Function And Art: An Interview With Ron Arad
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Ron Arad has a bit of a bad-boy reputation in the art and design world. From the moment he walked out of an architect’s office and into a scrapyard, he has defied expectations and boundaries. It was there in a London scrapyard in 1981 that he salvaged the pFunction And Art: An Interview With Ron Arad
Ron Arad has a bit of a bad-boy reputation in the art and design world. From the moment he walked out of an architect’s office and into a scrapyard, he has defied expectations and boundaries. It was there in a London scrapyard in 1981 that he salvaged the parts for the “Rover Chair,” a car seat set in a curved steel frame that catapulted him into the world of design. In a recent interview, he discussed his shows at Friedman Benda in New York and Vitra Design Museum in Germany, both of which feature his earlier work; playing with standard forms; and his greatest tool: the pencil.To begin, your show “Fishes & Crows” at Friedman Benda features some of your earlier works from 1985-1994, pieces like “Cone Screen,” (1985) and “Looming Lloyd,” (1986). Can you tell us more about your show at Friedman Benda?Have you seen the show?I did, yes.So maybe you can tell me because I haven’t seen it (laughs). I’ve seen photographs. It’s funny because there’s a show at Vitra [Design Museum], “Yes to the Uncommon!” and there’s a lot of similarity between the two shows because they refer more or less to the same period.What period would that be?You know, like mid-80s on.When I went to Vitra, I saw the ugliest looking Big Easy that I had ever made. But it was so ugly it was delightful. There was something genuine about it because I was just finding ways to do things like that. And I definitely didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that my fooling around in the workshop was going to produce museum pieces. Next to this ugly piece, I saw the most beautiful Big Heavy. I was very jealous of Vitra for having it.Looking at the pictures from Friedman Benda, I do have some things that I’m a bit jealous of. I wish I had the “Spanish Made” (1990). I wish I had the “Wild Crow” (1990).You mentioned looking back on some of your earlier work and seeing this piece you thought to be terribly ugly, but that there was a certain pleasure in this….But you know that when I say “the ugliest thing” I exaggerate…Of course. But I was wondering if now, as a seasoned designer, you ever look back on your earlier work and cringe?Not a lot. But you know sometimes you do something for a client who says can you make me a bedside table with a light. Yes, we did it, but we never thought it would go to an auction or become public. This is something to do with that period and that time. So cringe maybe, but also there’s some charm in it.I noticed you have a continued fascination with chairs. Can you talk about how your chairs developed over time? From the Rover to the Big Easy chairs; from hammered steel to decorative paint.The “Rover Chair” is actually what sucked me into the world of furniture design. If someone suggested to me, “You’re going to design furniture” a week before that, I would have laughed at them.Anyway, I walked out of an architect’s office in 1981, I think, and made my way to the scrap yard. I always had the idea of taking amazingly and lovingly designed leather car seats and, instead of letting them rot in a scrap yard, I could make domestic furniture out of it. Those days, I was thinking more of Readymades and Marcel Duchamp and Picasso’s bicycle seat with the handlebar, more than I was thinking about Jean Prouve.Sometime later, I read in a magazine called Blueprint, an interview with Rolf Fehlbaum who was the owner and director of Vitra [Design Museum], that Ron Arad was one of the most interesting designers to come out of London, before I knew I was a designer.That sort of exercise sucked me into this world. The problem in the ’80s with furniture design was that the modern chairmakers of the ’50s like Jacobsen… they had a lot to rebel against. We didn’t. To do a new piece of furniture, you have to have a good reason to do it. You have to have something that’s genuinely new about it.You seem to be very keen on the new and making room for what’s next. Where do you think that stems from?A very low boredom threshold. I once said that boredom is the mother of creativity. Google it. It became a very popular quote.It’s also curiosity. Asking yourself: what if I do this, what if I do that. What if I don’t do this. Curiosity is the fuel. And if you’re lucky, other people are curious enough of what you’re doing to allow you to continue doing it.That said about boredom, there seems to be something special about chairs that continues to fascinate you. What is it that keeps drawing you to this form?I mean we all know more or less the size of the chair, the height, the inclination of the seat. It’s not neuroscience to make a comfortable chair. It’s easy, it’s not as difficult as people think. It’s a form that is there, waiting for you to do something exciting with it. The form is given. It’s like a form in poetry or a sonata in music. We all know the structure, but yet there’s excitement in tweaking it and doing something exciting and new with it.I’d like to talk about your work process. How does that unfold exactly? Do you have a routine when you step in the workshop?I don’t have a routine. I’m a bit like a pinball. How do I work? I sketch and I talk. I have very good people around me that are good at modelling and developing with me and also good conversations. But the pencil, whether its a pencil on the tablet, or a lead one. The pencil is still my main tool. And then my mouth as well.I know early on a lot of people talked about bad blood between those in design and those in the art world. Do you still think there’s that fission or has that dissolved over time?I don’t think it’s dissolved. People like to know exactly what compartment something belongs to. Even if I painted the “Mona Lisa” tomorrow, there will be enough people that will say “designed by Ron Arad.” I don’t care about boundaries. I don’t care about breaking boundaries. Because I don’t have boundaries. I do things that are completely not design and I have no problem with it. And I do things that are completely design. I did some chairs and their destination is to be sold in a furniture shop and produced by the industry.My next show in L.A. [in September], for example, is in a new gallery called “Over the Influence.” There’s nothing functional there. It is all art. But it’s part of the spectrum of what I’m interested in and what I’m doing. It’s not that I dropped this and did something else. For me, it is of the same sort of world. But in the end, there are two types of things. There’s tedious things. And there’s charming things. And that is a division that I am interested in.This interview appears in the September editions of Modern Painters and BlouinShop.https://www.blouinartinfo.com/homeFounder: Louise Blouin Read more