CITY Issue 52

This page: U.K. designer Max Lamb prepares to bury a polystyrene form for a chair in sand at Design Miami; he later poured on molten pewter to turn it into a metalfinished product. Stage Freight With their power tools and production methods in tow, designers are flocking to Art Basel to show off their craft. The result? Your next chair may be built in front of your eyes. By Tim McKeough VISITORS TO THIS YEAR’S EDITION OF ART BASEL, the art community’s annual shopping spree in Basel, Switzerland, could be forgiven for feeling a little confused. While performance art would be expected, one off-site event presented a very different take on live spectacle. Under the expansive concrete dome known as Markthalle, some of the world’s top product designers had recreated bits and pieces of their own studios and were making objects by hand right on the show floor. London’s Tom Dixon was wrapping strings of plastic squeezed out of an Extrudex machine into blobtastic chairs. Italian designer Martino Gamper was cannibalizing classic pieces of modern furniture by Gio Ponti with power tools. Dutch designer Maarten Baas was molding self-hardening putty around metal frames to create his off-kilter Clay Furniture. Curated by Design Miami, the organization that got its start in 2005 as a design counterpart to Art Basel Miami Beach, these design performances are the latest twist in the quickly evolving world of collectible contemporary design. Design Miami caters to a high-end market, partnering with dealers who show hard-to-find furniture and limited-edition collections by notable designers, which adds fuel to the fast-rising market for rarefied design objects. In this context, the mere mention of design performances is enough to make you wonder whether the organizers might be hoping to transform live design events into the next iteration of performance art. But that’s not the case, says Ambra Medda, director of Design Miami. If anything, design performances are meant to be the opposite—they’re about putting the raw creative process on display. “We’re not trying to make a statement that design is like art, and we’re not going to be making limited-edition DVDs,” Medda says. “It’s really about trying to be an open book and showing people how designers are working. The difference between seeing a handmade clay chair in a shop window and actually seeing the designer working with a metallic frame and applying self-hardening clay gives you a different dimension.” By simulating a small part of each designer’s studio, and revealing their processes for making prototypes and limited-edition pieces, design performances aim to provide a window onto activities that are normally kept private. Rather than positioning the performances themselves as the creative output, designers use the opportunity to show off production methods they are already using in their own studios. 56 CI T Y

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 52

CITY Issue 52 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Fit The Amused Bouche Fast Food Must Haves Hot Wheels Idol Handlers Design Public Affairs Pluck of the Draw Novel Ideas Monster's Belle Not Guilty The Understudies The Hunger Elastique Where to Buy It Socials Icon

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