Much of the current interface between art and
design yields results that are a little too didactic for some tastes. The
artists involved tend to engage the muscular ideological models of Walter
Gropius’s Bauhaus, within which Johannes Itten’s bizarre preference that all
students shave their head and maintain a strict garlic diet was upheld as
exemplary practice. And even if the contemporary artist attempts to critique
this strict functionalist model, something of its tone still pervades. The
work of Superflex, N55 and Atelier Van Lieshout is often theoretically
engaging but it is seldom visually tantalising. So it is just as well there
is another model provided by Ray Eames, who engaged with design via the
decorative. Eames’s concept of ‘functioning decoration’ nimbly overcomes the
hurdle facing the Bauhaus, with its strict ‘form follows function’ treatise
since she conceives of decoration as being functional itself; judiciously
perceiving, too, that decoration can take any form whatsoever. Today Pae
White is the direct heir to Eames’s model, and so it is worth finding out a
little about Eames before discussing White’s work.
Starting out as a painter under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann in the 1930s,
Eames soon wrapped Hofmann’s lessons up in counterpoint in a hip biomorphic
abstraction, later gingerly dangling the results from the ceiling of the
Eames house in California. Experimenting in various media soon led to the
design of a number of magazine covers for Arts which extended the
configurations cultivated in the paintings. At the same time, Eames also
became absorbed by sculpture, and it was an interest in this medium,
together with her creative dialogue with Charles Eames – who started out
from design, not art – which eventually yielded the moulded plywood
sculptures and splints. Each of these experiments were key to the formal
development of the infamous LCW chair, whose low-slung rounded-out seat and
backrest appear to float in space like relational abstract forms in a
painting. Years later, when a young woman came bobbing up to her and asked,
‘Mrs. Eames, how did it feel to give up your painting?’ she guilefully
replied, ‘I never gave up painting, I just changed my palette’.
Today White manages to seat both art and design on the same palette. She
works as a designer and an artist often within the same project, but
frequently it is not clear which hat she has on when, nor where the outcome
sits more comfortably. This is part of the point. White dreams up
advertisement schemes and book layouts for galleries and their artists,
fabricates functional objects, like barbecues, together with non-functional
things, like mobiles. Each one passes through the gallery system and so
accrues something from it, but in each case it is something quite distinct.
Unlike the gallery bound work or even the largely editioned designs, an
advertisement appears in a magazine and so in an edition of thousands. White
scrambles the advertisement’s traditional function by pushing the
information it contains to the point of illegibility. White’s other graphic
design work, often in the form of catalogue designs, exploits a different
conceptual premise, although one no less tricky. For example, with the
catalogue for ‘Against Design’ (2000) not only was White representing the
artists in the exhibition, she was also presenting herself on the same level
as them, as an equal part of the exhibition. The only difference is that
White opted to realise her contribution through the medium of graphic
design. Where some artists would opt to link each of the components of their
practice through a unified formal vocabulary, instead White ensures that the
same laid-back ambience pervades each one. So, rather than any one
individual component, it is the way they all loosely interrelate with one
another that lends her practice its dynamic character.
These two separate but overlapping tracts of White’s output have been
further explored in two recent series: the mobiles and barbecues. The
mobiles consist of hundreds of threads hanging parallel to one another,
extending down from the ceiling from which they are pinned to just an inch
or so above the floor. Dozens upon dozens of colourful coin-size and
coaster-scale shapes, all cut from colourful sheets of construction paper
and glued atop one another like eccentric targets – recalling more the 1960s
designs of Vera Neumann than Eames – are strung onto thread. The effect is
both optically stimulating, as the individual discs shimmer while they move
in the air, and phenomenologically impressive, since the mobiles dynamise
the space they inhabit. A series of spindly hanging aviaries, such as that
recently exhibited at greengrassi, London, extend some of the implications
of the mobiles by way of this more overtly figural subject.
The barbecues are more unequivocally sculptural than most of White’s work.
Cast in iron, each of the most recent barbecue units is based on an animal
that may be encountered by venturing deeper into the woods: an owl, a
turtle, a rabbit, a fox and a frog. When closed, they resemble oversized
decorative sculptures akin to British gnomes; when opened, they are
functional objects replete with grill and cooking implements. The way the
iron has been cast and finished gives them a roughly hewn feel that recalls
the steel sheets of Richard Serra, even though the overall effect couldn’t
be more different. White’s work is playful and goads the viewer into
participation, retaining a sense of intimacy despite their bulk; Serra’s
assaults the viewer and presses them into participation through its
monumentality. Where Serra’s hulking sculptures impose a sermon on the
beholder and their relationship to space, White’s barbecues simply enable
someone to cook a burger. In this way they are just another example of
functioning decoration.
Alex Coles is the author of DesignArt, published by Tate Publishing