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[av_heading heading=’Special Feature: Delineating Design’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ subheading_active=” show_icon=” icon=’ue800′ font=” size=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” subheading_size=’15’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” icon_size=” av-medium-font-size-1=” av-small-font-size-1=” av-mini-font-size-1=” color=” custom_font=” icon_color=” margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ icon_padding=’10’ link=’manually,http://’ link_target=” id=” custom_class=” av_uid=’av-kpi2jakb’ admin_preview_bg=”][/av_heading]
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Where once art meant paintings and design meant a chair, these narrow conceptions are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full breadth of contemporary practice in both fields today. So what really is the difference between art and design? Design expert Penny Craswell finds out.
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In the Renaissance period, being an artist meant having a trade, with membership of a guild, a system of patronage through the church and the aristocracy, and a small army of apprentices to do the grunt work. In fact, back then design wasn’t considered a separate field at all – even architecture was considered art. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that design came to mean the design of commercial, mass-produced goods. “Prior to industrialisation, art and design co-existed in the practices of many great creatives,” says the National Gallery of Victoria’s Curator of Contemporary Design and Architecture Simone LeAmon. “Design was coopted by the project of industry and globalisation, and the delivery of standardised goods.”
This is the conception we have of design today – to mean things like chairs, tables and lamps, plus fashion and jewellery. These are mass-produced products that we buy and use in everyday life. Then there’s architecture, interior design, urban and landscape design, a totally different category, which along with digital design, animation, user experience design and others, have opened the field out even more. But, when it comes to objects, design is much more than a mass-produced product, and this conception is growing. Enter the designer-maker, an artisan who creates one-off or limited-edition functional design objects by hand, often sold direct to the customer or through a gallery or shop. In Australia, there are plenty of designer-makers creating functional pieces for the home – from furniture makers like Laura McCusker in Tasmania and Jun Kim in Sydney, to ceramicists, such as Hayden Youlley in Sydney and Bridget Bodenham in Victoria.
Then there is another category of designer, the conceptual designer who creates one-off or limited-edition pieces, sometimes also called functional art or design art. This designer may or may not make the work themselves. Sydney-based designer Trent Jansen describes this kind of work as his natural way of working. “When I was starting out, I interned for Marcel Wanders who said it’s not good design unless it can be produced in numbers,” says Trent. “This really governed my practice for a long time.” Now he realises that making limited-edition and one-off works can still be design.
Trent’s pieces are not made to a brief. They usually begin with in-depth research, followed by a process of experimentation that leads to the final work or series. For example, Trent’s Shaker Family Home is a beautifully handcrafted cabinet that can be unpacked to create a table, chest, mirror and other parts. This cabinet tells the story of the Shakers, a religion with a strong focus on family and on crafting timber furniture by hand, with physical labour acting as a type of prayer. “There’s no focus on the consumer need in my process. I could talk about it being form follows narrative, rather than form follows function. The function it’s serving is storytelling.”
For Trent, design and art are on a continuum, with art practice at one end, commercial design at the other and conceptual design somewhere in between. So, what is it that separates conceptual design from contemporary art? It’s the starting place. While contemporary art starts with ideas and a blank slate, conceptual design starts with a typology – a chair, or a tea set or a table – and goes from there. The functional part of the work, even when the work is not very functional, gives the work its design flavour. “What gets me excited about conceptual design more so than conceptual art and definitely more than commercial design is when you are designing conceptually, you’re using the function as part of the storytelling,” says Trent. “You start with all of this context and you can use that to shape the work, to counter that, or juxtapose with something else, with a cheeky or ironic message that works against it.”
For Simone, design and art are more similar than people think. “Some people see art as cultural production and design as commercial production. But they are both cultural production and commercial production,” she says. But the difference between the two is also vital. She says: “As a design curator I’m really conscious of not recasting design as art. I say this with great conviction and intent, because design embraces a conversation around how we shape the world.” While visual art is concerned with aesthetics and meaning, design is still very much grounded in the world of things – how they look and function. And while the categories of the designer-maker and the conceptual designer may bring design closer to art, the categories remain, regardless of material or process.
Feature image: Trent Jansen’s Shaker Family Home. Photo: Romello Pereira. Courtesy: the artists and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.
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[av_heading heading=’More features from issue #28′ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote modern-centered’ subheading_active=” show_icon=” icon=’ue800′ font=” size=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” subheading_size=’15’ av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” icon_size=” av-medium-font-size-1=” av-small-font-size-1=” av-mini-font-size-1=” color=” custom_font=” icon_color=” margin=” margin_sync=’true’ padding=’10’ icon_padding=’10’ link=” link_target=” id=” custom_class=” av_uid=’av-kpi59lzj’ admin_preview_bg=”][/av_heading]
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