The cat curiosity can't kill
Ron Arad is a man of all disciplines and none. Corinne Julius previews his new exhibition
Ron Arad loves wordplay; and such titles as This Mortal Coil and No Spring Chicken also demonstrate how much he enjoys toying with people’s preconceptions. A show that charts his career will always be a playful experience, and the Barbican’s Ron Arad: Restless doesn’t so much examine what makes the man tick as what makes him buzz.
The title of his show at MoMA and the Pompidou – Ron Arad: No Discipline – was just as pertinent: he doesn’t and won’t fit in a box. Arad trained as an architect at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and then the Architectural Association – though most of his work has been built abroad, as British planners find his designs hard to take. He came to public attention at One Off, a practice/workshop founded in 1981 with Caroline Thorman, with work made from found materials. A Rover V8 2L leather seat discovered in a scrap yard and mounted in tubular steel became Rover Chair; a car aerial transformed into the remote controlled Aeriel Light; such unlikely elements as electronics and concrete were combined in 1983’s Concrete Stereo. These designs were less a philosophical statement than a commercial necessity, but they helped Arad spawn ‘Design Art’.
He fits neatly into the craft world, working with one-offs, loving to play with materials and processes, to push them to their utmost – but he is just as comfortable designing for mass manufacture. In 1985 furniture manufacturers Vitra gave him the opportunity to work on such production pieces as the Well-Tempered Chair, a contemporary take on the club chair in bent sheets of tempered steel, a material he is fond of. Here too began his trademark of reusing his own designs and forms: 2002’s Bad-Tempered Chair is a carbon fibre, Kevlar and glass fibre edition.
He is intrigued by material opposites, which expands his spectrum from craft through design to fine art. In his Volume series he created a cartoon-like classic club armchair, playing on the dichotomies of full-empty, hard-soft and heavy-light. The first Big Easy (1988) is in welded, polished steel sheets; the second, Soft Big Easy (1991) is an upholstered version for Moroso; the third, New Orleans (1999), is a limited edition created by painting layers of pigmented polyester gel coat inside the mould, filled with polyester; the fourth, Big E (2003), is a rotomoulded polythene mass-produced version.
As well as working with leading manufacturers and gallerists, Arad has profoundly influenced a generation of designers as a professor at the Royal College of Art. He became head of the amalgamated departments of furniture and industrial design, and created an interdisciplinary conceptual approach with an emphasis on materials, investigation and the questioning of assumptions. This restlessness is in his make-up; he simply refuses to do things as they are done elsewhere, and now his students follow suit.
Designed by Arad, the Barbican exhibition will be interactive and engaging, emphasising his interest in process. It fully exploits his knowledge of the latest LED technology, with see-through screens conveying information about process
and materials. His Lolita chandelier for Swarovski acts as a disseminator of text messages, and the curators hope to include speed-dating via the chandelier as part of the programme. As in his early experiments with rapid proto-typing – such as Bouncing Vases – process becomes the final product: videos here will show the development of products, while some of his former students put his mobile objects into genuine motion. Visitors can sit in a playroom on his mass-manufactured pieces, and even play ping-pong on one of his specially created table-tennis tables. Sadly they can only look at his trademark Cappellone hat: to try it on they’ll have to buy one in the shop.
Arad’s assured handling of form and material turns the humblest product into a flamboyant piece of sculpture. It’s true that his pursuit of the Design-Art market – even though he abhors this term – can seem exploitative, a dissipation of a talent better used for public benefit, and the joke of re-interpreting former pieces can also wear thin, but his febrile spirit of enquiry makes him the cat that curiosity can’t kill.
Ron Arad: Restless, is at Barbican Art Gallery from 18 February – 16 May.
www.barbican.org.uk
