Ciba Inc.
Klybeckstrasse 141, P.O. Box
Basel
4002
Switzerland
Tel.: +41 61 636 49 16
Fax.:
+41 61 636 25 59
Review of Design Miami/Basel – From Art To Design … And Everything In Between
Reviews
By Le Vin Chin, with additional photography by Salome Seiler
Come June, and the world of furniture and design, having crossed the ocean from Milan to New York, now swings back to Europe, in the direction of Basel in Switzerland, there to unpack and display its precious goods once more. This year, the city was in full flight: Design Miami had accompanied Art Basel Miami Beach back to the place of its birth, where the first week of June now brought a whole gaggle of art fairs to the city. Alongside Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel, Basel also played host to Liste (the “Young Art Fair”), the Volta Show, SCOPE Basel and Bâlelatina. But the elephant in the room was the impending European soccer tournament, EURO 2008 – hosted this year by Switzerland and Austria – which shared time and space on its first day with Basel’s Art week. Could the worlds of art, design and soccer mix without causing a logistical disaster?
Well, bear in mind this was all happening in Switzerland …
Once more in the venerable dome of the Markthalle, this year Design Miami/Basel offered a generous and pleasing blend of the renowned and the up-and-coming, the contemporary and the classic, the solid and the ephemeral, the East and the West …
… Design and Art. The blurry lines continued to blur in Basel – so many pieces were in limited edition only, and so many pieces served no function beyond their design aesthetic.
The Homework series, by Studio Job at Moss.
Take for example the glorious Homework series from Studio Job. Produced only in a limited edition of five per piece, these oversized kitchenware objects will never be used in the way their shape might indicate.
UPDATE: read our interview with Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel of Studio Job here.
The Robber Baron series, by Studio Job
 |
 Perished bench, by Studio Job |
The neo-pastoral at Antik.
A classic: Michael Boyer’s sofa from 1971 (photo courtesy of the Galerie de Casson’s website as it was too dark for my camera)
This year, four young designers – Martino Gamper, Max Lamb, Julia Lohmann and Clemens Weisshaar & Reed Kram – shared the Design Miami Basel Designers of the Future Award in an effort to “provide a more complete picture of where design practice is heading … taking into consideration the tremendous energy in contemporary design, a field which encompasses a vast variety of compelling approaches and styles.” The award is meant to encourage the development of creative, experimental design, and this year the winners were tasked with the creation of all-new installations based on the use of concrete and wool, and to document their creation processes on video.
Max Lamb’s Solids of Revolution
Max Lamb took the weight out of the concrete by autoclaving it, producing a foamed lightweight solid when it set, and made the wool hard by felting it, producing a firm solid when it dried – thereby bringing the two contrasting materials closer to a happy medium in both effect and usability. He then turned blocks of both on a lathe to produce these stools. UPDATE: read our interview with Max Lamb!
Julia Lohmann’s Resilience
Julia Lohmann cast concrete onto a backing of woven wool, then strategically shattered the concrete so that the pieces would “only” be held together by the wool, reversing pre-conceptions about which the weaker is and which the stronger.
|
 Martino Gamper’s Terazzo Tables |
Clemens Weisshaar & Reed Kram's Vendôme Series
More Martino: Together shelves by Martino Gamper at Nilufar.
Michele de Lucchi's oak and walnut Bookshelf at Nilufar.
Peter Harvey’s Forbidden Fruit stool, apparently a prototype, at Kenny Schachter ROVE Gallery.
 |
 Joseph Heidecker's Photographic Chest and mirror from the Photofurniture series. |
Joseph Heidecker’s work is playful, but his use and manipulation of found-images is also considered by some to explore “the revealing and concealing nature in people and their construction of different ‘masks’”. Since my visit to Design Miami Basel was on its final day, I sadly missed the opportunity to have my photo-booth photos included on chairs he was assembling on-site at the Johnson Trading Gallery booth!
More Max: Hexagonal Pewter Stools by Max Lamb
The Johnson Trading Gallery also featured (very popular!) video projections detailing the creation processes for Max Lamb’s Hexagonal Pewter Stools (cast in sand on a beach on the Welsh coast, with Lamb looking like a New Age blacksmith-wizard) and Bronze Poly chairs (each carved individually from a block of polystyrene and then the polystyrene destroyed during the bronze casting process), which ably demonstrated the “one-off-edness” of each piece. UPDATE: read our interview with Max Lamb!
A metal variation on Pablo Reinoso's Spaghetti Bench at London’s Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
 |
 “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” by Studio Makkink & Bey. The sumptuous silk-wrapped furniture and paper cut-outs (NOT laser-cut – it’s all hand cut!) fuse “eastern” aesthetic with international contemporary design. |
One third of the Contrasts Gallery booth was dedicated to the work of Studio Makkink & Bey (Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey) and their new project “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”. This work, like all Contrasts Gallery pieces, was conceived of and nurtured as part of the Shanghai gallery’s residency program which brings international designers into China to explore local, traditional craft production techniques. All the pieces were manufactured in sites all over China. Bey said they had gone “to China to discover qualities we have lost ...”
UPDATE: Read our interview with Jurgen Bey of Studio Makkink & Bey here.
Another third of the Contrasts booth was occupied by Maarten Baas’s wooden Chinese pieces which we already reported on in our Milan review
A classic among classics among us: Finn Juhl’s marvelously biomorphic and sculptural (and comfortable!) Chieftan Chair (first shown in 1949) fittingly receives visitors to Danish Møbel Kunst
Gonçalo Mabunda’s The African Throne armchair.
This was one of two pieces he exhibited at Perimeter Editions, featuring deactivated weapons from his native Mozambique, welded together into a brutal, yet functional form. The commentary it represents is also brutal – the prevalence of firearms, their recycling into useful household objects, the continuing threat of violence, the dominance of men in society – but no less effective or impressive.
A fitting end to this story: this chair is not meant to feel comfortable and, like everything else this year, straddles the fine line between Art and Design. Whether such distinctions matter, or will come to matter, is a question for better minds. Hours later it was all moot in the Markthalle: the Design Miami contingent had all cleared out ahead of the other hordes who would soon arrive to watch the soccer matches of EURO 2008 on giant screens in that old venerable dome.