The Matt and Ron Show
The book is a transcript of their conversations which chronologically cover Rons career. But its not just another book about Ron. Its also about Matt. He tries to get to the heart of art critic type issues. Rons answers are terrible. But that's OK. Ron is just too excited about his own story to engage with anything else. Or even to get his own story straight. Everything was fantastically interesting and amazingly exciting. His mother thought he was a genius at drawing! Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhass thought he was a brilliant student! His final project at the AA was great! etc. The only thing missing are shots to camera of Matt arching an eyebrow while Ron gets angry and shakes his fist. What makes the book unusual is the clash of cultures: Ron (the design guy) doesn't seem to have much time for ideas, which is exactly what (the art guy) Matt is looking for. In the same way, Israeli born Ron dismisses the French art critics who interpreted his concrete turntable as a reference to the rubble of Beirut or the Gaza Strip. My guess is that Rons not telling the whole story. That the interesting bits have all been edited out. Which is a shame, because that's what we want from autobigraphing celebs. My Furniture Fair Hell! Blown Aluminium Saved My Marriage! Chair Design Shame - the full story! Maybe Rons been lucky. My own experience as a designer is littered with disappointment, angst, fear, loathing, failure, incompetence, bad luck, bitterness, jealousy and waste. The book is beautifully designed by GTF. Clear, sharp, and clean. Which suits Matts honest-but-a-little-confused schtick. Ron looks as comfortable as a Pope in Francis Bacons headlights. For the front cover, GTF made a squirmy piece of type that morphs Matts signature into Rons. Maybe it symbolises the rope that Ron is given to hang himself with. Or maybe its the distance between the two men. The book revolves around asking what design is, and how its different from art. Ron thinks of art as something made by a kind of heroic Picasso/Pollack figure. A crazy self obsessed ego, whose genius spills from his hands in the marks he makes. Hence lots of 'Arty' sketches, (ie messy and freehand). Art is a affectation, like Tony Hancock in The Rebel . Being an artist means wearing a funny hat. Design is strangely purposeless for something so interested in function. Maybe because the idea of use is justification enough for existing. Artists need to invent that reason. And that invention means that art isn't just decoratively visual, its an idea too. Because design doesn't need this, it don't need to articulate why its here. It just is. Like rocks or trees. That doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't, its just that most designers choose not to. And it doesn't mean that it cant tell us about the world, it can. But maybe indirectly, in an anthropological way - like an artefact from a distant land. Despite its mythologising of function, design is nothing to do with use. It has everything to do with feeling. Its like a special bit of the world that has been made different. At its best, its a kind of narcotic. It empties your mind and fills it up with a sensation. The only guy who gets a rough ride is Phillipe Stark. Dubbed 'a stylist' which is about as redundant as describing Thierry Henry as a man who often wears shorts or David Bowie as a man who uses a microphone. Of course he's a stylist, but its styling that's been taken into something that style isn't supposed to do - something incredible, something beautiful, something profound. He's also great at talking about it too. His ridiculous French accent spouting non-sequeters, making funny sounds, showing off his fat belly and generally acting the fool. Artists make serious work but act like twats, designers make twatty work and talk about it in the most depressingly faux serious way. Matts tries to ask about meaning. But of course he should have realised that there is no room for meaning in contemporary design. Matt the art critic asks about the meaning of all those curves. Ron: 'I don't really think about curved lines much. Its just that you're forcing me to analyse them now'. Matt remarks that all Rons curves look like they'd like to go back to being 'a flamboyant thick pencil-mark line-curve'. Maybe they'd really like to go back to be a movement of Rons hand. Perhaps furniture is just a way to multiply his gesture - to make it solid and real outside of his body. Chairs are way of reproducing himself or at least a little bit of himself. The bit of Ron that his mum loved and cooed over when he was small. Maybe each chair is really a plea from his inner child: 'Mum, I love you! Do you still love me?' Poor Ron has hardly spent any time thinking about why he does what he does. He's spent a long time figuring out what you can do with various materials, how to work the industry - from limited edition studio pieces to mass produced factory products - all of which shouldn't be underated. 'I don't have to refer to anything. I don't have to place myself in history, or to carefully align myself with anything' is a typically vapid baby boomer statement. The book starts with Matt claiming to know nothing about design. But actually, its Ron that knows nothing: he's just a guy that makes funny shaped chairs. And there is nothing wrong with that. First published in Modern Painters
Hi. I've just read Matt and Rons book. Here's the plot, nicely documented in a photo story running through the book: top art critic Matt Collings goes to Chalk Farm, shakes 80s design superstar Ron Arads hand, sits down, chats, has a cup of coffee, stands up to look at something. Ron gets up and gesticulates. The sun shines. The tape rolls. Someone brings another drink. Matt leaves.
For Ron - and most other designers, art is something that ended in about 1964. If art is a sculpture, it's curvy and sculpted like a Hepworth or a Moore. If art is a painting, it's splattered in an Abstract Expressionist kind of way. He's not alone though. Most designers would agree. Terms like 'sculptural form' are used to describe design and architecture in a way that would puzzle the contemporary art world. Design darlings like Ghery, Hadid, and FOA make things that look like 1950s art with a streak of 1960s sci fi. Things that if made by an artist could only avoid ridicule by claiming the asylum of irony.
Posted by anothersam at July 15, 2004 1:20 AM. 2 Comments
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Contents:
More Scenes In Cartoon Deserta
Generic Powerpoint Template: Delivering Bad News
The Best New Building In London
Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Now Showing: John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt
Obscure Design Typologies: Life Guard Chairs
Osama bin Laden Cigarette Lighter: Novelty Products as Congealed Culture
Absurd Car Crashes: A Eulogy for J.G. Ballard
Now Showing: Dan Grahams 'Rock My Religion'
This Concrete 'O': On Serotonin, the M25, and the Motorik Picturesque
Church of the Literal Narrative
Philadelphias Floating Architecture
Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
2 The Lighthouse: Self Storage & Architectural Hallucinations
Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pipe: Infrastructure as Architectural Subconcious.
Viva Sectional Cinematography!
Now Showing: The Installation of an Irreversible Axis on a Dynamic Timeline
Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
Inflatable Icebergs: Sublimated Guilt Has Never Been So Fun
The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
41 Hours in an Elevator: The Movie
NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
Dogs: Britains Greatest Design Obsession
Detroit Sucks: The Motor Shows Last Gasp
Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction
A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
Pseudoccino: Instant Coffee Foam
Blown Up: More Inflatable Military Stuff
On Christmas Trees, Folk Forests and Staples Office Supplies
Hampton Courts Shrouded Sculptures
Named Fabric: 20 Sponsored Pieces of Architecture at the New Museum
Form Follows Felony: The Secret Home of the Un-Dead Canoeist.
Architectural Magazines: Paranoid Beliefs, Public Autotheraphy - More on Clip/Stamp/Fold
James Bond Lives Next Door: Suburban Imagery as Industry
The Ghost of Christmas Futurism
Chapters for an Imaginary Book About Architecture
Shrouded Plinth - Urban Striptease
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
Place Faking: Instant Heritage for the Thames Gateway
The Marc Bolan Memorial Crash Barrier.
Enjoy The Silence: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
In Search of Britains Vehicular History
Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
I Like Your Manifesto, Lets Put it to the Test-o
How to Become a Famous Architect
Northampton - Sci-fi Pop Planning Promotion
Advertising Central Milton Keynes
The Velvet Underground at the Glass House
Duplikate: Kate Moss on the Production Line of Individuality
Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials
Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
Church of the Ascension and Descension
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
The Most Visited Location in the UK
Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
'Its beauty will know no season'
2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
Useless Proclamations for a Beautiful City
Topsy Turvy VSBA: Inverted Heros of an Upside Down Avant Guard
Everything Flows: ideological cartography
How Geostationary Was My Valley?
The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
Mach 3 Nitro Gel - Design that's foaming at the mouth.
Marchitecture. Architectural things to do in London this March
What happens when you cross a pen with a car?
Football Pitch: Best of British
The First Cut is the Cheapest - Blenheim Palace: pop architecture that goes for the jugular
Holiday Snap II : Giant Glowing French Balls
Holiday Snap: Canadian War Memorial, Vimy, France
Anatomy of an Architectural News Story
Its All About the Big Benjamins
Poundbury, unexpectedly, in the rain
The Exploding Concrete Inevitable. Lou Reed and the Casa da Musica
Untitled (Plastic Sack and Timber)
Berlin 1945 - The Obscene Picturesque
Interview: Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane
An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
Langlands & Bell - The House of Osama Bin Laden
Architectural Criticism gets Sharp
Venturi, Scott Brown and my love that dare not speak its name.
Douglas Coupland: Design and Fiction
Christopher Dresser at the V&A
Fugitives and Refugees' - Chuck Palahniuk
Just What is it That Makes Yesterdays Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
Other:
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I will look at this book when i get a chance. As a hybrid identity (artist-designer-artist) i have overcome the urge to
define the respective professions.
I love your mostly cynical texts. Whenever I need a good smile or wicked grin I come to your site - Thanks for posting them.
Keep it up!
C
Thanks for your kind words. Though I think of it all as more of a crie de couer. What's a guy to do when he opens his heart and all that crawls out is a weary wisecracker?