Art with a purpose

The Fig Leaf Wardrobe. Photo / Supplied

You wouldn't normally sit on your favourite sculpture. Or hang your clothes on a painting. But there's a new school of furniture design that says that's exactly what you should be doing. Well, sort of. It seems that in the 21st century, funny looking chairs, tables and shelves are the new art. So come on in, please relax, take a seat on the armchair - oh, sorry did someone say armchair? We meant the "design art".

Because that's what it's all about: "design art".

The category includes such things as a wardrobe covered in glass fig leaves, (worth around three quarters of a million dollars), a sleek and collectible steel lounger by designer Marc Newson that you too could loll about in if you had $3 million and various other wacky bits of furnishing - stools, shelves, candle holders - that will set your bank account back around the same amount as a relatively fancy piece of contemporary wall art.

And though some design aficionados love design art and pay big bucks for it, others - art world insiders among them - hate it and say it's a big con so dealers can extract more money out of art collectors.

So what exactly is this marvellous stuff and why is it causing so much debate?

Other names for interiors-oriented art, which has been much hyped for the past few years, include limited edition, collectible, one-off or art furniture; it's also been described as the "haute couture of the design world" and the work of so-called "blue chip designers".

A simpler definition might be pieces of furniture that blur the lines between art and design. This includes classics of 20th century design as well as avant-garde contemporary pieces.

But mostly, your definition of design art really depends where you're coming from. "Design art is a very broad category that includes limited edition furniture and other limited edition items such as lamps and vases," explains Vicki Vuleta who runs Design55 furniture showroom in Newton with long-time art dealer, Gary Langsford. There they stock the likes of work by the Campana Brothers from Brazil, who were recently named Designers of the Year at Design Miami 2008, one of the most important events for dealers in design art.

"The appeal is its uniqueness and rarity. And unlike classic furniture designs from the 20th century, like the Barcelona chair or the Eames chair, these limited edition items will not be reproduced in their thousands by either the original manufacturers or some unscrupulous manufacturers in Asia."

Katy Wallace, a designer and former board member at Objectspace (she curated a show of some of the most interesting contemporary furniture in New Zealand there last year), points out the difficulties in defining design art.

As she puts it, "problems arise when titles such as "design art" are created. (Because the category) will always be blurred by differing opinions."

After all, it comes down to the different definitions of design, art and craft and the various kinds of crossover between all three - a tricky business at the best of times.

Hawkes Bay-based furniture designer, David Trubridge, explains this blurry nature further. "As I see it, there are a number of different sorts of design art," he says. The worst includes: "the objectmaker who can't be bothered with the rigours of function and thinks he or she can justify its existence by calling it art. This is lazy nonsense and only displays an utter ignorance of art.

"Then there's the designer who does one-off designs that are made under contract by skilled craftspeople and that come up for sale by auction or in dedicated galleries. This has been big in London."

The best examples of this sort of thing include the Fig Leaf Wardrobe, described above. Based on the idea of wild "fantasy furniture" made at the turn of the 18th century when craftsmen would compete with one another for wealthy patrons, the outrageous cupboard was designed by modern Dutch designer, Tord Boontje.

Its bronze-branch interiors were sculpted in France, the insides upholstered in England with specially dyed and painted silk and each of the 616 unique glass fig leaves were hand-painted by some of the last remaining fine enamel painters in Britain.

For a cool $750,000, this mad mix of design, craft and art can be yours - of course, that's after standing in line; because of the artisan work required, only three wardrobes can be made a year.

Along with several other beautifully made, exclusive and expensive bits of furniture, the Fig Leaf Wardrobe was commissioned by a British firm called Meta, an offshoot of a 143-year-old antiques company called Mallett. Basically the company had noticed their customers were becoming more interested in contemporary design and wanted to create some antiques-to-be of their own. The process took Mallett three years and cost them millions.

And even though objects such as these are clearly of pretty incredible quality, it is another of the reasons why design art gets a bad rap.

"Design-art is a commercial phenomenon, not a cultural one," writes Alice Rawsthorn, the design specialist for the International Herald Tribune, based in Paris. "It's a label adopted by auction houses in the hope of flogging limited-edition furniture for higher prices than it would muster if relegated to the unfashionable category of "decorative arts". And it has been very effective, commercially at least."

Auction houses have driven the trade in design art "with great ingenuity", Rawsthorn says.

Somewhat ironically, this is another thing that has given design art more credibility and crossover potential - the way in which it is being sold by auction houses, often for the sorts of prices "real" art would fetch. In 2005 an oak and glass table by Italian designer Carlo Mollino sold for almost NZ$8 million at auction, a record for a piece of modern furniture - and perfect for putting under your Picasso, one imagines.

Then there's the way design art has been included in various art fairs around the world, including events attached to important American and European events such as Art Basel, Art Basel Miami and the Frieze art fair in London, which now has the DesignArt London fair happening around the same time.

As Vuleta of Design55 says, "[Design art] presents a great opportunity for collectors, particularly those interested in three-dimensional works and already there have been some spectacular capital gains in this area."

Design art is now being shown in proper art galleries. Several of the most powerful galleries in the world now represent designers as well as bona fide artists - these include the Gagosian in New York which represents designer Marc Newson alongside their other artists, the estate of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys among them, and the influential Haunch of Venison in London which represents British designer, Stuart Haygarth.

All of which brings "design" as we know it, closer to "art".

At the top of this pile of fascinating furniture and wacky homeware and we find the best "design art", or perhaps that most worthy of the more illustrious title.

This, Trubridge maintains, is "design with content", by which he means an object that is utilitarian, like a chair, but which also tells some sort of a story. That is, you can sit on the darn thing without hurting yourself and it also makes a meaningful statement, raises issues, makes you wonder or maybe greases the wheels of cultural evolution in the same way the best art does.

One of the earliest examples of this might be Smoke, a range of furniture presented by Dutch design-wunderkind, Maarten Baas in 2004.

Basically the collection involved Baas singeing or burning whole bits of furniture than sealing them with resin, so that you can use them even though they've been blackened.

As Britain's Independent newspaper reported recently, "Baas saw Smoke as a way of exploring the notion of beauty.

Today, consumer goods such as furniture are considered worthless once they become worn or damaged, but Baas wanted to see if an object could be made more beautiful by partially destroying it."

Baas' cunning plan worked. His burnt, Baroque dining chairs will now set you back a couple of thousand and a torched armchair around $6000 or more.

And Trubridge points out another expression of local design art: traditional Maori artefacts and furnishings.

"Look at bone carvings," he enthuses. "It's a marriage of design and art, where it tells a story and has cultural content but is also functional."

In New Zealand we're obviously not quite so mad for this sort of stuff - yet. For now businesses like the Art & Object auction house, Objectspace, Minima Design and Vuleta and Langsford's Design55 are advocates for design art and some of our local art galleries may present design-related exhibitions - such as designer Humphrey Ikin, whose work is considered by many to be an example of the best of "design art", is often exhibited in art galleries.

And Wallace points out what locals making one-off pieces of furniture can earn in New Zealand for their work is still pretty minimal when compared to prices overseas, and definitely when compared to prices for local, contemporary art.

Nonetheless it doesn't seem like a design trend that will go away anytime soon, despite tough economic times.

"There is certainly room for expansion in this area with awareness growing through the efforts of progressive auction houses," Wallace notes.

By all accounts, despite fears about less spending, it sounds like the various international events specialising in design art have been doing just fine - even if the hype, and some of the more incredible prices, is dying down a little. Iin some cases market-watchers have commented that design art has been selling better than fine art.

Which naturally makes the staunch supporters of design art happy.

For years the design world has been trying to expand its definitions, writes one of the best known international advocates of design art, New York design retailer and collector Murray Moss; he's a champion of Baas and his smoked chairs.

This trend, Moss says, allows us, "to not relegate art solely to those flat canvases one can hang on one's wall over one's purely "functional" sofa." And, he says it allows designers "the opportunity to evolve from simply being our society's slavish problem solvers to - at their best - simultaneously being our poets."

Trubridge agrees the best of this sort of furniture raises plenty of interesting issues. "Maybe it tells a beautiful story, maybe you pass it down to the family; it might make us re-evaluate craftsmanship. Basically it's all adding to our understanding of design and making."

None of which is a bad thing - especially for those with bank accounts bulky enough to allow them to hang their frocks on copper branches inside a leaf-covered closet.

Is it a chair? Or can you call it design art? A bluffer's guide.

* A funny looking pottery vase made at art class in Hawke's Bay hand-crafted but not necessarily designed.

* An original Eames chair Beautifully designed and expensive but not necessarily handcrafted.

* An installation in a contemporary art gallery that includes an office chair inspires consideration and conversation and you could sit on it, but you probably won't. Plus it isn't intended as furniture, nor for reproduction.

* A chair that looks like a huge green mushroom. But when you try to sit on it, you slide off. Not design because it doesn't work. Possibly art. And depending on how it was made, it could qualify as craft. Mostly just silly though.

* A very expensive Italian leather sofa the only deep and meaningful statement this makes is about the owner's bank account.

* A table made, or decorated, by a local artist Tricky! Is it good looking and well designed? Does it make you think about anything other than whether to put your cup of tea down there?

* A table by local furniture designers that looks a little different. There are dozens in the store sorry, it's probably not design art. The term implies exclusivity.

* A Fig Leaf wardrobe amazingly hand-crafted and there are only three in the world. But does it have any intellectual trappings or address any issues in contemporary culture?

* A Smoke chair by Maarten Baas interesting design, handcrafted and, hey, it makes you think. There's integrity of creativity and function plus there's an intellectual component to it.

* A Stuart Haygarth lampshade interesting design, made in a fascinating way and as it's made out of plastic debris washed up on the beach, it also makes you think about modern life. Plus nobody will ever be able to make one exactly the same as this.