Postinteresting

I meet my French friend Anne in the Cafe San Remo in Kreuzberg. Ahead of us lies a lazy, pleasant afternoon walking around Berlin's post-industrial warehouses, peppermills and bakeries, looking at the exhibits in the annual ten day design festival, Designmai. This isn't strictly pleasure, though. I've been commissioned to write an article on the theme of 'the designer as auteur'.

Anne, sipping her coffee, laughs. "What are you going to say?" I tell her I'll probably start the piece saying something like “Quelle pretension! Designers will be cutting off their ears next, starving in garrets, eating opium and warning that there's a .25mm line between design and madness!” I take a gulp of too-watery green tea. “But then I'll do a surprise turnaround and say that big egos might be a necessary corollary to original work, that the rise of the charismatic design star might not be such a bad thing, and that upping the general level of pretension might be good for design. It might help drag design away from a too-narrow focus on briefs, problems, clients, customers. Because design is about something bigger than that, something utopian, almost spirit”—Anne interrupts to tell me she thinks that design is probably just like her field, music. Most of the work is done collectively. People don't really make a distinction between art and craft any more. If stars do appear, it's just because some of the craftsmen also happen to be good at self-promotion.

We're walking towards the Kunstfabrik now, a big brick building on a leafy canal. 'That was actually the first idea I had for the piece,' I tell Anne. 'I wanted to say that stars are like queen bees or poster children: they don't contradict the collective nature of most design work, but actually confirm it. Just because the public knows the names of Philippe Starck and Karim Rashid, it doesn't mean that a thousand schools are flourishing and being acknowledged in the big design hive. Knowing the name of one designer isn't the opposite of knowing the names of no designers. It's just the socially-acceptable face of knowing the names of no designers. The design stars acting like artists are the exception that proves the rule. The average designer is only 'acting like an artist' by accident, because a few artists currently seem to think it's trendy to ‘act like a designer.'

“Like Liam Gillick, with his suspended perspex ceilings and his patented product designs,” says Anne, showing off her knowledge of contemporary art. I pull out the Designmai Guide, a fat brochure printed in green and black on tabloid-sized newsprint. “Listen to this. It's from the blurb for a photo show called ‘Anything For Human Happiness.’” No doubt it's a bunch of commercial photographers showing their own projects—mostly raunchy shots of naked women, by the look of it. The text says: “The photographers present their very own view of things: provocative and sometimes crude. An example of photography which dares to throw off the shackles of advertising and is free to breathe.”

“Now, doesn't that sound slightly pathetic? Doesn't that defiant gesture of throwing off the yoke of advertising just remind us that, for commercial art, that yoke is always there? Surely that shows the gap that still exists between designers and auteurs like artists? Isn't art all about finding your own problems to solve rather than letting 'the client' set 'the brief'? Until that changes, designers will never be artists, no matter how many toothbrushes are 'signed by' Philippe Starck or laptops 'bear the hallmark of' Jonathan Ive.'

We walk into the first exhibition hall and—bang!—there it is, the work that sums everything up. Mounted in a glass case is a copy of Karim Rashid's coffee table book “I Want To Change The World” from which the shape of a pistol has been precision lathed. The card-and-paper 'gun' stands beside the book like a challenge: “So you want to change the world, do you, Karim? Well, here's a way.” It's a piece by Tobias Wong. I pick up a handout for enlightenment.

“Originally from Vancouver, Canada,” it tells me, “Tobias Wong creates in New York. Wong treats design as a medium rather than a discipline to show how it embraces the aesthetics traditionally relegated to the fine arts. He's coined the term ‘paraconceptual’ to describe his dismantling of the hierarchies between ‘art’ and ‘design.’ In Wong's hands, both have similar goals.”

Wow, all we needed to resolve this thorny issue was a grasp of “the paraconceptual”—and a paper gun! Excitedly, I read on. “These new forms and aesthetic concepts brace against, appreciate, and invite desire. Wong's continuing exploration of this conundrum goes beyond the paraconceptual to projects he now refers to as ‘postinteresting’...”

Next time someone tells you this debate about the designer as auteur is boring, narrow your eyes mysteriously and say “Actually, it's postinteresting.”