Twisted normality

The new décor exhibition at London’s Haywood gallery showcases artists’ ingenuity in taking everyday interior design objects and creating surprising installations from them

The New Décor is the conclusion of an informal trilogy of summer exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, which, in the words of director Ralph Rugoff, have all explored ‘different kinds of space’. In 2008 there was Psycho Buildings, in which artists took on architecture, while 2009’sWalking In My Mind presented a series of introspective installations exploring the inner workings of the human psyche. The New Décor falls somewhere in between, but also beyond, the two, featuring work by 36 leading contemporary artists whose sculpture and installation re-imagines the language of interior design. It takes the minutiae of our everyday lives – doors, chairs, tables and lamps – and looks at it anew.

Thinking of some of the more outlandish creations on show at this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, you might ask where the line is drawn between fine art and design, and indeed that was a fundamental question for Rugoff when he began putting the show together. ‘I don’t have a quick answer to that,’ he says. ‘This show emerges against the background of designers like Mark Newson and the Campana brothers [Humberto and Fernando], who are showing in art galleries, making one-off pieces that sell for six figures and are treated very much like art works.

‘When I started thinking about this show, I looked at designers, too; I was looking at eccentric designers and, visually, some of the work would fit into this show, but in terms of their conceptual content and how they operate rhetorically as an object, they don’t.’

Rugoff rejects the notion of fine art as having to be free from function as ‘old-fashioned’, but he’s clear that all of the pieces in The New Décor have to make some kind of statement as well. Some of the works function better than others. Those based on lighting for example, such as Spencer Finch’s beautiful clusters of dimmed light bulbs, Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), would be perfect as mood lighting in a bar or a restaurant, but the work also explores the problems and opportunities inherent in the act of representation: Finch first painted a watercolour of the sky and then, ‘using simple scientific means’, analysed the molecular structures of the paint and based the position of the light bulbs on that.

Other works in the exhibition are intentionally dysfunctional: Layers and Leaves by Martin Boyce comprises several typical park benches turned upright and connected to form an undulating screen. The benches neither fulfil their original function as places for relaxation nor their new role as a screen because of the gaps in their wooden slats. It’s typical of the way the artist extracts objects from their original contexts and uses them to create abstract forms.

But The New Décor isn’t always this abstract or conceptual. One of the most powerful and accessible pieces in the show is 1/2 Life by Chinese artist Jin Shi – a half-size replica of the home of a Chinese migrant worker, painstakingly recreated right down to the meagre food rations, magazine clippings of coveted consumer goods and a tiny TV. The viewer looks down on this miniature world just as the rest of the population does on the millions of Mingong’, the Chinese migrants who are crucial to the nation’s voracious economic development.

There are, unsurprisingly, a lot of beds in this show: beds and what goes on in them – birth, sex and death – have always fascinated artists. They are also our most rudimentary item of furniture and a symbol of safety and security which Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum asks us to reconsider. In her work Interior Landscape, Hatoum has created a bed with no mattress, sprung with barbed wire. On the pillow, sewn in the artist’s own hair, is a map of Palestine. The bed is no longer a safe place but, like Palestine itself, a compromised territory.

Another bed by Cuban duo Los Carpinteros (the Carpenters), Cama is distended and twisted into the shape of a complex motorway junction complete with flyovers and slip roads. It’s one of the most striking and immediately memorable pieces in the exhibition, and a thought-provoking comment on the American dream, which is so inextricably linked with the freedom of automobile travel.

Doors have also had a special significance in art. In painting they can symbolise new beginnings or the movement of time. The surrealist sculptor Marcel Duchamp famously installed a door in his Paris apartment between two adjacent doorframes so that it could be simultaneously open and closed. In The New Décor, a work called Powerless Structures by Berlin-based artists Elmgreen and Dragset features doors within doors, a door with a jagged crack down its centre and, picking up where Duchamp left off, two adjacent doors connected by security chains.There is also a gothic door whose apposition with the gallery’s sterile white walls makes it seem all the more imposing and forbidding.

Despite Rugoff’s description of the show as ‘an interior decorator’s anxiety dream’, this tightly packed exhibition will fascinate interior and product designers alike.

The New Décor is at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London SE1 until 5 September


This article was first published in FX Magazine.








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