Mutant Materials

   The New York Times
   May 26, 1995, pp. C1, C26.


   Design Review


   A Museum Marvels At a Brave New World of Materials


   [Drawing] Sporting: Vent Design's molded-rubber wet suit.


   By Herbert Muschamp


   What a smart idea for the Museum of Modern Art to mount a
   design show about materials. At a time when so much fuss is
   being made over cyberspace, virtual reality and other
   odysseys into the immaterial realm of pixels, bytes and
   holograms, "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design"
   reminds us that we still inhabit a world of things.


   But things aren t what they used to be, at least not in the
   design department of the Museum of Modern Art. Instead of
   Bauhaus classics like Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair,
   "Mutant Materials" serves up such goopy items as exercise
   putty, a product put out by Nordic Track that could serve
   as a symbol for the entire show. Made for exercising the
   forearm, the putty is a rubbery substance cooked up in a
   lab. It comes in yummy neon colors -- red, orange, blue --
   that indicate the degree of firmness. But basically, it's
   a blob. A blob in a jar.


   The show, too, is a bit of a blob. A bright, colorful blob
   in a museum. Design today comes in many shapes, and the
   show does not attempt to impose a single esthetic on the
   field. Instead, it offers a survey of mutability: the
   changeable, mercurial forms made possible by the
   development of new materials. The show also marks the debut
   of Paola Antonelli, the Modern's new design curator. Ms.
   Antonelli, an architect and a former editor with Domus, the
   Milanese design magazine, has created a show with verve,
   imagination and a few too many ideas for its own good. But
   excess is surely preferable to the dearth of design ideas
   at the museum in recent years.


   Looking something like a cross between a science fair and
   a "Good Design" show, the exhibition focuses on the
   expanded design potential created by new materials cooked
   up in the lab: exotic plastics, sheets of glass that switch
   instantly from transparent to opaque and a tasty new
   variety of synthetic wood made from ground-up almond
   shells. Along with the more than 200 designed objects on
   view, there's a lot of touchy-feely stuff: raw materials
   that are set out on ledges within convenient reach. The
   intention seems to be to claim for design some of the
   glamour that currently surrounds genetic engineering.


   Some of the materials are really scary. From the Livermore
   Laboratories, for instance, comes a substance that is said
   to be lighter than air; you can barely make out its ghostly
   white presence in its transparent container, which appears
   to hold not physical matter but some gravity-free
   atmosphere brought back from outer space. Then there are
   all manner of gels, foams and sponges, in an assortment of
   toxic-looking colors. No doubt the resilience of these
   products makes them comfortable to wear or sit on, if you
   can bear the thought that what you're sitting on started
   out as slime.


   Designers are doing wonderful things with slime these days,
   and the show encompasses a startling array of forms, sizes
   and functions, from a set of transparent glass exhaust
   tubes to a molded fiber two-seater airplane, from a ceramic
   condom holder to a clever little condiment holder that
   delivers a perfect squirt of ketchup. There's a suave green
   shaver, with a ceramic razor blade; plastic corneal
   implants that resemble a startling set of jewels, and a
   scuba rebreathing apparatus that transforms divers into
   fish.


   The show, which is beautifully installed in galleries with
   midnight blue walls and floors, begins simply enough with
   a spotlighted panel of glass. Containing an inner core of
   plastic baffles, it's an architectural product that allows
   designers to control light and heat, but as stunningly
   lighted as it is here, the panel is also a work of art in
   its own right. It's the perfect introduction to a show that
   restores design to its historic place in the center of the
   Museum of Modern Art.


   Beyond that high-tech looking glass, the show unfolds in
   separate sections on glass, plastic, wood, ceramics, metal
   and more sophisticated composite materials. But these
   innocuous catagories scarcely convey the science-fiction
   hybrids that they contain. Esthetes, however should not
   feel put off by the chemlab stink given off by the
   technical terms for the materials on view, like
   viscoelastic-polymer, silicon-elastomer and thermoplastic
   vulcanzate.


   Ms. Antonelli's mind is very much on the look of things,
   and her scope includes many different kinds of beauty.
   These range from the lethal allure of a Good Grips knife,
   designed by Smart Design, with a striated plastic handle
   that bristles like an angry predator, to the ethereal
   "Light Light" lamp, designed by Takeshi Ishiguro. A
   porcelain cup of radiance, balanced on the tip of a slim
   carbon rod, the lamp uses a floating white feather to
   reflect panache as well as light.


   Sports equipment dominates the show. With a wet suit, a
   kayak, hockey sticks, snorkeling fins golf clubs, roller
   skates, ski poles, bicycle seats and baseball gloves, all
   brilliantly spotlighted, the place begins to look like a
   platonic idea of Herman's.


   These objects are uniformly frisky, as sexy as an episode
   of "Bay Watch," and they make an important historical
   connection, for they link the Modern at century's end back
   to the preoccupation with athletics and speed that obsessed
   Futurist artists at the dawn of the modern movement in the
   years before World War I.


   The sports motif may also be read as a welcome sign of the
   museum's eagerness to move forward once again with its
   coverage of design, a field that it has allowed to lie
   fallow in recent years. The museum hasn't mounted a
   thematic design show on this scale in more than two
   decades. That's quite a hiatus for an institution that
   invented the idea of displaying architecture and design,
   and built much of its reputation -- and advanced the cause
   of modern art generally -- with its promotion of "good
   design."


   Why the big sleep? Partly it's a matter of institutional
   neglect. Until the appointment of Terence Riley as chief
   curator two years ago, the department of architecture and
   design had been dozing for years. And partly it's a matter
   of institutional identity. Like the museum's other
   departments, the design department has had a hard time
   redefining modernism for an era inclined to view modernism
   as a closed historical epoch.


   Yet design should have played a major role in challenging
   that misconception, for, unlike architecture, design never
   ceased to keep modernity up to date. While architecture
   lapsed into historical pastiche, industrial and product
   designers continued to innovate and experiment. "Mutant
   Materials" is above all a tribute to that spirit.


   It's also a tribute to a field that has been less corrupted
   than architecture by media hype. Without getting too
   romantic about it, one can appreciate design as a field in
   which some of the best work is created by relatively unsung
   designers. "Mutant Materials" has its share of objects by
   design stars, including some extraordinary tables and
   chairs by Gaetano Pesce. But these come across as cameo
   appearances among a cast of gifted unknowns.


   The show is by no means flawless, though you can manage to
   overlook its major one if you pass up the beautiful but
   hideously over-intellectualized catalogue. To her credit,
   Ms. Antonelli wants the show to be more than a collection
   of handsome objects, and to express something more than her
   own individual taste. But she hasn't mustered sufficient
   rigor to support the hyperactive ideas she hopes the show
   will convey.


   In her catalogue essay, Ms. Antonelli maintains that the
   objects in the show exhibit a "shared sensibility." She
   writes that "revolutions in science, technology and
   philosophy are historically accompanied by deep,
   unconscious shifts in the culture at large." Elaborating
   further, she cites relevance of new materials to the
   deconstructivist theories of Jacques Derrida and chaos
   theory in science.


   This is a fairly promiscuous coupling of disciplines that
   actually shed little light on the particular objects on
   view and may in fact distort their meaning. I don't, for
   instance, see much in the way of chaos theory in these
   objects. On the contrary, most of them seem firmly rooted
   in the industrial age and the Newtonian universe that
   underlay it. And whether or not deconstruction is either
   revolutionary or a philosophy, most of the designers have
   managed to do well enough without it. Indeed, many of these
   objects can be understood as more or less straightforward
   evolutions of the industrial design esthetic that the
   museum has championed since the 1930's.


   I suspect that the reason chaos theory and deconstruction
   appeal to Ms. Antonelli is that the fuzziness of these
   concepts offers a convenient cover for the show's lack of
   clarity. For the viewer would be hard pressed to identify
   the criteria that have been used as the basis of curatorial
   discrimination. With the museum's old "Good Design" shows,
   viewers knew that objects were chosen because they
   illustrated a clear set of ideas. They were, or looked,
   functional. They were geometrically simple, exploited the
   structural. visual or tactile properties of their
   materials, and exhibited the standardized character of
   industrial production.


   But mutability and diversity are not so easily illustrated,
   at least not if discrimination is meant to play a part in
   creating the picture. For what work of art or design is not
   a mutation of something that has gone before? What is not
   part of a diverse world? On what basis should any object be
   excluded from a show dedicated to these ideas?


   Ms. Antonelli is surely right in pointing out that many
   designers today don't mind creating "arbitrary" forms. This
   is indeed a significant departure from the rationalism that
   prevailed 40 years ago. It's also true that the range of
   objects that qualify as well designed today can't be neatly
   codified. But most of the individual objects in "Mutant
   Materials" display a functional precision that far
   surpasses those of 40 years ago. They may be part of an
   arbitrary, chaotic universe, but they are themselves
   neither more nor less arbitrary than the cane seat of a
   Breuer chair.


   In short, the "shared sensibility" displayed by the objects
   in "Mutant Materials" is the one dancing around inside the
   curator's head. Fortunately, her sensibility is a good one.
   Ms. Antonelli has an eye for first-rate design, a hunger
   for ideas and an unmistakable passion for her subject. Even
   her intellectual overreach is the defect of a virtue, for
   it reflects an eagerness to shake her Rip Van Winkle of a
   department out of its slumber. Coffee's on.


   [Photo] The "Bap" padded back protector for motorcyclists,
   designed by Marc Sadler for Dainese.


   "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design" is to remain at
   the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan,
   through Aug. 22.


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UD/Manhattan8766