summary:
There is a difference between creating real objects or a real
environment and conjuring up a world (mimesis). Architecture and design
are creating a real environment to live in and real objects to
manipulate, art is conjuring up an imaginary world. Design is often
coupled with art and art is often coupled with design. Both design and
art oppose such hybridisation. In sharp contrast with such purism is a
totally opposite tendency whereby design comes to pose as art or art is
approached as if it were design. The disguise of design as art is
facilitated through a partial similarity of both activities.
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ART AND DESIGN
Meanwhile, the fame of Panamarenko has spread far outside the confines
of his native country Belgium. Whoever has seen his vehicles, cannot but
be charmed by their utter poetic and slightly ironic charm. Which does
not prevent that his creations cannot possibly be compared with the
paintings of da Vinci, with whom Panamarenko is readily compared.
Let us try to find a rational foundation for such intuition.
MELTING WATCHES
Rather than of paintings, Panamarenko’s vehicles remind us of those
other magnificent examples of design such as the Concorde or a Ferrari.
It is stating the obvious when we point to the fact that the difference
between a Concorde and Panamarenko’s vehicles is that the latter only
pretend to be able to fly. These are ‘useless’ planes that rather seem
to ridicule functionality altogether. Therewith, any attempt to refer
Panamarenko to the world of the designers, seems to be nipped in the
bud.
But there is something like ‘useless’, non-functional design. Think of
Greek or Chinese vases, that have been designed not so much in view of
the conservation of oil or wine, but for the sole purpose of embodying
beauty. They only pretend to be vases, just like Panamarenko’s vehicles
only pretend to be planes. We could speak of ‘aestheticising design’.
Other examples are chess boards that are only meant to look at or
clothes that one can only wear on the catwalk.
But we surely would do Panamarenko wrong when equalling his vehicles
with decorative vases. No doubt, Panamarenko’s vehicles are beautiful,
but we cannot possibly maintain that here is a designer that is so
mesmerised by beauty, that he forgets about the utilitarian aspect of
his creations. Whereas with decorative vases the utilitarian aspect is
inconspicuously swept under the carpet, Panamarenko is deliberately out
at making vehicles that cannot fly. But also therein, Panamarenko’s
vehicles are not unique. Many a design openly questions functionality:
think of the nail bed of the fakir, of stilts or bicycles with oval
wheels, of Man Ray’s iron with nails, of Dali’s melting watches, or of
Tinguely’s machines that are working without producing anything or are
destructing themselves. One could easily figure out other playful
designs: think of very high or very low, oblique or wobbling tables, and
so on.
We could subsume all those kinds of ‘aestheticising’, ‘playful’ or
‘ironic’ design under the general category of ‘free design’ (or, by
analogy with ‘fine arts’: ‘fine design’) as opposed to design that is
functional in the first place.
HALLS OF MIRRORS
Design is not confined to the creation of utensils in the strict sense
of the word: furniture, instruments, vehicles, clothes and so on. Also
the space wherein man is moving pertains to the world of design. And
what has been said above about design of utensils goes equally for such
‘spatial’ design.
As a rule, man creates environments that provide a feeling of security
through organising a space structured around a centre from which emanate
three dimensions: there is a solid ground with the open sky or a dome or
vault above it, there is a central point where all the movements come
together, there are several entrance ways and the whole space is
bordered with trees, columns, walls of hills. Roads are structured
around a central axis with symmetric rows of trees, columns or gates.
Often roads and spaces converge in one single point, as in a gothic
church or a mosque.
Other spaces have a quite opposite effect because they violate one of
the above mentioned rules: think of ‘English parks’, labyrinths, mirror
halls, artificial caves, slides and trampolines, fairground attractions
with rising, falling, turning or wobbling floors, and what have you. Or
we could fancy spaces with steps leading nowhere (like on Piranesi’s
etchings) or ending up in themselves (like on Esher’s prints).
As a rule spatial design tends to escape our attention. A mirror hall is
not so easily associated with a mosque. But there is no reason to
discriminate between a gallery and a labyrinth on the sole ground that
they produce a totally different effect.
As a rule, architecture tends to be decorated. Sometimes it is festively
illuminated as in shopping streets. In Las Vegas the entire architecture
seems to be born out of light. Sometimes buildings are decorated with
marble, or they may be painted or cleaned. On festive occasions they are
decorated with carpets, flags and flowers. It suffices to replace the
‘festive’ effect with another - be it ironic, estranging, funny - and we
have landed up in Christo’s ‘emballages’ or Fabre’s covering of
buildings with (bluebic) paper or slices of ham. There is no fundamental
difference between the decorating of the Eiffel tower as if it were a
Christmas tree and Christo’s wrapping of the Pont-Neuf in Paris.
LE FACTEUR CHEVAL
We might ask whether Piranesi with his ‘Carceri’, Esher with his stairs
ending up in themselves or Dali with his melting watches, are not
equally designers? Everybody will instinctively answer: no, these are
artists! And that certainty is founded in an obvious difference:
Piranesi is only conjuring up imaginary spaces by using ink on paper. A
genuine architect on the other hand is building real spaces in steel and
concrete.
That does not prevent anyone from trying to build real ‘Carceri’ of real
‘Esher stairs’ as if the prints of Piranesi and Esher were mere plans.
He would then be a ‘spatial designer’, an architect, albeit a ‘free
designer’ just like the good old Facteur Cheval.
It would immediately appear that there is a difference between merely
conjuring up an environment and really building one. Of course, on the
canvas we can afford many ‘artistic licences’. But, suppose the designs
on the canvas were realisable, there would remain an important
difference between the Carceri as they were etched by Piranesi and the
real building in the ‘Piranesi Park’. That Piranesi uses black ink and
etched lines lends his Carceri an inalienable flavour. What a work of
art evokes is inherently determined by the means of evocation.
Thus, an architect like Corbusier is a designer, not an artist. Just
like a gothic cathedral or the Hagia Sophia, his constructions are real,
not imaginary like Piranesi’s carceri. And for the same obvious reason,
Panamarenko is not an artist, but a designer. His vehicles are as real
as the Concorde. And this holds equally for Long, who walks a path in a
field of flowers, for Man Ray who fixes nails on an iron, Tinguely who
constructs useless or self-destructive machines, Christo who wraps
buildings.
Designer is also Rauschenberg when he makes ‘soft toilets’. That he
thereby ‘refers’ to Dali and Duchamp might be of interest for art
critics, but it does not turn his designs into works of art. One could
argue that Rauschenberg replaces the porcelain with plastic, just like
Praxiteles replaces the flesh of Venus with the marble of his sculpture.
But that is a mere sophism. It is not Rauschenberg’s intention that his
plastic would look like porcelain, whereas Praxiteles succeeds in
transforming stone in a body of flesh and blood.
VASES IN THE SHAPE OF FROGS
That does not prevent art and design from joining hands. Architecture
used to be decorated with works of art: columns in the shape of papyrus
or pillars in the shape of branched trees, sculptures, paintings,
frescoes and mosaics. A lot of furniture used to be so worked out as to
resemble imaginary beings: think of the ‘legs’ of a chair or of Dali’s
sofa in the shape of a mouth. The surfaces of utensils are often
decorated with works of art: paintings on dishes, cloth, carpets and
curtains. Vases often take the shape of an animal. Also vehicles often
remind of imaginary beings: the Concorde of an insect, the Jumbo jet of
a swan. The similarity is often enhanced by adding some painted details.
Also clothes often imitate what they conceal.
Nevertheless, in all these cases were are dealing with a mixture of two
essentially different things. The painted sky in the dome is a conjured
up sky that is totally distinct from the real hemisphere of the dome and
even tends to obliterate it. And when we admire a painting on a Greek
vase, the surface of the vase disappears behind the scene we are
watching – however much the decorative aspect of the painting may be
integrated in the decoration of the vase itself.
Another source of confusion is the fact that design, especially
architecture, often carries a symbolic freight. The floor plan of a
temple may measure a double square as a symbol of divine perfection, a
dome may symbolise the sky, or pillars may refer to the apostles and so
on. Also the colour may function symbolically: the Taj Mahal was
intended to have a black counterpart on the other side of the river. The
same goes for the material: there is a difference between a wooden house
and a brick house, between a brick church and a marble temple. In all
those cases architecture begins to ’speak’. The cross of the cathedral
refers to the Holy Cross. Gold on a dome is not only beautiful, it
equally tells us that we are dealing with an important building. And
Fabre’s rotting slices of ham on the columns of the Aula of the
University of Ghent are intended to tell something about the academic
world. Therein, Fabre’s slices of ham do not differ from the
calligraphic panels that the Turks had hanged in the Hagia Sophia – no
to mention the stucco with which they covered the whole interior – of
from graffiti. But – as we have already demonstrated in ‘Are Rubens and
Beuys colleagues? – it is not because something has a meaning, that it
is art, even when the meaning is conveyed through icons (iconic signs).
That we can conceive Tinguely’s machines as non-verbal statements about
the industrial society, does not turn them into works of art.
THE CANVAS AS A CARPET
Conversely, many an artwork is embedded in design.
That already goes for the subject that is conjured up. As a rule a work
of art stages people in diverse clothes, using utensils in man-made
environments ranging from interiors, over public places to man-made
landscapes. All these designs may be borrowed from the real world, but
in most cases it is the artist himself that has created them. On
Botticelli’s Primavera we see an alley with orange trees, Brueghel has
designed his imaginary ‘Tower of Babel’, Piranesi conjures up imaginary
spaces with stairs leading to nowhere, and in his ‘Trial’ Kafka conjures
up a room where the public has to stand stooped. But that does no turn
Botticelli, Brueghel, Piranesi or Kafka into designers. Not for nothing
are artists often accused of thinking themselves Gods: they not only
create objects and environments, but living being and nature as well.
But, otherwise than the real creator that saddled us with a real world,
artist only create only imaginary beings in a imaginary world.
In addition, works of arts are not seldom objects that call for a
becoming design and a becoming environment. A novel is a book that has
to be printed and put on shelves. A piece of music has to played on
instruments and in a given space. A fresco is conceived in view of the
wall on which it is painted and a painting is surrounded by an often
intricate frame. A sculpture calls for a pedestal or a niche and for an
appropriate square or space, and so on.
This combination is not only external. That a sculpture is conceived for
a niche determines its very composition from within: think of the
sculptures in the portal of Chartres that take the shape of the pillars.
And paintings not only have an often intricate frame, as a rule the
geometry of the rectangle is affecting the inmost composition of the
painting. And that holds not only of the composition: before conjuring
up a world, a stained-glass window is a decorative composition of
coloured planes that has to be integrated in its architectural context.
DIVORCE
However much some designers and artists may delight in such promiscuity,
others are totally allergic to it. Since Adolf Loos’ ‘Ornament ist
Verbrechen’ many architects try to clear architecture from any artistic
frill: away with caryatids and sculptures, frescoes and mosaics. A
similar tendency was apparent in ‘functional’ design.
Conversely, from the Renaissance onward many an artists was striving for
the liberation of the painting from its subordination to architecture.
The autonomous painting should retire within the confines of its own
rectangular frame. It suffices to compare a stained-glass window in
Chartres with a painting of Titian. A similar strive can be observed in
sculpture, where the statue was to be liberated from the straitjacket of
architecture. Here, it suffices to compare a statue from the portal in
Chartres with a sculpture of Bernini or Rodin.
ART AS A CRIME
There is also a totally opposite evolution, whereby design is posing as
art or whereby art is approached as if it were design. Especially in the
plastic arts, the idea of art as mimesis, as evocation of a world, has
become increasingly suspect. The narrative - or ‘literary’- aspect of
art had to be replaced with the ‘decorative’ or ‘the musical’.
No wonder that art was inconspicuously transformed into design. Both
design and art use the same colours, forms and compositions and even the
same materials. Also colours, forms and compositions have an effect of
their own. A painting is in the first place a plane with a given
composition of forms and colours. As long as we make abstraction of the
world evoked, these colours, forms and compositions have the same
effects as those of furniture, tapestry, interiors or clothes. In these
effects of colours and forms are interested both those who approach the
painting as a purely formal composition, and those who are asking
themselves whether the painting will harmonise with their interior. But
there are also the colours and forms of the imaginary world. There, red
is no longer red as such, but the red of lips or a blush, of a garment
or of flowers. These colours are not ‘real’ in the sense that they
always are colours of imaginary things.
Now, a painting may be regarded as a mere composition of colours and
forms. Whoever adheres to such pure formalism – whoever forgets that the
painting also conjures up a world – reduces the painting to a mere tiled
floor, a carpet or a flower bed: the opposite move as the one that was
out at liberating the painting from its function as a ‘carpet’. Such was
the program of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ and - on an industrial level - of
the constructivists in Moscou that wanted art to dissolve in life. They
paved the way for a more playful design like that of Panamarenko. In its
endeavour to clear architecture from art, ‘De Stijl’ laid the
foundations for a further dissolution of art into design. ‘De Stijl’ not
only wanted to integrate exterior and interior, also the paintings –
i.e. the painted walls and doors – and all the objects in the interior –
clothes included – had to be conceived in one and the same style. Thus,
art was swallowed by design and reduced to a mere play of colours and
forms.
It is obvious then that a beautiful composition of forms and colours is
not necessarily a work of art. The same goes for beautiful objects of
design. These may be beautiful, just like flowers or women, but that
does not turn them into art.
DA VINCI AND PANAMARENKO
Because both design and art are using the same materials and techniques,
it is often the same persons that produce them. It is well known that in
Van Eyck’s studio also signboards were painted, that Dürer designed
triumphal arches and that da Vinci not only designed clothes but also
instruments and vehicles. But that should not induce designers like
Panamarenko to regard themselves as colleagues of these painters. It is
not because da Vinci also designed clothes, that fashion would be art.
And it is not because da Vinci also designed fountains and squares and
parks, that landscape architects would be artists. And for the same
reason designers or engineers are not artists, because da Vinci also
designed submarines, helicopters and other armaments. As opposed to da
Vinci, who was not only an artist, but also a designer of fashion,
gardens, submarines and helicopters, Panamarenko is merely a designer.
Which does not amount to say that Panamarenko does not have colleagues,
but these are not Van Eyck, Dürer or da Vinci. The genuine colleagues of
Panamarenko are designers like Coco Chanel or van Beirendock, Tatlin or
Loewy.
That Panamarenko – just like the fashion designer van Beirendonck – knew
how to conquer the museum that formerly used to be reserved for artists,
does not make the difference. They – or the directors of the museums –
are only mistaken about the nature of the museum in question. Man Ray’s
iron and the vehicles of Panamarenko, should not be exhibited in a
‘museum of fine arts’, but in a museum of design, next to the designs of
da Vinci and Coco Chanel, the triumphal arches of Dürer and Speer, and
Mies van de Rohe’s chair. Perhaps there will be room then for what
really belongs in the ‘Museum of Fine Arts’. At least, if meanwhile most
artists have not completely forgotten what painting and sculpting were
all about…
It will be superfluous to remind that the above does not mean that we
should think low of a designer. It is not because a streamline design of
Loewy or the surrealistic iron of Man Ray are not works of art, that
they would be inferior objects. The cathedral of Chartres does something
else than its stained-glass windows and its sculpture, but it is not
less worth our admiration.
© Stefan Beyst, 2000.