Unorthodox vehicles for design

The beating heart of Ron Arad’s exhibition ‘In Reverse’ consists of six vintage Fiat 500 cars crushed flat and mounted along the walls of the Holon Design Museum’s upper gallery.

By CARL HOFFMAN
From Ron Arad’s ‘Pressed Flowers.’ (photo credit: Courtesy Design Museum)
From Ron Arad’s ‘Pressed Flowers.’
(photo credit: Courtesy Design Museum)
Ron Arad has been one of the country’s most celebrated designers, artists and architects for the past three decades. Now the Design Museum in Holon is featuring a major exhibition of his creations, called “In Reverse.”
The museum, which opened three years ago, is a fitting venue for the show; it was Arad and his London-based architectural firm that designed the already iconic building.
Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Arad has a long resumé of works that have been pivotal to the realms of architecture, art and industrial design. “In Reverse” presents a selection of his work in metal – perhaps his favorite design material – from the past 30 years.
Although not a retrospective in the strictest sense of the word, the exhibition begins with his earliest work, The Rover Chair (1981) – “a leather Rover car seat salvaged from a London scrap yard and mounted onto a frame made from steel tubing and clamp fittings,” according to the exhibition’s Web page. Then there is his Well Tempered Chair (1986), a sleek, shiny metal armchair made from “four sheets of sprung steel, looped and held together with wing nuts.” The exhibition also includes his now-famous Tinker Chair (1988), which the website notes he “made by beating sheet steel with a rubber mallet until it felt like a comfortable seat” – or, as Arad says, “until it confessed to being a chair.” Along the way, viewers are treated to other works, like Caddy Compression, from Sticks and Stones (1987), a mangled object made from chairs tossed onto a conveyor belt and crushed by a baling machine.
But the beating heart of the exhibition is Pressed Flowers, consisting of six vintage Fiat 500 cars crushed flat and mounted along the walls of the museum’s upper gallery. The title, says museum chief curator Galit Gaon in her introduction to the exhibit, is “a reference to the very methods by which flowers, plants, butterflies and insects had gained access into the first museums – being pressed first and then pinned with needles, to be neatly arranged and spread in display trays.” And for any viewers who may wonder why anyone would want to crush and flatten six vintage Fiat 500 cars, two uncrushed, intact models of the car sit happily unmolested in the center of the room.
The day before the exhibition’s opening last month, Arad sat down in the spacious interior courtyard of the Design Museum – perhaps the most significant work of the exhibition – to answer a few questions about the show, his work and his life.
First of all, why is this exhibition called “In Reverse”?
Most people take two-dimensional things and build three-dimensional things. Here, I take threedimensional objects and flatten them. I take sculptures and turn them into paintings. And in what I call the next stage, you can see what I call autobiographical references, like the Tinker Chair, which comes flat and then I bend it forward to make a three-dimensional thing out of it. So this is a reverse process.
Also, mostly when you impose your will and manipulate materials, they’re going to perform something – they’re going to perform some function. Here, I took perfectly functional things and transformed them into useless but delightful objects. So that’s another reverse. “In Reverse” is also a reference to cars and to the car industry. “In Reverse” is whatever you make of it.
Writing about you and this show, exhibition curator Lydia Yee says that much of the work on display “relates to a miraculous incident from his childhood in Tel Aviv.” Did you in fact experience a miraculous incident during your childhood in Tel Aviv?
My first family car was a Fiat Topolino Giardinetta, designed by Dante Giacosa. It was made of wood. Early one morning, a neighbor knocked on our door and told by a huge garbage truck. My brother, who was 13, and I, aged seven, rushed to the scene of the accident on our bikes. It wasn’t far from where we lived. We saw the flattened Fiat Topolino and couldn’t believe that anyone could get out of there alive. Then we cycled to the hospital, and I will never forget my father’s first words to us: “If my car had not been made out of wood, I wouldn’t be alive now.” He is today 96 and still drives. He refuses to stop driving.
Many critics and commentators have said that your work enigmatically blurs the usual boundaries between art and design. Is there any difference between the two, as far as you are concerned?
Look, I designed the chair you’re sitting on. It’s an industrial design. They make thousands and thousands of them, the more the better. It has no identity crisis. It can be “arty,” but it’s a piece of design. The Pressed Flowers on the walls upstairs are not design, they are art. The only thing that confuses people is that the same pieces of work are done by someone who has best-selling design items to his name, and creates art that is nonfunctional. I’m sorry if I confuse people. I have absolutely no problem doing both, and I don’t like all these discussions about “blurring the boundaries between design and art.” It’s all bulls***.
You know, Oscar Wilde defined art as something that has no function at all. But the same Oscar Wilde said something that I think is worth quoting. He said that there are two types of people, tedious people and charming people. And I say the same thing about anything you see in a gallery or museum or wherever. There are tedious things and charming things. Defining what’s “art” and what’s “design” is completely uninteresting to me.... There are some people in the art world – I mean the gatekeepers in the art world, curators, gallery owners – who if you show them the Mona Lisa, they’ll see a chair. Good luck to them.
Some architects design their buildings to “say something.” The architect who designed Boston’s controversial City Hall, for example, wanted his building to say that the seat of government was open to all, easily accessible from all directions, with unhindered entrance for everyone. Philadelphia’s concrete gray International House was designed to suggest incompleteness – a building completed by people, who provide the life and color. What does this Design Museum building say?
It says it has two galleries that are very good places to make an exhibition of whatever. It has a fantastic outdoor area where people can sit – very breezy, very enjoyable. It has a hierarchy of outdoor spaces, and easy ways to circulate between one and another. It is somewhat an autistic building; it doesn’t try to be part of the outside neighborhood. You can see a bit of the sky in here, you can see some buildings and maybe things out there that you don’t want to see. But we are inside, protected in a very generous way.
About a week before we finished the building, the rabbis of Holon came and went around looking for a place to put the mezuza. I said to them, look, if you do that, [you] wreck the concept of the building. There isn’t a place here that’s a threshold. If you find a place for the mezuza, then the concept is gone. And surprisingly, they said, “You’re right.”
In the basement of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, there is a plaque memorializing Sir Christopher Wren, the building’s architect and designer. The plaque says, “Let he who seeks a monument look about him.” Of all the buildings you have designed, would this one, the Design Museum, be your monument?
Yeah. So far. This is my biggest architectural achievement. Ynet recently did a survey on what is the most-liked building in Israel, and this building came in second. The Baha’i Temple in Haifa was No. 1. That’s good. It means that this is the best-liked modern building in this country. So this would be the monument, so far. But who knows, maybe it’s the next one.
Is this what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
Well, I always drew things. And I made things. But I never had a five-year plan of what to do and how to get there. But I guess I wanted to do something like this.
Why are you based in London instead of here in Israel?
Because in 1973, I found myself in London, and I stayed. It’s really nothing more than that. I do a lot of work here. And I come here often. I have lots of friends here and I like Tel Aviv. And my father is still here. But my studio is in London, and I’ve built my life in London. And you don’t want to immigrate twice in your life.
One final question: Where did the rabbis finally put the mezuza?
They didn’t. And this is probably the only public building without one. There are mezuzas inside, but the building as such does not have one. There is no threshold.
“In Reverse” runs until October 13 at the Design Museum at 8 Pinhas Eilon Street, Holon. For opening hours and all further information, call 073-215-1515 or visit www.dmh.org.il.