Oy vey, does she really want a painting to go with her sofa?!
A documentary film about the abbreviated life of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was reviewed recently in The Paper (you know, the Paper). Towards the end of the article the writer references a “tantalizing anecdote” where either one of the invited talking heads appearing in the film or Basquiat himself “tells of his [Basquiat’s] disgust at a patron who asked him to color-coordinate a painting to her living room”. This is a real-life version of a frequently repeated mise-en-scène in which the artist becomes aghast at the notion that his or her work could possibly be considered as somehow related to the surrounding décor. A fictionalized dramatization of the same scenario occurs in Woody Allen’s 1986 Hannah and Her Sisters when Dusty Frye (Daniel Stern) visits the studio of the artist Frederick (of Hollywood?) played by Max Von Sydow, who flies into a rage when the moneyed but obviously boorish Dusty explains his desire to find some art of sufficient scale for a place in Southhampton he’s renovating with the help of an interior decorator.
The aversion among the cognoscenti to the idea of connecting fine art to its physical environment is a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries this was not at all the case; quite the contrary – art was very much viewed as part of a larger whole, rather than as self-contained, autonomous objects floating in their own hermetically sealed bubble. We can start by citing the ancient Greeks, who adorned every square inch on the inside of their pagan temples with works of painting and sculpture, all organized to harmonize with the surrounding architecture. The Romans continued the tradition, developed some new media to add to the mix (e.g., mosaics) and extended it into secular buildings and private dwellings. The practice reasserted itself with a vengeance in the art-crazed Renaissance, its apotheosis being the riotous agglomeration of artistry inside the Christian church, especially those in the northern reaches of Europe.
Things visually calm down a bit in the more restrained Neo-classical era, but in truth it’s during this period that the concept of the consummately designed environment – what would later be broadly labeled the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’ – emerges as a desired objective among design professionals working at a domestic as well as an institutional scale. Perhaps no entity better represents this new empowerment than the architectural and interior design firm headed by Robert and James Adam. As impresarios of a new attitude towards interior design, the Adam Brothers are among the first to regard the modern domestic interior as a weave of the fine and applied arts, and then to choreograph the execution of these spaces in a masterful assemblage of multiple media down to the smallest detail. To coordinate the parts into a coherent whole, their scope of work necessarily included the design of tableware, decorative accessories, furnishings and floor coverings, as well as the development and commissioning of the fine art program.
You might be thinking at the moment that this is all fine and good for the olden days, but hey, we’re in the 21st century now and we just don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Well, not so fast: the first generation of Modern Masters were very much of the same mind as the Adam boys when it came to the idea of the totality of the arts. The doctrine of the gesamtkunstwerk underpinned the curriculum of the Bauhaus through its entire history, to take just one of many celebrated examples of modernism’s embrace of this philosophy.
Excuse me, Mr. Molina – I mean Rothko – there’s no smoking in the studio, even your own.
So when and why did artists start to think differently? Honestly, we can’t say for sure, but we can surmise that, like so many things, it all changed with the War (you know, the War) and the demise of the Beaux-Arts. To bolster this assertion we again cite a literary dramatization about artists – this time, the award-winning Broadway play Red. The play tells the story of the painter Mark Rothko in the late ‘fifties after he’s received a commission from noted architect Philip Johnson to paint some murals for the upscale Four Seasons restaurant inside New York’s Seagram’s Building. Rothko is both flattered and repulsed by the invitation, and ultimately decides to turn down the work in part because he felt the atmosphere was undignified and his artwork a mere palliative for the unenlightened fat cats who would be dining alongside them. Among the snippets of dialogue there lingers a whiff of familiar disdain for anyone who dares think of art as merely ‘decoration’ tacked onto a wall.
In historical fact, Rothko was among the last of a generation of artists who very much wanted to embed their art in the larger context of a holistic environment. His canvases for an eponymous chapel in Houston and his research in preparing for the project represent the very embodiment of an artist in search of a physical grounding for his work. So again, we ask, when did things go awry? Okay, here’s another stab: when the artist’s studio and the art gallery became White Cubes.
But that’s a story for another day. For now, we would simply like to note that our efforts to promote a modular art stem in part from our desire to see art and its setting re-united in a common vision. For one of the most appealing characteristics of modular art is its customizability, which provides the artist, collector and designer with a powerful tool for re-linking the components that make up a space. After all, isn’t the whole nearly always greater than the sum of its arts?
This model lost her head over her fabulous bag she was so happy with it!
If shoes are punctuation points encasing a part of the body, then a handbag is its extender as the body transitions from arm to hand to bag. The handbag, or pocketbook as it’s also been called, has many roles to play, including 1) to hold stuff; 2) to catch the eye of anyone design-savvy enough to know something cool when they see it and initiate conversation with said individual; 3) to complement and accentuate the rest of the fashion ensemble, thereby further advancing item 2; 4) to express one’s individuality and taste; and 5) to hold stuff. So, given how tightly the identity of person and bag are interwoven, what fashion object lends itself more naturally to the concept of mass customization than the pocketbook?
Laudi Vidni clearly realizes the insightfulness of our viewpoint, since they’re a web-based company that offers buyers the opportunity to personalize their handbags by selecting styles, materials, colors, ornaments and other details from an array of interactive menus. Their flash configurator is among the most visually and functionally sophisticated we’ve seen for ecommerce sites and is almost worth a visit for that reason alone.
Interestingly, this approach to handbag design is in some ways directly opposed to the counter-trend of creating value by elevating a mass produced item to cult status. The folks who put out the high-end Prada, Louis Vuitton and Hermes bags are continually searching for a singular, iconic item (like the Kelly bag) which they hope will be acquired by large numbers of people; Laudi Vidni facilitates the production of an almost limitless number of different bags each of which, ideally, would be acquired by just one individual. We see no reason why both approaches can’t remain viable in the marketplace for the foreseeable future, which makes this an excellent time to be alive and in the hunt for a handbag.
By the way, if you’re wondering about this company’s unusual sounding name, here’s a clue: think ANAGRAM. Now do you get it? Ahhhhhh, yessssss…of course!
We are very fond of these modular storage cubes (and larger cousins), for several reasons. First, their shape – the cube is one of those Platonic solids that the ancient Greek philosophers believed represented the atomic units from which all physical matter derived. We might no longer believe in such theories, but there remains something eternally appealing about this very elemental, cosmically pure geometry. And of course, at the root of the cube is the square, a favored shape for modular design by virtue of its direct application to grids (just glance at some of our own posts, like this one and this one).
The formal simplicity of this product is nicely mirrored in its straightforward construction and means of assembly — no tools, simply a strong eco-friendly adhesive to hold it together (wow, that must be seriously sticky). And just when you think things might be veering toward the formally ascetic, their designers wrap them in colors and finishes that range from child-friendly playful to elegantly adult. The contrasting tone along the edges and back face add to the whimsy of the brighter versions.
Top and middle:Way Basics offers kits for a larger sized unit called the “Tribeca” as well as the standard cube size; both can be customized by varying either their interior sub-division or by grouping multiple units in different combinations. Bottom: buyers can take the possibilities of personalization a step further by mixing and matching individual components from different series as well as by adding their own touches in the form of adhesive decorations, casters, and whatever else they can imagine. The company has also added some neat accessories to its line, including hardware for spinning stacked cubes and tightly fitted storage baskets. Thankfully there are legal or moral limits to what one can do with all these options!
Speaking of eco-, these products are composed of zBoard, which is made from recycled paper and non-toxic materials, and which is available to others for use in their products. Way Basics has received a lot of recognition from green-minded organizations and reviewers for their approach to sustainable design. This doesn’t appear to be just a marketing ploy on the company’s part to bolster sales — they seem genuinely involved in pro bono activities to foster sustainability at large.
Oh, and then there’s the price point; at these numbers who can not like them?
Apparently very few, judging from the strongly positive reviews they’ve gotten on Amazon (not to mention the company’s website, but we’d kind of expect that!). We look forward to seeing some more pieces from this company in the future.
Bottom: Moducool: Modular Vaccine Rucksack. Designed by Ian Friday (2010). Courtesy of Open Architecture Network.
Art and Design as a Return on Investment (ROI)
If the art market were a sport, then the painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939) should be credited with scoring a hat trick for appearing in no fewer than three different regional exhibitions at the same time: a small, focused show of his work at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; a broader retrospective at the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York; and an exhibit of his drawings at the Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York’s Chelsea art ghetto. Most artists would be thrilled to have any one of these events on his or her résumé; in fact, the only person who appears to be a more popular subject in these parts than Mr. Downes at the moment is Andy Warhol and, sadly, he’s not around to enjoy it.
Mr. Downes’ work is notable, among other things, for synthesizing two seemingly opposing impulses: on the one hand, to lovingly render the material world by means of a luminous and sensuous application of paint, and on the other hand, to choose as his subject matter some of the least visually appealing snapshots of the urban streetscape. But we’re not going to dwell here on Mr. Downes artistic accomplishments. Rather, what caught our eye in the review of his works that appeared in the Times was the reference to his painting of the underbelly of the Westside Highway pictured above having taken him fifteen months to complete.
Now, it’s not clear whether Mr. Downes spent these months working exclusively on this particular painting, or whether he is the sort to have several projects underway at the same time, but in either case we are reminded of the labor intensity of good old-fashioned plein-air easel painting. The hugeness of the time invested is only further amplified in our minds when we realize that the object which is born out of this endeavor is singular in nature – that is, there is and always will be only one painting to show for the effort (along with some notebooks compiled by Mr. Downes and, of course, a potentially infinite number of inferior mechanical reproductions). Only one person or institution will be able to own it, and a limited number of people able to view it.
By the laws of supply (necessarily low, given Mr. Downes’ working method) and demand (high, given the artist’s reputation and quality of work), the cost to acquire one of Mr. Downes’ works is no doubt very substantial. Which further means that only a limited number of people or institutions will be able to purchase it. Let’s not bemoan the fact or question the value of Mr. Downes’ work or the work of other artists who create by means of manual craft; this is how capitalism is played, and apparently nobody’s thought of a better way to do it.
Speaking of capitalism, these circumstances raise a question in our minds about value, or more particularly, about a return on investment (ROI) when it comes to objects of art and design: how do we measure the value of the work product relative to the amount of creative energy invested in producing it? In the case of “West Side Highway”, it’s fair to say that the high quality of the piece is offset by the large amount of time and effort needed to produce it and by the comparatively small size of the audience which will enjoy it, and therefore its relative valuation is at best, in strictly capitalistic terms, flat. Take a painting similarly composed by another artist who is lesser known or, um, emerging, and the valuation of the return on effort goes into negative territory since the sales price for such work is likely to be considerably less than Mr. Downes commands, and far fewer will clamor to see it.
Now let’s apply the same approach to assessing ROI for a work of modular art or design. In its most elemental form a single module deployed in multiples is sufficient to generate a piece that has the aesthetic integrity and critical mass to stand on its own, as in the illustrated example from the textile designer Mia Cullin (left). The greatest investment of creative energy required to realize Cullin’s concept no doubt went into the design of the individual module, which we can reasonably presume did not remotely approach the fifteen months needed to create the Downes canvas. Even adding in the time needed to evolve from individual module to concepts for assembled pieces, or the hours spent developing prototypes, or the interaction of the designer with the parties responsible for the physical production of the modules, would not greatly alter the disparity between the (hu)man-hours required for the two works. And if one objects to comparing a fine art painting with a textile design as a case of apples and oranges, we can reply that the very same point could have been made by referencing works by recognized modular artists like Sol Lewitt, Tony Smith, Norman Carlberg and others.
Having spent far fewer waking hours devising her module, Cullin was ostensibly free to design other modules and other pieces in the same amount of time it took Downes to make just one. But here is where the ROI of the modular approach really pays off: unlike the singular work of art, which is both the beginning and the end of itself, the design of the individual module spawns an infinite number of subsequent iterations, since it can be reproduced in unlimited quantities with no loss of artistic quality. When we figure in the limitless permutations that can be generated from the design of a single module, then the potential ROI of modular art and design balloons to an astronomically high figure.
Using slightly different terminology and a metric based purely in terms of energy versus output, we can say that modular art and design is by its nature a highly efficient system of both design and production, whereas the arduous practice of crafting fine art by hand is a largely inefficient means of value creation. Efficiency benefits the greatest number of people by producing the greatest amount of goods or services at the lowest cost; inefficiency yields a lower supply, an inflated price point and a necessarily restricted audience.
Which takes us, finally, the question of socially responsible design. If the modular method is in fact highly efficient and provides a high rate of return on the investment of creative energy, then it stands to bear that it is equally advantageous as a means of addressing the problems that afflict humankind, or at least those which can be ameliorated with the help of design. A recent project by Ian Friday for a modular vaccine rucksack, affectionately labeled Moducool (ah, a wordsmith after our own heart), reminds us that design can indeed solve problems beyond those of a purely aesthetic nature. And in a world of limited resources and a seemingly unlimited number of humanitarian ills, we need to “capitalize” on any expedient we can find.
Project Description of Moducool, via Open Architecture Network:
Function
Moducool is a modular vaccine rucksack designed to aid in the transportation and distribution of vital vaccine vials in rural areas of developing countries. Vaccine vials must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, anything above or below and they start to lose potency. Millions of pounds worth of vaccines are wasted every year because of heat damage. Moducool features removable insulated modules that house custom-made icepacks allowing each module to be dedicated to particular communities, thus, ensuring that only the vaccines needed at any one point are exposed to heat. In the existing product, there is no other storage for syringes or anyway to dispose of medical waste. Moducool, however, features a removable sharps box and extra storage to ensure that the user takes away all the medical waste and can carry the vaccines with both hands free, making climbing mountains to reach remote communities much safer.
Inspiration
Inspiration came from a documentary on the immunization process within developing countries and witnessing aid workers struggling to carry the cumbersome existing product, a traditional cool box. The major flaw in the existing product is the fact that it only has a single chamber that the vials are stored in. As the aid workers tend to visit multiple communities within a day, with a single chamber, it results in all the vaccines being exposed to heat every time the lid is opened. The cold air is released and hot air enters, therefore, risking heat exposure to ALL the vials. The advantage of Moducool’s modular design is that only the vaccine vials required at certain locations are exposed to heat, thus, keeping more vials colder for longer which could potentially saves millions of dollars and lives.
Development
Development involved initial user, task and environment research to develop the idea in to a potential product. Many cardboard prototypes were made of various insulated rucksack forms and tested with potential users. A PDS was developed which adhered to World Health Organization criteria regarding vaccine transportation. A full working prototype was made by hand and was fully evaluated with potential users. Feedback was highly positive and users felt there was a real need for the product.
We must admit, despite our own efforts in the field of Word Art, that we’ve often felt uncomfortable with the preachy tone of a lot of work coming out of this genre. Maybe that’s because the conversation has always seemed…well, kind of one-sided. And in your face. And over-scaled. And prone to one-liners and the self-consciously profound. And most of all, very top-down because of the tendency among word artists to deliver their content in the form of proclamations, an attitude underscored by the widespread use of text laid out in all caps.
But in the age of crowdsourcing this sort of dictatorial attitude can no longer relied upon to attract viewers, so it’s interesting to see how the art world is straining to meet the crowd halfway by associating a major figure in Word Art like Holzer with an interactive art project. Titled ADDRESS (there are those caps again), the project is connected with an exhibition of her work at Montreal-based DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, running from June 30 to November 14, 2010. It’s billed by the host as an Art Education project, which is a somewhat puzzling label and perhaps reflects the uncertainty of the host as to how to involve spectators in the otherwise passive experience of viewing art exhibitions.
Projects by Jenny Holzer, from the artist’s website. Words words words!
In any case, the project has something to do with inscriptions, postcards, mailboxes, graphic imagery, video and the Canadian postal system, although how they interrelate is not altogether clear from the DHC/ART website. Perhaps you will have better luck if you read it yourself:
Project
Participants will create a postcard based on the theme of social engagement. At the end of the exhibition participants will be invited to take part in a happening where as a group, each card will be addressed and deposited in a selected mailbox as a symbolic, group gesture.
In reference to themes explored by Jenny Holzer, the participant will call up and reflect upon social engagement inspired by:
a point of view on human behavior
a point of view on culture
a reflection or critique on society
Text is central to this project. The challenge is to express an idea in a one word or concise phrase in order to remain within the constraints of the postcard format, which may motivate the participant to take a poetic approach.
Creation of a postcard
The participants will receive a short presentation from the DHC/ART Educators about the postcard’s presence in art history, on the public function of objects and the impact of words in poetic writing in order to contextualize the project.
Each participant will then receive a blank postcard on which they are free to:
Visually interpret the word or phrase on the front of the card
Write the word or phrase on the back of the card and to create a visual on the front that is thematically linked to the word or phrase
The participant may use drawing, photography, painting, collage and decoupage to make their creation.
Exhibition
The projects will be exhibited in the Education Space and in a virtual gallery on DHC/ART’s website. A reception will be held to conclude the project.
Happening 10 / 11 / 10
During the closing reception, participants will be invited to go as a group to a selected mailbox where the cards will be deposited as a symbolic gesture. This event will be documented on video and posted on DHC/ART’s website and Facebook page.
*DHC/ART will provide postage for the mailing. Canada only. [Thanks guys! ~Eds.]
Within the sphere of customizable products one might say the two areas most ripe for personalization are the things you put in your body (food) and the things you put on your body (clothes). We’ve already begun to look at examples of the latter (as in this earlier post), so now let’s check out the food department (pardon the puns).
Of course, one could say that cooking is itself a process of customization — mixing together individual ingredients in infinitely diverse combinations to produce coherently tasteful ensembles. What’s perhaps fresh about the idea of customizable edibles is that it’s happening now at the level of prepared foods, rather than remaining at the miniature scale of individual preparation. Especially since this is not an industry known for finessing its wares — listen, when they say General Foods, they mean general foods!
Now, we understand the economic (and perhaps even moral) challenge of trying to shift the packaging of food from the scale of mass production to one of mass customization, but then, that’s what the shift towards the New Industrialism concept is all about. So here are just a few of the companies working now to satisfy the hearts, minds and tummies of their customers by personalizing their comestible wares.
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Chocri: Customized Chocolate Bars
Chocri is a German startup, founded in September 2008, and then launched in the US in January of this year. Chocri enables its customers to design their own chocolate bars by selecting from a menu of base chocolates (white, dark or milk) and toppings, of which there are over 100. These include global favorites, like nuts and dried fruit, but if you really want to surprise someone you can also choose real gold flakes, roasted almonds, pretzel, chive rolls, and even jalapenos! Talk about hot chocolate…Anyway, the bars are made in Germany and shipped globally.
Chocri says it wants you to eat chocolate and fully enjoy the good feeling it creates, so they claim to use only the best ingredients, such as organic, fair trade chocolate from Belgium. And, since goodness comes in different forms, they also state that they donate a percentage of their revenues to DIV Kinder, an organization that supports children in the West African country of Ivory Coast. According to a running tally on their website, these donations are approaching $50,000 to date.
YouBars: Customized Trail Mix, Cookies and Other Nibbles
This online operation takes the cake (sorry) when it comes to the variety of customizable food products offered by a single site. Here’s the list of offerings: nutrition and energy bars; protein shakes; trail mix; cookies; and cereal. While the cookie category stands out at first glance as not exactly aligned with the nutritional goals of the other products, the company has done a pretty good job of offering healthy choices among its ingredient options. The website even provides a nutrition chart on every category page, which is not a universal feature among the other sites reviewed here. The About Us page, by the way, tells the classic story of a start-up launched by a mother/son team and the business’s subsequent evolution. We wish them the best of luck with their venture.
We love our animals, certainly enough that we’re willing to spend time concocting their very own chow online. Yup, pup — you heard us right: throw away that bag of Purina, you’re getting a custom mix of your very own! And same with you, my friendly feline. Actually, the degree of product customization is relatively modest; you go on the Red Moon website, select one of the available base formulas, add a supplement or two from another list and choose your bag size. The order is then shipped direct to you and your mammalian companions. Re-order the very same mix from the saved formula when that last shipment’s been devoured by the hungry beasts.
Forget the iPhone, forget the iPad, forget even iTunes — the topper is now…iScream! Yes, the old chant “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM” can finally be put to rest, or at least truncated after the very first line, since WE no longer all have to grab spoonfuls of the delicious foodstuff from the same container as it’s being passed across the sofa. Thanks to an online purveyor of customizable ice cream called eCreamery, we can now create our very own personalized flavors and have them shipped to us in tastefully designed containers bearing the flavor names of our choice. Don’t ask us how they manage to get the stuff to our doors without melting in a gooey mess, but they do.
The company’s configurator is easy to use and involves a four-step process of which the most impressive part is the long list of mix-ins — those added accent flavors that take ice cream out of the bland chocolate/vanilla/strawberry mode that existed before Baskin-Robbins’ 31 Flavors arrived on the scene in the Early Boomer Age. Thanks to mass customization we can now guffaw at the notion of having only thirty-one flavors to choose from — although we’re not sure the world is quite ready for avocado-flavored ice cream!
Okay, so this is the kind of food product that you DON’T want people trying to customize, at least, not in terms of formulating the food itself. So what do you do if you still want to provide your customers with the co-creative experience? You let them design some of the packaging, of course! That’s what the people at Heineken did, and we must say, it would be pretty cool to serve your guests a bottle of beer with a picture of your frat brother’s derrière on the reverse side – you know, a heiny on your Heine!
General disclaimer: listen, we’re art and design types, not food critics, so we can’t vouch for the taste or preparation quality of anything discussed here. That’s why we’re inviting our readers to send in their own reviews and recipes for customizable eats from these or any other sites, so we can compare notes and all head to the nearest food configurator!
From bricks to blobs: Who said walls had to be straight? Contractors will love this!
The late great architect Louis Kahn once famously asked “what does a brick want to be?”. Probably few of his responders answered back, “a blob”. But then, when Kahn posed his inquiry, future architect Greg Lynn (b. 1964) was probably playing with his Froebel blocks in his parents’ Ohio home and had no idea that he would one day demonstrate the viability of just such an idea.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and Lynn has emerged as a leading proponent of ‘blob architecture’, a term which he helped coin in the mid-1990s. This particular aesthetic is a good example of form following tech, meaning that the artist is letting the available tools guide the creative process, rather than first visualizing a composition and then figuring out how to realize it. In the case of blob architecture, it’s the development of 3D modeling software and the robotic machinery capable of fabricating objects with complex volumes that make this design approach feasible.
Blob architecture is characteristically organic in form, meaning it emulates the soft contours with which nature tends to endow its living creations. It generally avoids the flat surfaces, right angles and clear demarcation of boundaries that we typically associate with works of architecture and the shaping of space by human hands (like rooms enclosed by straight walls). Think of it as the Vitruvian man with the circle but without the square.
Understanding that the whole is dependent on the part, Lynn has explored blob architecture not only as a large-scale undertaking but on the level of the micro-building unit as well. His modular Blobwall brick system — currently marketed by the Panelite company — is a 21st century reinvention of the ancient building block as transformed by the computer. Gone are the measurable dimensions, rectilinear outlines and planar faces that make the traditional brick such an effective building material when stacked and placed in rows. In their place are undulating surfaces, non-linear points of assembly and irregular geometries that require automated fabrication techniques, like rotational molding, to accomplish. Moreover, the blob bricks are completely hollow, and therefore can’t be used to support weight from above, perhaps reflecting the modernist’s ambivalence toward classic brick as a load-bearing material.
Nonetheless, the Blobwall bricks share with their ancient counterparts the capacity to be joined together as modular units to form larger compositions. Robbed of their structural role, assembled Blobwalls hover between sculpture, architecture and design — yet another manifestation of the steady erosion of boundaries that permeates our culture of digital connectivity.
Henry Ford, move over – the era of mass production has come to a close! Personalization is the name of the game now. People want a role in shaping the physical world around them to suit their individual needs, tastes and resources; to satisfy that goal they're looking for works of art and design that are reconfigurable, interactive and scalable. This blog explores how creatives are responding to the quest for customization, as well as the impact customization is having on the creative disciplines themselves.
