What is design? Should you choose to answer that irritating question without using wikipedia, you might come up with something about ‘putting stuff together’ or ‘creating the shape and look of something’ or another invented phrase somewhere equally as generic. How about the antithesis of that idea? When we deconstruct previously designed objects, are we designing something else, or just ‘taking it apart’? It takes a fair amount of talent to pull apart someone’s previous design and call it your own–have it called brilliant, even–without coming across as a glorified show-and-teller. Look here at two designers who have done just that.
Brittny Badger, a young American designer finishing her design thesis, decided to crack open several old appliances and visualize their contents as laid out on a white background, artfully arranged for maximum aesthetic satisfaction. Look at these materials on their own, or enclosed in their final, appliance form, and you have nothing but electrical parts we’ve all seen before–so how did she do it, exactly? I say a flash of inspiration and the keen eye to follow it through. I love it when stuff comes out of nowhere like this, random, anonymous students doing undergraduate thesis work that gets fast, honest praise from hundreds of big design sites. So much praise, in fact, that she now has prints available in her etsy shop in case you’re interested.
Our other, far more high-art example of dismantled objects is the Berlin-based Damián Ortega. He too works with found objects, playing with their meaning in a “mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction,” which isn’t a generic piece of art-theory-description at all but actually an apt description of almost all his lively projects.
The ones that interested me the most take the same fundamental approach as Brittny Badger–pulling out the individual pieces of an object and displaying them in a pleasing way–but Ortega does it with hanging wires, beautiful precision, and the approach of an instruction manual. You know those cross-section diagrams you used to see when setting up a particularly complex new piece of technology? The ones with all the individual sections isolated and pulled away from each other, as though a small bomb went off inside the device and left each part hanging clearly, visibly in space? This is Ortega’s art.
His most recent exhibit was put on in Turin, home of the Vespa, and coincidentally he actually took apart a Vespa in a re-visit of his earlier Volkswagen Beetle deconstruction. Called the Miracolo Italiano, it involved three classic vespas: seen from the most-deconstructed point of view, the viewer could trace the individual parts of the scooter as they came together into a second, half-completed design, with a third, fully constructed Vespa standing just beyond.
This takes his Volkswagen project–called Cosmic Thing–to a new level. Where his Bug was a single installation, the Vespa is seen in three stages of completion, allowing the viewer to walk backwards and forwards, creating and dismantling the icon. Icon-deconstruction is a fun process for Ortega; the Volkswagen was one of Mexico’s “most potent symbols of Westernization and mass production”, and the latter applies, within Italy, to Piaggio’s Vespa as well.
His exhibit shows us both ends of the process: just as important as the thousands of Vespas pouring out onto the Italian streets in the 1950s was the idea behind the Italian Miracle: the transforming economic power that comes with mass producing complex objects. Ortega gives us a satisfying, contemporary glimpse into that ideal.
