Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage, 1981-1991

Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage, 1981-1991 C u ra t e d by G a re t h Wil lia m s

FRIEDMAN BENDA 515 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10011

“It’s the accidentals which result from working with scrap that make it such a great material for an artist.” - Joe Rush When Marc invited me to curate an exhibition dedicated to Creative Salvage furniture, I jumped at the chance – this would be an exciting opportunity to explore an overlooked area of design. The global recognition and success of the later work of Ron Arad, Mark Brazier-Jones, Tom Dixon, André Dubreuil, Danny Lane and their contemporaries has overshadowed their earliest pieces, some of the most radical and innovative furniture ever produced.

Back in 2009, when Nick Wright and I first started work on Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage, there were surprisingly few publications available on the subject. It wasn’t until we interviewed those involved that we learnt the exciting stories of how their furniture exploded with a bang out of the subcultures of 1980s London.

Although Joe Rush led the charge, his pieces functioned best on a monumental scale. Only grainy photos of his earliest endeavours survive, leaving Tom Dixon, Mark Brazier-Jones and Nick Jones as the original domestic pioneers. Forged from rusted scrap metal and pilfered industrial bygones using little more than a spot welder, youthful intuition and a wing and a prayer, their furniture was raw, spontaneous, immediate, and, occasionally, fell apart. Unencumbered by any formal design training, they saw possibilities where others saw only junk, and pressed into service everything from engine parts to manhole covers. Bicycle inner tubes were used as upholstery, pickaxe blades supported seats, and parquet flooring served as tabletops. Chance finds sourced at Lots Road scrapyard dictated the forms, redundant functions suggested new aesthetics upending the need for preplanned designs, and occasionally comfort was forced took a back seat.

André joined them later. He’d met Tom through Chantal Coady who commissioned them to decorate the interior of her Rococo chocolate shop. Tom was to make the furniture, some of which is exhibited here, whilst Andre was to paint the trompe l’oeil panels. Fascinated by Tom’s steel concrete reinforcement rod furniture, he created his own, twisting and shaping the bars into open expressive forms, that hinted at French classicism. He became hooked after Tom showed him how to handle a welder. Learning on the job his earliest efforts in sheet steel resulted in unwanted burn holes; his solution, to disguise them with circular scorch marks. Here was beauty in the accidental, and his iconic Paris series was born.

Ron Arad favoured building materials such as scaffolding poles, concrete and salvaged car seats. He exhibited these creations and later explorations in welded sheet steel at his ground-breaking One Off Studios in London’s Covent Garden, founded with Caroline Thorman. Here, he also showcased Jon Mill’s pioneering volumetric metal pieces and his own collaborations with Danny Lane, who dared to handle glass like no one else before him.

Danny exploited the medium’s fragility, juxtaposing it with forged railroad tracks, driftwood and breeze blocks, battering its edges with a hammer and stacking the pieces into layered slabs that threaten to shatter under their own weight.

Jon’s work combined a frisson of danger, too. His retro future Dan Dare chair contours up images of alien worlds or resembles a Cold War instrument of interrogation waiting for the human form to be strapped in, whilst his Cooker Chair incorporated the heating element from an electric cooker hob ring, which glowed red when hot.

He recalls with some mischief, the time a well-to-do client ignored his warnings about sitting on it and was lucky to escape with nothing more than a singed fur coat.

Deborah Thomas also worked with glass, although she was a little softer on the material. She transformed seemingly unusable wine bottles into stunning lights by breaking the glass and exploring how it could be used to ‘transcend its origins but still retain a sense of punk-inspired anarchy’. Like Danny she was reliant on the random way the glass fractured as she broke it, selecting the most visually beguiling pieces from which to build her work. Her Northern Fleet Chandelier (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection) was showcased at Liliane Fawcett and Guiliana Medda’s innovative Themes and Variations gallery, where works by Danny, Tom, Mark

and Andre were also exhibited.

So where did this furniture emerge with seemingly little aesthetic or conceptual precedent in design history?

Perhaps the jarring forms and jagged edges hinted at the pervading sense of social and environmental breakdown that occurred in Britain during the 1980s, whilst the elements of chance found in the materials was a natural reaction against a hard- line government that seemed to have been directly lifted off the pages of George Orwell’s 1984? Industrial strikes, protests, inner-city riots, mass lay-offs, the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, acid rain, the Chernobyl radioactive fall-out and the collapse of Communism were all stories that dominated the British newsstands. While the City of London was earning (and spending) money like it was going out of fashion, large swathes of British society had been marginalised by the Tory Party’s cast iron policies.

As Joe Rush recalls: “You were either for it or against it with Margaret Thatcher: the police, the miner’s strike, Stonehenge, getting battered. There wasn’t this middle ground you could flirt with…”.

Joe’s earliest endeavours with furniture involved repurposing old car seats for the space he illegally occupied in Frestonia, London. It was a DIY existence, propping up walls, rebuilding staircases, managing to make do with the little available. Situated on the fringes of London’s Notting Hill, formed from rows of dilapidated Victorian terraced houses designated for the wrecking ball, Frestonia was turned into a squat by its residents. It eventually became a self-declared free and independent state, an experiment in communal living, and a point of aggravation for the local authorities.

No stranger to dissent, and fascinated by the randomness thrown up by redundant objects, Joe combined the two with significant effect at the illegal free parties he put on with the Mutoid Waste Company. The mutant assemblages Joe cobbled together from the skeletons of vehicle wrecks became the giant sculptural set pieces that later awed revelers at the Burning Man and Glastonbury festivals.

Danny Lane talks with excitement about the squats and parties held in the abandoned wharves of East London before the whole area was stripped clean by redevelopment, whilst Tom attributes the success of his furniture to the underground music scene: “It comes from London, and it comes from the music business. You take different influences, you meld them together, and you make it up as you go along. There’s no formal training in rock and roll. People learn themselves, and they teach each other.”

Together with Mark and Nick, they carved their own niche on the party scene, commandeering empty buildings to put on nights that were a heady mash-up of light shows, cutting up cars and Kung Fu. A poster survives of what they billed as the ‘World’s First Drive-In Demolition Derby Disco’, where they promised to customise the humble Renault 4 into a super-hot rod pick-up truck.

Mark’s Robot Console could have been lifted straight out of one of these derbies. Its marble tops, originally part of the exterior of a Notting Hill bank and rescued from the skip outside, were supported on gigantic steel limbs that looked poised to spring into action. This was furniture designed to rock!

Of the group, Nick was the DJ, whilst Tom played bass guitar in Funkapolitan. His band supported the Clash in New York, where he stumbled across the emerging hip hop scene. Fascinated, they bought hip hop back to London and introduced it to their music sets.

The leap from holding riotous parties to making free and expressive furniture was a small one, with the spirit of the former inevitably permeating the latter’s design. Their work was a potent combination of the DIY ephemerality of punk, the cut and paste sampling of hip hop, the freestyle poetry of rap, the raw energy and showmanship of their parties, and the collaborative qualities of being in a band.

Ron’s Concrete Stereo mined this anarchic musical spirit with its concrete carcass, chiselled away to expose the inner workings of the electronic components – perhaps the most perfect metaphor for this disjointed time. It still plays well today despite being almost forty years old.

Between them Ron, Mark, Tom, André, Danny, Jon, Joe and Deborah’s ‘get up and go’ attitude, their willingness to tear up the rule book and their unique visions, meant that some of the Britain’s most important furniture was made. Their defining spirit inspired us on a personal level too and following their example we jumped in the deep end and decided to self-published our book. Cut and Shut The History of Creative Salvage with all it’s beautiful flaws is the end result.

Over time their furniture developed, becoming a little more refined here, a little more polished there. Whilst the original anarchic spirit remained, it seemed that, amongst this brave shiny new world of commercial success, serial production, design awards and museum recognition, the original roots of Cut and Shut creation were in danger of being overshadowed.

Although many of the earliest pieces no longer survive, the legacy of Creative Salvage certainly has, imbuing the spirit of design with a sense of endless creative possibility. Invigorated by the chaotic energy of the underground scene, those involved pushed the boundaries of what furniture could be, what it could be made from, and who could make it. Their willingness to find beauty, however accidental, in the most unlikely of materials liberated a whole new generation of creatives in the process. At a time of shared climate responsibility, their incorporation and recycling of redundant materials has never seemed more relevant.

We’d like to thank all those who have generously helped us make Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage 19811991 possible. An international exhibition of Creative Salvage furniture is long overdue, and a reassessment of these dynamic and truly radical pieces has never felt more fitting. We hope you’ll join us at the gallery to see the furniture first-hand and share in the exciting stories surrounding its creation.

- Gareth Williams, co-author Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage

Invitation to Tom Dixon’s One Off Exhibition, 1985

Accidents Will Happen

by Glenn Adamson

“There was no business. There was a situation.” That’s Caroline Thorman speaking, in Gareth Williams and Nick Wright’s Cut & Shut, published in 2012 and still the essential source on the Creative Salvage movement. Thorman was giving her first impressions of One Off, the workshop and gallery she founded with Ron Arad in Covent Garden in 1981. “Ron was making things out the back,” Thorman remembered, “and I was selling them out the front.” It was a literal short circuit, which cut right through design as it was normally practiced.

One Off was the first manifestation of a movement that eventually came to be known as Creative Salvage, after a manifesto written by Mark Brazier-Jones, Nick Jones and Tom Dixon in 1985. This was, to all appearances, a radically stripped-down vision. The manifesto itself, all of 72 words long, read in part: “The key [to] success is not in the expensive research and development costs of modern day products, but in the recycling of scrap to form stylish and functional artefacts for the home and office.” A complicated and highly capitalized enterprise with numerous stakeholders was summarily reinvented as something anyone could do, given rudimentary tools, a pile of junk, and sufficient imagination. That it has had such far-reaching influence on subsequent design makes it an ongoing provocation.

As Williams and Wright (and pretty much every other commentator on the subject) have pointed out, this ethos had its roots in London’s punk rock scene. As a ‘zine called Sideburn had famously counseled its readers, “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” Yet we shouldn’t forget that punk was a complicated phenomenon, inspiring one of the period’s most searching theoretical texts (Dick Hebdige’s Subculture, 1979), and non-stop academic writing ever since. Just to give an impression of how tricky the terrain is: by 1981, punk’s death had already been proclaimed several times, with ritualistic regularity. Had it happened as early as January 1977, when the Clash signed to CBS? January 1978, when the Sex Pistols broke up? January 1979, when Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” showed that punk could slide effortlessly into disco? Or February 4, 1980, when the Ramones released a pop-inflected album produced by – get this – Phil Spector? From its very beginnings, punk had to confront the consequences of its own popularity. Its media-unfriendliness, as it turned out, was a brilliant marketing strategy. None put it better than the Sex Pistols themselves: Don’t know what I want. But I know how to get it.

If we’re to draw comparisons between the music industry and Creative Salvage, then, we need to understand this design movement in similar terms. Like punk, it was definitely a youth movement, brash, fearless, and somewhat heedless of consequence. It had none of the self-consciousness that often circumscribes design practice; these objects were put out into the world on a strictly take it or leave it basis. But Creative Salvage was also a hell of a lot more sophisticated than one might initially think. This helps to explain how two of the most significant figures in recent design worldwide – Arad and Dixon – got their start in such raffish circumstances. It is also a good way to approach the objects themselves, which were by turns distressed and distressing. British designers in this moment were drawing on a dizzying range of historical influences, from baroque decorative art to recent conceptualism, and they infused their work with elaborate, sometimes self-referential, narratives.

Like any movement, the parts of Creative Salvage were more than its sum. That is, the various personalities involved were far too various, and too interesting, to be reducible to a single formula. Arad, to begin with, was doubly an outsider to British design. He arrived in London from Tel Aviv in 1974, and plunged headlong into the intellectual ferment of the Architectural Association; in the years he spent there, the faculty and students included Nigel Coates, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi, among others. This vantage point gave him a remarkable acuity. When he looked at a seat from a Puch scooter or Rover car, a set of stereo components, or the commercial construction system that was Kee-Klamp, he saw not somebody else’s idea of design, but an existing asset that he could exploit. Ironically, it was his disregard for originality (as it was conventionally construed) that fueled his own originality so powerfully. Though Marcel Duchamp is often invoked as his

key inspiration in this regard, Arad’s approach was actually closer to the “adhocism” outlined by Jencks and Nathan Silver, in their 1972 book of that name. Arad exemplified their imagined bricoleur, who “makes use of preexisting subsystems, sticks with his existing resources as long as he possibly can, and is intent on undertaking his job immediately, with whatever resources are available.”

For Tom Dixon, the route to Creative Salvage actually was the music industry, or its ragged fringe, anyway. He had been the bass player for a band called Funkapolitan, and also hosted illegal warehouse parties, which seemed to him to require “a big kind of entertainment: putting on black light shows and kung-fu shows, cutting up cars and plate smashing.” Dixon made furniture in the same entrepreneurial spirit, working alongside Nick Jones and another denizen of the scene, Mark Brazier-Jones, who had superior craft skills, having built stage sets for such acts as David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Elton John. Though typically braced together with Dixon because of their close working relationship, Brazier-Jones’ idiom was actually quite different, more symbolic in its references, a meeting of (in his own words) “the allegorical, the zoomorphic, nature, and ancient cultures.” His interest in historicism is particularly clear in the dressing table included in this exhibition, which has the stately proportions of a bureau by the seventeenth-century master André-Charles Boulle.

1985 marked a step change for the core Creative Salvage group. The year of the aforementioned manifesto, it also saw Dixon exhibiting at One Off: “thrones, chandeliers, office chair and an indoor fountain,” all cobbled together from a miscellany of Victoriana and orphaned industrial parts, as if an earlier England had disgorged itself right into the room. It was all very entrepreneurial, the quintessence of instantaneous value creation – “money for old rope,” as Nick Jones puts it. Yet this was furniture with a snarl, easily legible as social commentary. When Dixon sketched a series of scrolling forms in space with steel rebar, throwing in some rubber strips as a desultory gesture toward upholstery, he was mobilizing the typology of the chair as a carrier of sensibility. The aesthetic may be very different, but conceptually the gesture bears comparison with Alessandro Mendini’s Proust chair (1978), which similarly presents itself as a repository of past tropes, an extended riff on what’s held in the collective memory. This comparison helps us see Creative Salvage as the successor to earlier Italian radical design, equal parts creativity and critique, and also as a vital bridge to later movements and moments. So many designers today, whether they are aware of it or not, are operating with the same playbook: feeding off the energy of a subcultural scene, to some extent cloaking extraordinary ambition behind a casualness of attitude, making it up as they go along.

Two of the other stand-out talents of the Creative Salvage movement, André Dubreuil and Danny Lane, make for an intriguing contrast. One was a master of elegant contours, the other a sculptor of jagged masses. Dubreuil, a Frenchman who initially encountered design as an antiques dealer, fell in with Dixon, Brazier-Jones and their hard-partying set in the mid-1980s. They all met, deliciously enough, via the Rococo chocolate shop on the King’s Road, which had been the main drag of the punk district in the 1970s. Rococo’s proprietor, Chantal Coady, also frequented Dixon’s warehouse parties and a connection was made: together, the three re-did her shop as a fantastical gesamtkunstwerk, baby-pink walls serving as the backdrop for serial refurnishings; some of these fixtures are included in the current exhibition. (Coady also used the space as a quasi-gallery, on one occasion giving it over entirely to Brazier-Jones.) Though Dubreuil shared a basic technical repertoire with Dixon, his work was far more refined. Witness his Ram Chair (1986), which takes its name from the curled horns springing from its back. From there the slender metal whips down and around in gorgeous, looping gestures, finally coming lightly to rest on the ground in four delicately pointed feet. If Dixon’s use of rebar takes its cues from rock-and-roll, this is a classical string quartet.

With Lane, we’re more in the territory of heavy metal – sometimes literally, though he is best known for his innovative use of glass, thick plates of the stuff, which he cuts, stacks, chips with a hammer, sandblasts, and otherwise manhandles. There is something marvelously counterintuitive about his use of this material, which is of course transparent, but in his hands becomes emphatically solid, weighty, tinged industrial green where its thickness is exposed. The edges are not actually sharp (they are, in fact, polished to a pleasing smoothness) but they look dangerous. In the late 1980s, when “fragmentation” was an ever-present buzzword, it was easy to see

these objects as illustrative, props for a postmodern era. This is something of a misreading, though. Lane was far, far from expressing anxiety about the coherence of the self, the death of the author; he has always been much closer to Arad, in his confident and visceral treatment of existing industrial materials. (In fact, it was while in Arad’s company that he discovered a load of broken glass tabletops, inspiring his subsequent investigations, and he went on to supply One Off with glass components thereafter).

The story of Creative Salvage includes a few other figures, too, who are well worth discovering. One who is not in the present show – because hardly anything of his 1980s work survives – is Joe Rush, whose enormous, apocalyptic, DIY metal scrap sculptures anticipated the ephemeral monuments of the Burning Man festival. His itinerant art group, the Mutoid Waste Company, pulled off some truly extraordinary things, including an archway made from military tanks and a sculpture incorporating a decommissioned MIG fighter. It is Rush who inspired the title of the present show: he was devoted, he said, to accidentals, “designed, but designed within the nature of chaos.”

Jon Mills got his start in 1986 when he walked into One Off and Arad gave him an exhibition on the spot (it had just opened up because Lane was in a real-life car crash, as opposed to the ones evoked in his work). Mills’ Dog Bollock cabinet requires little explanation, perhaps, but it may be helpful to American audiences to know that his Dan Dare chair is named for a “pilot of the future” who dominated British pulp science fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Deborah Thomas, the most prominent female exponent of the movement, was active both as a sculptor and a theater designer before finding her métier of lighting. Her fixtures, characteristically made from recycled chunks of glass lashed together with wire, are explosive reinterpretations of the traditional crystal chandelier. Thomas, like Dixon, received early support from Liliane Fawcett, whose gallery Themes and Variations (situated in a former garage in then rough-and-tumble Notting Hill) was an important venue for the new work, roughly comparable to Rick Kaufmann’s Art et Industrie in New York City. Fawcett’s support was all the more important because Creative Salvage was never shown much at all outside of London. Incredible as it may seem, the current exhibition at Friedman Benda is the first exhibition about this historically crucial movement ever staged in the USA. Nonetheless, several of our protagonists would become very well known internationally, in no small part due to their increasing professionalism. Already by the late 1980s, the Creative Salvage designers were demonstrating far greater formal control, partly a reflection of their ever-improving workshop skills, partly a change in attitude.

Situations had become businesses. As before, Arad led the way. The vertical stele in the present exhibition is a rare and early incarnation from his Volume series, best known for the slightly later Big Easy (1988) and Rolling Volume (1989) chairs. It is formed of hand-beaten, polished stainless steel, a difficult material to work. Where metal meets metal, crisp seams add definition to the form. Dixon’s slightly later Pylon series (begun in 1989) makes for a fascinating juxtaposition. It was among the first furniture ever to be designed on a computer, and Dixon made sure that showed: the wireframe construction is a direct translation of the era’s early rendering software into physical space. Fascinating as a harbinger of what was to come, it also reflects Dixon’s own development; no longer crashing the party, he was now defining design from a central position.

At a distance of over three decades, even non-Brits may feel nostalgic for the glory days of the eighties. The Peter Anderson photos included in this exhibition remind us that London swung even harder then than it had in the sixties – swung between extremes. In an angrily polarized nation, huge amounts of fun were had; there was also a desperate backdrop of unemployment and unrest. To really understand all this, to a certain extent, you probably had to be there – which I wasn’t. The objects of Creative Salvage only can give us so much: originally built from remnants, they are now relics in their own right, the remains of a rebellious time. It would be a big mistake, however, to view them through the scrim of nostalgia. Better to take them as models to follow. In 1981, a kid could set the world alight with nothing but a welder and a few good ideas. There wasn’t anything simple about that proposition then, and today, forty years later, that hasn’t changed one bit. Long live the accidentals.

Original Flyer for the Second Creative Salvage Exhibition, 1985

Peter Anderson BBoy BoomBox, 42nd Street, NYC, 1980 Hand printed gelatin silver print, from a later impression, in artist’s frame Framed Dimensions: 36.25 x 32 x 2 inches 92 x 81 x 5 cm

Peter Anderson The Clash, Shoreditch, London, 1985 Hand printed gelatin silver print, from a later impression, in artist’s frame Framed Dimensions: 36.25 x 32 x 2 inches 92 x 81 x 5 cm

Peter Anderson Java Sound System, Nottinghill Carnival, 1983 Hand printed gelatin silver print, from a later impression, in artist’s frame Framed Dimensions: 36.25 x 32 x 2 inches 92 x 81 x 5 cm

Peter Anderson Sound System Nottinghill Carnival, 1983 Hand printed gelatin silver print, from a later impression, in artist’s frame Framed Dimensions: 36.25 x 32 x 2 inches 92 x 81 x 5 cm

Ron Arad [British, b. 1951] Bookcases, 1983 Patinated steel, cast iron steel, glass Each: 88.25 x 56 x 15.75 inches 224 x 142 x 40 cm

Ron Arad [British, b. 1951] Concrete Stereo, 1983 Concrete, rubber, electrical components, steel rods, acrylic

Horns Armchair Drawing, 1985 Arad’s Horns series marked a crucial step for the designer, away from the readymade and into fabrication from scratch. Each object in the series was based on a simple manipulation of flat aluminum sheets, which are joined together with curved lengths of steel tubing. The title refers to sharply pointed triangles that were used as “props” for a dining table and related side chairs. This imposing armchair lacks this aggressive element, but it still exemplifies the tough “post-industrial” look typical of Arad’s work at the time. The sides of the chair are cut out and then bent at a ninety-degree angle, to form the arms. The seat and back are made up of 62 horizontallystretched springs; the curve of their placement is visible in perforations through the sides. The aluminum surface is ground to create a reflective pattern, an allusion to the Cubi sculptures of David Smith of the 1960s, whose hard-edged geometric quality the Horns series shares.

Ron Arad [British, b. 1951] Horns Armchair, 1985 Aluminum, steel, PVC covered galvanized springs 47.25 x 46 x 47.25 inches 120 x 117 x 120 cm

Ron Arad [British, b. 1951] Sculpture, c. 1988 Stainless steel, welded, polished 115 x 23.75 x 8 inches 292 x 60 x 20 cm

Ron Arad [British, b. 1951] Rolling Volume Prototype, 1989 Polished patinated steel 30.75 x 35.5 x 37.375 inches 78.1 x 90.2 x 94.9 cm

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Dressing Table, 1988 Steel, copper, bronze and glass 63 x 53 x 14 inches 160 x 134.75 x 35.75 cm

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Metal Fish with Scallop Shell, 1983 Steel components 18.25 x 12.75 x 12.75 inches 46 x 32 x 32 cm

Photograph of Robot Console, 1989

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Robot Table, 1989 – 1990 Granite, metal, glass and integral light fitting 47.75 x 28 x 29.25 inches 121 x 71 x 74 cm

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Rococo Chandelier, c. 1988 Welded steel 17 x 36 x 36 inches 43.2 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Rococo Chandelier, c. 1988 Welded steel

Mark Brazier-Jones [New Zealand, b. 1956] Tall Lyre Chair, c. 1987 Waxed iron and found objects 49.75 x 19.75 x 19.75 inches 126 x 50 x 50 cm

Creative Salvage Collage, 1985

I was searching for the hardest-wearing and most attractive materials for tabletops. At the same time, I was labouring on my own apartment, laying a reclaimed oak tile in a herringbone pattern on the floor. I thought it might make an attractive wall finish, and then there was no reason not to use it as a kitchen counter-top. It struck me that a top idea might be to use the same surface from the table and the floor and try and gain visual space through the vanishing table plane (it was a small space). This might create an almost invisible set of furniture.

The extravagant shape was taken from a visit to a jewelry workshop, where traditionally the craftsman will sit at a desk with a cutout to be as close to the work as possible and not lose precious metals. - Tom Dixon

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Camouflage Table, 1987 Oak parquet, sheet steel 15.5 x 46.5 x 65 inches 39 x 118 x 165 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Bull Kitchen Chair, 1986 Sheet steel, wok ladles and frying pan 27.5 x 14.25 x 17.5 inches 70 x 36 x 45 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Chair, 1985 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods 36.25 x 22 x 19 inches 92.1 x 55.9 x 48.3 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Chair, 1985 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods and rubber inner tubes 29.75 x 22 x 24 inches 75.6 x 55.9 x 61 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Chair, 1985 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods and rubber inner tubes 25.5 x 20.25 x 22.5 inches 64.8 x 51.4 x 57.2 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Chair, 1985 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods and rubber inner tubes 27.25 x 20.5 x 27.5 inches 69.2 x 52.1 x 69.9 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Executive Chair, 1984 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods and rubber inner tubes 35.5 x 19 x 19 inches 90.2 x 48.3 x 48.3 cm

Funkapolitan, In The Crime of Life, 1982

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Funkapolitan Poster designed by Tom Dixon, 1981 24 x 16.75 inches 61 x 42.5 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Monopod Chair, c. 1985 Welded steel industrial racking and scrap metal 40.5 x 18.75 x 22 inches 103 x 47.75 x 56 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Pair of Candlesticks, c. 1989 Welded steel, vehicle exhaust parts 34.75 inches 88 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Pylon Mirror, 1989 Welded steel and glass 65 x 25.5 x 25.5 inches 165 x 65 x 65 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Regal Chair, c. 1985 Welded sheet steel and scrap metal 42.25 x 22 x 18.5 inches 107.3 x 55.9 x 47 cm

The most resonant artefacts are those that communicate eloquently of their era, capturing the spirit of a moment in time and establishing a basis for contemplation that gathers in importance over ensuing decades. The confrontational urgency of Creative Salvage evolved as an intuitive indigenous reaction to the cultural, political and economic destabilisation of post-industrial Britain. With the benefit of hindsight, the eloquence and energy of this reaction becomes more valuable, whilst its context and circumstance only gains in relevance.

With social discord disrupting both city centres and coal-mining shires, by the mid-1980s Britain had de-industrialised to reveal sparse and derelict terrain beneath. The iron that once built an Empire was now scrap sold by the tonne — fertile ammunition for a new generation of partisans who celebrated a noisy collage of Merz detritus, postpunk heavy metal romanticised with just a dash of pop Armageddon.

Retrospection may assign Dixon’s Skeleton as Memento Mori, an ergonomically calligraphic Dorian Gray, cheerfully assured of the inevitable impermanence of human endeavours, yet willing to offer us a seat for the ride. Or perhaps his are the skull-and-bones of the pirate’s tattered wind-torn Jolly Roger, announcing buccaneering spirit to turbulent seas.

Theirs is a message of necessary cultural evolution, an informal celebration of discarded fragments of an industrial heritage now scavenged and repurposed for shock and discomfort. A changing-of-the-guard over choppy waters, the memory of an industrial revolution now welded firmly shut. - Simon Andrews Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Skeleton Armchair, 1985 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods 49 x 23.25 x 32.75 inches 124 x 59 x 83 cm

Tom Dixon and Skeleton Contact Sheet, 1985

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Space Age Chair, 1987-1988 Welded steel 35.5 x 27.75 x 26.5 inches 90 x 70 x 67 cm

Tom Dixon [British, b. 1959] Victorian Chair, c. 1985 Wrought iron, cast iron 48 x 15.5 x 21.75 inches 122 x 39.5 x 55.5 cm

André Dubreuil [French, b.1951] Chair, 1986 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods with upholstered seat 37.75 x 23.75 x 30.5 inches 96 x 60 x 77 cm

André Dubreuil, Time Magazine, 1986

André Dubreuil [French, b.1951] Early Ram Chair, 1986 Welded steel concrete reinforcement rods with upholstered seat 36.75 x 29.8 x 33.5 inches 93.3 x 75.7 x 85.1 cm

André Dubreuil [French, b.1951] Paris Chair, c. 1988 Waxed and welded sheet steel with acetylene torch burns 36 x 24 x 22.5 inches 91.5 x 61 x 57.25 cm

Danny Lane [American, b. 1955] Etruscan Chair, 1988 Sand blasted and rusted steel, forged stainless steel and hammer chipped polished glass 35 x 16 x 24 inches 88.9 x 40.6 x 61 cm

Danny Lane [American, b. 1955] Michael’s Table, 1989 Burr Oak, glass and steel 28.5 x 126 x 54.25 inches 72 x 320 x 138 cm

Danny Lane [American, b. 1955] Solomon Chair, 1988 Stacked hammer chipped polished glass, opaque glass and steel rods 47.25 x 15.75 x 23.75 inches 120 x 40 x 60 cm

It’s [The Dan Dare chair] born of a technique. I made a tool that would impress those little domes in a piece of sheet steel and I’m thinking: what can I use that technique for? So I made a rocket seat and I stood back and thought what now? So I made a little capsule, a porthole, but I didn’t like that so I cut it all off. But eventually the idea of this radar dish with hand-operated cables with handles above your head came to mind. - Jon Mills

Jon Mills [British, b. 1959] Dan Dare Chair, c. 1987 Forged and welded steel with multi-directional radar dish 60 x 48 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 x 121.9 cm

Drawing for Dog Bollock Wardrobe, 1988

Jon Mills [British, b. 1959] Dog Bollock Wardrobe, 1988 Forged and welded steel with painted interior 86.75 x 47.25 x 23.75 inches 220 x 120 x 60 cm

Jon Mills [British, b. 1959] Neptune’s Cupboard, 1989-1990 Forged and welded steel 114.5 x 51.25 x 19.75 inches 291 x 130 x 50 cm

Cindy Palmano [British, b. 1963] Contact sheets of Creative Salvage Furniture, 1985 Photographic print on paper Each: 18 x 12 inches 45.75 x 30.5 cm

Tony Sleep [British, b. 1950] Untitled, 1978 Giclee print 14 x 11 inches 35.75 x 28 cm

Tony Sleep [British, b. 1950] Frestonia London, 1978 Giclee print 14 x 11 inches 35.75 x 28 cm

Deborah Thomas [British, b. 1956] Blue Flame, Wall Light Installation, 1987 Blue glass, painted varnished steel rod, painted galvanized steel wire 65.75 x 16 x 7.5 inches 167 x 40.75 x 19.25 cm

Deborah Thomas [British, b. 1956] Original Drawing for Blue Flame, Wall Light Installation, 1987 Ink on paper 7.25 x 10 inches 18.5 x 25.5 cm

Deborah Thomas [British, b. 1956] Pair of Forest Breeze Wall Lights, c. 1991 Clear and red glass shards suspended on wire Each: 16.5 x 13 x 5 inches 42 x 33 x 12.5 cm

Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage, 1981-1991 Cur ated b y Gar eth Wil lia ms

Published by Friedman Benda 515 West 26th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel. + 1 212 239 8700 www.friedmanbenda.com Special thanks to Gareth Williams.

Photography by Timothy Doyon, Daniel Kukla, Cindy Palmano, Time Magazine, & Tony Sleep.

All content copyright of Friedman Benda.

Creative Salvage 3, 1986

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Accidents Will Happen: Creative Salvage, 1981-1991, January 13 - February 12, 2022.