DESIGN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biography Extract – 2005 – Contemporary Art

– -Contemporary Art: my career in DESIGN is understood through my work as an artist, as a sculptor. I only went into DESIGN by chance. I do not think that DESIGN is a by-product of art, even so, today, in the general sense of the term, DESIGN adapts artistic forms to functions. I regret this current standing of DESIGN, I prefer the standings of Walter Gropius and Bauhaus which mixed artists and artisans. The sense of design did not exist as merchandise but as an ideology, a way of thinking, which gave birth to revolutionary products.
In fact, all of the great classics of design (that is to say products of another era which have always been considered contemporary) come from that school, from Breuer to Ray Eames, passing by Panton or Jacobsen.
In very pragmatic way we must keep in mind that DESIGN demands means which make us think and do communally. Design demands manual, virtual and intellectual means, and I have had the opportunity to come across this assembly in my work for twenty-odd years.
In this way, objects of design, from the conception of urban spaces to that of tables and chairs, or ways of movements, have been put together by teams.
During this period, I learned that there are no small-scale projects in design,
The design of a stool took us more time than certain public spaces, and I still have not found the stand for a table tray I drew ten years ago.
I will take this opportunity to explain what I mean by ‘drew’: I bought a red cauliflower in the market and cut it in half. A photographer captured the cut side, a computer graphics artist scanned the photograph, a second computer graphics artist reworked the scan to make it compatible for use, a metalworker and technician made a cut-out in steel. I ‘drew’ a table tray… and we could say the same of a building ‘drawn’ from the crushing of a large box of matches one night in Milan.
All this to try and say that this community of thought and action led us to conceive of what we now call social design. Social design, the goal of which is to make our world more liveable, putting the action of thinking together, the experience of using it and the research of a more durable way of life in the centre of the preoccupations of design. A century later to join the preoccupations of the school of Bauhaus. Is this a political coincidence? Unfortunately, I think not…