Sunday, November 30, 2008

Art and Design

Art and Design

The boundary between fine art and design is one that is of confusing definition for me. Especially at an art/design school, I am subject to the segregation that comes naturally from different interests. First, however, we should take a look at the definition of fine arts and design before we can compare them. Officially at RISD, fine art majors consist of: Sculpture, Printmaking, Photography, Textiles, Jewelry, Glassblowing, Ceramics, and Digital Media. Design majors are a group consisting of Industrial Design, Architecture, Interior Architecture, Graphic Design, Illustration, Landscape Architecture and Apparel Design. What makes these two categories of disciplines different? Aside from the obvious differences in focus, what do we have in common? Every major has lots of work, utilizes studio space, and every major has to pull all nighters. Is there a difference in our work intent? Are there fine arts majors who design better than designers and designers who make better art than fine artists? I am sometimes asked to straddle this fence between design and fine art in the pursuit of relating to others at this institution. As an Industrial Design major, I am being trained to shape my work towards the design end of the spectrum. As I become so involved in my work, I tend to see my peers in other majors of RISD less and less compared to freshman year when all students were grouped randomly. By spending more time in the ID studio, I find myself able to concentrate on my own work more, but am less able to keep up with the work of other majors and see what they have been working on. This type of specialization is great, but I also feel that being in such an environment as RISD, where there are so many different disciplines of art and design, one should take the time to look around and take inspiration from all work being made.

The Campana Brothers, two designers based in São Paulo, Brazil who have been selected as designers of the year by DesignMiami, describe their work in their interview on www.dezeen.com as “An attempt to make function, poetic and poetic a function.” This philosophy fascinated me, as design vocabulary does not typically contain this word. Poetic design is the true expression of a designer’s personal experience and one that can never be replicated by another designer. I found some of their work very poetic, such as the Vermelha chair, made from a steel frame with hand-woven upholstery.
From the Cooper-Hewitt design museum’s collection: “This piece incorporates many aspects of weaving: intertwined threads form the ropes, which are then hand-woven into upholstery. Five hundred meters of red cotton ropes are used to create these random looking loops, but, in reality, there is a structured method in the rather chaotic padding.” This one off piece of furniture ended up being mass-produced as it was seen by the Italian furniture producer , Edra in the mid 90’s. Edra had such strong conviction about producing the chair, they found a way around the hurdles that stand in such a piece.
Another innovative and poetic piece produced was the Favela chairs also produced by the Campana brothers. The concept for this chair was inspired by the local methods of construction of shanty towns – where found and recycled pieces of wood are nailed and tacked together. The imperfections and methods of construction were the feature of this project and it stemmed from a local inspiration.

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