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Against Design |
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Looking Familiar |
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Artists have worked on, around, against, and in opposition to furniture forms for decades now. Some of this work has appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and at local galleries.
An early 1980s show at the museum featured the sculpture of Richard Artschwagger. His pieces were clearly grounded in the forms of common household furnishings, transposed these into massive closed cubes and rectangular solids.
Constructed of appropriately low-brow materials like plywood and particle board topped by plastic laminate (sometimes with an imprinted floral or marble pattern), Artschwagger operated in a niche between Pop Art and Minimalism. From Pop, they borrowed a sense of humor as well as a sense of the familiar. From Minimalism, they borrowed a refined sense of shape and proportion, as well as an insistance on fine craft.
In the early 1990s, San Diego artist Jim Skalman produced a body of work which was more purely sculptural and more purely based in popular form than Artschwagger's. Skalman also anticipated much of what appears in "Against Design."
Jim Skalman, "Wall Cabinet,"
1990
His "Wall Cabinet" appears familiar enough, at first glance. But it's quickly recognized that the open door opens in the "wrong" direction; as expectation would dictate that it open to the side, not drop down and bash someone on the head. Furthermore, neither the open door nor the closed door is hinged. So for all time, one space is accessible and obvious while one is inaccessible and mysterious.
Jean Lowe, Installation, 2000
Yet another approach to the use of Against Design-type ideas and forms was seen recently in the work of San Diego artist Jean Lowe. At the museum's downtown facility, in the fall of 2000, she presented several large installations of furnishings and paintings with which she addressed a range of social, environmental, even nutritional issues. The works conveyed her ideas unambiguously and with great exuberance -- another set of qualities which the offerings in Against Design take great pains to avoid.
