Hasta La Ideas

The Vitra Design Museum Gallery opens with a show of the Memphis Design founder’s definitive early work

The Vitra Design Museum (a must-see destination for design nerds), recently opened a new gallery space for small exhibitions. The inaugural show, curated by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari, features the lesser-known enamel designs of Ettore Sottsass. Created early in his post-war career, the designer began experimenting with geometric forms and color. He explored the complex process of enameling, and used the glasslike material to illuminate metals like copper with pure, vivid hues.

Accompanied by sketches, the exhibit complements the larger exhibition currently on display in the museum until 3 October 2011, “Zoom. Italian Design and the Photography of Aldo and Marirosa Ballo,” which also features Sottsass’ work.

In the vases pictured above, the stark industrial look of the enamel set against the natural warmth of the wood establishes a concept deeply explored in Sottsass’s career. The irregular nature of the enamel, with the colors melding in a wavy line, also stands out in contrast to the polished, earthy glaze of the finely lathed wood.

Working with copper rounds, the designer also made a series of brightly-colored paintings, defined by their geometric forms within forms. The irregularity of the enamel surface produces a vivid texture as well. It’s within these early works, dating back to 1958, that lays the foundation of his style: brilliant colorways and pleasingly severe geometric shapes.

Visit the Vitra Design Museum‘s site for information.

While fashion designer Raf Simons is perhaps best known for his work for Jil Sander and his eponymous label, he actually studied industrial design, launching his career as a furniture designer before switching to fashion a few years later. His approach to haute couture is informed by youth-cultural reference points, which Simons translates into cutting-edge contemporary menswear.

Mercedes-Benz—which, of course, needs no introduction—recently invited the Belgian designer to curate the first edition of the Avant/Garde Diaries, a new media platform that will offer exclusive content related to creative culture. Considering that the first series of artists includes everyone from sculptor Dustin Yellin to British art rockers These New Puritans, The Avant/Garde Diaries, for better or for worse, has little to do with automobiles.

Under the direction of fashion designer and curator Raf Simons, artists and trendsetters will be presenting their take on today’s and tomorrow’s world and engaging in dialogue with experts, as well as the general public. With this event, Mercedes-Benz is providing a creative platform for the discussion of social and contemporary issues relating to art, fashion, music, innovation, trends, culture and the automobile.

Marble sculpture by Germaine Kruip

Nevertheless, the high production value and premise—artists are asked to share their thoughts on the contemporary avant-garde—might just be enough to give LVMH’s Nowness a run for the money. In fact, we posted one of the first videos, a Konstantin Grcic studio visit, earlier today.

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“Nikolai Egorov’s Thread Spooler” (1994/2011) and “Igor Kachan’s Maraca” (1990/2011), from Vladimir Arkhipov’s Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts series.

A wall on the second floor of New York’s New Museum is currently filled with 35 photos of jerry-rigged objects that look to have been confiscated by the TSA or rescued from a thrift shop on Mars: a wafer of black rubber impaled by a fork, a tube of metal grating capped with a vaguely menacing wooden paddle, an empty Fanta can tethered to a hunk of foam-covered wood. Photographed with clinical precision against a pure white background, they are Vladimir Arkhipov‘s “Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts,” part of an ongoing series documenting the extreme DIY survival tools discovered by the artist throughout Russia. That fork/rubber combo? The ingenious bathtub plug of one Evgenii Vasiliev. The metal tube and Fanta can served as a rat trap and a maraca, respectively.

These fascinating traces of the communal apartment have come to the New Museum as part of “Ostalgia,” a survey exhibition devoted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics that opened today. “We wanted to bring to New York art that New York does not usually see,” said Massimiliano Gioni, associate director and director of exhibitions of the museum, at yesterday’s press preview. The title of the show is derived from ostologie, a German term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Standing in the lobby of the museum, temporarily transformed into a replica of a Polish puppet theater by artist Paulina Olowska, Gioni likened the show to memory itself. “It’s personal, often unreliable, and incredibly personally charged,” he said. “We knew it would be impossible to make an objective show.”
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A look back at MoMA’s 1968 landmark show on our changing relationship to technology

At the time of the MoMA‘s 1968 seminal exhibition, “The Machine,” modern technology was at a point of critical transition between the mechanical age and the rise of electronic development. The Machine stands as the first exhibition entirely focused on and in recognition of the mechanical influence on the Western World. Through the artists central to the Futurist, Dada and Surrealist movements the exhibition illustrated the attitude of their time toward technology.

The metal book cover serves as a symbol of the mechanization of the modern world and makes it one of the more interesting book designs you’ll enjoy having on your library. The exhibition catalogue offers an in depth look at the 100+ included artists, chronologically ordered from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The catalogue ventures from early mechanical depictions by Leonardo Da Vinci to the inventive diagram drawings of Suprematist Francis Picabia nearly four hundred years later. Each piece is accompanied by extensive black and white imagery and a collection of informative text and comments on technology by the artists themselves. From this the viewer learns of the Furtists’ aesthetic admiration of the machine and the Surrealist’s decisive opposition to machines as enemies of nature.

As the introduction poignantly states, “We take the machine’s usefulness for granted: yesterday’s new invention, no matter how amazing, quickly becomes the commonplace of today.” Some forty years later this noteworthy aside seems even more relevant today.

From Eadweard Muybridge’s historical photographic studies of motion to the groundbreaking sculptures and projection installations by Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman’s Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), the catalog details the revolutionary group who reshaped the new technology of their time with art’s individualism and freedom.

Seen by many as the last great exhibition of its period, The Machine continues to inspire. Look to Amazon or any number of other auction sites to snap up a vintage copy for yourself.

Balloon molds are dipped in latex.

In case you missed it, Chicago-based design collective, Object Design League set up a Balloon Factory at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. For five days, the group workshop set out to demystify the process of producing a seemingly simple object of delight through a completely handmade process: handmade balloon molds, hand painted balloons, an oven made from upcycled IKEA products, and more!

“Balloon Factory” replicates the existing balloon manufacturing process inside a gallery. The installation is organized into a balloon production line, with eight stations: preparatory dipping, drying, latex dipping, handpainting, soaking, heating, stripping, and inflation. The group explains:

Balloons are familiar and loved objects, but few people realize that with some amateur kitchen chemistry techniques, the process for manufacturing them can be replicated on a small scale. “Balloon Factory” functions as a workspace and spectacle at once. Through it, the Object Design League explores methods of producing objects for consumption in a direct way, collapsing fabrication, distribution and purchasing into one space. The designers are replicating a hidden manufacturing process, but more importantly, taking ownership of it. By making a product by hand that is only known to be made industrially, they locate their practice on the fringes of mass production.

Even if you weren’t able to check out the factory, the balloons themselves are on sale at the MCA giftshop and the larger exhibition, We Are Here: Art and Design Out of Context will be showing through July 31st. Check out more pics of the awesome balloons that the factory produced and see more images of the workshop after the jump!

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