Next up at the Cooper Hewitt -
see this link for article and photos:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/arts/design/15trie.html?pagewanted=all
I'm including the whole article, unusual for me, since it seems really useful to have read before going through the exhibit (or it would be for me, whether I ended up agreeing with it or not).
Art Review | 'Design Life Now'
Fruits of Design, Certified Organic
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: December 15, 2006
It's Triennial time at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. This means that the former Andrew Carnegie mansion is up to its neck in mostly American design from the last three years. Like its predecessors, "Design Life Now," the museum's third National Design Triennial, is a crazed affair that illuminates a volatile, contradictory, ever-expanding field but fails to call it to order.
a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Once again the Triennial answers the question "What's design?" with the evasive catchall "What's not?" Covering so many bases so equivocally, it never gets around to tackling the weightier questions of "What is good design?" or, more to the point, "What is design good for?" It refuses to take sides on the issue of whether design should aim for social or environmental benefit or serve a relatively decorative purpose. Still, the show's benefits are many, even if you have to work for them.
The displays here range from genius to schlock, delightful to dispiriting. They cover life-extending innovations, completely frivolous reiterations of received ideas (far too many of which trace to Surrealism) and more varieties of recycling than you can easily count. Fashion, building materials, furniture, toys, theatrical sets, jewelry and textiles, medical and military hardware, all qualify as design according to this exhibition.
The main point comes across loud and clear: design permeates every aspect of contemporary life. Everything that exists is designed, whether natural or cultural. And while all of nature's designs are intelligent, whether you go by Darwin or the Bible, the human kind are much more various and sorely in need of sorting out.
"Design Life Now" declines to sort. It refuses, for example, to concentrate on design that does the greatest good for the greatest number, which might have eliminated things like haute couture gowns, numerous vases and quite a bit of Surrealism.
The show's rewards are, therefore, in unusually direct proportion to the energy you expend, what with the efforts of 87 designers or design units packed into three levels, including portions of the basement, now being called the ground floor. Graphic, Web, advertising and typographic design seem especially strong, as does architecture, represented most prominently in impressive public projects by OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Toshiko Mori, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Santiago Calatrava and the firm Predock Frane. Careful looking is required; close study of labels, video demonstrations and the catalog is strongly recommended.
Yet, with concentration, what initially seems less like an exhibition than a mass of undifferentiated information comes into partial focus as a series of deliberately orchestrated skirmishes between conflicting principles and entities ?- corporate and private, decorative and essential.
In the fourth gallery on the main floor, for example, you will encounter the intimidating fruits of design as applied by the military-corporate complex: the X-43A research plane, an unmanned experimental aircraft being developed by NASA's Hyper-X Program; the Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Rover from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and, most disconcerting of all, Sergeant Blackwell from the Institute for Creative Technologies ?- an interactive video character in the form of an all too all-American soldier, larger than life. It is unclear if his reluctance to answer questions is a technological glitch or just military hauteur.
Meanwhile, a large example of the pop-up tent frames designed by Hoberman Associates hovers overhead, implying shelter for soldiers, refugees, campers or tree-huggers. Just beyond ?- and more unequivocally benign ?- is a model of the Mother and Child Medical Center, designed by Architecture for Humanity and currently under construction in Ipuli, Tanzania.
A similar back-and-forth occurs in an upstairs gallery that will attract lots of children. Mass (read global) culture is represented by a wall of clay models for the animated characters of various Pixar movies, including "Ratatouille," which will be released next year. A more elitist form of pop culture is exemplified by a vitrine crowded with limited-edition "art toys" from Kidrobot, a company that, according to the catalog, is expanding its brand from artist-designed toys to T-shirts and sneakers. (Just what we need.) But also here are blown-up examples of Howtoons, a comic book that teaches children scientific principles by showing them, among other things, how to make their own toys ?- in this case marshmallow guns from PVC pipe and whoopee cushions from a coat hanger, a rubber band and a simple metal washer.
Throughout this show, the essential or at least the life-enhancing does battle with what I would call design pollution: status objects that no one needs and only those with limited imaginations and too much disposable income want, at least until the next got-to-have comes along. Nothing is exempt.
On the biomimicry front, for example, there are Natalie Jeremijenko's Feral Robotic Dogs (for X Design Lab), which sniff out toxins, and Joseph Ayers's underwater ambulatory RoboLobster, used to collect data and detect explosives, but there are also WowWee's robot toys: Robopet, Roboreptile and Robosapien.
Similarly, recycling ranges wide. Sometimes it is sweet but esoteric: Judy Geib Plus Alpha's beautiful little drawstring evening purses covered with tiny shells could dangle from the arm of an aristocratic lady painted by Goya or Ingres. In contrast, one of the show's most brilliant and promising moments is provided by Panelite, whose orange plastic honeycomb panels, made mostly of recycled material, line the Cooper-Hewitt's conservatory and have already been used in an OMA building.
Under quality-of-life improvements, consider the sleek, inviting interior of the business class section of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. But more thrilling because more crucial are LifePort's organ transport systems, exemplified here by the blue and white Kidney Transporter, which extends the viability of human organs as they travel from donor to recipient.
In the same gallery, Hunter Hoffman's "SnowWorld" puts Pixar-like animation to medical use in a virtual video game that relieves the pain of burn victims. Try it. It is completely absorbing to pelt woolly mammoths and penguins with snowballs while your ears are filled with the irresistible strains of "Graceland." "The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar," sings Paul Simon, who has donated his music to Mr. Hoffman's project.
The central second-floor gallery is bracketed by designs with global reach that we use every day: at one end, Google, the great connector, and at the other, Apple iPod, the great isolator. In between are walls decorated with Blik's vinyl stick-ons, which merge wallpaper and graphic design, and layouts from ReadyMade magazine that show how to transform Federal Express shipping tubes into CD storage racks.
But there is also the mindless recycling of familiar ideas: china, wallpaper and fabrics printed with various art-historical motifs by Jessica Smith and a seemingly cracked mirror and partly shattered glass vase from the Jason Miller Studio. I liked Mr. Miller's wastebasket made from colorful coils of Play-Doh, but the damaged-goods idea has been done to death. The resemblance to Ron Gilad's "Run Over by Car" chrome metal vases, on view in an adjacent gallery, should have disqualified both.
The indulgences of Mr. Gilad, Tobias Wong and the Tom Leader Studio share space with more practical designs, mostly for home furnishings, by Chris Douglas, Scott Wilson and especially the team of Ransmeier & Floyd, as well as the prefab architecture of the Up!House (by the Brooklyn studio Konyk) and the FlatPak House (by Lazor Office). Michael Meredith's ivY coat hooks split the difference between sculpture and coat hook with admirable efficiency ?- although, again, they look more interesting in use, as pictured in the catalog, than bare.
What one seeks and encounters intermittently throughout this exhibition is a modicum of integrity, freshness, purpose and economy. I recommend Tom Scott's simple, brilliantly structured knitwear; the quietly luminous SensiTile floor and wall tile of Abhinand Lath; and iRobot's floor-washing and vacuuming robots, Scooba and Roomba, which resemble enlarged versions of old-fashioned portable CD players (remember those?). And although Greg Lynn's flatware for Alessi seems like Art Nouveau redux, his bulging, asymmetrical Supple Cups, also for Alessi, look distinctly of their time.
The human eye and psyche need a degree of newness, and it is often surprising how little it takes. Among the freshest things in "Design Life Now" are the two new fonts, Clash Sans and Clash, designed by COMA for use in the exhibition's catalog and labels. Both fonts simply combine the two existing, classically opposed fonts Times Roman and sans-serif Helvetica ?- using one for consonants and the other for vowels. Despite the comfortingly familiar elements, the fonts look as a whole like nothing you've quite seen before.
"Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006" continues through July 29 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan, (212) 849-8400.
