Please Touch the Criticism: Design Exhibitions and Critical Design in the UK, 1998-2001

Cool Britannia-flavored design

In 1997, after eighteen years of Conservative government, Britain elected a Labour government with the forty-three-year-old Tony Blair as prime minister. Blair had helped lead the party’s dramatic repositioning: “New Labour,” a term first used as a conference slogan in 1994 and cemented in a 1996 manifesto, New Labour, New Life for Britain, represented a shift in party values away from traditional tenets of socialism and trade unionism and toward more centrist policies and market economics.⁴

Design, which had become ideologically enmeshed with Thatcher’s enterprise culture in the 1980s, was increasingly reframed in New Labour’s political rhetoric as “creativity” and “innovation” — qualities perceived to be more encompassing than design, and more representative of the reassignment of economic value from traditional production-line industry to the market-dependent service sectors of banking, advertising, design consultancy, media, property, and retail. In their efforts to reposition Britain in the global knowledge-based economy, New Labour adopted the language of marketing, encouraged by their media-savvy director of communications, Alastair Campbell, and embarked on a national rebranding effort that came to be known as “Cool Britannia.” This phrase, also a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream flavor featured on the cover of a 1996 issue of the American publication Newsweek, was used as a catchall for British creativity: “Britain has a new spring in its step. National success in creative industries like music, design and architecture has combined with steady economic growth to dispel much of the introversion and pessimism of recent decades. ‘Cool Britannia’ sets the pace in everything from food to fashion.”⁵

The reality of British design as an industry was somewhat bleaker, with its weakened manufacturing base and a poor international image. The Design Council was dramatically cut and restructured in 1994, resulting in the closure of its Design Centre and regional offices. Government-funded institutions such as the British Council and the Crafts Council were also focusing their attention on creativity, rather than manufacturing, as a particularly British quality and a marketable export. Britain’s state-endorsed design organizations were obviously concerned with British design’s image abroad, and sought to counter a longstanding and entrenched governmental reliance on “heritage” as a national export with a more modern conception of Britain as “a global island, uniquely well placed to thrive in the more interconnected world of the next century.”⁶

This notion of Britain derived from a report published in 1997 by the independent think-tank Demos.⁷ Commissioned by the Design Council, written by Demos senior researcher Mark Leonard, and titled Britain^TM: Renewing Our Identity, the report recommended a rebranding of national identity which would be largely dependent on capitalization of home-grown creativity and design.⁸ The upbeat views and the marketing language of this report quickly entered the lexicons of New Labour and design rhetoric of the period.

Taking creativity on the road

In art practice, curating gained currency in the mid-to-late 1990s, a period which Michael Brenson called “the curator’s moment.”⁹ Paul O’Neill suggests that artists were turning to curation as a new means of generating debate in response to the silence of the art critic: “The ascendancy of the curatorial gesture in the 1990s also began to establish curating as a potential nexus for discussion, critique and debate, where the evacuated role of the critic in parallel cultural discourse was usurped by the neo-critical space of curating.”¹⁰

Exhibitions, trade shows, and traveling showcases of contemporary British design proliferated in the 1990s, enabled by funding from sources such as the 1993 National Lottery Act, and impelled by a mission on the part of the government and government-funded institutions to promote British creative industries. International furniture trade shows were expanding with an increasing number of fringe exhibitions. For example, Blueprint magazine and the British Council staged a supplementary exhibition for the 1998 Salone del Mobile in Milan called Zuppa Inglese. It consisted of filmed interviews with eight British designers and architects (including Dunne & Raby) and a set of eight customized traveling cases containing representations of each designer’s creative influences. In London several new trade shows were initiated to provide commercial platforms for contemporary design, including 100% Design in 1995 and Designers Block in 1996. Museums such as the V&A exhibited contemporary design in their Design Now room and in large-scale temporary exhibitions such as 1991’s Visions of Japan. The Design Museum, launched in 1989, held exhibitions throughout the 1990s organized around themes such as sports, French design, or plastics, and retrospectives of designers such as Paul Smith, Philippe Starck, and David Mellor; and in 1994 initiated its Conran Foundation Collection, which presented selections of contemporary design. Designers also showed their own work in their own gallery spaces, like Tom Dixon’s Space gallery, or like Droog, the Dutch design collective, who organized traveling exhibitions of their oeuvre.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) was particularly active in the 1990s, arranging several exhibitions to promote British design abroad, and the BBC Design Awards program, launched in 1986, began in 1996 to be accompanied by exhibitions of its finalists, staged throughout the UK. City-specific design festivals, such as the Glasgow UK City of Architecture and Design 1999, directed by former Blueprint editor Deyan Sudjic, provided another opportunity for temporary exhibitions. Most monumentally, design was also included among the exhibits in the Millennium Experience, Britain’s controversial and ultimately underperforming celebration of the new century, sited in Greenwich and open to the public during the year 2000.

Due to the nature of their funding and the missions of their organizing institutions, most of these exhibitions were promotional, providing little opportunity for critical reflection on the part of their curators. They presented variations on the theme of design and creativity as marketable assets in the political project of asserting a dynamically reconceived national identity.

powerhouse::uk: inflated and babbling

One such promotional exhibition, and a highly visible example of New Labour’s co-option of design and creativity under its “Cool Britannia” banner, came in the first few months of its administration. powerhouse::uk was an exhibition commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry to encourage a global community to purchase British products and invest in British industry. Its opening was timed to coincide with the Second Asian Europe Summit (ASEM2), which was hosted in London on April 3 and 4, 1998. The summit was attended by heads of State and government from ten Asian and fifteen European nations, and the DTI, wanting to capitalize on the presence of business delegations and large media teams, saw this as “an opportunity to demonstrate, to an influential audience, how British creativity has led to world class products and services in design, fashion, technology, engineering and scientific research.”¹¹

powerhouse::uk took its name and much of its tone and terminology — which included such buzzwords as “hubs,” “hybridity,” “networking”, “connectivity,” and “innovation” — directly from the 1997 Britain^TM Demos report. Architecture critic Hugh Pearman, writing in the Sunday Times, observed the direct link between the report and the DTI exhibition, suggesting that architect Nigel Coates’ involvement in both projects was partly responsible.

The architectural practice Branson Coates designed the £1 million exhibition space, a silver, four-drum inflatable structure, which was staged on Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall, and open to the public for two weeks.¹² Each sixteen-meter steel-framed dome could contain 300-400 people and was clad in silver-coated polyester PVC membrane, the pockets of which were puffed out by a low-power electric fan. The inflatableness of the architecture was not structural, therefore; it was a skin intended to attract attention. Being sited on Horse Guards Parade, the structure could not have foundations, so it was weighted down by concrete entrance ramps and electricity was provided through cables, which ran to a generator in Admiralty Arch. Branson Coates won the DTI’s competition at the end of 1997 and was charged with designing, building, curating, managing, and deinstalling the exhibition in three and a half months.

Although it was Branson Coates who brought Claire Catterall on as curator, ultimately, Catterall’s authorial role in the exhibition was subsumed by their architectural vision. The architects were not concerned with curation in the sense of telling a particular story through objects. Instead they designed a spectacular environment, in which the selected exhibits became absorbed into the very structures of the exhibition design. They wanted to convey a surface-level impression of British creativity, and had neither the inclination nor the time to probe beneath that surface to analyze the significance of specific examples. The exhibition was divided into four sections, one in each pod of the structure. In the “Communication” pod, which comprised graphic design, advertising, special effects, computer games, and film, examples of packaging design were used to construct a London cityscape with a St. Paul’s Cathedral made from Conran’s Bluebird wine boxes, book jackets, tins, and CD cases. Toy buses and taxis, customized by selected designers, whizzed around the packaging city on a Scalextric track. The “Lifestyle” pod, which encompassed industrial design, furniture, and fashion, featured a luggage carousel, which dipped and veered around the room conveying 31 open suitcases containing Manolo Blahnik stilettos, Paul Smith suits, Ron Arad stacking chairs, Tom Dixon “Jack” lamps, and Psion calculators, as if already packed and ready for export.

Architecture critic Giles Worsley observed: “Some architects reckon that if they have been asked to design an exhibition it is because their work is quite as interesting as anything on display. That was certainly true of Coates’ powerhouse::uk, which was really no more than a trade show full of bio-crops and wackily inventive vacuum cleaners. The impact lay more in the totality of effect than in the individual objects.”¹³

Nigel Coates was under no illusion that powerhouse::uk was anything more than a trade show; in fact he highlighted its commercial objectives, saying: “everything here is connected to business in some way.”¹⁴ And Trade and Industry Minister John Battle baldly identified the exhibition as an example of Britain “setting out its stall better.”¹⁵ But Ian Peters of the British Chambers of Commerce argued that what was really needed to improve the British economy was “a lower level of interest rate and a stable economy” and “long term investment,” a line of policy thinking he saw as being resolutely ignored by New Labour’s public message.

The extravagant ambition of powerhouse::uk, and its emblematic role in New Labour’s efforts to deploy creativity as a national branding tool, put it at the center of the gathering backlash against the “Cool Britannia” campaign. According to an article in PR Week, PR agencies were beginning to advise celebrities to disassociate themselves from “Cool Britannia.”¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, the balloon-like quality of the structure lent itself to charges of being full of “hot air” and, as such, a physical manifestation of empty political rhetoric.¹⁷ Commentators on the exhibition were particularly distrustful of its use of “marketing jargon” and “US business school language.”¹⁸ Judith Williamson, who reviewed the exhibition for the graphic design journal Eye, took issue with its language — “babble,” “blab,” “meaningless chatter,” and “self-congratulatory streams of dislocated words and circular messages,” as she variously referred to it — and the ways in which such language did not speak of the actual creativity on display, but merely reflected the values of the politics that shaped it. She focused on the emptiness of the words and phrases that were projected on giant screens (intimate, rain, memory, work, laugh and hand me down, splash it all over, and west end girls): “The room was a babble of electronic messages made up largely of buzzwords and clichés. It was clear that they were meant to invoke a medley of British lifestyles and cultural trends. But what they invoked most of all was, appropriately, precisely the increasing bombardment of repetitive lifestyle verbiage that makes up much of British culture at present.”¹⁹ She saw the catalog to the exhibition, “packed as it was with buzzwords about creativity, innovation, mapping, diversity,” as “the hard-copy counterpart of the digital babble in the show itself. For the most part, the babble was the show.”²⁰

Another target for criticism was the exhibition’s evocation of a nation networked by intangible digital technology, which seemed out of touch with the still-fragmented, localized, and very tangible realities of the country’s decrepit physical infrastructure. Architecture critic Jonathan Glancey wrote: “For many first-time visitors to Britain — including the business executives the Government wishes to woo — the impression here is one of garish carpets that disfigure the airport lounges, deregulated buses, clapped-out privatized railways, major roads in a permanent state of disrepair or being repaired, trashy ‘vernacular’ housing, people sleeping in doorways, overflowing rubbish bins.”²¹

The overflowing rubbish bins of Britain, evoked by Glancey, were the point of departure for a very different exhibition, held the following spring at the ICA. Stealing Beauty British Design Now portrayed what its curator, Claire Catterall, saw as a new sensibility evident in design and the way it was being practiced in late-1990s London, “a mixture of passion, beauty, rough edges, rawness,” based on a relish for, rather than a repulsion toward, rubbish.²²

Stealing Beauty: a complete environment

The ICA, established as an alternative meeting space for artists, writers, and scientists, was not concerned with promoting British design, or indeed any worldview in particular. It was a broadly defined arts institution, staging avant-garde experimental performances and art exhibitions, partially publicly funded, but also heavily dependent on commercial sponsorship by brands such as Perrier-Jouët Champagne, in the case of Stealing Beauty.²³ It operated in an interstitial space between government, culture, and commerce, and afforded Catterall — who was born in Malaysia, and already considered herself an outsider — a position beyond both the state- and commerce-driven demands on a design exhibition like powerhouse::uk.

Stealing Beauty was hastily assembled in three months, with a small budget of £20,000 (compared to the £1 million spent on powerhouse::uk or the £250,000 spent on Culture and Commerce, the Design Museum’s inaugural 1989 exhibition), yet its influence extended well beyond its modest scope.²⁴ It was widely reviewed in the national press, lifestyle publications, and art and design magazines, generating at least 50 reviews and features thanks to formidable press outreach on the part of the ICA.²⁵

The exhibition gathered the recent work of seven individual designers and nine design collectives, with some pieces specially commissioned. Most of the designers were British; the foreign-born ones were based in Britain. They were in their twenties and thirties, and had recently graduated. Some of the designers worked in the spaces they lived in, such as the three members of El Ultimo Grito, who lived and worked in a council flat in Peckham, and many of the objects they produced were small-scale, multifunctional and provisional fixes to domestic quandaries, or attempts to bring small moments of beauty into their low-rent, sparsely furnished living spaces. The work these designers contributed to the exhibition was concerned with the experience of living a transient, noncommittal, urban existence. It turned away from public issues of deregulated capitalism, environmental catastrophe, and globalization, and looked inward instead to issues of personal meaning; it functioned in circumscribed sphere in which designers designed primarily for, and among, themselves.

Raiding the rubbish

Most of the exhibits were made from or inspired by found materials, or “things stolen from the landscape of our everyday lives,” as Catterall put it in the exhibition catalog.²⁶ She saw the use of scavenged materials and the act of “urban hunting and gathering” as deliberate responses to the slick processed materials used by more established designers. The improvised and ad hoc approaches to design represented in Stealing Beauty also implicitly referenced the social degradation that occurs under capitalism, and the potential of engagement with the everyday as a liberating alternative to style-based conceptions of design.

By repurposing pieces of mundane detritus such as bus tickets, lottery numbers, and secondhand clothes, the designers featured in the exhibition celebrated the everyday as “an arena of authentic experience,” as the literary theorist Rita Felski termed it.²⁷ The work can be seen as a delayed and largely depoliticized material manifestation of the ideal of an engagement with the everyday as a way to resist power structures, cut across class barriers, and problematize capitalism and society’s infatuation with “the spectacle,” as theorized by Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists of 1960s Paris.²⁸

The exhibition’s title, with its use of the term “beauty,” was selected to suggest an urge to transcend the everyday, and to render the ordinary extraordinary.²⁹ The exhibition went through many name changes before Stealing Beauty was approved by ICA director Philip Dodd. “Nothing Out of the Ordinary,” a title which evokes more closely Felski’s “world leached of transcendence,” was Catterall’s preference, but Dodd considered that the word “ordinary had pejorative overtones.”³⁰ Most of the work in the exhibition engaged with the everyday, however, not as a negative or residual state to be transcended or resisted, but rather as the expression of the small pleasures to be found in “repetition, home, and habit” (Felski’s conception of three facets of the everyday), pleasures that could be embodied through the methods, circumstances, and materials of making, as well as consuming.³¹

The design firm El Ultimo Grito, who produced hybrid, multifunctional furnishings, exhibited their Millwall Brick, a rolled-up newspaper secured with a piece of wire to make a coat hanger. Swedish fashion designer Ann-Sofie Back’s garments were made from secondhand clothes, which she reconstructed with new additions of plastic bags, safety pins, and color from felt-tip pens, while George Badele’s Stalagmite lanterns deployed stacked rolls of masking tape. The furniture designer Michael Marriott repurposed an inverted bucket as a pendant lampshade and a sign found at London’s disused Aldwych underground station as a table. In Furniture for people without gardens, he constructed a temporary living space from plywood frame and plastic sheeting as walls, with pieces of furniture designed to support combinations of flower vases. As such, these pieces fitted with an impulse in design of the 1990s to reject the perceived excesses of the 1980s and return to minimalist or neofunctional forms, humble materials, and the designer’s soberer public presence. “Humility is an inevitable step in the cleansing process that has been taking place in design,” observed design historian Penny Sparke.³²

In a special section of the October 1997 issue of Blueprint titled “Product Overload,” contributing editor Rick Poynor wrote that the contemporary shopping experience involved “too much variety. Too much duplication. Too many choices to make that have nothing to do with need. Too much fantasy. Too much stuff.”³³ This condition presented a “central dilemma” for designers of consumer goods: whatever they produced — how ever well-intentioned, thoughtful, or alluring — would simply contribute to the “gigantic over-production of things.”³⁴ The design critic used to be able to mitigate the situation by pre-sifting the stuff and helping people make informed choices. But a decade or more later, Poynor observed, “design-watchers” appeared to be paralyzed and were leaving TV, the newspapers, and the shelter magazine Wallpaper, “a buy-it-all bible of ‘urban modernism,’” to tell the dominant story of design — as consumption, business opportunity, and status symbol. “An alternative vision of design, not dedicated to consumerist overproduction, has all but disappeared within design itself as well as the press,” Poynor averred.³⁵

Concerns over climate change, implicit in Poynor’s comments about overproduction, also contributed to the designer’s dilemma. Curator and critic John Thackara summed up the impotency felt in the late 1990s: “For 30 years scientists, think tanks, and global summits, have measured and analysed the ‘environment’. … They’ve produced a stream of such ghastly projections that many people have been de-motivated by deep eco-gloom. … The ‘eco-problem’ leaves us with guilt, denial, despair, or a combination of all three.”³⁶ By logical extension, he and others implied, a green designer is one who designs nothing at all.

Some designers responded to this stymieing of the ostensible goals of their profession by retreating from the extravagances of 1980s design and focusing instead on modest incursions into the domestic environment that used recycled or cheap materials, and ready-made production processes. Paul Neale, a founding partner of Graphic Thought Facility, who designed the exhibition graphics and the catalog for the Stealing Beauty exhibition, recalled how “working with everyday undervalued materials,” “optimising small opportunities,” and using “modesty as a component” of practice were ways of reacting against the “style-led design of the late 1980s.”³⁷ The exhibition wall panels were engraved on laminate, and the catalog was comb-bound with cheap wood-free paper stocks and packaging box board to evoke a utilitarian commercial brochure, in distinct reaction to the refined production quality of a more typical glossy art catalog.

In a review of the 1993 Royal College of Art degree show, David Redhead observed: “Everywhere there was modular, minimal and everyday furniture made of easily assembled, eco-friendly materials.”³⁸ The students’ work, Redhead argued, was symptomatic of “a broader European shift away from self-indulgence and flamboyance and towards self-denial and restraint which Italian critics have already christened New Functionalism.” The furniture designer Jasper Morrison, who had been working in this austere mode even during the 1980s, told Redhead he “believed that designers have once again begun to think about the ‘contextual value’ of an object to its user and to restate fundamentals — usefulness, longevity, and ordinariness — that were squeezed off the agenda in the rush for self-expression.”³⁹ Some designers reasoned that the more connected someone felt to a product, the longer they would probably keep it, and the less damage it would do to the environment, and so they sought ways to ignite emotional responses to their work. In 1998 the Eternally Yours Foundation, a Dutch product think-tank, published Eternally Yours: Visions on Product Endurance, a book that made the claim that green thinking needed to focus on how to persuade people to keep their products for longer, through the use of well-built hardware, updatable software, and by making them lovable. Taking the Eternally Yours project as one of its reference points, Stealing Beauty drew attention to the emotional resonance of designed objects — how objects could activate and embody the memories of both their designers and their users.

As Catterall remarked: “I think the designers wanted to put out something familiar and something you could respond to on an emotional level. They wanted to show that design wasn’t a global monster that has no integrity, personality or intimacy. Design is driven by need but also by emotional need. It was a turning point, really, when we realized that design could really make you feel different, that it could provide comfort.”⁴⁰

Making do

Technological developments such as desktop publishing, Computer Aided Design, and Computer Aided Milling altered the way designers worked in the 1990s, allowing for smaller studios and more rapid prototyping, while increasingly computerized production processes and larger scales of production led to a more risk-averse manufacturing climate. Miniaturized electronics enabled by the microprocessor chip necessitated acts of translation on the part of designers, who were asked to create readable interfaces to allow the operation of appliances where the mechanisms were not easily understood. The abstract qualities of new technologies, such as tightness, transparency, transformability, and elasticity, gave rise to anxieties over the dematerialization of objects.

Most of the designers featured in Stealing Beauty made a virtue of their enforced role as postindustrial designers-as-makers. Making the things themselves, and showing the public how they could do so too, was a response to their lack of access to Italian manufacturers like Cappellini and Moroso, who tended to work with well-established names. The neutral authorial voice of these designers, the self-consciously provisional nature of their “make-do” solutions, and their dependence on default shapes and production processes and found materials were partly a reaction to the flamboyant stylistic flourishes of many designers in the public eye at the time, such as Philippe Starck, Ron Arad, Marc Newson, and Frank Gehry. Quality, craftsmanship, and signature styles were beside the point in chairs made of plywood and army blankets; these were anti-luxury statements.

Some used existing manufacturing processes but subverted their intended use for their own purpose. The architecture firm 24/seven, for example, appropriated Robin Day’s 1964 polypropylene chair and changed the production process to turn the normally brightly colored seat to monochrome and, for their bar design in the ICA café, they specified the fireclay used by Staffordshire ceramics firm Armitage Shanks for toilets and urinals.

Another way designers responded to their collective professional guilt about the perceived overexposure of design and its celebrities was to work collaboratively, and to conceive of themselves less as authors of complete works, more as facilitators of social interaction and “co-design.” They created half-finished and ambiguous products, which needed to be completed and interpreted by their users in the sense of “labour-to-be,” as art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud put it.⁴¹

The Dutch designer Tord Boontje exhibited his Rough and Ready furniture and lighting made from materials that could be “found in the street and on building sites,” such as softwood, plywood, chip board, screws, army blankets, plastic sheeting, secondhand fluorescent tubes, and metallic tape. Boontje provided exhibition-goers with instructions and a list of materials so they could make their own chairs at home. “The unconcluded appearance of the pieces makes them feel as if they are subject to change,” wrote Boontje in notes accompanying his exhibits.⁴²

This kind of work was similar to socially collaborative art, practiced by artists such as Martha Roster, Carsten Holler, Jeremy Deller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija and typified, in Claire Bishop’s words, by its “striving to collapse the distinction between performer and audience, professional and amateur, production and reception.”⁴³ Like the artists interested in participation, designers found the space of an exhibition to be an ideal testing ground for their work. Most young British designers’ work was unlikely to be put into production, while exhibitions provided them with a rare opportunity to introduce their work to the public. The participation that designers like Boontje offered with his kits of parts was limited, however. Users, in the role of deferred assembly laborers, followed a prescribed set of instructions; there was little room for creative input on their part.

The anti-lifestyle style

Stealing Beauty’s most explicit critique was directed against a consumerist culture and a fetishization of design and lifestyle that had developed in the 1980s. As Catterall wrote in her exhibition catalog essay, “Stealing Beauty is partly a reaction against the current saturation of the media by design — all those books, magazines and TV programmes which offer instant access to ‘stylish living,’ dispensing advice on how to ‘get the look’ and performing makeovers on our homes.”⁴⁴ Catterall saw lifestyle being used by the “style mafia” as a panacea for a society in crisis, or at least a state of malaise, one marked by “feelings of deep insecurity, in ourselves and our role in life, and in the machinations of a world where even the axes of time, space and reality are disintegrating.”⁴⁵

The “style mafia” Catterall invoked were represented most literally in the pages of Wallpaper, a magazine launched in London in 1996 by journalist and entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé, which enfolded design coverage with travel, fashion, and lifestyle. Its characterization of design as a necessary component of the kind of style-conscious, jet-setting way of life that Brûlé espoused was extremely successful in terms of publishing strategy, yet easily lampooned and quickly rejected by a younger generation of designers who found the glamorous lifestyle depicted in its pages out of touch with the concerns of their everyday lives. When Wallpaper wrote of the mission of Stealing Beauty (“the ICA’s snappy new exhibition”) as being “to reverse the 90s obsession for the sleek, the shiny, and the sanitized,” they must have recognized themselves in its wording, for they added: “though we have always maintained that a little of what you fancy does you good.”⁴⁶ The title of the magazine became a popular adjective to describe a genre of injection-molded furniture, products, or “blobjects” (dictated by the spline curve allowed for by computer-aided design technology) and sinuously surfaced interiors prevalent in 1990s Britain. As Richard Benson put it in The Face, “A lot of people are sick of super-slick, Wallpaper-esque bars and furniture, and all that taupe and curvy-cornered stuff is looking suspiciously like angular matt black things did around ’89.”⁴⁷

A specific target for the Stealing Beauty designers’ angst was Terence Conran and his propagation of stylish living through design, which had spread so vigorously in the 1980s. In answer to the question “What is your worst design memory?” the architectural practice FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) had responded: “A panic attack induced by good tastes in the kitchenware department of the Conran store.”⁴⁸

The anti-lifestyle theme of the exhibition was embodied most directly in the photographs included in the Stealing Beauty catalog. Objects were photographed in exaggeratedly banal and messy environments, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Ann-Sofie Back’s clothing was depicted on deliberately unglamorous models, with partial body shots pieced together in mismatched sections, like a game of Exquisite Corpse. With their calculated nonchalance, these anti-glamor shots (redolent of Wolfgang Tillmans’s still-life photography of the detritus of everyday life) were clearly styled just as much as those in the design magazines and showroom catalogs that they sought to counter.⁴⁹

Through critiquing lifestyle culture, the designers replaced it with another anti-life-style aesthetic, which itself would become increasingly commodified in the ensuing years. Celebrating the imperfect make-do approach to production became a stereotyped practice. As the critic Nick Currie observed of the exhibition, it “failed to avoid the post-materialist paradox: attempts to snub status-seeking quickly become new claims to status.”⁵⁰ And Giles Reid, writing in Object magazine, averred: “Stealing Beauty didn’t blur boundaries between high and low design, rampant materialism and gritty realism. It only entrenched a new aesthetic range of appreciation to maintain an elitist hold on the proceedings.”⁵¹

And yet, at that moment in the late 1990s, the work of the designers on view in Stealing Beauty did seem to present an alternative to the slick, lifestyle-oriented notion of design that dominated retail and design media. Catterall explained: “If design caters only for those who can afford it, who subscribe to a certain ideal and approach to life, what is left for those who cannot aspire to such lofty heights or simply don’t want to? In this light, the work can be seen to have a political and social resonance only because it responds so directly to the circumstances of its need, conception, production and, ultimately, its consumption and use.”⁵²

The exhibition would inevitably be caught up in a process of mainstream appropriation and commodification whose speed had increased to the point where it was happening in parallel to the production of the work itself. The exhibition could never exist completely outside the predominant strain of design discourse, but in seeking to present a strand of contemporary design still in formation, Stealing Beauty attempted to offer a counterstatement. As Paul O’Neill observed of art exhibitions with similar ambitions, using cultural critic Raymond Williams’ conception of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural moments, “emergent cultural innovation comprises new practices that produce new meanings, values and kinds of relationships. Emergence is thus not the mere appearance of novelty: it is the site of dialectical opposition to the dominant — the promise of overcoming, transgressing, evading, renegotiating or bypassing the dominant — and not simply delivering more of the same under the blandishments of the ‘new’.”⁵³

While all the designers featured in Stealing Beauty made use of free or inexpensive materials and processes, the resulting work was largely inaccessible; the products and proposals were limited editions, prototypes, and one-offs. As Gareth Williams, assistant curator in the Furniture Department at the V&A, pointed out, “Many people expect an ICA show to be transgressive just because of the venue. I suspect design may suffer more than art in this environment, as we understand art to be made for these rarefied places. Design on the other hand is still primarily to be used in the real world. Design in a gallery can appear precious and even pretentious, not because it is intended to be so, but because it is out of context.”⁵⁴

In the case of Stealing Beauty, however, the exhibition space at the ICA was the intended context for the design. There was no real world in which the objects once existed and from which they were subsequently decontextualized, and in that sense the show was a critique of young designers’ lack of access to manufacturing and distribution deals. (The ICA bookstore sold the pieces that could be produced in multiples, and took 50 percent of the retail price.)⁵⁵ Most of the work on display was produced specifically for the exhibition, and the pieces were carefully juxtaposed to create environments specific to the gallery, 6876’s jackets in “pavement grey” and “steel blue” hung above George Badele’s two-tone floorboards in which layers of paint had been exposed by the wear of feet. Tord Boontje and Michael Marriott provided the furniture and lighting; Bump supplied the cups and plates, which were labeled with insults suitable for plate-throwing arguments. All the appurtenances of the Millennial London designer’s domestic interior were represented in this composite portrait of design in thrall to the everyday.

Objects in conversation

In marked contrast to Stephen Bayley’s exhibition-as-magazine-article approach to curating at The Boilerhouse, discussed in chapter 3, Catterall made minimal use of wall texts and captions in the exhibition, using them only to orientate the visitor rather than to explain the objects on display. Catterall was interested in curating as a largely nonverbal practice, which was less about illustrating a prewritten essay with objects than it was about “weighing things up against each other, and seeing how they react to each other.”⁵⁶ She preferred to exercise her curatorial judgment by editing out “dead wood”; using juxtaposition to create “conversation” between objects; accumulating multiples for rhetorical effect; “precisely” positioning objects; and creating atmosphere through a constructed all-encompassing environment.⁵⁷ In notes for the exhibition, she wrote: “the few successful design shows are more like art installations — communicating something through the very space they occupy. It’s time to change the form and format of design exhibitions — so that they engage, challenge, and provoke.”⁵⁸

The exhibition, designed by Urban Salon, delineated each designer’s equally sized space with a colored strip, which extended across the gallery floor, up the walls, and into the corridor outside. The work was displayed on the floor, hanging from the ceiling, and leaning against walls. FAT used a mirror on the ceiling of their allotment-like strip to extend the height of their forest of silver birch trees. Exaggerated contrasts in lighting were used for dramatic effect, and various floor textures were employed throughout (maintenance instructions for the exhibition note that “Dunne & Raby’s grass should be watered every day”).⁵⁹ The stairway was flyposted with British Creative Decay’s screen-printed images of anti-flyposting devices. In the upper gallery, video jockeys The Light Surgeons installed an immersive environment of projected images and video footage, which evoked one of the lightshows they created for clubs. Sounds such as those emanating from Dunne & Raby’s talking plant labels, Rustling Branch and Cricket Box, created by experimental musician Jayne Roderick, provided an aural backdrop for the work.

Catterall eschewed the use of plinths and vitrines. Her primary inspiration for curating in this sense-evoking and atmosphere-producing manner was the Bodyworks exhibition by Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, which originated in Tokyo in 1983 and was shown at The Boilerhouse in 1985. Miyake displayed his work on custom-made black silicon mannequins hanging from the ceiling. Catterall enthusiastically recalls of the show: “it was a complete environment, it was about the inside of [Miyake’s] head more than anything — no really wordy captions — but a whole environment, with torsos bouncing up and down. And it made you feel really fantastic. And in a way I think that’s what the Stealing Beauty exhibition tried to do — rather than putting an object on the plinth and just telling you that ‘this is this’ and ‘this is about this.’ You were kind of meant to go into the exhibition and feel it. Or taste it, as the case may be.”⁶⁰

A species of quiet criticism

Stealing Beauty’s quiet introspection contrasted emphatically with the bombast and “babble” of the powerhouse::uk exhibition which had taken place the previous spring. Both attempted to materialize the nebulous concept of British creativity, and represented a contemporary moment in time, but while Stealing Beauty was a ruminative exhibition carefully contained beyond the fray of the marketplace in an independent art gallery, powerhouse::uk — from its macho name and its showy architecture to its alien-like landing in the middle of Horse Guards Parade — was intended to seduce a very particular audience of Asian businessmen and politicians. The form of Branson Coates’ circular exhibition space was literally inflated, its ambition metaphorically so.

Art critic Hal Foster, reflecting on the “inflated” condition of design of the period, wrote of the way in which prices for design as a service (branding) and as an object (collectible pieces) were inflated in a contemporary situation in which there is no “running room” for culture. Everything is folded back into “the near-total system of contemporary consumerism.”⁶¹ Charles Leadbeater, author and advisor to Tony Blair, commented a couple of years later: “We are all in the thin air business these days … most people in advanced economies produce nothing that can be weighed: communications, software, advertising, financial services. They trade, write, design, talk, spin, and create; rarely do they make anything.”⁶²

Stealing Beauty, by contrast, was grounded by its focus on physical objects and the process of making, albeit a limited conception of manufacture. Furthermore, its comparative distance from the concerns of commerce enabled it to experiment and take a more irreverent stance. In the context of the ICA the exhibition performed as a space, not for business-focused discussion, but for contemplation of more poetic themes — epiphany, even.

The extent to which Stealing Beauty could achieve any significant critical distance toward its subject matter might have been compromised by its very format as an exhibition. According to Bruce Ferguson, exhibitions are always framed by institutional and commercial concerns, and will always perform ideologically: “Exhibitions are … contemporary forms of rhetoric, complex expressions of persuasion, whose strategies aim to produce a prescribed set of values and social relations for their audiences. As such exhibitions are subjective political tools, as well as being modern ritual settings, which uphold identities (artists, national, subcultural, international, gender-or-race specific, avant-garde, regional, global, geopolitical etc.); they are to be understood as institutional ‘utterances’ within a larger culture industry.”⁶³

Yet the form of Stealing Beauty was more atmospheric than rhetorical. As an institutional “utterance,” this exhibition was taciturn. It refused the model of exhibition-as-text and instead used the entire environment of the exhibition to convey its ideas. Catterall also rejected the art-historical tendency to label groupings of work as a “movement,” captions preferring instead to characterize her selections as examples of a “mood and an energy.”⁶⁴ Using minimal explanatory captions and, in the catalog, letting the designers speak for themselves through their response to questionnaires, Stealing Beauty left viewers space to elicit meaning or to remain confused by what they saw.

Stealing Beauty critiqued the state of manufacturing, other designers, design retailers, the lifestyle press, and unthinking consumption. But it also critiqued the apparatuses of criticism through its non-linear, non-narrative, format. As a piece of design criticism, Stealing Beauty relied on the palpable tensions and correspondences between featured objects to stimulate discussion about design in late-1990s London. “I’m hoping Stealing Beauty will spark a renaissance of design shows which provide a platform for debate,” Catterall told Design Week.⁶⁵

One measure of the exhibition’s lasting effects can be seen in the work of Dunne & Raby, who at the time were formulating their own ideas about criticism. Their work, exhibited both in Stealing Beauty and in powerhouse::uk, was positioned at the intersections of art and design, and of industry and academia. They explored the idea that criticism could be embodied in products and speculative proposals, and provide a viable alternative to the role of the journalistic design critic during the late 1990s. As a result, their work provides the most instructive example of the continued discussion of ideas presented in Stealing Beauty, and a new trajectory beginning to move away from criticism as the design journalist’s purview.

Dunne & Raby point to Stealing Beauty as a “pivotal” moment in their practice and a means of meeting a network of like-minded designers. They identified in particular with Alex Rich, El Ultimo Grito, and Michael Marriott, and went on to rent a studio in the same building as FAT. Dunne reflected: “up to that point we felt quite isolated, really like outsiders. Stealing Beauty definitely made us feel like there were other designers who were doing really interesting work, and who we felt an affinity with, and kept in touch ever since.”⁶⁶

Products with a point of view

Although Dunne & Raby have relabeled their practice several times since that period, and currently do not use the term “critical design,” in the mid-late 1990s they did use it to describe electronic product design’s potential as criticism. “We view design as a form of criticism,” they wrote, “where design proposals represent not utopian dreams or didactic blueprints, but simply a point of view.”⁶⁷ They saw their work as a challenge to manufacturers and users “to question products through products.”⁶⁸

Their work also represented a challenge to design criticism as it was conventionally conducted, since they wanted to reposition criticism from its location in the media to a potentially more direct location within the design object. Dunne wrote: “design, too, has much to contribute as a form of social commentary, stimulating discussion and debate amongst designers, industry, and the public about the quality of our electronically mediated life.”⁶⁹

Dunne & Raby believed that electronic products could be designed to resist their passive consumption and unthinking acceptance and, as Dunne put it, “facilitate sociological awareness, reflective, and critical involvement.”⁷⁰ In this conception, the act of criticism would be performed in a nonverbal dialogue between designers and users, thus deemphasizing the more established role of the critic as a skilled interpreter or translator between these two constituencies. In Dunne’s conception of “critical involvement,” the kinds of questions usually asked of an object by a critic would be embodied in the product itself, to be accessed by the user. The ways in which such products were presented assumed increased significance, therefore, and Dunne & Raby confronted the continuing challenge of how to create the conditions in which such questions could be made specific, or even legible.

In developing this brand of criticism, Dunne & Raby did not want to prescribe or moralize; they turned to the genres of film and fiction, seeking a mode of address that was “gentle and slightly subdued.”⁷¹ Dunne wrote in Blueprint magazine: “Industrial design’s position at the heart of consumer culture (after all, it is fuelled by the capitalist system) could be subverted for more socially beneficial ends by enriching our experiences. It could provide a unique aesthetic language that engages the viewer in ways a film might, without being utopian or prescriptive.”⁷²

Part of Dunne & Raby’s technique was to play with time, framing their work in the future subjunctive tense so that it could express various states of unreality such as desire, emotion, possibility, judgment, or action that has not yet occurred. Yet using that mode did not mean that they conceived of their objects as futuristic products; it was better that the future their objects spoke of was close at hand and, better still, one that could “sit uncomfortably alongside the now.”⁷³ Their objects operated in fictive social scenarios set in a near future, or parallel present, in order to amplify current anxieties and practices. They blended critique of the present with projection into a hypothetical, prototyped future, exposing the mechanisms by which cultural values are made, and showing that it was still possible to reshape that future and those values.

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby met while studying Industrial Design and Architecture, respectively, at the Royal College of Art. Upon their graduation in 1988, the couple relocated to Tokyo, excited by the possibilities of a country with such a high rate of technological change, and disillusioned with the state of design manufacturing, the lack of advanced design research, and the drudgery required of a young architect in Britain. In Tokyo Raby worked with the experimental architect Kei’ichi Vie, and Dunne worked in Sony Corporation’s Design Center. Here he created the prototype for Noiseman, a subversion of the Walkman, which recorded street sounds and distorted them to create an abstract ambient soundscape, thus reestablishing a link, albeit a transfigured one, between the Walkman wearer and the city he or she moves through.

When they returned to London, the couple established a collaborative practice. Their experience in Japan was pivotal, both through the contacts they made and through what they absorbed about the relationship between society and technology. “Tokyo is a city immersed in a sea of signs,” wrote Dunne upon his return. “Every available surface is used to transmit information; clothes, objects, buildings all become screens, terminals for a vast information machine.”⁷⁴

One of their first clients was the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, who had been commissioned to create a thematic section of the Visions of Japan exhibition at the V&A in 1991. He had seen Dunne’s Noiseman in Tokyo, and asked the couple to work with him, Ito created a Dreams Room, in which hundreds of video clips of processed computer imagery and scenes from Tokyo life were projected onto the floor and walls. Dunne & Raby contributed a set of “media terminals” through which they addressed such questions as user-unfriendliness and the notion of data stored in spaces rather than in objects. Through this set of objects created for Ito, Dunne & Raby began to work out a design philosophy dedicated to revealing invisible aspects of the environment, such as electromagnetic fields.

The gallery space would provide Dunne & Raby with a public sphere for their ideas throughout the 1990s, but its location outside of everyday life troubled them. They considered themselves designers, not artists, and wanted to find ways to connect their work to lived contexts. Even when they got to turn an old TV salesroom in the Elephant Castle Shopping Centre into a de-electrification center (as part of artists Rebecca Nesbit and Maria Lind’s Salon 3 project), they were self-conscious about its art-world framing. In 1997, interviewed by Blueprint, Dunne commented: “we want to steer this debate away from a purely fine art context. Having our work shown at the Saatchi Gallery would be good. But being shown at Dixon’s would be much better.”⁷⁵

Over the years the duo would continue to wrestle with the way their work was presented. They concluded that working in an academic environment provided them with the most freedom and potential, although even within this field they were keen to forge a new kind of practice fed from a continual exchange between research, making, teaching, lecturing at conferences, and exhibiting.⁷⁶

Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales

Dunne & Raby joined a research group, which became known as the Critical Design Unit, funded by the Californian technology incubator Interval Research Corporation, and located in the RCA’s Computer Related Design department. Raby recalled that the Critical Design Unit provided them with a kind of shelter to work through their frustrations with the design industry and a confusion over where their own work could exist if they rejected commercial design: “We used to joke that the Critical Design Unit was like a refugee camp for architects who didn’t want to do architecture, product designers who didn’t want to do products, and graphic designers who didn’t want to do graphics.”⁷⁷ Dunne enrolled as a PhD student and embarked on a six-year research project, published in 1999 as a book under the RCA/CRD imprint, titled Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design. The essays in the book explore historical precedents (particularly the work and thinking of Andrea Branzi from the 1960s and 1970s, Daniel Weil from the 1980s, and Ezio Manzini in the early 1990s), the work of peers in art, design, architecture, and literature (especially the instruments, projections, and vehicles of Polish-born industrial designer and director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Krzysztof Wodiczko), and the thinking of philosophers (especially Jean Baudrillard).

Product semantics, an approach to design developed at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm in the 1960s, came to fruition in the early 1990s, and led to a product designer on information displays, graphic elements, and the form, shape, and texture of a product as ways to indicate its function. Hertzian Tales critiques this approach; Dunne dismissed what he saw as the prevailing emphasis on the optimization of the technical and semiotic functionality of products, arguing that most product categories have reached a watershed in terms of technical performance. He focused instead on a product’s potential to provoke what he termed “psychosocial narratives,” and to embody “inhuman factors” and “post-optimal aesthetics.”

The book included a section in which he documented and reflected on five of his projects: each a variation on radio technology or, as Dunne put it, “an interface between the electromagnetic environment of hertzian space and people.”⁷⁸ “Electroclimates” used a pillow-like PVC inflatable casing to contain a wideband radio scanner and a horizontally positioned LCD screen in a fluorescent polycarbonate box. It was created to be a kind of barometer of ambient electromagnetic radiation, that it converted into abstract sounds and pulsing patterns, which could be discerned by placing your head on the pillow. It was exhibited at the RCA exhibition Monitor as Material in 1996, but as an object, its commentary on the problematic interface between public and private space remained mysterious to the exhibition-goers. Dunne decided it needed contextualizing and so he, Dan Sellars, and Raby shot a pseudo-documentary video which depicted an elderly lady interacting with the pillow in her home, surrounded by doilies, teacups, and a copy of the Sun. This made the pillow’s story much clearer, and drew an audience into shared speculation on its meaning; thereafter, Dunne was careful to present his objects in use through staged photographs or videos.

Another of the Hertzian Tales projects used changing color fields and sounds to visualize the intensity of electromagnetic leakage, or what he characterized in softly poetic terms as “dreams,” from domestic consumer appliances like televisions, computers, babycoms, and fax machines. By contrast, Thief of Affections conjured a more perverse intentionality on the part of the object which could surreptitiously “grope” a victim’s heart — via their pacemaker. When activated, a radio scanner concealed in a flesh-colored prosthesis resembling a riding crop or police truncheon would search for pacemaker frequencies in the vicinity, lock onto a close signal, and convert the frequencies into vaguely erotic audible sounds.

Faraday Chair took the form of a simple transparent box on legs, like a vitrine, inside which someone would be protected from EM. Its name referenced the contraption invented in 1836 by Michael Faraday in which a cage protects the occupant from electromagnetic radiation or radio waves by using conductive material to distribute the electric charges, canceling those within. Dunne’s Faraday tank was not quite long enough for the person to lie outstretched, nor comfortable enough for relaxation, and so the supposed luxury and repose of a pure electronic radiation-free space was subverted by the inhabitant’s awkward and vulnerable-seeming posture, like a baby in an incubator.

Dunne’s Hertzian Tales were conceived of as stories in which objects figured as characters, props, plot devices, and atmospheres, and through which different values (spying, thieving, hiding) could be considered necessary means for survival in an increasingly electromagnetically radiated environment. Dunne was interested in shifting the focus away from the skin and interface of an electronic product and toward the kinds of psychological experiences that it could stimulate.

ln a paper Dunne and fellow RCA researcher Alex Seago presented in 1996, titled “New Methodologies in Art and Design Research: The Object as Discourse,” they attempted to validate the role of a designer as researcher within academia with the coinage “action research by project.”⁷⁹ They wrote: “Dunne’s work offers a positive and radical model of the action researcher in design as a critical interpreter of design processes and their relationship to culture and society rather than a skilled applied technician preoccupied by the minutiae of industrial production or a slick but intellectually shallow semiotician.”⁸⁰ This was at a time when the value of applied academic research was being tested and contested in the academic sphere. Dunne’s work, he and Seago suggested, provided a model of systematic research containing explicit data and reproducible methodologies: “the electronic object produced as the studio section of a doctorate is still ‘design’ but in the sense of a ‘material thesis’ in which the object itself becomes a physical critique.”⁸¹

Exhibition as “reporting space”

Throughout the 1990s Dunne & Raby were invited to participate in design exhibitions in Britain and around the world.⁸² Increasingly they considered an exhibition to be a “reporting space” into which they could bring a project, in order to gauge the public’s reactions, and then incorporate those reactions in the project’s development. The exhibition therefore began to function for Dunne & Raby as a part of the design process, and a space for testing their critical ideas.⁸³ And despite fruitful discussions with artists concerned with similar issues (such as Liam Gillick and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Le Labyrinthe moral, Le Consortium contemporary art space, Dijon, France, 1995), they also decided to move away from the art world: “Around the end of the 1990s, we said, ‘No, we want to contribute to the design discourse, and be designers even if we don’t fit in.’”⁸⁴

In addition to using the gallery space as a “test site” for their work, in the late 1990s Dunne & Raby made increasing use of heavily stylized videos of fictional scenarios to present it. The scenarios they invented to frame their objects took place in alien, depthless worlds that, through their aesthetic unfamiliarity, are also morally disorienting. Dunne & Raby thought these videos were able to “focus the viewer’s attention on the space between the experience of looking at the work and prospect of using it.”⁸⁵ They still sought a situation where people might actually engage with their objects in their own homes.

Placebo Project

With Placebo Project, a body of work created in 2001, Dunne & Raby realized their ambition of inserting their work into actual domestic environments, to allow for critical reflection by a using, rather than merely a viewing, public. They fabricated eight pieces of furniture, using MDF in as pared-down a way as possible, “to get against the emphasis on form.”⁸⁶ Each piece gave material shape to an aspect of the anxiety surrounding the presence of electromagnetic fields in the home, and could be used as a tool either to measure their presence or to protect users from them. Compass Table contained twenty-five magnetic compasses that twitched or spun when an electronic product such as a laptop computer was set upon it. Nipple Chair incorporated a sensor that caused two nipple-like protrusions in the chair’s back to vibrate in the presence of electromagnetic fields, making the sitter feel as if the radio waves were entering his or her torso. Loft comprised a ladder topped with a box that was lined in lead to allow for the storage of sensitive magnetic recordings. Electro-draught Excluder was a foam-lined shield that provided only a false semblance of protection from electromagnetic radiation, but that users could place between themselves and a television or computer to create a “sort of a shadow — a comfort zone where you simply feel better.” None of these objects actually removed or counteracted electromagnetic radiation, but they could, as placebo devices, the designers hypothesized, “provide psychological comfort and, as such, reinforce the role of design criticism as therapy.”⁸⁷

As one of five finalists of the newly inaugurated Perrier-Jouët Selfridges Design Prize, in the spring of 2001 Dunne & Raby were able to display their work in the windows of Selfridges department store in central London, exposing it to an estimated 1.7 million passersby. They used the opportunity to present their Placebo furniture/objects, in an ideologically problematic yet expedient conflation of commerce’s co-option of design, and their work’s intended critique of design’s commercial focus. Using notices in the Selfridges windows and advertisements in a London listings magazine, Dunne & Raby solicited individuals to adopt one of the Placebo objects and live with it for several weeks. Once their allotted time with the object was up, Dunne, Raby, and the photographer Jason Evans visited their homes to interview them about their experience of living with the object, and to photograph them interacting with it.

ln this example of critical design in action, the design criticism occurred at more than one juncture. In themselves, the ambiguous Placebo objects — hybrids of furniture and appliances — provoked questions about their use. The criticism also occurred during the use of these objects. The people who lived with them experimented with putting them in different places in their homes, and reflected on the presence of invisible electromagnetic fields brought to their awareness through the physical form of the objects. Next, the objects’ potential for constituting criticism was made available to others, through the extensive documentation of the project-stylized photographs of the adopters interacting with the objects, and interviews which elicited the questions the objects had raised for them. These photos and interviews were published in the book Design Noir, and exhibited in multiple exhibitions around the world.