Ugly Design

If we were to retrospect about the charm of the unfinished and the seemingly ugly or fragmented, we would certainly look back to the 19th century, to ruinophilia and excavation, to the admiration of objects of a collapsed past, of non-utilitarian spaces and of objects unknown to people at large, instances that required the accustomed spectator to clarify the meaning of the findings and include them in a frame of reference. Admiration for the unfinished, the ugly and the weird is usually the meeting point of past and present and subsequently a place where object and user/spectator can communicate. Ugly design now has many practitioners and we could say it has become a trend, merging the sociopolitical with the aesthetic. Networks of corporealities and textures create unique, collectible even, objects which stylistically can be categorised under the term ugly design.

Artists who produce such objects aim to oppose the mass and uniform character of modern architecture and design. More specifically, it is an objection to the perfect and polished material or even to the digital imprint, that opens a discussion concerning the level on which the objects surrounding us should be more beautiful and perfect than our lives themselves. What is it that they communicate, what makes them useful and why do we tend to be attracted to the simple and unchallenging?

As design critic Stephen Bayley writes in his 2013 article for Architectural Review, Ugly: Aesthetics of Everything, “the strange truth is: too much beauty would be intolerable, an awful world of meticulously cropped lawns and starched linen.” Furthermore, Collins says that the digital age has sparked within us a desire to touch the materials, to make our hands dirty and to create objects from clay. By relating the latter phrase to historic presences of the 20th century we can perhaps locate the initial stages of ugly design in the 40s, particularly in 1949, in the ART BRUT text-manifesto by Jean Dubuffet titled “unrefined art, preferred to the cultural arts“. According to Dubuffet “we are now at a strictly unrefined artistic process which is invented anew by the creator and with his natural drives as a starting point”, and for an object to be invented it must be distant from cultural exemplars. Similarly, Design in the last decades has been a field in search of a new aesthetic direction.

Otto Dix, Skat Players, 1920 | Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo Credit_ Erich Lessing _ Art Resource, NY _ © Estate of Otto Dix _ SODRAC (2018)

As characteristically described by Jonas Nyffenegger (cofounder along Sebastien Mathys of @uglydesign, a very successful instagram account) “such an earnest world is boring and such an eccentric, exhausting. Both are needed. I think we need to search for a new aesthetic.” It is historically accepted that the search for a new aesthetic, the formation of a new vocabulary, outline political and social disruption. Chris Schanck notes astutely that imperfect design evokes the failure of late-stage Capitalism.

An important starting point for ugly design was the period after WWII where handmade products and non-industrial objects (unlike readymades and Bauhaus) were necessary for the field of design. Designers, potters and sculptors such as George Nakashima, Peter Voulkos, Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abkanowicz, created objects emphasising their material aspect and the process of inventing new objects. Between 1960-70 design spread to Italy and in 1980 the famous collective Memphis Design was founded by architects, designers, carpenters and writers. Its founder, Italian Ettore Sottsass, believed that postmodernism is one of the most important “dedications” to ugliness that the western world of architecture and design had faced (reference to Robert Venturi). Finally, it is important to note that the particular group of designers was deeply influenced by movements such as ArtDeco, Pop-Art, Kitsch and of course by the radical post-minimalism of the 70s and 80s.

In the decades of its existence, Ugly Design has kept a critical stance through every age, taking part even in contemporary burning issues such as climate change, social inequalities, political disruptions, and the out-of-control exploitation of workers. Contemporary creators of objects such as Chris Wolston and Ketie Stout, reexamine their materials and make a turn towards the raw material, a turn ideologically common with that of art brut (matièrism). They incorporate the experimentalism of new textures, through the rediscovery and reinvention of shapes and materials. The handiwork, seemingly ugly and useless, bears the message of a new aesthetic and a dialectic about the economy of matter since we consider contemporary concerns through aesthetics and subsequently consider through aesthetics the distancing from strictly functionalistic standards that are cut off from modern reality. Thus it is easier to relate these objects with the ideological aspects of neo-dada and less with pop art.

These connections are expressed by ugly design’s creators themselves, like for example Katie Stout, who calls her work naive-pop, associates her work with the period after the end of WWI and particularly with Dada, of which its absurdity she finds logical since nothing made sense anymore. Furthermore, we wouldn’t be amiss to make a connection between ugly design and works by Otto Dix or kitsch in general, which (like Baroque) followed an age of apparent aesthetic prime as an expression of political failure. A synonym for tasteless and provocative, it constituted an aesthetic stance that used populist and outdated patterns and forms fused in a new corpus to communicate something different with the same means. As Nyffenegger and Mathys say, new designers must embrace experimentation and stop being afraid that they might create something ugly, adding that “if everything was beautiful, nothing would be”.

Katie Stout Pink Pulp Vanity + Stool | 2015 Nina Johnson

So much the association of ugly design with the visual arts and especially with avant-garde movements, as much as the fact of every object’s uniqueness, beg the question of whether ugly objects are only (anti-)aesthetic. If, in the end, it is a contemporary form of art, perhaps of sculpture or installation, or a new product for aspiring collectors, or something functional that anyone can access. The answer came from Bellavance-Lecompte, Canadian architect and cofounder of Nomad, Carwangallery, Oeuffice, A-trio and Samare. He condemns the question of art against design as something dull, saying that the important thing is what one experiences when one encounters an object. Each experience is personal and referencing fair Nomad, in particular, he says that works of art and design coexist in a dialogue of customs and techniques. However, it’s interesting to think about the attendance numbers of a specialised audience for Nomad in particular (3,800 collectors, dealers, and art/design enthusiasts) to give an answer to the question of art against design.

From an art market perspective as well as from the social aspect of an object and its ability to be critical of society, we might be able to speak about art forms that are quite radical but within the institutional context. It’s important to note that ugly design opens up a discussion about trauma and not only social, apropos of colonialist and capitalist symbols which follow the course of design, but apropos of climate change too. The shift towards sustainability and materials that are friendly to the environment characterises today’s design, while the objects in question are not only artistic presences but are functional as well. Collectors furnish their houses with design pieces and live among them without placing them in display cases or exhibition spaces. They are not functionalistic in the Bauhaus way but are functional and constitute life choices that other than being of collectable value, owing to their uniqueness or the distinction of the creator, they personalise space and given all that has been mentioned, could be considered mouthpieces for the ideology and personality of their owner.

Robert Rauschenberg. Charlene_1954

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Αθήνα

• https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-revolution-ugly-design-upendingconventions-

beauty

• https://flash---art.com/2020/03/is-collectible-design-a-new-form-of-contemporary-artnomad-

st-moritz-3rd-edition/

• https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/can-i-sit-on-it-thoughts-on-collectible-design