Designblog

The Change the System show left a feeling of good-willingness. A presentation of their good-willingness towards the world, and how they want to change the system with the use of their work. With this the show can be placed on a long list of strongly socially-engaged exhibitions. Going with the hype is one thing, but using your work as a tool to change things is another. This has everything to do with the relationship between the work and the maker, in relation to the work itself. When I came to discover that Martin Margiela is known for, besides of course his designs, his strong opinion on the importance of the separation between creation and creator, I knew that this would be a subject that I would like to address in relation to the show in the Boijmans.

In the ‘Change Maker’ show was a strongly visible parting between the participants; those who want to use their work to change the system and those who change the system as a consequence of their work. This was something I could immediately feel when seeing the work.

By giving a work a certain expectation, a goal, the central point, as it were, drifts towards a purpose and away from the work itself. You will always end up with following the ethic, the moral. Because of that the end result is always limited, it will be something you already know, something everybody already knows. In a way propaganda. For me, the function of an artwork can be connected to the function of a dream. This raises the question: what do you get from a morally correct dream?

That is the reason why it is so tricky to use art or design, if you want to make that distinction, to reach a certain goal. Reaching for a certain goal, apart from the work itself, is like starting from the opposite direction: first the shape is made, where later is made an attempted to insert a tenor. But in the end it feels like only a shell remains, which never had a content. Richard Serra made a clear comment about this issue when he was told that his work was not socially engaged enough; “art doesn’t need justification from outside”. To go a step further, you will kill the power of an artwork by making it justificational.

The motivation of doing this can be multiple things; with a lot of these kind of socially-engaged artists their own ego plays a big role, in the sense of: yes, also I am concerned about global warming and the extinction of all kind of animals. And others have financial motivations; one way to have a lot of shows these days is by presenting yourself as the engaged artist. This became clear when doing some general research into the participants, an image-search on the participants, no works came up, just the nice promotion pictures of their faces. Is it for creator about making a good chair, or is it more about other things and is the chair just a tool/consequence of those things? And how important is your work to you if you put you self in front of it?

Martin Margiela also saw this; at a certain point in his career he decided not to talk to the press anymore and not to appear in public again. For some the statement was simply seen as an advertising stunt, but Margiela did not care about that, it was the content of the interviews that bothered him. For him, interviews had to be about the collection, not about Margiela the person. Only what he created was of importance, only that, not the man or goal behind it, the work stands on his own. The attached publication photos have an obvious connection to that standpoint. By leaving the models in anonymity, the attention is drawn even more to the designs. (We Margiela, the just released documentary about Maison Margiela and their way of working can be seen [here]).

Margiela did things that were never done before, but not because he wanted to be a changemaker. Margiela’s works are ground-breaking, because of the steps he took he found necessary for his work. With this Margiela belongs to the other kind of participants in this show. The contribution of these artists and designers made the exhibition interesting as a whole. With the changemaker show, the Boijmans van Beuningen makes, consciously or unconsciously, a clarifying distinction in a long tradition of border-seeking artists.

This text is not only about my research into Martin Margiela and his view on the relationship between the creator and the creation, but also a research about my personnel point of view. The further I went in the research on Martin Margiela, the deeper the research into my own ideas developed. Two focus points that together form one research. The work of Margiela got me thinking. Thinking is one of the things I always hope that art can offer me.

Adolf Loos was an Austrian and Czech architect and an influential European theorist of modern architecture. One of his famous buildings, Looshaus, is now one of the most representative architectures of the modernist movement, although at the time it was established it had received great opposition and contempt.

The industrial revolution, the sudden accumulated wealth, and the people who longed for the appearance of the nobleman came to the city to compete with the idea that they should be more splendid than anyone else and it is natural that such people despised Looshaus. Anyhow, Loos was established with his opinion, he believed that the ornaments were not beauty, but more as a self-display and that if an artist made commodities for aesthetic purpose, it would not reflect the way people live and would not have the necessary function. The ornaments were a crime for Adolf Loos, a waste of the craftsman’s time, they were made for the main purpose of aesthetic pursuit and must be eliminated from architecture and design. He said that if an artist produces household items for aesthetic purpose, it does not reflect the way people live and it is a crime to make the worker spend so much time on such a useless thing. Therefore, he can not be called extreme functionalist, rather, his ideals were to produce household goods and to build buildings by reflecting the people’s real life at the time. Alfred Loos want to send his message to people who are captivated only by their splendid ornament and life and who are trying to forget their past without being true.

Hansje van Halem is an Amsterdam based graphic designer, she is mainly interested in typography, book design and other printing techniques but she also experiments with computer processed graphic patterns and drawings. Her work is centred on “exquisite” typography, it is a fusion of ornamental patterns and letters which become more then letter-forms, they are ornaments wth a specific function, they are meant to be read.

There are 100 years between the idea that Adolf Loos had about the use of ornament and the way Hansje van Halem is using it today, and it is very interesting to see how, although their point of view regarding it is so distant from each other, there’s still a big connection between two, both indeed are giving great importance to the “function” of their work, Loos eliminates the ornament because there is no function in it and van Halem on the other hand gives a function to it though the use of typography.

But how are the contemporary artists and architects actually reacting to the Adolf Loos’s ideas nowadays ? There are different manifestations of the ornament’s resistance in the contemporary architecture, The London-based FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) for instance consider ornaments as an important and indispensable part of architecture, Charles Holland, partner of the FAT says in an article from the Financial Times: “The Loos argument is very interesting. As I understand it, he was saying that ornamentation was a waste of labour, effort and craft. With contemporary techniques and manufacturing it is possible to achieve a lot of complexity and intricacy with very little effort, so there’s a weird reversal of his argument. We regard ornament less as a guilty pleasure and more as a communicative tool. There is traditionally a kind of puritanism in the UK, a rather macho approach in which engineering and high-tech appliqué is OK. It can all be justified in practical terms but I think we can look more critically now at a modernism in which the motifs of industry were applied to architecture to make it look modern, which in itself is a kind of ornamentation.”

The current computer technologies are also playing a big role in the contemporary w  orld, this modelling and manufacturing technologies has allowed the mass production of the most complex forms and ideas. Evan Douglis is using this technologies to create new strange, forms which recall baroque and rococo decoration in their own new digital world, he also says: “The technology and the software at our disposal now gives us enormous control over form, equations can become a material presence. We’re interested in that intricacy between pragmatism and retinal exuberance – it’s something that bridges the disciplines, from architecture to furniture, interiors and product.”

This new digital tools are helping designers and artist in their work as never before in our history and are also an easy way to experiment with forms, letters and of course ornaments, it makes the whole procedure more interesting and exiting, this is how Loos’s position, after a century, is slightly starting to become invalid, and the ornament on the other hand is on it’s way to decriminalisation.

a cooperative research by Yuriy Krupey & Eun Seo Lee

My graduation work called ‘Brooch’ stems from my study in structure of brooches and daily objects. I am interested in the relationship of forms and functions in mass productions; how the form appeared because of function but not only aesthetic. I was wondering how they work and how people use or misuse them. During the research I questioned what jewelry can be and its characters, and compared jewelry with other ready-mades [x].
My practice has combined these daily objects with jewelry, focussing on the tensions between “sense and nonsense, “usefulness and uselessness”. I was observing every details of the objects, and in the mean time, I was observing my reactions to them. I saw my works as results but not answers of this process, which included remaking, testing, running, repeating and failing.
I take jewelry as a way of asking questions instead of giving answers, I hope people wear my works and question them, maybe even misuse them, or be questioned by others.

Brooch by Jing He /photography DAN/NAD

My practice on jewelry is focused on the relationship of the human body and daily objects. I questioned what jewelry can be and its characters, observing and experiencing the function of objects, and comparing them with jewelry. The central interests in this are tensions between ‘sense and nonsense’, ‘usefulness and uselessness’. What I did was to focus first on the structure of mass produced products; how the form appeared because of the function and not he aesthetic. Then I explored how jewelry, as part of people’s daily life, resides at the edge of usefulness and uselessness/function and aesthetic, analyzing the special character and dilemma of jewelry makers. Finally I related my findings to the practice of the contemporary jewelry field.

In Chapter 1, I mainly referred to the philosophy of Laozi and Martin Heidegger: the absence and function of objects, the different structures and usages between jewelry with other practical objects.
From Heidegger’s essay ‘The Thing'[x], I found the handle of his example of the jug interesting. In my opinion, the character of the jug’s handle has similarities with jewelry. In addition, I described and questioned my own jewelry practice, and how I discovered “absence”.
In Chapter 2, I studied similarities and differences of the jug handle and jewelry. In the contemporary jewelry field, I provided examples, referred to Jacques Derrida’s idea of supplement, and questioning the meaning of jewelry.
Jewelry is not only about the creation process but also the viewing experience, thus in Chapter 3, I compared paintings from ancient China and Italy, and discovered a new way of viewing image and jewelry. I proposed the idea that jewelry is seen out of the corner of once’s eyes.
In the end, I refocused on the absence of objects, and added how people misuses daily objects, and a few pieces of art. I believe that jewelry making can originate in the idea of combining different absence parts from objects.

text by Jing He [graduate student department of Jewelery] he-jing.com

Download my thesis: ”Absence, Function and Contemporary Jewellery Practice“