"Design Real" Exhibition Review

Exhibition Reviews

to the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design abounded in the exhibition, and many of the featured designers arrived in London as students at those institutions, and then stayed. What “Super Contemporary” unintentionally suggested, then, is that rather than celebrating the increasingly restrictive city itself, perhaps it is the role of London’s design schools that merits closer examination.

Design Real Serpentine Gallery, London, November 26, 2009– February 7, 2010.

Reviewed by Shirley Surya DOI: 10.2752/175470810X12863771378996

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Shirley Surya is an M.A. Student at the Royal College of Art, specializing in the history of design. shirley.surya@network.rca. ac.uk

The buzz about Design Real was largely due to its status as the first show to focus on contemporary design at the Serpentine Gallery, famed for its conceptual art shows and commissioned pavilions. Yet inviting a noted industrial designer like Konstantin Grcic to curate such a show demonstrated an awareness of landmark exhibitions such as Machine Art (1934) curated by Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art and Mathematica: A World of Numbers . . . and Beyond (1961) curated by the Eames Office for IBM at the California Museum of Science and Industry. In the context of historical precedents and today’s prevalent design shows, Design Real had surprisingly fresh insights to offer by atypically raising often-destabilizing yet necessary ontological questions about design.

By claiming the centrality of “the importance of good design,” and selecting the exhibits based on the criteria of having “a practical function in everyday life,” the show’s opening thesis seemed, at first, narrow and didactic. Yet its method of installing and communicating the selected forty-three items incited playful ambivalence and multiple readings that went beyond the aestheticization of products or linear design narratives typical of design shows. From Zaha Hadid’s plastic shoes to the titanium-plastic heart implant (present only in the form of a fold-over card with the words “unavailable for loan”), items ranged from the authored, attractive, and extravagant, to the technologically driven, anonymous, and anti-aesthetic, representing fields such as healthcare, transportation, and leisure.

Items were arranged in the U-plan gallery space without any categorical or hierarchical division, in a non-linear and unlikely fashion, with surprising contrasts and shifts of scale that expressed their animated diversity and individuality. With a soulless electric sports car battery on the floor next to a transparent polycarbonate lamp at the entrance, the tip of an advanced ceramic blade knifed through

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a chipboard plinth, and a mechanical welding robot staring down a sleek donut-shaped humidifier, the items were installed to induce a focused engagement with their physicality and performance. Such an encounter was intensified through semantic incongruity by the use of broad generic headings printed on the wall – such as “Bed,” “Mask,” or “Heart” – for each highly specific item, and by displaying only one component of the entire object for some items. For a heading such as “Bed,” one would expect a set of mattress and frame, not a polymer bed spring system hung flat on the wall, while a three-meter long helical fin horizontally suspended from the ceiling resembled an elegant piece of sculpture more than a component of a wind turbine.

The fractional form and separation of the complete data from the exhibit (apart from a one-page list of credits for every item available at the entrance) not only questioned one’s assumptions of “good,” “real,” “functional,” or “purposeful” design but also exposed the viewers’ established object-language systems as the notion of a word and an item did not overlap. But the gallery’s central space, which included stacked sandbags as seating and television monitors that broadcast statements on global issues, provided Kindle readers through which visitors could engage with the exhibits in greater depth. The generic headings of the exhibits became entry points on the Kindle through which visitors could click their way into an online database of each item’s technical, social and cultural significance.

Design and Culture

Figure 1 Installation view, Design Real, Serpentine Gallery, November 26, 2009 – February 7, 2010. Photograph courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery.

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While these data revealed each item’s broader relevance to society and culture, as posited by the show’s thesis, the above experience is not a representative one. For those who made no reference to the list of credits or the online database, objects on view would be perceived very differently. Yet could such room for slippage in the show’s positions on “design” be of any value to how the mercurial state of design today maybe communicated today?

With the increasing hyper-specialization of design, and the interdependence between products, services, industries and politics, it seems that only a narrative characterized by a lack of philosophical unity may truly reflect the realities of design. Perhaps only through the breaking-down of entrenched Modernist meanings of design can we rethink the concepts of “good” or “real” design. But whether or not the license for such ontological exercise is only possible in the setting of an art gallery, or whether design exhibitions could reinvent their typically pedagogical and prescriptive agenda through more poetically imaginative means that allow discursiveness, are questions worth pursuing – and ones that the show effectively raised.