The quiet strength of design
The exhibition Nu – 90 jaar Pastoe, curated by Guus Beumer and Gert Staal, was an attempt to investigate the potential of Modernism today. That exhibition was a good occasion for a conversation between Beumer and Louise Schouwenberg about Dutch design. The result is a series of loose impressions.
For more than a decade Dutch designers have come in for praise for their recalcitrant attitude towards their own discipline. Dutch design as a synonym for an ironical, questioning and conceptual approach. The fact that only a small group of designers actually live up to that description is usually forgotten. It is not the comfortable sofas of Jan des Bouvrie, but the chairs made of rags (Téjo Rémy), the cupboards made of demolition wood (Piet Hein Eek), the stacked tables (Richard Hutten), the rope chair (Marcel Wanders), the rubber urn (Hella Jongerius), the top-heavy utilities (Job Smeets) and the theatrical presentations of Viktor & Rolf that have given Dutch design its international status. Conceptual designers are also given full recognition in their own country, in fact to such an extent that the old discussion of high versus low has received a remarkable apotheosis in a new hierarchy with design as the winner. Design as the medium par excellence to satisfy the demands of the market, to reach new groups of the public, and to produce new cultural meanings! And all practically without a cultural infrastructure. Dutch design as the wet dream of the politicians in The Hague. But it is shaking. A crisis is supposed to be taking place not only in art, but questions have been raised regarding the future of Dutch design for some time in the world of design too. Besides irony or humour as more light-hearted forms of commentary, even the classification itself is conceptually under attack.
Those who espouse a doom scenario also talk about a crisis in design, and for the sake of convenience equate a drop in turnover with doubt about its social significance. There is no crisis. Or at any rate, no internal crisis. The only demand on design is to produce added value. In that sense – also because of its serial character – design has been an extremely adequate reply to art. In the past decade that added value was the result of an enlarged awareness of its own functioning. No external or internal necessity, but a hyper-consciousness of its own functioning was the driving force, and perhaps also the Achilles’ heel of Dutch design. By analogy with the insights of semiotics, many Dutch designers welcomed the idea that design was part of a semiotic system that could be read, analysed and then manipulated.
Does design still want an internal necessity? After all, design has never had an internal necessity compared to that of fine art. Or is this the price that design has to pay now that its significance is so explicitly sustained by art?
For a decade Dutch designers have failed to think up any new forms. They shuffle existing, often archetypical forms around in order to deconstruct them and then to rearrange the different components. Why are they so reluctant to abandon this Postmodern principle? Does actually giving something form mean that only aesthetic, and thus unknown, criteria remain? Is that where the danger lies. Is lack of familiarity, precisely because of its communicative weakness, not by definition unwelcome at a time when design requires a certain immediacy and directness? The relation of all those meta-products with a user is based on recognition, on a shared language, not on the novelty of a new language of forms.
If added value and not functionality is the first and perhaps even sole purpose of design, then the current discussion within design is a shadow play. Instead of a possible retreat within its own domain of design and a predicted return to functionalism, design will appropriate more, different domains to guarantee itself a permanent cultural added value and thus an economic value as well.
In 2000 Max Bruinsma wrote in METROPOLIS M (No. 1, February-March) that in today’s culture artists can only be designers. And Camiel van Winkel wrote in ‘King Midas in Wonderland’ (De Witte Raaf 89/2001) that hardly anything is made any more, but everything is designed. At the same time that design products obtained the autonomous status of art objects, and thereby became further removed from their natural context, user and industry, art was expected to proceed in the opposite direction towards design, or rather towards the shared domain of visual culture. At the moment art is trying to turn away from this trend again in order to articulate its own domain once more. But how does art relates to a design that by now flaunts the classic symbols and strategies of fine art? How can design in turn articulate a domain of its own without denying its cultural ambitions?
Like fashion, design has the task of continuing to sustain the belief in the new. In that sense it is symptomatic of an astonishing naïvety that it is precisely that design which keeps on raising the question of why, year in and year out, an endless flow of new products appears on the market. People suppose that this proliferating system of designers, producers, distributors and media is founded on a real demand and a real need, as if the basis of this system were still to be found in use value.
Is there still room for change in a world that is designed down to the remotest corner? Even the subject, the designer, the artist, is designed and is no more than a rearrangement of familiar components.
Viktor & Rolf = Gilbert & George + Christian Dior x Cecil Beaton
Tracey Emin = Janis Joplin + Jeff Koons : Marcel Proust
If anything is characteristic of Dutch design of the twentieth century, it is the demand for legitimation. If not the function, then the concept must determine what constitutes ‘good’ design. A connection is often supposed to exist with Dutch Calvinist culture, that is riddled with meekness and a sense of guilt. The religious foundation – the argument runs – is absent, it is true, but the need for legitimation still remains. But is that emphasis on legitimation really the result of a specific cultural background? Are we not here faced with a more international movement, a more compulsive force? Design today provides primarily design value, not use value, and it is the former that requires a constant flow of self-legitimations, albeit in a coded form.
We all function under the same paradox: the paradox that everything is subject to the greatest possible visibility, but at the same time hardly anybody has paid it any notice. Take Droog Design. At the beginning of the 1990s this icon of Dutch design, by analogy with the star curator in the art world, demonstrated that not the production but the thematised distribution of ideas offered a productive response to a stagnating design. Droog Design knew better than to deploy the concept and the vitality of the prototype as a media strategy. Everyone is agreed on this. But hardly anybody, if at all, went on to note that Droog Design marked the entry of a unique model. You could even call it a typically Dutch model, since it is the direct result of the Dutch possibilities and limitations: a subsidised design initiative directed by two individuals with the explicit characteristics of a brand, direct links with the training institutes, and an excellent network for the industry and the media. And this personal and also institutionalised platform has managed to perform a reflective, even critical role within design for a decade and to reach an international public with that message without any problems.
A virtually inextricable series of apparent contradictions are presented here: an institute as a brand, a platform as a personal vehicle? Does this amalgam of fragments offer a possible new strategy for design? And what is the significance of the link between media popularity and the adopting of a critical position? Does this display a different social role of criticism? Strangely enough, the first decent essay on Droog Design as a model still has to be written!
Dutch designers appeal to a design that has to be read first and foremost as commentary. But it is a very specific commentary, a commentary that functions just as well within the liberal environment of the market as its own target. The mirror and the reflection go hand in hand, so that there is no problem about linking Jurgen Bey with Jan des Bouvrie. In fact, they both form part of an endless series of possible options and seem in the first place to reinforce the legibility of one another’s positions. Is the flexibility of the market underrated? Is their own role overestimated, and does that make the role of Dutch design as a critical commentator a primarily cultural idée fixe? Or must this so-called commentary simply be regarded as an excellent marketing strategy? ‘A little controversy is always food for sales.’
Initially designers like Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Alexander van Slobbe tried to confer new meanings on design through a renewed perspective of handicrafts. But within the present Dutch context, the statement that the hand-crafted skin possesses more meaning, more character, and even more soul bears witness to a perverse naïvety. The most that can be said of traces of handiwork is that they refer to a supposed past and a supposed maker, just as the smooth skin presupposes a future and an industrial process of production for ever.
The handicrafts have undergone a new transformation in the Netherlands, and one that has been little researched. One can hardly speak here of a classical craftsmanlike way of working, in which a processual approach makes use of and eventually overcomes chance. The visible traces of their handicraft production in the work of conceptual designers do not therefore refer to the briliiant and virtuoso craftsmanship of the maker, but to the idea of the genius and the idea of virtuoso craftsmanship. It would be hard to imagine a larger gulf than that separating the current generation of Dutch designers from the old masters. And that gulf will never be understood if that current focus on craftsmanship is seen from the perspective of a supposed continuity and tradition.
The debate within the world of design is full of remnants of remnants. The ease with which decorative patterns are repeatedly exposed as useless obstacles on the road to pure form and then welcomed again with Postmodernist citations is illustrative. Like the white, spotless skin of Modernism, every decoration carries meaning. Like every skin, the ornament too functions as a provider of identity.
Conceptual design is the Postmodern reply to the Modernist adage of functionality. In the 1990s various Dutch designers adopted other design values, such as humour as a form of commentary. Not functionality, but the playing with artistic meanings was what determined ‘good’ design. Still, conceptual design was only a productive critique of Modernist functionality for a brief period. It soon manifested itself as a continuation of functionalism, though with a different interpretation of what function means. The cultural added value evolved from critique to a new type of use value of products, which found the international magazines, museums and galleries to be the appropriate platforms. Functionality must therefore be conceived primarily as the production of difference, differences from all those other products that also produce difference above all else. A new adage has made its entry: Form Follows Difference.
Since the early years, conceptual design has evolved from an expression of recalcitrance to an accepted style. It is interesting that the notion of style has undergone a transformation with the arrival of conceptual design. Style is now linked not to external, visual characteristics, but to internal, mental ones. But in spite of this difference, conceptual design is just as recognisable as its several predecessors, and in that sense can be defined as a style as well.
Now name three foreign epigones of Dutch Design!
In a culture that virtually coincides with the economy, with a market that is more and more influenced by a psychology of the moment and consumers who move on from one ecstasy to another, the classical role of the critic is virtually exhausted. At most it is a legitimising ritual of importance. A new counterforce arrives on the scene, more dangerous than the critic who has almost disappeared: boredom!
Conceptual design presupposes a new relation between user and object. It is a relation stripped of a functionalist background, which is situated at a meta-level and presupposes a shared language. This language connects the stories of Bey with the icons of Ineke Hans and the provocations of Wanders with the anthropological signs of Jongerius. With this language, a new principle for conceptual design has made its appearance: the principle of legibility. And the demand for immediacy and directness is connected with that legibility. But that trinity runs the risk of boredom. Disappointment is inherent in functionalism: the fact that a product does not do what it promises to do. Boredom is inherent in conceptual design: the realisation that no single promise awaits us beyond direct legibility.
Adolf Loos was already aware of the problems involved with that legibility. It was not for nothing that he sought the neutrality of the industrially manufactured product and the meaning that only goes with a daily and intimate use. Conceptual design has abandoned that quiet strength, surrendered it for a meta-position, for irony. That redefinition of use as commentary creates distance, a critical distance from the object, rather than a fond proximity. Within semiotics, the patriarch of Dutch design, different layers of analysis are presupposed parallel to different layers of meaning. A sociological meaning, a psychological meaning, and so on, to eventually reach a layer of meaning that cannot be analysed. Just as the strength of fine art arises at the point where things evade definitive signification, where they can no longer be analysed fully, design also needs an amorous fascination with the object again. The meta-character of conceptual design may be the obstacle to that fascination, to that ultimate level of meaning, and thereby the relation to many products collapses under an over-consciousness and never becomes amorous, never becomes pure fascination.
Cross-over is the most misunderstood concept of the last few decades. While it inherently presupposes borders that can be temporarily moved aside or even incidentally broken down, it is understood as an indifferent blurring of difference. With a gruesome sort of optimism we have hopefully embraced society and the culture that goes with it as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Now that the differences between disciplines have been silenced, this alternative turned out to possess a stifling uniformity.
A new conflict of interests between art and design awaits us. No longer the conflict over the aura of art, but the struggle for the public domain, the almost forgotten domain of design, that will no doubt be rediscovered with a renewed interest in Modernism. In this classical arena of traditional parties such as the politicians, the architect and the project developer, the artist has already adopted a strategic position by assuming a new guise each time: urban designer, strategist, autonomous artist, activist, and even designer. And which position will design adopt, enveloped in the aura of art?
That meta-consciousness of design offers an enormous potential for designers, but only if it is no longer deployed for an overcoded playing with functions, or for a language of forms that permanently moves between an abstract, handicraft, industrial or tactile guise. That consciousness needs a utopian desire, without lapsing into the universalist principles of Modernism, nor into all too private forms of commentary. No progressive ideals, but a responsibility for the environment that can and should be evaluated as a market, but must be viewed first and foremost as a social environment. Only then can the requisite sense of responsibility arise to focus from that angle on all of those processes that shape how we function. Otherwise, all that remains for design is to endlessly create shapes for an insatiable market.
Is it not time for a conceptual design to arm itself with insight into its possible pitfalls and to create a new field of play again within clearly demarcated boundaries? Is it not time for a Catholic design?
As Edward Said put it: ‘What is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?’
Guus Beumer and Louise Schouwenberg
This is essay was previously published in METROPOLIS M issue No. 1, February/March 2004