The exhibitions to go to: Richard Prince and Donna Wilson

Photograph courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery

Richard Prince: The Fug

We all know Richard Prince for his Jokes, Nurses, Cowboys and Girlfriends series, as well as for his heavy use of rephotography. A member of the influential Pictures Generation, the American artist had a strong hand in expanding the scope of conceptual photography through the use of appropriation. This first solo show at Brussels’ Almine Rech Gallery gives the audience the perfect occasion to explore Prince’s fascination with American culture, Borscht Belt jokes, car enthusiasm, pulp-literature, and his unmatchable knack for elevating material directly sourced from the underbelly of soceity to the status of fine art.

Until 5th November

ALMINE RECH GALLERY

Rue de l’Abbaye 20 Abdijstraat -1050 Brussels

www.alminerech.com

Photograph by Gareth Hacker

Donna Wilson, Ercol & SCP

The Brussels-based design showroom La Fabrika has invited Donna Wilson to create an installation in collaboration with established British manufacturers Ercol and SCP. Earning the accolade of British Designer of the Year 2010, Wilson has been quoted as being “wonderful with wool”, a “material marvel”, a “textile designer extraordinaire” and even an “all round textile legend”. Characterised by a playful nature, tactile aesthetic and multicoloured palette, the young designer’s work ranges from colourful knitted creatures to striking upholstered furniture designs, which all promise to be a refreshing sight during this month’s Design September festival.

Until 30th September

LA FABRIKA

Rue Antoine Dansaert 182 Dansaertstraat – 1000 Brussels

www.lafabrika.be

The tour to take: Designers Weekend

© SICIS - The art mosaic factory

Hot on the heels of Design September, Brussels’ Designers Weekend brings together professionals as well as amateurs for a weekend of impromptu meetings and punctuated showcases. Over 15 hotspots have been selected – showrooms, shops and galleries – to provide as rounded a view as possible of the current crop of local talent. Think open doors with a slightly more commercial focus. What’s more, the lazy ones out there can rejoice in the thought of a shuttle service having been organised just for them, taking them from one stop to the next at their own pace. Sign up for it here.

The shuttles run from 10h00 to 18h00, and departs from the Nonciature, Place du Sablon / Grote Zavel

The movies to watch: Truffaut retrospective at the Cinematek

This Thursday, Brussels’ Cinematek started a comprehensive retrospective dedicated to French director and cult cinematic icon Francois Truffaut, one of the most influential filmmakers in history and co-founder of the French Nouvelle Vague. An extensive collection of Truffaut’s films will be replayed on the big screen until 31st October, with this weekend’s agenda screening Les Quatre Cents Coups (Saturday at 19h00), awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and the director’s first huge success, as well as its more experimental successor Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (Sunday at 19h00).

CINEMATEK

Rue Baron Horta 9 Hortastraat – 1000 Brussels

www.cinematek.be

Watch the trailer of Les Quatre Cents Coups:

The shop to stop by: Diito’s Hay pop-up store

Photograph courtesy of Hay.dk

Brussels-based gallery and interior design shop diito opened up a pop-up store solely dedicated to award-winning furniture namesake Hay. During the course of three weeks you’ll be able to admire the Danish imprint’s creations which bring 1950s and 1960s design philosophies closer to and contemporary ones.

Open every day of the weekend from 11h00 to 18h30

HAY POP-UP STORE

Rue de la Régence 9 Regentschapsstraat – 1000 Brussels

www.diito.be

Photographer Sarah Eechaut

www.atelier4cinquieme.be

(This feature was first published in the blue album)

“The studio was founded in 2007 and is located in the Koekelberg district of Brussels. I live in one of the city’s last dead end street – old worker houses, quiet surroundings, like a small village. My neighbours are people who work at Medecins sans frontières, a taxi driver, a lorry driver, a pianist…”

Photographer Sarah Eechaut.

(This feature was first published in the blue album)

Following a three months hiatus, we’re back with a bang. Our blue album. It hits the street Friday, 2nd September and we’d love for you to join us for a drink or two and a little boogie. It’s all happening at the À St Médard Centre for Arts, located on Rue Haute 298C – 300 Hoogstraat, in 1000 Brussels (it’s a 2min walk from the flea market). Proceedings begin at 19h00, with a small showcase of the Prouvé RAW collection, a collaborative exercise in design re-edition that sees denim brand G-Star RAW partner up with design manufacturer Vitra to re-edit a collection of Jean Prouvé design pieces. Expect historical artefacts, blow-up print outs and a lesson or two in denim excellence. We’ll also be handing our some Word-branded cotton goodie bags (filled by the likes of G-Star RAW, Hugo Boss and ourselves) to the 250 first readers to arrive so make sure to come early. Join the Facebook event page here.

Musically, we’ve concocted a line up sure to get you up on your feet:

1. Sixsixsixties(Antwerp, DJ set)
2. Slove(Paris, Live)
3. Ménage à Deux (Brussels, DJ set)

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15868930[/vimeo]

© Ulrike Biets

Photography Sanne Delcroix

Taking over the indoor playground of Ixelles’ Ecole Les Mouettes (Av. des Eperons d’Or 16 Guldensporenlaan, 1050 Brussels), we’re throwing yet another party that’ll ensure you give the start of the year the kick off it deserves. It’s all happening on SATURDAY 18TH SEPTEMBER, from 22h00 onwards.Entrance is €7,00. Find the school on Google Maps here (it’s literally a two minute walk from Flagey).

LINE UP FOR THE NIGHT
Jean-Biche
L-Fêtes versus Bernard Dobbeleer
Lady Jane (Catclub)

To give the whole event just an extra dose of themed integrity, we’ve even enlisted a yearbook photographer for the night, whose mission it will be to photograph each and every guest coming through the school doors. Come prepared then, as your lovely mug might end up in our November-December edition.

Join the Facebook event page here

And here are some images of the school that’ll host our party:

]]> http://www.thewordmagazine.be/office/saturday-18th-september-we-go-back-to-school/feed/ 5 http://www.thewordmagazine.be/uncategorized/we-go-pro-with-karim/ http://www.thewordmagazine.be/uncategorized/we-go-pro-with-karim/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:13:34 +0000 Hettie Judah http://www.thewordmagazine.be/?p=815 On the last day of Design September we dashed between presentations from the dons of the European design award scene and talks from product packaging pack before sitting down for a speedy cappuccino with a very candy striped Karim Rashid

It was the closing event of Design September – the professionals’ day – with conferences featuring an impressive line-up of key speakers.  The packaging speakers had a kind of wary defensive aura to them; Fabrice Peltier of Paris’ DesignPack Gallery admitted that when people asked him what he did he’d sometimes joke that he “designed waste” – which pretty neatly indicated the elephant in the room. Sustainability – still an afterthought, still a buzzword, not yet centre stage. Packaging people – there’s no excuse.

Over on the award side, Peter Zec of Red Dot did point out that it’s not just the packaging people that were failing to grasp the sustainability nettle. During the most recent Concept Awards; Red Dot’s Singapore based awards for younger designers; 300 works were entered for the Green Design section but the jury was so disappointed that they ended up not actually giving the award out.

Lisbeth Juul of Index Awards made Copenhagen seem like design-loving right-on community spirited heaven. The awards go to works that improve human life – this year’s laureates included a system of microcredit loans, and an integrated infrastructure to support electric cars – and the events connected to the awards are all held in the homes of local design enthusiasts. Which sounded like perfection until Jean-Pierre Blanc, director of the Villa Noailles’ Design Parade, started showing slides of the design conferences at Hyeres – long lunches in the Provencal sunshine during the early summer – and we considered asking whether he’d adopt us. Design, wine, sunshine, glorious architecture and fabulous conversation – it almost makes us weep thinking about it.

Karim Rashid unfolded his long pink-clad legs from one of the Festival’s Mini Coopers at 5 o’clock, just in time for a chat before he gave the closing address of the day. We decided not to bother with small talk (although for those of you lap up the incidental froth – he is very bright, charming, and super articulate, likes good quality coffee with milk (preferably a cappuccino), rates the architecture of the Flagey building and admits that his sideline in DJ-ing has fallen by the wayside since he discovered that even he needs to sleep occasionally).

Hettie: Since today is really about branding I’d like to ask you about you as a brand. If I say that there is a very recognisable Karim Rashid style, to you take that as a very positive statement; the result of really good branding on your part, or do you find it oppressive? Do you ever feel the need to break away from it?

Karim: Because I do such a broad range of work there will always be some brands that hire me because they expect me to be very Karim Rashid, but I never believed that I had a very specific style. Before I started my own studio 18 years ago I spent 10 years working for other design offices. During that time I designed power tools for Black & Decker, I designed humidifiers, medical and even military equipment. When you do that, there’s no personality that you can impose on the work – you are driven by the performance of the product.

I think there are two worlds of design; there is the more artistic commodity that occupies the popular domain of design and there are products that fill our everyday life where we don’t see the designer at all. Packaging design occupies the second area. Most of the brands prefer to keep the designer out of the equation – Issey Miyake is the brand, not Karim Rashid. If you walk through an airport Duty Free shop, I’ve probably designed 10% of what you see, but you’d never know it. Is that shouting my style or not?

It depends if companies have their own strong identity, or they ask me to be quite expressive. But I’m more interested in doing important things that in being a celebrity.

These days consumer culture is interested in who’s behind these things; they realise someone has had an original thought and that it’s become that particular product. Objects aren’t just generic. It’s a new phenomenon and I think it’s very positive; people know which bottle of water Ross Lovegrove designed and which was designed by Ora Ito, for example.

I’m working on a water bottle at the moment and I have convinced the company to make it out of sugar cane – I talked to six different companies before them and no one was interested – designers don’t just bring form, material and ergonomics, they can be responsible for major shifts?

Hettie: That leads pretty neatly on to the second thing that I wanted to talk about actually: the role of designers in industry. One of the speakers earlier pointed out a big difference between packaging in the Southern European and Northern European markets; apparently in the South the notion of quality comes from the earth up; they take their notion of quality from its provenance, whereas in the north we judge it on the packaging. Perhaps as a result, from a lot of quarters at the moment I’m getting the sense that we’re suddenly encountering a generation of designers that design identity rather than products; they understand packaging, branding, image and so on, but not about actually creating a genuinely new product. Does this chime at all with your experience?

Karim: I think it’s one of the things that modernism did – it was the age of specialisation – it bifurcated our profession.

I was recently working for a client on an ice tea – and I was trying to convince them that they couldn’t just change the packaging, they had to change the product; I was talking to them about the big shift towards natural and organic products, but I didn’t get anywhere, because I’m just hired to make the package. There’s a huge disconnect. For something like that you need to get all the people in the room together right at the start of the project, but that’s not how things happen.

Companies come to me, and other like me, because their sales are going down. These days the global competition is extraordinary; there are lots of little brands that are right on there, understanding the particular demands of the time, and larger companies miss the signals. Say you want to do a new sports drink – the competition is fierce precisely because there are all these smart moves coming out of these tiny companies. The companies expect that changing the label or bottle will get them back in the game, but they need to take a more holistic approach.

I had the same thing when I was designing a toothpaste brand – why do the big brands have nothing to compete with Tom’s? Method was one of the few product ranges I’ve done where I was part of a holistic approach. It was started by three guys with pretty small loans; now it’s worth $700 million. They’re young guys who reacted to the times. I’m so interested in the political and social life of the world – I want to be more proactive.

Hettie: I’m interested in this idea of the designer out engaging with the world and responding to changes. I was talking to someone about Rei Kawakubo and they were explaining how she kept Comme really responsive and ahead of the game as a brand because she was really engaged with political and social movements in that way. She really works with a team on the design, which her allows her to give her attention to these other elements. I imagine that your studio functions in a similar way?

Karim: Actually we are really small: only 12 people. I’m doing 90 projects now. I’m a bit controlling; it does hold me back but I don’t want to be a big company; I reject lots of work and stay small. I don’t know if I’m capable of doing it any other way; I’ve never really had the personal desire for it to get bigger. Unlike a united brand, we work for a plethora of different brands, and if you delegate the quality can become uneven.  When you have big overheads you end up having to do what the British critic Peter Dormer used to call ‘below the line’ work to pay the bills. I never wanted to be in that position. I take only one in ten jobs because they’re the ones I want to do.

We do have to produce quite technical prototypes for companies – they expect it, so two of the team are design engineers. I’ve gone in a bit of a full circle – my education was very rigorous, but then I went to Milan and saw the Italian design artistic the work was. My background (I’m half British) and my education have been a good balance for me; the practical, pragmatic and technical side balances the artistic. It allows me to work with big multinationals that create real mass products and to make real changes.

I think what I’d refer to as the ‘Droog School’ of design changed the world because it made people think that design was all about whimsical, craft like, artistic proposals, but that’s not design. Real design is a Nespresso machine. Design is about moving things forward. Of course it is very valuable to have someone doing something critical and radical too.