Arts & Culture
Professor of cool
Published 19 June 2000
Ron Arad made London his home when the city was far from the creative hothouse it is today. Hugh Aldersey-Williams talks to the avant-garde designer whose work is at last being recognised in Britain
Twenty years ago, Ron Arad foresaw the demise of Rover. His prediction took the form of a chair that cannibalised the leather seat from a two-litre Rover, mounted, with deliberate brutality, on a hulking half-moon steel frame. The Rover chair was briefly known to millions because it featured in one of those terribly style-conscious 1980s advertisements. You remember the one: stubbly loft-liver jettisons suddenly unfashionable pastel-shaded cubic foam chair from window before installing post-industrial objet trouve to admiring gaze of black silk lingerie-clad soulmate. Punchline (quite misleading in art-historical terms, but drearily predictable as advertising slogan): "Less is more." Product: I can't recall - a beer, perhaps. But that's not what matters here.
The advertisement showed how we British were prepared to indulge the presence in our midst of a rebellious avant-garde in design. Intentionally or not, these designers quickly became a kind of official opposition to the norm of nice, if rather puritanical, modern house wares bought from Habitat and then Ikea. A surprising number of them, including the Israeli-born Arad and the American Danny Lane, were from overseas, and chose, to local puzzlement, to make London their home at a time when the city was far from the creative hothouse it is today.
It's all very different now. These two tribes have interbred. Another of these enfants terribles, Tom Dixon, is now the design director at Habitat. A few years ago, Lane created the new glass gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum; now Arad, best known as the designer of the Belgo chain of restaurants, has a retrospective there.
An interview with Arad is always a slightly unnerving affair. My last was held with the two of us sitting side by side in a crumpled steel settle - what the Americans would call a love-seat - of his own design. This time, we're in his equally intimate Fiat Cinquecento, nipping through the north London traffic between his studio in Chalk Farm and a plastics workshop in Holloway. I ask him about his teaching role at the Royal College of Art, where, as a recently appointed professor (another establishment foothold), he has caused a minor earthquake by merging the departments of furniture design - all semiotics and signature pieces - and industrial design - staid anonymity and mass production. He says he wants to see all the departments, which range from textiles to vehicle design, so fused. Belatedly, he sees the opportunity to do his professorial duty and push the good works of his students. Arad has been accused of hungry self-promotion, of denying his collaborators their due, of pushing himself to the fore. It has been noticed, for example, that he was more evident in the recent television series about the college than he tends to be in its studios. But his air of disengagement suggests that these aberrations may be no more than the unintended consequence of life in the spotlight.
Arad really gets going only when we discuss his prospects of getting a design for a house built in this country. Arad's major architectural project to date is the interior of the new opera house in Tel Aviv. It is a sculptural intervention, rich in colour and material and textural contrasts, luxurious in the way that opera houses demand, but fluid in form to soften the formality of the environment (using, for example, a wall-cum-bench made of row upon row of bronze tubing bent along suitable contours). It makes you wish he had done the whole building, which is by another architect, Jacov Rechter, in the predictable sub-Lincoln Center style.
But in Britain, Arad's innovative design for a house to replace a vaguely Arts and Crafts building on an expensive residential street running off London's Hampstead Lane met with disaster. It would have been the perfect chance to honour a true original in his adopted land. But the project - comprising two overlapping curved shells like a broken egg - was scotched by the objections of the man across the street. His name? John Seifert. His profession? Architect.
So what is it that Arad finds congenial about London, a city where there is so little manufacturing and where his buildings are vetoed? His clients are Italian, his collectors are German, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris pipped the V&A in hosting the first large exhibition of his work. It is London's creative milieu that works well for Arad. He is friendly with some of the BritArt pack, and names Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread among those he admires. The V&A show was opened by the sculptor and Arts Council young turk Antony Gormley. His role is as their props master, one stage less subversive than they are. "Somebody has to design the cows before they can be cut in two. We design the cows," he says. For cows, read tables, chairs, lamps. The piece that sits most comfortably in this no-man's land between art and design is a Beuysian concrete stereo set. The speakers are concrete for good acoustic reasons. But to finish the turntable and amplifier in the same rough, crumbled material was pure wilfulness exerted over a product of a kind normally finely finished in metal. There was a subtext to this piece, too: it was designed in 1983, the year of nuclear winter and Ronald Reagan's "star wars" defence initiative.
Arad's work connects with the world of art more than with his designer peers. More pertinent to an understanding of his output than Alessi, Starck or Sottsass are Boccioni, Dubuffet and Miro (there are explicit references to the surrealist's paintings in the Tel Aviv building). It would be tedious to debate whether Arad is primarily an artist or a designer: some of his pieces are never manufactured; others are. Some things cost hundreds; others have five-figure price tags. He commands collectors as much as consumers.
He is a technological innovator, too. His Aerial Light, of 1981, extends under robotic control with the assistance of a telescopic car aerial; the Transformer is a kind of beanbag from which you can suck the air with a vacuum cleaner to produce an infinite range of rigid shapes, freezing in the shape of your own body contours. He can develop a craftsman's understanding of individual materials, yet produce effects that no traditional craftsman ever dreamed of - using tempered steel and nothing else, he managed to fold the unsympathetic industrial raw material into huge baroque loops to make surprisingly workable chairs.
There is startling functional ingenuity. For an Italian manufacturer, Arad has designed a table with six folding chairs that pull out from the side of the smooth table-top slab. "Bob Wilson [the artist noted for his reflecting pool of oil at the Saatchi Gallery] said: 'This is like theatre. It's better than anything I can do.' But he was drunk." A folding carbon-fibre chair for another manufacturer will be the thinnest possible design, to be stacked in multiples "like Pringles".
Arad's flow of ideas is unabated. One project shows a vase made out of a single coiled strip of some clever plastic like a Slinky. The animated drawing bounces like Tigger; the idea is that the actual objects are made by feeding the data from one frozen frame of the animation to a computer-compatible laser-scanning process which forms the shape from raw resin or powder. No two pieces need be quite the same, even though Arad has used the latest technology of mass production. Another product, also designed on the computer, was made "artificially rare" by destroying the computer file on which its data was held. But that was not enough. "It was necessary to sell it to make it rare." And that is Arad's point: it is not the manner of their making but of their consumption that determines the value of things.
Ron Arad: before and after now is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, until 1 October 2000 (020-7942 2528)
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