Introduction

Ron Arad: No Discipline
August 2, 2009–October 19, 2009
The Museum of Modern Art, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Gallery, sixth floor

Ron Arad stands out among the most influential designers of our time for his daredevil approach to form, structure, technology, and materials in work that spans the disciplines of industrial design, sculpture, architecture, and mixed-medium installation. Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. In 1973 he moved to London, where he attended the Architectural Association School of Architecture, and in 1981, together with long-time business partner Caroline Thorman, he opened One Off, a gallery-studio for experimental design that showed not only his work but also that of fellow freethinkers such as Danny Lane and Tom Dixon. Since then, the name and address of the office and the scale of its work have changed, but its spirit remains the same. For nearly three decades, Arad has countered the traditional separation of the roles of architect, designer, and artist. Prominent in art and design communities while keeping a foot in industrial mass production, he has inspired a new generation of designers in many fields to adopt hybrid practices that have the flexibility to match today’s shifts in design applications. His work has been imitated, idolized, feverishly discussed, and criticized, but never ignored.

Ron Arad: No Discipline celebrates the designer’s interdisciplinary and “no-disciplinary” spirit. Physical concepts are traced through works in different materials and scales, and objects are grouped in families based on a shared form, material, technique, or structural idea. The exhibition culminates in Cage sans Frontières, Arad’s giant structure that cradles all the other works.

Biography

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2009
Ron Arad: No Discipline is held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2008
Ron Arad: No Discipline is held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle

2006
Exhibits in Designing Modern Britain at the Design Museum, London

2004
Begins designing Magis' headquarters in Treviso, Italy and the Holon Design Museum in Holon, Tel Aviv, Israel
Participates in the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial

2003
Works on projects including the Maserati headquarters showroom in Modena, Italy and Y's fashion store for Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo
Begins designing for the Upperworld Hotel at Battersea Power Station, London

2000
Before and After Now retrospective is held at the V&A Museum, London

1998
Introduces Design Products MA course at the Royal College of Art, London

1997
Begins tenure of teaching product design at Royal College of Art, London
Commision by Domus for a Milan Furniture Fair installation prompts the designand production of the popular Tom Vac chair

1994
Founds Ron Arad Studio, a design and production venture, in Como, Italy
Designs the foyer and bookstore for the New Tel-Aviv Opera House, Tel Aviv

1993
Begins designing his Bookworm bookshelves which, in production by Kartell, become his best selling works.

1989
Founds Ron Arad Associates in London

1986
Designs for Vitra the Well Tempered Chair, his first commission by a major manufacturer

1981
Establishes One Off Ltd. in Covent Garden, London, with Caroline Thorman
The Rover Chair launches Arad’s career, followed by other readymades

1974–79
Studies at the Architectural Association—School of Architecture, London

1973
Moves to London

1971–73
Studies at the Jerusalem Academy of Art

1951
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel

THE DESIGNER AS AUTHOR By Paola Antonelli

At the beginning of the 1980s, design’s need to break with the disciplinary boundaries of modernism had grown out of its most heated and rebellious phase and reached a new maturity. Gone were the 1970s attempts to annihilate objects and tear form-and-function tyrants from their pedestals; gone were the efforts to debunk the power of corporations and technocrats by refusing to design anything that could actually be produced and sold; and gone were the activists and thinkers who sided with the people and preached that everyone was a designer. It was time to reclaim the creative role of designers as givers of soul in addition to form, uniquely positioned as they were to break with the past and model the world’s future.

Ron Arad—who studied art at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and moved to London in 1973 to attend the hotbed of experimentation that was the Architectural Association—emerged on the other side of the 1970s an unscathed (emboldened, if anything) creative maverick. In 1981, the same year the Memphis group was founded in Milan, he opened One Off, his studio, together with Caroline Thorman. This was also the year in which he designed—almost by chance, according to myth—his legendary Rover Chair. In 1983 One Off became a showroom in the Covent Garden market, a vibrant group of small stores, galleries, and restaurants, in which One Off stood out as a laboratory for design experimentation, with Arad showing his work and that of other budding, talented British designers such as Tom Dixon and Danny Lane.

Calling the lab One Off was a statement unto itself. Each object, albeit functional, was treated as a focused experiment in the use of materials, techniques, and process. If the human bodies for which these objects were intended still hovered above as the measures for true design accomplishment, the creative act in itself was unencumbered by definitions. The studio’s trust in inspiration—whether it be found in a construction system like Kee Klamps, a car seat, or a volume to be pummeled and sculpted and molded—transcended disciplines.

The relationship between art and design has been carefully examined in terms of the perceived juxtaposition between them. Designers have been accused of borrowing art methods and markets; artists have been accused of cavalier gestures such as adding a bulb to a sculpture and calling the work a lighting fixture. Are art and design both ways to act out ideas, or is art self-expression, while design is inherently driven by consideration of other human beings and their needs? Some critics point to comfort as the distinction between the two; others cite economic considerations, sale price, social relevance. Some simply move between the two spheres by switching the number of end users—from oneself to a few collectors to a wider public to the consumer market. Once upon a not-very-remote time, these two disciplines lived happily together and shared the same conceptual roof with architecture and other forms of cultural production, each informing the others with generosity and benevolence. History is dense with examples of universal donors, the O-positives of creativity—Peter Behrens, Bruno Munari, Vivienne Westwood, Ettore Sottsass—whose curiosity and openness have defied disciplinary confines. Schools, academies, and movements, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, from de Stijl to Radical Design, rejected any hint of hierarchy of creative expression.

In the heated contemporary debate on what distinguishes design from art, and in an art market that has been built around the degrees of separation between them, Arad’s spontaneous posture, assumed in the 1980s and never since abandoned, has become a postmodern archetype. He is the unwitting father of what we now call Design Art (a term he is frankly allergic to), of all the six-figure sales of objects too functional to be full-fledged art and too sculptural and expensive to be considered real design. He is also, however, a champion of creative freedom, admired and emulated by many designers, especially now that the production and distribution of artifacts has become so diversified, and the channels for expression so tentacular, that any disciplinary definition is deeply hindering.

No Discipline celebrates Ron Arad’s spirit by avoiding any separation between industrial design, one-off pieces, architecture, and architectural installation. Objects are grouped in families whose common blood is a form, a material, a technique, or a structural idea, revealing a conceptual evolution that is still amazingly solid with the designer’s beginnings at One Off. As much a creature of habit as a versatile artist, he has formed long-lasting relationships with collaborators (Caroline Thorman is still his partner in the studio, which is now called Ron Arad Associates), manufacturers, galleries, and even materials, and thus has built a firm grounding that will continue to enable him to take even bigger leaps.

Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator
Department of Architecture and Design
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ron Arad: No Discipline is published in conjunction with the first major retrospective of Arad’s work in the United States. The exhibition catalogue showcases Arad’s work with full-color illustrations and descriptions of over 150 works.

Essays include one by Paola Antonelli about Arad’s role as an educator; an essay by Stedelijk Museum Curator Ingeborg de Roode that details Arad’s use of innovative materials and technology; an interview with the designer by Centre Pompidou Curator Marie-Laure Jousset; and a whimsical reflection on Arad and the idea of definitions by author Jonathan Safran Foer.

Ron Arad: No Discipline is published by The Museum of Modern Art and is available at MoMA Stores and online at MoMAstore.org. It is distributed to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P) in the United States and Canada, and through Thames + Hudson outside North America. Paperback, 8 x 10.5 in.; 216 pp.; 300 color ills. Price: $45.00.

The book is authored by Paola Antonelli, edited by Emily Hall, and designed by Karlssonwilker; production was handled by Christina Grillo.

EXHIBITION

Ron Arad: No Discipline, on view at The Museum of Modern Art from August 2 to October 19, 2009, is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, with Aidan O’Connor, Curatorial Assistant, and Hunter Palmer, Intern, Department of Architecture and Design.

The exhibition installation is designed by Ron Arad and developed by Michael Castellana of Ron Arad Associates and Betty Fisher, Production Manager, Department of Exhibitions Production. The graphics in the installation are designed by Brigitta Bungard and August Heffner, Design Managers, and Inva Cota, Designer, Department of Graphic Design.

Ron Arad: No Discipline is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de creation industrielle, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The exhibition is supported by Notify.
Additional funding is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
The accompanying publication is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Collection Boisbuchet Workshops, Lessac, France
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris
Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
Andrea Aranow, New York
Collection Sergio Casoli, Rome, Italy
Jean and Annie Galvani. Private collection, France
Collection Michael G. Jesselson, New York
Collection Reed and Delphine Krakoff
Christiane Leister, Switzerland
Collection Aby J. Rosen
Collection Jérôme and Emmanuelle de Noirmont, Paris
Pizzuti Collection
M.J.S. Collection, Paris
Jerome L. and Ellen Stern
Anonymous lenders
Ben Brown Fine Arts
François Laffanour, Galerie Downtown, Paris
Swarovski Crystal Palace, London
Museo Alessi
ddc domus design collection
Driade
iGuzzini illuminazione
Kartell
Magis
The Miyake Issey Foundation
Moroso SpA, Udine, Italy
Notify
Vitra
Galerie Arums, Paris

VIDEOS

All videos courtesy Ron Arad Associates, London

WEBSITE

Curatorial Direction and Text
Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design
Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design
Hunter Palmer, Intern, Department of Architecture and Design
Aidan O’Connor, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design

Website Concept, Design, and Development
Rasso Hilber, BASICS09
Arne Fehmel, BASICS09
Korbinian Kainz, BASICS09

Design Management
Allegra Burnette, Creative Director, Digital Media

Project Management
Shannon Darrough, Senior Media Developer, Digital Media

Editorial
Jason Persse, Associate Editor, Development and Membership
Rebecca Roberts, Assistant Editor, Publications