Jun / 29 / 2007 ¬

Veni Vidi Vintage - Re-Collecting Design Miami/Basel

“We are making history,” a representative of New York-based design gallery R20thCentury exclaimed to me with enthusiasm, “finally people seem to get what we have been trying to do for so long.” After a successful launch in June 2006, 22 design galleries spanning the globe from New York and London to Paris, Copenhagen and Shanghai opened shop once again at Art Basel’s spin-off fair Design Miami/Basel. PAD-correspondent Martina Grünewald stopped by and collected impressions from this new kind of design event.

Their united goal: to convince deep-pocketed collectors of high-end contemporary art to invest in a modern lifestyle uncompromised by outdated modes of domestic acculturation. Their sales strategy: to effectively align famed contemporary art with upscale utilitarian homewares on similar claims to witty panache, conceptual complexity, and - desirable singularity.



From June 12 to 17, 2007 the dramatic concrete dome of Basel’s Markthalle gave shelter to a classic assortment of star items in an internationally burgeoning design market. In museum quality displays, gallerists presented early 20th century Austrian “Jugendstil” side by side with Danish post-war design, French 1950s prefab housing and the multicoloured graphics of bold 1980s Italian furniture. With prices too high to be quoted publicly labels were kept to a minimum, shrouding the exhibits in the mythical imagery of art production. In my mind’s eye I could make out the transfigured silhouette of a perfectly balanced chair, a sculpted table, a dashing sideboard springing forth, fully grown, from the master’s brain, the designer as magical artistic genius.

Vintage meets Vitra and Fresh Fat
However, while successfully feeding from this popular image that has been promoted especially by decades of design literature, Design Miami/Basel also explored future trajectories in product design. Together with the Hoffmanns, Corbusiers, and Kjaerholms of the past century the show introduced new limited editions and offered onsite production demonstrations.



Trusting that aroused visitors would eagerly set out to experience the brand-new prototypes instead of resting their bones on six Polder sofas generously provided by Vitra Design, the office furniture company mounted an exhibition of images and models illustrating the development of a cutting-edge “signed, numbered and strictly limited edition” of furniture “authored” by fifteen eminent architects and designers from Ron Arad to Tokujin Yoshioka. In German Weil am Rhein, across the border yet only driving minutes from the Swiss fair ground, the proud owners of passports and motorized vehicles or valid bus tickets could explore the talent pool’s material results in actuality.

I almost felt as though Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum was effectively trying to propagate another company offshoot by planting his creative seeds at Design Miami/Basel. By the way, if Vitra ever decides to abandon the world of office furniture and contract design, its factory grounds would convert into the world’s first open-air museum of late twentieth and early twenty-first century architecture. Starting from Jasper Morrison’s bus stop you can meander through and around Frank Gehry’s Design Museum, walk along the cherry-tree lined conference center by Tadao Ando and tour Zaha Hadid’s fire station, Jean Prouvé’s gas station and the production facilities by Nicholas Grimshaw and Alvaro Siza—not to forget Charles Eames’s original office.

Back in Basel, a panel discussion with Rolf Fehlbaum, Greg Lynn, Hella Jongerius, Konstantin Grcic, Didier Krzentowski and the Bouroullec brothers disappointed the expectations of local design students and magazine editors alike. On the one hand, a technical glitch with the speakers’ microphones remained unresolved; on the other hand, the conversation focusing on “the process behind limited edition design” was strangely devoid of insightful reflection by the distinguished participants. Maybe their speechlessness pointed in part at a dangerous characteristic inherent in the socioeconomic dynamics of artistic production: once you made it you have nothing to fight for, thus nothing to say anymore.



Beyond Vitra, onsite performances explored the possibilities of a desirable connection between the fine arts, canonized vintage prototypes, and contemporary limited editions. For example, Tom Dixon’s Micro Factory allowed design aficionados to partake in the production process of big-name design. Once turned on, his Extrudex Machine squeezed yard after yard of “Fresh Fat,” a red and black thermoplastic sausage that was immediately hand-layered around a chair-shaped chipboard core into fuzzy three-dimensional mesh to eventually sit on when hardened.

Ethics, Ergonomics, and Ecology: Enough to Reinvent Good Design?
Among the many other projects, I would like to mention the one that delivered the obligatory charity appearance art shows like to appeal to. Yves Béhar, HSBC, MIT Media Lab, OLPC, Google, and Linox collaborated on the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative aiming at distributing inexpensive child-size yet universally equipped laptops to children in developing nations.

When I first encountered the laptop without knowing its history, I was truly impressed that somebody had finally come up with the perfect globetrotter’s accessory: small, robust, with a sealed keyboard (no more bread crumbs piling up between keys), an ergonomic plastic handle to carry the thing, a revolving color screen that can be turned into a high-contrast black and white screen for reading in the sun, a wide track-pad on which to draw and handwrite, solar energy—all the latest technology you need for only $100. Wishful thinking, as it turned out, because the laptops are not intended for the free market. The governments of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Lybia have apparently already ordered the first five million units scheduled to ship by fall 2007.



What will happen to these laptops? Will children or their kin use them? Will they simply sell these alien high-tech gadgets in exchange for other, more desirable goods or will they even be stolen from their users and resurface in a semi-formal second-hand market such as eBay? The project does not mention the involvement of any long-term ethnographic fieldwork to assess local needs; rather, the technology is supposed to be self-regulating by punishing those who do not use it according to the project team’s intentions. The exhibition attendant told me that the laptops would only function within a certain geographic area and therefore lose their functionality outside of everyday school life. I am not convinced and will curiously monitor future feedback on a project that has so far demanded $500 million dollars, not a slight sum by all means, from developing countries for technological innovations that might be more in tune with the ideals of Western computer nerds than the reality of pupils living in the developing world.

Design Miami/Basel efficaciously associated limited edition design with industrial mass production while at the same time explaining the difference as a matter of artificial shortage. The international fair thus revealed a dizzying process of upgrading everyday objects by transforming vintage design circulated in secondary markets into authentic works of art and then arguing for their familial affinity with contemporary design production. I agree with dealers who felt that we were witnessing only the beginning of an increasingly vibrant market place for design as it moves more and more into the moneyed arena of art collecting.

In any case and despite the unwanted side effects that might emerge from a change of identity, in Basel or on eBay we encounter a cultural phenomenon that reconnects local communities on a global scale around a new understanding of modern living powered by second-hand trade. It calls on today’s design professionals to channel the dynamics generated in such heterogeneous market places into novel forms of materiality.

Text & photos by Martina Grünewald

Gallery Yves Macaux

R20Century

Galerie Dansk Møbelkunst counted on Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjaerholm, Hans J. Wegner & Co.

A whole prefab house by Jean Prouvé was on display at Galerie Patrick Seguin.

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein designed by Frank Gehry.

The Vitra conference center designed by Tadao Ando.

The panel discussion.

Tom Dixon’s “Fresh Fat” in action.

Swedish design collective FRONT was elected Designer of the Future. Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren and Katja Sävström produced enough life-size polyester horse sculptures to make a harnessed team of four silvery lamp bases.

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