Telling Tales: Fear and Fantasy in Contemporary Design
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The all-pervading influence of surrealism continues to inspire artists and designers, sometimes in bizarre ways. Design has often been a way for artists to explore the odd and unnerving, whether in Salvador Dali’s iconic sofa in the shape of a pair of giant red lips or in his lobster telephone. By appropriating everyday familiar forms, idea and object take on different and often disturbing significance. The argument is that, by taking practical objects, the notion of use is subverted by the concept.
This is one of the themes in Telling Tales: Fear and Fantasy in Contemporary Design in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s gallery devoted to new or topical design. It brings together recent trends among European designers who, in addition to producing useful ranges of work, are also involved in designing unique or limited edition pieces that push at the boundaries between art and design. Furniture, lighting and ceramics, designed by a youngish generation of international designers, including Tord Boontje, Maarten Baas, Jurgen Bey and Studio Job, make work inspired by the spirit of storytelling.
The layout and presentation of the exhibition is intrinsic to the meaning. In a complex installation, an ever-narrowing and turning corridor presents the viewer with a set of displays reminiscent of imaginative window dressing or tableau in museums. Sounds often accompany the objects, wind blowing, animals croaking, birds tweeting, creating an eerie, jungle-like atmosphere of slight menace rather than reassurance. This is design to disturb rather than comfort. The claustrophobic atmosphere is intensified by the final part of the installation where the corridor comes to a dead end and the “windows” looking onto the objects are so small and curiously placed as to make seeing the objects all but impossible.
Each object tells a tale through their use of decorative devices, historical allusions or choice of materials, sharing common themes such as fantasy, parody and a concern with mortality. Fairy tale and myth predominate, with chairs morphing into kissing seats, as in Sebastian Brajkovic’s Lathe Chairs VIII (illustrated) or in Tord Boontje’s The Fig Leaf Wardrobe of an elegant but dead tree set against a projected background of ever-restless flying insects.
At a time when art is challenging long established boundaries, craft and design contribute to these shifting grounds, re-examining the links between contemporary design, history and the imagination to create a new category “design art”. In Telling Tales, artists/designers/makers explore how more-or-less overtly functional objects – “designed” objects – can be made to carry meanings and associations or tell tales.
As contemporary design practice, the art market and art itself become more and more integrated – reflecting the merging of art, craft and design – Telling Tales offers an often complex and multi-layered assessment of contemporary practice, linking it with painting, sculpture and literary theory. With a concern with objects as art, this is not the exhibition for the dedicated shopper in search of “good taste”, but, provocatively, questions any notion of complacency around the objects with which we fill our homes.
Emmanuel Cooper
