By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, June 18, 2010;
C08
Here at Galleries we're in a World Cup frame of mind, so we've decided to pit two arch rivals in a contest that could surpass Friday's U.S. vs. Slovenia Group C match.
Our contest: Art vs. Design.
The Favorite: Art. Perfected by the Greeks and tweaked for millenniums, art has hosted history's wiliest strikers and enjoyed countless championships.
The Underdog: Design. The club has a strong history: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit Rietveld and Marcel Duchamp made important contributions, elevating Team Design to championship levels. Yet prejudices linger. "Too commercial," "Too entwined with consumer culture," critics say. Or maybe just too close to everyday life for comfort?
Team Art's edge grew from its sometimes guarded level of remove from quotidian affairs -- these were objects to be admired, not touched or used. That advantage fell away in the 20th century, and parsing significant differences between the two clubs got harder.
Remember 1925? That year's match was over Marcel Breuer's then-brand-new tubular-steel Wassily Chair, inspired by the bicycle frame. Today, the iconic object sits on a MoMA pedestal as a triumph of both art and design. You can eyeball it like an art object or sit in it (or its knockoff) to enjoy Breuer's Bauhaus rigor. That 1925 contest ended in a draw.
In today's match, we pit two exhibitions against each other. One features art objects fashioned from industrial materials. The other asks that we view commercial products as art objects. Let's see how each side fares.
'Objectified'Playing for Team Art, we have Anacostia's Honfleur Gallery, where four artists present objects and conceptual jewelry inspired by (and incorporating) construction-site detritus and office-building HVAC systems. Team Design is represented by the Mexican Cultural Institute, where a large-scale, multi-floor exhibition of commercial design -- lamps, chairs, dental-floss holders -- offers objects that are meant to be used.
"Objectified: The Domestication of the Industrial" at Honfleur culls objects related to commercial products -- building materials, toasters -- that are scaled down for personal or domestic settings.
There's apocalyptic humor to Andrea Miller's necklaces, one of which features a mini HVAC duct. Miller fabricates small versions of everyday items into a thinking person's jewelry. In a series of photographs presented here, models pose, like intellectual Flavor Flavs, with small-scale commercial parts dangling from their necks. Miller's objects, five in all, hang adjacent to the pictures.
Miller calls the pieces "Peripheral Systems." She's interested in how these ubiquitous materials live at the periphery of our awareness. (You need only look to the gallery's ceiling, with its exposed ductwork, to find Miller's prototypes.) Part of her aim is to remind us how central these items are to our existence.
But there's also a sinking feeling associated with wearing four inches of HVAC ducting around your neck. The thing suggests a gas mask or some future world where we may need personal breathing units to survive.
Robert Longyear also makes industrial jewelry. One brooch and three "neck pieces" -- necklacelike, yet meant to drape around the neck without a clasp -- are displayed alongside a few photographs and a series of panels harvested at construction sites.
Longyear fashioned his jewelry out of discarded nails and metal fabric he found at neglected structures near his St. Louis home. These are difficult, prickly objects, yet he treats them with a jeweler's care. A brooch offers a voodoo doll-like pincushion of nails, undermining our definition of jewelry and elevating detritus to the realm of ornament.
Other works at Honfleur are less convincing. Jeanne Jo translated a love letter into a crocheting pattern and created a massive scarflike scroll measuring 150 feet long. With its references to Penelope waiting for Odysseus's return, it's an interesting artwork. Yet it belongs in another show.
I can't muster the same kindness for Colleen Heineman, who attempts a quasi-scientific analysis of household clutter by producing small copper objects. Her aims and her objects don't square.
'Rethinking Tradition'Artistic intent and final products jibe much better at the Mexican Cultural Institute, where the best work in "Rethinking Tradition: Contemporary Design From Mexico" seamlessly engages our mind, our senses and our need for reading lights and pencil holders.
The massive show of contemporary Mexican design dwarfs Honfleur's modest offerings; more than 200 pieces by 31 collective workshops and individual designers are on view.
Highlights include Ariel Rojo's ceramic lamps shaped like tubby black and white pigs; energy-saving fluorescents screw in to form their tails. The swine are traditional symbols of prudence and incorporate current earth-friendly technologies. Also appealing, the oak plywood hanging lamps of Caterina Moretti and Hector Mendoza, both of the design collective Peca. The designers arranged a series of curved wood slats into a bell-shape cage, though a few slats are not like the others. These feature bird silhouettes that inject these objects with poetry.
But my favorite item for both utility and art-historical chops is Andres Amaya's 1999 "Chacmuelas" dental-floss holder. Its title is a pun on "Chac Mools," Mesoamerican reclining male figures that first appeared between 950 and 1521 at sites such as Chichen Itza. Amaya's little flosser is a tubby pink fellow with floss emerging from his belly. He's useful, ergonomic and art-smart.
Match notes: After a scoreless first half in which the two sides had an equal number of chances, Team Design scored on a sharp-angle shot in the 76th minute. Considering that Honfleur's offerings were more conceptual than utilitarian and that Mexican Cultural Institute's best pieces were both utilitarian and conceptual, the shot breezed past Team Art's goalkeeper.
Design: 1, Art: 0
[Cue the vuvuzelas.]
Dawson is a freelance writer.
Objectified:
The Domestication of
the Industrial
at Honfleur Gallery, 1241 Good Hope Rd. SE, Tuesday-Friday noon to 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., 202-536-8994, to July 23. http://www.honfleurgallery.com.
Rethinking Tradition:
Contemporary Design
From Mexico
at the Mexican Cultural Institute, 2829 16th St. NW, Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., 202-728-1628, to Oct. 16.
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