Fifty French Rock Chicks vs. One Restless Ron Arad

The two exhibitions currently open at the Barbican Centre prove one thing: birds spend their lives looking for the same thing as we do, an agreeable place to perch for momentary rest and recuperation. For their part, birds may take a more simple-minded approach to life, whereas we humans tend to complicate our existence with thoughts of legacy and making a lasting difference to our environment; but whether fowl or fellow, we are all fluttering from post to wire, tree to washing line, seat on the tube to a stool at the pub, eyeing up the next comfortable stoop to occupy when the music stops and this giant game of music chairs comes to a standstill.

For his current installation at The Curve, the French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has smashed together a walk-through aviary of zebra finches with a school music room made out of a B&Q patio set. Inside this menagerie, upturned cymbals are redeployed as bird feeders and watering holes whilst half a dozen electric guitars - hooked up to Bose speakers – have been sprinkled with seeds to encourage the birds to perch on the strings and make music for their gawping visitors.

The resulting spectacle is not too dissimilar to the scene upstairs at the Barbican art gallery, where the designer Ron Arad has arranged an exhibition of his innovative chairs, seats and sofas from the last thirty years. Purportedly for human delectation, visitors who try sitting in one of Ron Arad’s chair inadvertently create another spectacle for more gawping visitors, only this time there is a personalised table-tennis table to encourage interaction in place of the sprinkling of birdseeds.

As far as I know, the two exhibitions are unrelated, but I wonder whether the curators had this juxtaposition of bird and human being in mind when they planned the Barbican’s spring season. I also wonder what the zebra finches would make of the noise of the bat hitting the ping-pong ball and the human hamsters rocking back and forth in Ron Arad’s ‘O-Void Paperwork Testa’ chair, a sitting experience reminiscent of grown-up tomfoolery on a Fisher Price plastic seesaw. But whatever the answer might be, there is a worthwhile afternoon to be spent at the Barbican comparing and contrasting the two experiences.

The last time I visited The Curve was for Robert Kusmirowski’s Bunker installation, a dark but surprisingly spacious series of rooms meant to represent an underground control centre from World War II. Now fast forward to Dylan going electric and Gibson bringing out the Les Paul (the guitar favoured by zebra finches as well as Slash and Sir Paul McCartney), and the eerie silence has been replaced by periodic bursts of electric guitar evocative of the ‘Mic Check’ song strummed by a roadie before a gig.

Armed with his band of merry finches, Boursier-Mougenot has created an overnight success story worthy of a recording contract from Louis Walsh. A video of the finches playing the guitar has become a huge hit on YouTube, and their adoring fans turn out in droves to see the band perform live, lining-up inside the Barbican foyer like an orderly nightclub queue (an unintended marketing success achieved by the 25-person limit inside the aviary and a one-in-one-out door policy). After waiting in line for half an hour, I was able to watch the colourful birds for myself. To my surprise, I found the monotony of watching little fat finches eating seeds, flying from guitar to guitar, eating seeds, nesting in their bird boxes, eating seeds, and crapping all over Bose speakers, to be sufficiently captivating to forget the people waiting outside the entrance for me to leave.

When I eventually did leave the birds to their natural flightiness, taking with me a little bit of their uncomplicated serenity, I went upstairs to the Barbican art gallery to see the Ron Arad exhibition called ‘Restlessness’.

With typical hyperbole, the opening sentence of the exhibition handout introduces Ron Arad as an architect, a designer, and an artist who defies categorization, a useful oxymoron to describe this showcase of Arad’s furniture designs, models for shopping malls, sculptures and even an action figurine. However, for the purposes of this exhibition, Ron Arad is primarily a chair designer, and ‘Restlessness’ is first and foremost a retrospective look at the chairs that he has designed since he burst onto the scene in 1981 with ‘Rover Chair’, a driver’s seat from a Rover 200 welded to a stand made out of curved scaffolding poles.

‘Restless’ is a funny name for a retrospective of chairs. At first blush, ‘Take a Seat’, ‘Put your feet up’ and ‘Relax’ would all have made for more accurate, if less curious, titles for the exhibition; though as it turns out, neither one would fit the different positions in which Ron Arad proposes to contort the human body. According to the exhibition handout, the ‘restless’ of the title refers to the chairs themselves, many of which undulate and oscillate like giant elastic bands, or in the case of the rocking chairs, are pressed into movement by a rudimentary piston device attached to a poking stick with a shoeshine brush on the end of it. But for me, this negligible movement is too unremarkable to explain the remarkable designs on display, which arguably defy categorisation more successfully than their designer.

The same can be said of ‘Restless’ (2007), Ron Arad’s design for a rocking bookshelf, which is displayed on the ground floor of the gallery. Besides chairs and sofas, bookshelves are the other traditional household furniture that the designer has repeatedly applied his mischievous attention to, including for his best selling design, ‘Bookworm’, and in less marketable works like ‘Oh, Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends’ (2009), a giant cookie-cutter-shaped map of the continental United States. But with his Restless bookshelf, Arad has not created a centrepiece exhibit worthy of lending its name to the entire exhibition. Rather, it is his unique and limited edition pieces on the upper floor of the gallery - where the exhibition starts and arguably stops - that should prove to be the destination artworks for most visitors to the retrospective.

As I walked around the upstairs gallery - with the emphasis on walking – it struck me that the ‘restless’ of the title might refer to the visitors’ frustration at not being able to sit down on any of his idiosyncratic designs. Chairs, seats, sofas and settees are paramount to our everyday lives and yet we rarely look upon them as works of art. Chairs are functional objects; seats are meant to be sat on; and when we move from car seat to office chair to the couch in front of the TV, we judge each new piece of furniture by its comfort. Except upstairs at the Barbican art gallery that is, where the only seats to sit on are two exhibition benches in hideous grey; dull, uninviting and hidden away like an embarrassing member of Ron Arad’s extended family.

The zebra finches might be happy do their business on these empty benches, but in stark contrast to the incumbent furniture, the ‘Please Do Not Touch’ signs that surround Ron Arad’s designs are indicative of their status as works of art. ‘Please Do Not Sit’ signs might have been more intuitive warning signs for the chairs, much like a ‘Wet Paint’ sign on a park bench, but in his subtle choice of wording, the artist is immediately showing us the regard he wants us to have for his prodigious children.

For his chairs are works of art and they deserve not to be touched let alone sat on. Works such as ‘Bodyguards’ or ‘At Your Own Risk’ (pictured above) share more in common with a Henry Moore sculpture than with the ubiquitous black Herman Miller chairs that sit in offices throughout the capital. To place a ‘Please Do Not Sit’ sign in front of these ‘seats’ would be as a redundant as attaching the same sign to a row of spiked railings.

Arad favours using polished metals, plastics, springs and rivets for his bespoke chairs, including in place of a traditionally padded-out seat, but his choice of tough industrial materials takes nothing away from the perceived comfort of his designs. In fact, the cold hard surfaces only made me want to sit on the chairs even more; or in the case of ‘Thumbprint’ (2007), I wanted to crawl into the hollowed out metal, which looks to have been styled after an Anish Kapoor sculpture.

The shape of Thumbprint resembles the impression left by a giant thumb squashed into a malleable ball of copper, and as the title suggests, the names of Ron Arad’s chairs are as clever and playful as his designs.  The title for his space saving chair, ‘Schizzo’ (1989), a single chair pulled apart to provide seating for two, is perhaps a product of its time even if the chair remains resolutely modern; Bodyguards, which I have already mentioned, gained its name from the amount of bodyguards that had to guard the piece when it was presented to D&G in 2006, and my favourite, ‘Happy Days’, is an all-in-one metal table, slide in chair and a crumpled-up footrest; presumably a nod to the booths at Arnold’s Drive-in, which were made famous by the TV show.

In large part, the upper floor of the gallery feels like a fine art exhibition because visitors are not allowed to sit on any of the exhibits. The spirit of Arad’s fantastic creations is disconnected from the practicalities of life and his chairs become artworks in the absence of a gormless sitter ruining the view. Even the ergonomic doll that Arad has designed to represent the everyday person ‘sitting’ in his chairs, which he calls ‘Gomli’ after his friend Anthony Gormley, looks a closer relation of Stretch Armstrong than the artist of Angel of the North fame. But whilst this anomaly might explain the unconventional shapes of Ron Arad’s chairs and the wildly ambitious expectations that he has for the average human body, therein lies the Ron Arad paradox: his chairs are not designed to be sat on even though he has designed them to be sat on. Luckily for the visitor, the artist has a simple answer to this conundrum: he designs chairs for people who already have enough chairs to sit on. How simple!

But just when I thought the lofty debate about functionality verses aesthetics could go on all afternoon, I descended to the interactive ground floor of the gallery. Downstairs, visitors are invited to sit on some of Ron Arad’s mass produced chairs and play on his metal ping-pong table. The resulting effect of turning fine art into a fine lark falls somewhere between a children’s playpen and a DFS showroom, and it is almost a disappointment to see Arad designing with one eye on his wallet (a handicap epitomised by ‘Lolita’ (2004), a Swarovski-sponsored chandelier that displays text messages spiralling down a reverse helter-skelter).

Without the wires and warning signs from upstairs, the designer’s mass-market products inevitably lose some of their sparkle. His lumpy Lego brick carpet, for instance, and his chez lounge shaped like Mick Jagger’s gurning lips already appear physically and artistically worn down by their contact with the everyday consumer. Likewise, the entire downstairs gallery is symbolic of a shop floor, suggesting the curators intended it to look like an extension of the actual exhibition shop, which features products picked out for sale by Ron Arad.

But not to worry, Ron Arad has not sold out, and on the basis of his commercial designs displayed in the exhibition under the title ‘Failings’, he is incapable of selling out. As the heading suggests, these mass-market prototypes for companies like Vitra, the designer furniture manufacturers, failed to be a commercial success. In some instances the reasons are clear. For starters, who calls a chair ‘Schizzo’ and expects it to sell on a global scale? But the model for ‘The Table that Eats Chairs’, a family-sized table that can ‘eat’ six fold-up chairs, turning them into drawer-sized shapes beneath the tabletop, should have been a big hit in this era of minimalism, shrinking square footage and the IKEA catalogue.

Talking of IKEA, the moment Ron Arad had me thinking of converting into a full blown furniture enthusiast, the chairs and tables were packed to one side and the exhibition became a bizarre politicised light show (turning GOD into WAR), topped off with a selection of Arad’s architectural output. Located in the anterooms downstairs, his architectural ideas are impressive, my pick being the Maserati HQ, but the models on display feel ancillary to the main exhibition and the light show is plain confusing.

The clumsiness of the anterooms even made me wonder if they were late additions to the exhibition to justify the ten-pound ticket price. Then again, they may have been included so Ron Arad could ‘defy categorization’ on page one of the exhibition handout. Either way, the curators needn’t have bothered because the exhibition is well worth the cover charge without these confusing add-ons, and I gained little additional insight about Ron Arad from seeing his design for a shopping centre in Belgium.

Besides the examples of his work on display, Ron Arad’s playful personality is piped into the exhibition via the videos and short films that play throughout the gallery. Many of the videos are narrated by the man himself, including the first video of the exhibition in which the Israeli-born, London-based artist explains - in the coolest voice in the designed world - how he tried to work for a firm of architects in ‘am-sted’ after graduating from the Architecture Association, but walked out because he realised he couldn’t work for somebody else. So, like all freshly unemployed designers, he set up his own firm in 1981, but unlike most of his peers, he created the Rover Chair, he enjoyed the early patronage of Jean-Paul Gaultier, and bosh, he is the subject of an individual retrospective at the Barbican art gallery, documenting his thirty-year vision to change the way we all sit on our arses.

After spending an hour reading about him in print, watching the man behave on film and admiring his final product, by the end of the exhibition I decided that the ‘Restless’ of the title refers to Ron Arad himself, the man who redesigned a ping-pong table with slopping sides to mutate the traditional game into the form he likes to play it. The designer describes his studio as a playground and this is a fairly accurate description of the scene from one of the short films featured in the exhibition, a home video of the Ron Arad workshop, which would suggest his working practices are the design equivalent of filming an episode of Jackass.

The film features Arad and his team riding the ‘Bucking Bronco’, his design for a chair that looks as easy to sit on as it would be to run downhill on top of a rubber tire. In the clips, Arad seems to run the show in the vein of Jonny Knoxville, the leader who remains one of the boys, a fitting characteristic for this almost sixty-year-old man who has his own action figure on sale in the exhibition shop, complete with a miniature version of his stackable ‘Tom Vac’ chair.

Asides from the £2500 price tag for his action figure, the last word on Ron Arad’s enduring legacy can be taken from his nickname at the Royal College of Art, where he led the well-respected Design Products department from 1997 to 2009.

‘Ron the Don’ is a fitting name for this design superhero!