NOTES FROM NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK 2008

Some philosophers like to make a logical distinction between ontology and event with the latter rupturing the inevitable persistency of things that already exist and envelop us. Design is a jolly disruptive and therefore eventful phenomenon. If it is good at all, design hardly is; it happens. We appreciate design and delight in it in so far as it is coming out as a surprise – in so far as it is unanticipated at least to some degree, if not entirely. Habituation of design is the process of its gradual deterioration and ultimately that of annihilation. At some point it disappears. It is a stubborn psychological fact that when a particular form is elicited many times in succession, our innate response to it is waning. We get bored with the form that repeats itself too often. It’s true that all things come in design. It seems, however, that the longer or more extensively the things exhibit their properties, the more definitive is their reclassification with a shift in emphasis from designed things to designed things. What then normally follows is the qualitative transformation. Hardly anyone today considers, say, Big Mac to be a design product. Invented by Jim Delligatti in 1968 the exact way all other things are conceived design-wise, it is now epitomic of poisonous triviality and represents the perfect zero – if not the negative dimension – of taste. We are fed up with this burger. Your second Big Mac tastes just like the first one – it tastes incrementally worse each time diminishing whatever favorable first impressions of the original. If Big Mac was never invented, it would taste so much better. Design as ontos vs. design as event…

So what’s happening? What’s new? What’s truly phenomenal? I am not in Milan, but I still walk while intoxicated under the influence of NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK, head-started – if informally – a week ago with the “locally grown and internationally known” BKLYN DESIGNS tradeshow, an annual exhibition of designers and manufacturers from Brooklyn, selected by editors from leading design periodicals; and an exciting lineup of keynote speakers, panel discussions and presentations.

The Fractal 23 bureau by Takeshi Miyakawa. Born in Tokyo, since 1989 he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

This is the first NY Design Week I am attending. I can’t tell how many of such weeks I have missed so far for the last 20 years while I am in NY. The event does not seem to be institutionally centered in its origin and ongoing development. I google around for about two hours in search of some official pronouncements and find virtually nothing. NY Design Week appears to be a name loosely applied to not too small a number of independent exhibitory acts – often in conjunction with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, perhaps tactically so. The other day CORE77 published its Essential Guide providing an overhead distillate of more than 300 venues around the city with the ICFF topping the list; while the ICFF’s general information desk generalizes no further than the walls of its own participatory paradigm. The mass media are not particularly verbal when it comes to using the word combination. Contents of the New York Times’ regional “fit to print” news section exemplifies the near-silence. In this light, my take is that NY Design Week is the kind of reality made possible through spontaneous free-associative effort; it is principally and practically an anarchical congregation – in a positive sense of the word, since what this word stands for works and works quite well.

Design as event. Walking back and forth, up and down - nonstop. Sometimes it feels like a sport.

In the course of three days I have visited about 30 expos – all of them situated “outside” the main spot at Javits Center. Some of the free-standing expositions turn out downright hype (sometimes to the extent that they are closed); while other outsiders accommodate stellar exhibitions. The risk of wasting time walking from point A to B on the map of events is not that great as the sites come in tight clusters – in Meatpacking district, in Chelsea, in Soho… These are the kind of areas where one would be hanging around on the weekend anyway.

While in Meatpacking district, I keep finding myself (naturally?) gravitating to HARDCORE showcasing 25 individual design projects from Finland (not to mention countless cases of FINLANDIA VODKA). To make myself clear, I will be referring to a precautious all-capitalized red-inked footnote in the HARDCORE press-release. The word HARDCORE “is used to refer to an extreme dedication to a specific activity or to something more intense than the regular mainstream. It can also be understood as the most authentic part or the essential core of something. As such, it can be used to characterize Finish design.” See, it is NOT what you might have thought! I haven’t. This footnote is not for me… It must be targeting the admins of my other blog who, concerned with moral ecology of the network, went so far as to ban this very word – one would not be able to type it. A certain segment of the music enthusiasts was infuriated and vigorously protested the measure. The semantically-challenged paranoid robo-geeks in control scratched their dirty heads, checked the dictionaries, and capitulated to the rockers.

In the aftermath of that curious incident, I understand properly and see without a hint what HARDCORE is all about: It “defines the essence of today’s Finish design. It gives a timely view on Finland’s unique design scene through the eyes of exhibition curator, word renowned designer Ilkka Suppanen…”

Conceptualization of hardcore furniture by Hannu Kähönen

Materialization of hardcore furniture by Hannu Kähönen

Softcore? Arihiro Miyake’s extension cord management solution

Next door to the HARDCORE pavilion one finds HUDSON FURNITURE, INC. There it turns out that none of the woods in the production of luxury pieces are harvested from old growth forests. The wood slabs are sourced from either salvaged trees or trees damaged by natural forces. Barlas Baylar, the company’s founder and designer who travels around the world hand-picking eco-friendly material, elaborates the point: “The trees have an average life span of 250-300 years. When these trees die, they gradually do so from the crest to the roots. The farmers or the tree owners thus have to remove these trees as they might cause damage to houses, other trees or outlying areas.”

Integration of various wood species to produce unique furniture

While we are dwelling on the subject of eco-responsibility and self-restraint – both in the moral and natural realms – and will not step away from the subject to the end, let us take a short break to entertain the notion of creativity grounded in a somewhat different principle. ART MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY by APT (meaning “exactly suitable”). What about it? “It’s the unrelenting, unapologetic pursuit of awesome. It’s making someone look at something and say “holy crap” by any means necessary. It’s making someone’s head explode with the sheer force of your creativity alone, with no remorse.” We are in Soho…

Unapologetic Big, Medium, and Small Pig Piggy Banks in Silver by Kikkerland (meaning “land of frogs”). You can observe in the reflection that not only my head has, as promised, exploded upon exposure to the awesome, the rest of my body has suffered deformation, too. But I still love the awesome. I will always do. You know my little secrets…

Time Square Blackboard Clock in Black by Black + Blum. Let’s see, my time is… No fixed time.

I am no longer consulting my Essential Guide – considering the percentage of champagne bubbling in my blood, I can’t. Soft as an overdone spaghetti, I go with the flow. The flow takes me around the corner to CAPPELLINI. The phenomenon named Cappellini is rather complex – it is self-affirmatively “an exploration without frontiers”, a journey to everywhere. History of the brand goes back to 1948 and now the name implies many and often contradictory things: the relationship with more than 30 international designers and as many different styles, myriad of temperamentally diverse cosmopolitan customers, collection that combines the modern with the past, juxtaposes tranquility and vivaciousness, simplicity and magnificence… “The products of Cappellini are never boring neither absurd, but they always possess something of life and light, often full of healthy humor…” Let me confirm: this introspection is not far-fetched.

Folding chairs by Adam Goodrum. The chairs are made of aluminum and come lacquered in white, blue, yellow, grey, red, black colors, or in a multi-colored version. Best news is that the chairs come in personalized cardboard boxes! Two chairs deal means two personalized boxes. Now do the math for three… Use your calculator for precision.

Table [tā-bəl] – a flat horizontal slab or board, usually supported by one or more legs, (usually four, but sometimes as many as 20) on which objects may be placed.

Back to Meatpacking district… I’ll let AZURE speak for itself: “If the Wry & Ginger by Azure exhibit teaches us anything, it’s that Canadian designers need not shy away from being Canadian. The show, featuring iconic symbols, traditional techniques and materials native to the True North Strong And Free, makes one thing clear: when it comes to design, Canada rocks!” Indeed, why would Canadian designers shy away from being who they unavoidably are? – in the first place. I do not understand. Perhaps virtuous Canadian designers should be reading Sartre: the hell is other people. I’ll help them: “Because… when we try to know ourselves, … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters.”

In case you are wondering what is important, yet missing in the picture above: it is YOU. “What YOU make is important” – George Nelson, one of the greatest risk takers in the history of design. Though I am not sure about the emphasis in the sentence.

Two buildings down the street, M2L presents a curated timeline exhibit highlighting iconic modern masterworks from the Netherlands – spanning from the 20’s to today. I find the ICONIC FINDS showcase educational.

Steltman chairs by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, a famous fellow traveler of Mondriaan and Van der Leck in the De Stijl movement with its commitment to the idea of pure and functional forms and the aesthetics of primary colors. Or, let me deduce, of no colors, according to Rietveld’s grandsons’ replicas here shown.

ESTABLISHMENT gallery nearby presents Korakot Aromdee, a Thai designer endowed with the traditional kite engineering skills which he employs – with the hands of about 30 locals – to create intricate large scale bamboo sculptures and hanging lighting.

Bamboo is aged more that three years and smoked to ensure strength and pliability. Aromdee learned the “tie and knot” technique from his grandfather.

In a certain light of creativity, problems figure as solutions. This is the wisdom that facilitates designs by RAYDOORS. Luke Siegel, formally a sculptor and now a furniture designer based in NYC, takes a step further: From the point of design, the lack of problems creates vacuum. I interpret it as a suggestion that without a problem to be addressed, design suffers from the deficit of motivation and loses its sense of directedness. To be cute, let me circle that statement: There is no problem as long as there is a problem. The problems that Luke Siegel is happy having are mostly related to entrances and spaces. Luke Siegel’s solutions are for the most part semi-transparent doors and sliding partitions.

Hard to tell what’s going on here. Are the guys busy generating problems or rendering solutions? Whatever is happening, the hors d’oeuvre are great and plentiful. The lack of hors d’oeuvre would have created vacuum – from the point of my stomach.

I can go on, but I need to stop somewhere. Let it be STREETLAB – Amsterdam in NYC… or more specifically, in the MILK gallery. Streetlab, as I gather from my conversation with Elisa Marchesini, one of the participants, is a platform for young street fashion designers and street artists. Its main goal is to encourage young artists and designers to develop their creativity as well as to bring creative individuals in contact with each other.

I like the spirit of this event. Future is in their hands.

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