YOU DO YOU
After wrestling with a recalcitrant employee at a meeting last week, my boss told him, with a shrug of the shoulders, “You do you.” This could be the motto of the newest generation of product designers, whose work is represented handsomely at this year’s Collective Design Fair.
The overall mood is sophisticated and twee. I’ve thought before that our current moment in design is a throwback to the 80′s but, after walking through CDF I realize there’s something essentially different. Today’s design work isn’t principled formally; it’s casual and idiosyncratic. Each object is about realizing one small idea – about narrative, material, proportion – in hallucinogenic detail, but without an overarching set of beliefs. This is form-making without rules, personal design. Which isn’t to say it isn’t substantial or complex. All the objects and artwork here are
immaculately crafted, curated and installed.
The mood is, almost always, playful, and the objects are like toys – whose only function is to amuse and delight. Even the most practical pieces (chairs, tables, drinking glasses) are overwhelmed by their idiosyncratic form, so that their everyday functions seem secondary. The most spectacular installation is the R + Company booth, which contains a balloon-shaped couch welded together from nickels, a six-foot-tall bead-encrusted mushroom, a hanging chair shaped like a wasp’s next, and spiked ceramic vases that look like exotic fruit envisioned by Dr. Seuss. Each object feels immediate, as it has been fabricated directly, without refinement or engineering, from a child’s crayon drawing.
Modernists defied formal conventions to challenge staid bourgeois notions about what a table was, what a window was, and what a house was. Now, perhaps because there is no authoritative dogma to rub up against, designers are defying convention simply because they have the freedom to, and because they’re bored doing ordinary stuff. The results are lovely to look at, and emotionally slight.
R + Company installation, Collective Design Fair, 2017. Photograph by Nalina Moses.