The Theory of Nevolution: Time for some modern design

June 04, 2009

Time for some modern design

It's a little bit late, but I'll be heading out to Heide tonight for what should be a good talk about the influence of Modernism on designers today. It's part of the Modern Times exhibition, which I sadly have not been out to see yet. Chaired by Denise Whitehouse with some heavy hitting panelists: Gary Emery, David Pidgeon, Andrew Budge and Kerstin Thompson. For details follow the link.

Update: It was a great, if sometimes strained night. Each speaker gave a small presentation and then moved on to a panel discussion. I was hoping for a little bit of a flow on between the speakers and the themes they brought up; or at least what I was interested in. I asked Budge (after he was discussing the end of PoMo and the aesthetics of Neo Modernism) if he thought we would go back or move on. It was more of a knee-jerk reaction to what he was saying, so I didn't have time to compose myself. I was hoping for a tangent on relationalism or alter-modernism, where they thought the next set of ideals would come from, but no one seemed to be having a bar of it. For quite some time the focus seemed to be on architecture, which is usually far more interesting than graphic design when discussing modernism and I was quite happy for it to centre around the this. After sometime, I noticed that Emery had sat quiet for most of the night, seemingly disinterested in the whole thing until he erupted near the end. I recorded the whole talk hoping to get some juicy quotes and insights but unfortunately the audio quality was useless, forcing me to rely on my memory instead. Someone asked him if he still considered himself to be a modernist and after stumbling for a little while just let it rip.

A question was asked if the fruits of modernism were successful, and he flat out denied that it succeeded. After stumbling around with furniture for awhile; that the chairs were never mass produced, that they were elitist, even the Bauhaus chairs were never mass produced - except the cantilevered steel tubing chairs. We had some Ikea ones when I was a child, so in that regard it was a success. He then continued that Modernism was simply a period that came before post-modernism and after the arts and crafts movement. That people only focus on the aesthetics of modernism, and not the ideals behind it. He doesn't consider himself to be a modernist, nor did he know what modernism was when it was in the sixties. His methodology is to look at the problem and break it down into it's elemental parts, considering himself an elementalist. Obviously working in the reductionist sense, something I'd never considered as a facet of modernism, but now seems so glaringly obvious in hindsight. Everyone seemed to wake up and pay attention at this point, guiltily accepting that yes, we had only been considering the visual language, and not the ideals.

All in all, a rather interesting night, if only to watch a grumpy old bald man tell us how it's done.

Colophon: Image credits go to the National Archives of Australia and the sadly missed Wolfgang Sievers. I met him as a child and despite his ability to swear like no ones business he was a friendly and caring man with whom australian photography would be a different landscape without him.

Posted at 11:58 AM in Marvellous Melbourne | Permalink

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The Theory of Nevolution

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