (2001) series of works, Morieson’s role is closer to the event manager or art director. His practice is a peculiar kind of art without an artist, allowing him to critique its biggest sales ploy, the mythic persona of the artist itself, nowhere more forceful than in modernism.
Each product in the blandly named VersaTiles range, accompanied by a (deliberately) dreadfully designed flyer, is represented as being ‘inspired’ by a specific artistic source. An imitation corporate sales video showing their making and installation accompanied each product, complete with bland voice over and the sort of stock muzac used only in porn and, well, corporate videos.
It is as though the application of artistic logic (an oxymoron?) to three ordinarily pragmatic building materials, saps them of every scrap of functionality – though not that one would know it from the dreary hype of their mock marketing materials. PlasTile are Edwardian styled roofing tiles made from flimsy vac-moulded plastic in twenty-three colours “inspired by the [Howard] Arkley House series palette.” Arkley, in a wonderfully ambiguous turn of phrase, is described as a “renowned painter of houses.”
LogTile, mass-produced MDF log cross sections designed as garden steppers, from the Hills Hoist to the Pergola, for instance, “seeks to converge the ideologies of two conflicting and merging art movements” – the floor works of Carl Andre with the “circle theme” of Kenneth Noland. The result, we are cheerily told (and one can almost hear Noni from Better Homes and Gardenshere), “is not only practical and affordable but also looks great”. Similarly,PulpTile (rolls of white paper with an embossed bathroom tile pattern) is as “contemporary as was the work of Robert Hunter.” The flyer goes on:
The PulpTile process is careful and precise. Hunter was an artist with a great appreciation of the austere. [Alan] Dodge’s testimony, “The complex white surfaces of Hunter’s painting… also require concentration to read, - a concentration that can lend to an emptying mind, known in zen as a state of “no-mind”.” It is with this in mind that RBP is proud to launch the PulpTile range.
It is no mistake that a vertical graphic element in RBP’s dated logo could easily have it misread as I-rational. To this end, no responsibility is taken for the longevity of any of the range. The fine print on each flyer exposes their disfunctionality, in case anyone misses it – they accept “no responsibility for the warping or tearing of PulpTile in a wet zone”, LogTile cant be used on “any ground with a moisture content of more than 1ml per 10cm cubed”, andPlasTile only works when winds don’t exceed 10 knots.
This might be a cunning parody on the oft-recounted conservation problems presented by modern art, but it is also very much in the grand retail tradition of small print and disclaimers obscured by happy customer service platitudes, like that from which the title of Foster and Berean’s installation is taken.
Aside from Morieson’s droll sarcasm at the rhetoric of DIY (this is surely a man who has assembled a Billy bookcase!), the Rational Building Products series, like No Nonsense Return Policy, points of the process by which art becomes décor and fashion, and by extension, avant garde becomes mass culture. At the hands of a taste-makers rummaging for source material, it is a process that has never been more rapid, and as a result, its implications are increasingly significant. As far as the lifestyle industry is concerned, flagrant imitation is something to be proud of. So, a convincing copy of a Noguchi coffee table from King Furniture is not as good as a really bad imitation from Freedom, and nowhere near as good as a home-made MDF job.
As Larissa Hjorth asks in the catalogue for Home Loan, “How can artists justify their prices and ‘cultural capital’ when Craig of Room for Improvement can do a Jackson Pollock copy by simply putting holes into a can and spinning it across the canvas for a mere $200?” Of course, when real artists (like Jackson, as opposed to Craig) pinch their ideas from the wide world of mass consumption, it is, something very different indeed. Apparently that’s called appropriation.
One can only hope that one of our DIY doyens delivers a step-by-step guide to your very own David Salle, maybe as a folding screen – it surely couldn’t be any harder than Abstract Expressionism. Wouldn’t that just present a wonderfully embroiled set of relations between art and the lifestyle industry?
Flatness Packed
Artlink, Vol. 24 no. 2, pp. 22-25
Shopping is often a selfish pleasure. But the social construction of the self through fashion includes a much wider range of retail pursuits than just clothing. Something called lifestyle has come to signify all the bits of living (or should I say, Vogue Living) that come with a price tag, encompassing behaviours of consumption ranging from what we wear to what we eat. Described through magazines and television, lifestyle might present choce as its central tenet, but its version of individualism is closely guarded by the makers of taste - above all, it is about inconspicuous conformity. Nowhere is this more true than in the stuff of domestic life. Both homes and homewares - the latter itself a recently created category - are central to the dizzying cycle of novelty that has become the lifestyle industry.
As other have pointed out, the pursuit of newness is also central to art, especially in the history of that thing called modernism. While the idea of modern and contemporary art are located in a fairly nebulous discursive realm, the notion of modern of contemporary lifestyles (the two seem, in fact, interchangeable) are very much a part of the familiar rhetoric of consumer spending.
But their motivations are, of course, related - the idea of the contemporary has become, for both the art and lifestyle industries, simply any style trend in full swing - the aesthetic equivalent to the Vanity Fair 'in' list. In the same way, that the notion of the avant garde so comfortably becomes sales-speak for the up-to-date-ness of everything from cars to stereos demonstrates the accuracy of Paul Valery's statement that 'Everything changes but the avant garde.’ As a quality, newness might be in constant flux, but as a phenomenon it is truly timeless.
By drawing attention to the formal and ideological intersections between modernism and the stuff of homes and home decoration, recent works by Ben Morieson and Pat Foster dissect the curious (and sometimes related) aesthetic cycles that drive the commercial products in both realms.
Until they became an essential part of the interior decoration repertoire, and as a result often outrageously expensive, many artists haunted op shops for inspiration and materials. But it is not only for reasons of economy that IKEA holds such interest for artists, as a powerful (and global) visual presence in everyday life: its mass produced, flat-packed and self-assemble objects are a cultural force difficult to ignore.
When everyone understands that to speak of one's Lack is not a moment of self-analysis but a coffee table, and when people don't think it at all odd to call your bookcase Billy, the cultural currency of IKEA can't be overstated. Design innovation at IKEA is driven by relentless novelty, their products are, from the outlet, conceived as disposable. Their furniture might. as a result, be the cause for wholesale scorn among both contemporary tastemakers and critics of globalised brands, but one suspects that Le Corbusier would at least approve of its replicability.
No Nonsense Return Policy (2003), Pat Forster and Jen Berean's installation as BUS Gallery, documented six mis-assembled items of IKEA furniture. Each sculptural recombination was visually represented in two ways - as a photograph on the gallery wall, and below this, as a hand-drawn diagrammatic line drawing on a stack of product flysheets (mimicking the look of the IKEA original) that gallery visitors could take as a souvenir. The forms are suggestive of modernist sculpture - two distinctly anthropomorphic and suggestively interlocked Ringo stools are a tad David Smith-ish, while a stack of three Artur trestles balance like beams and girders in an Anthony Caro.
It is difficult to read their stacked Svala children’s furniture suite as anything other than a caricature of a Sol Le Witt. Lack coffee tables already add a touch of Sol Le Witt style to thousands of lounge rooms around the world, but here are transformed into an optically twisting monolith. Professionally photographed, the combination of white-cube lighting and austere blond timber finishes, would have these oh-so-significant looking sculptures not out of place in a museum, or for that matter, in an important art magazine. As well as undermining ‘contemporary’ furniture design and modernist sculpture, the installation also points to recently ‘rediscovered’ of mid-century modern design. Van Der Rohe, Eames, Jacobsen (surnames only please!) have become design’s answer to painting’s Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning.
And just as artists have taken aim at the portentous mysticism of abstract expressionism and the narrow formalism with which it was explained, so too modernist architecture and design. Peter Blake’s characterisation in Form Follows Fiasco is especially memorable:
"Illegible but impeccable typography; unintelligible but impeccable timepieces and calendars; unsittable but impeccable chairs; uncleanable but impeccable spoons; intolerable but impeccable sound and light; untouchable but impeccable glass, plastic, marble, and chrome. …the problem that the Modern Movement really wants to solve, judging by its performance to date, is the infuriating anatomy of the human race."
Callum Morton has been looking at the relationship between people and some of modernism’s most dehumanising achievements for a decade or so, but modernist furniture design (though often equally uncomfortable) seems to have had less attention from Australian visual artists. The installation also plays to the horror of tackling a pile of birch with a tiny Allen key, and the potential for this task to descend into a folding beach chair slapstick routine – surely a collective DIY experience.
Additionally, a combination of Billy bookcases installed with their Masonite backs removed (ironic, for those of us who have one – and one only buys one – because these back panels have an uncontrollable habit of popping off) dramatically lit from the rear, suggests a sculptural form half Mondrian, half Donald Judd.
By exhibiting receipts as a narrative of their IKEA expeditions, Foster and Berean quietly reveal the cleverness of their challenge to retail consumption. It becomes clear that each mis-assembled piece was returned to the store once photographed, and exchanged for the next item.
Given that IKEA returns are only accepted if they are returned to their flat-packed state, each object had to be repacked into the dense tangram of cardboard and plastic wrap from which it emerged – no small feat. In fact, it turns out that the whole exhibit was made at a net cost of nothing, for even the Billy bookcase sculpture was returned to the store at the conclusion of the exhibition. The seemingly illogical succession of purchases comically circumvents the shopping mantra that one can’t get something for nothing.
In an earlier work, Foster cast a modernist eye on that storage staple of poor students everywhere, the milk crate. If Lyndal Walker’s mid-nineties work on the aesthetics of the share house celebrated grunge décor at the same time as mourning its watered-down-absorption by mass culture, this work hopes for brave new (minimalist) world of budget furniture. The result, spray painted white and with the added comfort of an upholstered seat, looks like this season’s witty design essential from Space furniture. If Foster’s IKEA works take furniture and turn it into something quite useless (i.e. art), this work resolutely redesignates an object of varied use (and thus vague functionality) as furniture.
Foster and Berean are not alone in using Ikea to stand for the conflicted relation that modern furniture has to the natural world of landscape and the body. Rosemary Laing’s photographs in her 2003 exhibition one dozen natural disasters in the Australian landscape (part 1) show the defined edges of Ikea furniture swallowed by powdery red dirt, so that the candy-coloured forms we remember from our annually-delivered catalogue, are reclaimed by the land. When Laing sets the sculptural forms alight it is surely more than a formal exercise: it suggests a dramatic victory of nature over modernism that is entirely more Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire than Tim Storrier.
Even more explicitly than these works using IKEA, recent work by Ben Morieson produced under the guise of Rational Building Products (2003) dismantle the commercial discourse of lifestyle, blending the similarly hyped discourses of art and DIY home renovation. Home Show-style displays of three mock ‘tiling’ products were first installed in a corner shop on Gertrude and Smith Streets, among one of Melbourne’s gallery clusters.
Its second exhibition was as part of Home Loan, a 2003 group show curated by Larissa Hjorth and Kate Shaw, held in the surreal context of recently completed faux warehouse conversions in outer-Melbourne housing development Caroline Springs, visited by bus loads of gallery types as well as display home inspectors whose radar for irony was slightly lower.
That the work has not yet been shown in a gallery space is appropriate, for as with his Burnout (2001) series of works, Morieson’s role is closer to the event manager or art director. His practice is a peculiar kind of art without an artist, allowing him to critique its biggest sales ploy, the mythic persona of the artist itself, nowhere more forceful than in modernism.
Each product in the blandly named VersaTiles range, accompanied by a (deliberately) dreadfully designed flyer, is represented as being ‘inspired’ by a specific artistic source. An imitation corporate sales video showing their making and installation accompanied each product, complete with bland voice over and the sort of stock muzac used only in porn and, well, corporate videos.
It is as though the application of artistic logic (an oxymoron?) to three ordinarily pragmatic building materials, saps them of every scrap of functionality – though not that one would know it from the dreary hype of their mock marketing materials. PlasTile are Edwardian styled roofing tiles made from flimsy vac-moulded plastic in twenty-three colours “inspired by the [Howard] Arkley House series palette.” Arkley, in a wonderfully ambiguous turn of phrase, is described as a “renowned painter of houses.”
LogTile, mass-produced MDF log cross sections designed as garden steppers, from the Hills Hoist to the Pergola, for instance, “seeks to converge the ideologies of two conflicting and merging art movements” – the floor works of Carl Andre with the “circle theme” of Kenneth Noland. The result, we are cheerily told (and one can almost hear Noni from Better Homes and Gardenshere), “is not only practical and affordable but also looks great”. Similarly,PulpTile (rolls of white paper with an embossed bathroom tile pattern) is as “contemporary as was the work of Robert Hunter.” The flyer goes on:
The PulpTile process is careful and precise. Hunter was an artist with a great appreciation of the austere. [Alan] Dodge’s testimony, “The complex white surfaces of Hunter’s painting… also require concentration to read, - a concentration that can lend to an emptying mind, known in zen as a state of “no-mind”.” It is with this in mind that RBP is proud to launch the PulpTile range.
It is no mistake that a vertical graphic element in RBP’s dated logo could easily have it misread as I-rational. To this end, no responsibility is taken for the longevity of any of the range. The fine print on each flyer exposes their disfunctionality, in case anyone misses it – they accept “no responsibility for the warping or tearing of PulpTile in a wet zone”, LogTile cant be used on “any ground with a moisture content of more than 1ml per 10cm cubed”, andPlasTile only works when winds don’t exceed 10 knots.
This might be a cunning parody on the oft-recounted conservation problems presented by modern art, but it is also very much in the grand retail tradition of small print and disclaimers obscured by happy customer service platitudes, like that from which the title of Foster and Berean’s installation is taken.
Aside from Morieson’s droll sarcasm at the rhetoric of DIY (this is surely a man who has assembled a Billy bookcase!), the Rational Building Products series, like No Nonsense Return Policy, points of the process by which art becomes décor and fashion, and by extension, avant garde becomes mass culture. At the hands of a taste-makers rummaging for source material, it is a process that has never been more rapid, and as a result, its implications are increasingly significant. As far as the lifestyle industry is concerned, flagrant imitation is something to be proud of. So, a convincing copy of a Noguchi coffee table from King Furniture is not as good as a really bad imitation from Freedom, and nowhere near as good as a home-made MDF job.
As Larissa Hjorth asks in the catalogue for Home Loan, “How can artists justify their prices and ‘cultural capital’ when Craig of Room for Improvement can do a Jackson Pollock copy by simply putting holes into a can and spinning it across the canvas for a mere $200?” Of course, when real artists (like Jackson, as opposed to Craig) pinch their ideas from the wide world of mass consumption, it is, something very different indeed. Apparently that’s called appropriation.
One can only hope that one of our DIY doyens delivers a step-by-step guide to your very own David Salle, maybe as a folding screen – it surely couldn’t be any harder than Abstract Expressionism. Wouldn’t that just present a wonderfully embroiled set of relations between art and the lifestyle industry?