design is dead! long live design!

 

A friend directed me to a news snippet out of the Agence France Presse (AFP) a few days back and there’s been a lot of news and posts since about Philippe Starck’s “Design is dead”statement to Die Zeit magazine about five days ago. 

 

If I were to take Philippe Starck’s comment at face value, removed from context, and localize it, I would readily and totally agree. This has been my prevailing sentiment, for example, whenever I pass EDSA and see all the building facades covered with tarpaulin billboards or posted with announcements like these were flea market visual space merchandise, and would often wonder how the architects and building designers feel about this defacement. 

 

 

 

Certainly, those buildings were built to show off lines, rhythm, and symmetry (or intentional asymmetry, as the case may be) except, perhaps, the condominium building on Ortigas, the first to advertise building-sized leased visual space with the tacky, 30-storey high ‘world’s biggest billboard/St. Francis Square tiangge’ tarp announcement dropped from its deck, then followed by G.A.(below) and the BSA towers (above), all facing EDSA, among others. These old and new elegant structures, and much of the Metro’s skyline, are now lost to the energy-hungry tarpaulin billboards, concealed behind these gaudy and vulgar distractions and to the assonant and assaulting billboard frames. Even if these billboards were art directed well, they cannot be excused from institutionalized vandalism.  

 

 

 

But before Starck’s declaration is reduced to the print equivalent of a sound bite, like that of Warhol’s “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (1968), or Mies van der Rohe’s “God is in the details” (attrib.), Starck’s quotable-quote was already evident when he spoke about Why Design? at the last TED conference in March 07. 

 

 

Being a follower of the TED lecture series online since coming across it sometime in late 2005/early 2006 (TED has been online about ten years before), I downloaded and watched the one of Starck’s, made available on TED in December 07, and I reviewed it again recently. Starck, I believe, reduced his design philosophy to the now abridged “design is dead” assertion, and should be taken in context. 

 

Even earlier, in December 2006, was an interview of him by ICON magazine (which I, too, read online), titled “Nowadays you fart and you are a designer”. Part of the article says: 

 

 

…And the man who made it possible for designers to be household names means it. He looks suitably disgusted. “More the design is trendy, less there is good designer,” he continues, transliterating from French.

 

…Starck’s name may be synonymous with the nouveau-riche aspirations of the Eighties, but his great achievement has been the democratisation of design. “My first chair, it cost one thousand dollar. It was a huge success. People were very happy, but not me. I said, one thousand dollar: you have a family with four children, that is six. Then there’s the table. Ten thousand dollar to eat with your family? What is that? It is a joke. It is absurdity!” Now you can buy a Starck chair from American chain store Target for nine dollars. This is an achievement that he is not unduly proud of – nor is he ashamed to recount it in the most portentous terms. “I killed design like it was by killing elitism. It took for me 20 years through the democratic design. But it’s almost done.” 

 

Starck was the keynote speaker in the recent Le Web 3/07, titled What is Social About Design (December 07), not talking about the web, but design in general. As in the TED talk, Starck put to fore his philosophy of evolution and the designer’s role in society and commerce; that in the future, companies will sell no products “where 90% is of use, and 10% is… I don’t know what [for]”,  as opposed to today in which the existence of products is “90% of no use“ and exist for the sole intention of “selling” [making a profit]. As an example, he said, (transc. by me from the video): 

 

“I do not like that, [that each is] a target market…why should I buy a new car when [what I have] is still working? …do I need a BMW? Or do I just buy a bicycle?”

Starck went as far as saying, “There is no war without money…we wear these shoes, buy these clothes because we have money…[and] we eat because we kill… Every one of you has to have a political consciousness…You can be subversive with anything.”  

 

 

When Starck, in his TED talk, reflected about the state of the world today as compared to decades ago when it afforded certain sectors of society “’luxus’…to appreciate art, beauty”, to own designer labels and collect expensive ephemera, he was more global in his perspective and certainly did not sound like singling out a certain hemisphere or race. I believe he did not promote “luxury” as the single reason for defining one’s life, as interpreted by Bruce Nussbaum in his article. Starck was talking about the world outside of his that resonates beyond Europe. 

Starck was profound in a sardonic but understated way in his funny TED video lecture, was more reflective in the Le Web 3.0/07, as he struggled to be understood as much as possible in both, speaking in a borrowed language, on his theories of evolution and the role and contributions of the designer to society at large. There were also several cynical undertones to his observations on global matters, almost a kind of poignant irony to his stature vis-à-vis the nature his work and how he sees himself involved in the scheme of things.

Something was lost in translation in the recent headline (Starck is French, the magazine German, and the news snippet, in English, from a French news agency), that sometimes, like in a passage, the short-cut leads to surprises, so that when something is headlined “Design is dead”quoting a very prolific, high-profile designer, the end of that passage is either a shock (to the unfamiliar) or an expected turn. The shock value, whether intended or not, leads to a lot of tea leaf-reading in the process. 

 

It is more about himself, as a designer, and about his output and role as “maker of useless things” when he said  “I want to find a new way of expressing myself …design is a dreadful form of expression.*” In TED, he said,

 

“That’s why I say that … I say that nothing exist if it’s not in the good reason, the reason of our beautiful dream, of this civilization. And because we must all work to finish this story. Because the scenario of this civilization, about love, progress, and things like that, it’s OK, but there is so many other different, other scenarios of other civilizations.” 

 

Starck was being consistent and, I believe, “design is dead!” is  more of a challenge to the designers — the young ones, the serious ones, and those who are out to prove something to the world —than a complete and total surrender of design as a discipline to what he calls falling to “the shadows…the many faces of barbaria” today.  

 

References, credits and links:

• DIE ZEIT article (German)
• Translated article (via Babelfish)
• AFP article (via Yahoo news)
• ICON article, 2006 (cover feature by Justin McGuirk)
• TED, Video, Transcript
• Le Web 3.0/07 | Video 
• NussbaumOnDesign: Businessweek.com
• Skyscrapercity.com
• Building photos: [a]BSA Towers, [b]GA Tower

eye-witnessing altered states

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“…images can bear witness to what is not put into words.”

~ peter burke, eyewitnessing: the uses of images as historical evidence

(ithaca: cornell university press, 2001)

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Peter Burke’s quote above is not in any way part of an exhibit catalogue or review. I lifted it to describe the intricate works and what look like historico-visual investigations of Brian Dettmer.

 

Brian Dettmer started his Book Autopsies in 2003, cutting through the z-axis of old books — some supposed to be very old (early 20th century*) — of esoteric subjects as engineering, the applied medical sciences, maps and atlases, and revealing their secrets, putting each in a new light.

 

 

There is something addictive in looking at Brian Dettmer’s works online. When I first saw the web reproductions of his works, mostly frontal photos, some isometric, they looked like 3-D collages; the precision of each cut-away quite unbelievable.

 

 

 

I own a few old books myself, acquired from various sources around the Metro, from some people’s yard sales, from some out-of-town acquaintances, flea markets or other serendipitous circumstances, of no particular theme or subject matter. These books are discards of others and they can be had for a song, practically (or a lot of bargaining, if prodding won’t do). I collect old books and other publications for many reasons: for the quality and process of binding, the illustrations, historical value. Sometimes, an old book may be calling out from a pile to be bought, and I heed it. Sometimes, too, I get lucky when quality, historical value and personal interest are all in one book, but luck seems to be more of a reward than mission.

 

I have also been involved in book publishing and production, and hold the serious book craftsmen — printers, strippers, binders and press operators and the authors themselves  — in high regard.

 

Brian Dettmer’s works, therefore, offer other ways of seeing, as it were. I find his works to have deconstructed the out-of-the-box concept and makes the popular definition of book arts sound exotic. At the same time, his works make for some kind of tactile time travel, a repurposing of the printed word and re-examination of spaces fused in bound pages. His works are reviewed as harking of Dada sentimentality. He certainly aims to tease and provoke perceptions but perhaps stops short of anything heavily political as to draw up a social manifesto.

 

 It is always inspiring to know and read about the concretization of someone’s passion. I hope one day to be able personally see a Dettmer exhibit and meet the artist.

 

 

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References and related links:

• 2006 Review by Michelle Gonzalez Valdez
• Brian Dettmer Exhibit, 2006
• Image source and a blog comment entry by Brian Dettmer, 2007: Centripetalnotion
• Exhibit in action, SF
• A reference on book arts
• A [note]book art site, by the way

 

 

View Brian Dettmer’s Flickr site.

aga, the fighter

Today, 11 March, 2008, Aga, whom I fondly call Aga Purrrh, appears to have used up his 9th life but not without a fight. Against weakness, age and defeat, that is.

Aga was born the twin of Apa, pictured above, both lively kits of Ms. M, the 4th generation descendant of Jaja who, in turn, was the very cute kit of Derby and sibling to Unido.

Apa and Aga were named by my mother as it came to the point that we were running out of names for the feline pets. They were both jumpy and playful, had long gray tails, almost identical stripe-y gray coats and white ‘socks’. It was hard to tell them apart when they were younger cats (older kittens?).

One day, probably the human equivalent of late teenage life, Aga started taunting Apa and cat-calling out like mad in the evening. And so it was that the once playful siblings became taunter and tauntee to each other for the next five human years or so.

Aga would disappear before cat-dinner time and would sometimes miss his meals altogether. Sometimes, we see him perched on top of the mound in the empty lot adjacent to ours as if in prayer; other times we’d hear a thud on the roof to announce his arrival. Most nights, though, we can hear him pick a fight with other neighborhood cat-bullies, notorious of which was ‘The Terrorist/Intruder’, a black-and-white scruffy cat from another part of the neighborhood with a spot below his nose like Hitler’s. ‘Terrorist/Intruder’ was totally an uncharacteristic, bland, uhm, ugly cat who’d come in stealthily in the dead of night and, well, terrorize everyone else (e.g the cats). Or would seek out Aga on purpose and pick a fight with him right within Aga’s territory.

Aga, who turned out to be a bully, became a street-smart cat; he gained weight while Apa remained slender and innocent-looking…not!

Apa became the infamous bird catcher, so much so that in the last two years or so when a couple of brown birds with white fan-like tails came to nest in our trees, they would actually swoop down on Apa scaredy-cat prancing on our roof, and peck his forehead or chase him around the yard for disturbing their birdly peace. Apa, being more house-bound, also became a keen mouser, hence his ‘a.k.a’: ‘Mouser’. He remains playful and home-bound, but has learned his lesson well to not mind bird business.

As I write this, Apa is calling out like an adult cat, like what Aga used to do in the evenings. Maybe it’s just natural that he now takes on the alpha male role in the wake of Aga’s silence, diminished aggressiveness and overcoming weakness the past few days.

11 March 2008 | 3:42 pm, Aga Purrrh. Thanks, Cat, for letting us back in your nomadic life again in the past few months, letting us rub your tummy like when you were a kitty, showing us your domestic side and acknowledging that you do have a home to come back to when you need us. Hope you find the final place I prepared for you comfy, just about two feet from Rebo, so you could always be close by. Apa is now fighting with another intruder in your stead.