Hasta La Ideas

Left: Seven Stacked Benches (After Shelves) by ROLU. Right: Temple by AQQ Design

This article was originally published in the C77 Design Daily, Vol. 1, Issue 3, on Sunday, May 18.

Last month, with ICFF and New York Design Week looming, I arranged for Matt Olson and Matthew Sullivan to get on the phone with me for what I was describing as “a long conversation about furniture design.” Olson is one third of ROLU, a Minneapolis studio whose products include furniture, landscape design, urban planning and collaborative public art, among other work. And Sullivan runs AQQ Design in Los Angeles, where he produces furniture and objects that show a keen interest in the experimental spirit of postmodernist design (although he might cringe at that oversimplification); he also writes a twice-monthly column about lesser-known design figures for Core77.

I chose these two because I admire their work, and also because I thought that they could provide a sort of outsider’s perspective on the industry—both make furniture, but their work is more about engaging with design history than producing and selling chairs for people’s homes and businesses. Indeed, as I found out during our conversation, neither one considers himself “a furniture designer” exactly, and getting them to talk about just furniture design was impossible. Over the course of two wide-ranging telephone calls, they touched on everything from the nature of capitalism to their youthful punk-rock days and Robert Filliou’s theory of the poetic economy. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation.

Maybe we can start by talking about blogging—you’re both active bloggers, and it seems to inform your design work.

Matt Olson: I’m an avid blogger, and have been for many years. I started in 2005 as a kind of marketing attempt for the studio, and it was an utter failure. But I got into the habit of waking up in the morning and posting something. At some point, I asked the rest of the studio if it would be cool if I just did it for myself. And then I started writing about what I was actually interested in. It’s led us to a wild community of like-minded designers and artists—both on the blog and now, increasingly, on Instagram too.

Matthew Sullivan: Yeah, I was a detractor of blogging at first. But now I really feel that it is an amazing thing, and that it’s only going to get more interesting. I also think it’s problematic, though, just because it’s so image-based. There are lots of images of things that really require your physical presence. Like, Matt, I just saw some Donald Judd stuff on your blog. He would say, I think, that a photograph of my work is meaningless.

MO: Judd would say that. I wouldn’t.

MS: But this proliferation of images—like, you can have entire histories that you can scroll through in 30 seconds. Literally, if someone posted the whole history of art, the main pieces, you could be done in less than three minutes.

MO: See, that’s what I want. That’s absolutely what I want. Because of the Internet, we live in a time when history is free of institutional or academic constraints. And I think it allows the images and the objects in them to live their own life in some way.

MS: Yeah, I think that it does democratize and deinstitutionalize a lot of things. And I like that it makes things less precious. Because that’s the most annoying aspect of art—and why furniture in particular is interesting to me, because it’s not as precious.

MO: I was actually just reading an interview last night, where one of the Memphis designers was talking about the conflict of trying to make something that was acceptable to her, and all of the sudden it gets so expensive, because it’s so rare and difficult to produce, that it becomes completely out of reach to most people. And I was thinking to myself: Well, with online imagery, now you can get the spirit of something without possessing it. That’s why I don’t really think of what we’re doing as furniture design. I think it has as much to do with photography and conceptual ideas as functional furniture.

MS: That’s nice to hear you say, because that’s exactly how I feel. I always think that that’s one of the silliest things about design—the idea that design is solving, like, an engineering problem. I don’t think that’s what we do. We’re cultural; Memphis is cultural. It’s not about ergonomics or anything like that. Everyone wants to think that design is a problem-solving thing primarily, when it’s really not, or that’s not the main thing.

MO: Yeah. I’m good at making problems, not solving them.

ROLU’s Box Chair Square (After Scott Burton)

AQQ’s Pinget (left) and Sarraute

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