Cooper Hewitt's triennial design exhibit looks at 'Beauty'
NEW YORK - Every three years, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum offers visitors the chance to take a good, long look at the state of contemporary design.
With the dizzyingly expansive theme "Beauty," the latest triennial, on view in New York through Aug. 21 and then opening at the San Jose Museum of Art on Oct. 7, features hundreds of works from around the world, from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural inventions.
"The focus is on works from the past three years by both emerging and established practitioners who are pushing the boundaries and showing where things seem to be going," said Andrea Lipps, who curated the show with Ellen Lupton.
Many of the works interact with viewers or the environment, and involve multiple senses. Here, beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but in the touch of a finger or the sniff of a nose.
The show makes the case that "aesthetic innovation can drive change … Objects of beauty exalt the experience of living," Lipps said.
"So much of beauty is about sensual experience."
The show, which extends across two floors of the museum, is divided into seven "lenses" of beauty. "Extravagant," ''intricate" and "ethereal" are on the first floor and in the elevator, while "transgressive," "emergent," "elemental" and "transformative" take the third floor.
Starting with "extravagant" beauty, the show opens with a dramatic, polychromatic tulle skirt and a red 1950s pajama top by designer Giambattista Valli, known for his intense romanticism combining a sense of fantasy with simple clean lines. It is juxtaposed with stark black-and-white images of hairstyles designed by Guido Palau.
Nearby, in "ethereal," milliner Maiko Takeda's surreal headgear resembles giant fuzzy caterpillars, with bristles of thinly shredded acetate tinted with color gradients to evoke a sort of delicate synthetic fur that undulates with the slightest breeze.
In a long corridor around the corner, the museum commissioned Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolaas to create "Smell, The Beauty of Decay: Smellscape Central Park 2015." An unassuming off-white expanse of wall, covered in paint imbued with scents gathered in the park, exudes the almost-tangible scents of flowers, hot dogs or even horse manure depending on where it's rubbed.
The "Beauty" catalog says that for Tolaas, "Smell is information. She composes provocative smells to stimulate memory, recreate place, capture seasonality, and arouse emotional and intellectual responses."
Upstairs, the "transgressive" section starts with a collection of bold and blindingly bright beaded creatures dubbed "Afreaks" that look like they just strolled in off the pages of some African Dr. Seuss book. The pieces, which evoke feelings of joy and possibility, are by the Los Angeles-based Haas Brothers (twins Nikolai and Simon Haas) in collaboration with a group of artists from South Africa who call themselves the "Haas Sisters."
A little further on, the exploration of beauty delves into the depths of conventional ugliness. Juxtaposed with the smile-inducing "Afreaks" are works created using jagged black iron filings by Dutch designer Jolan van der Wiel. Van der Wiel uses oppositional forces of gravity and magnetism to create organic, armored forms - including stools and, in collaboration with Iris van Herpen, shoes and dresses - made from a composite of iron filings and plastic or ceramic.
"These are very prickly and primordial forms. They are so ugly they really do cross over into beautiful," Lipps said.
In the "emergent" gallery are 3-D-printed pieces in glass by Neri Oxman and her team at MIT. Working at the intersection of computational design, robotic fabrication, materials engineering and synthetic biology, they have created a series of "wearable, synthetic organ systems that could help humans survive the harsh conditions found on distant planets." At first glance, the detailed works in glass resemble some type of space-age clothing, or enormous sculpted scarves; up close, they look like wearable human organs, complete with what appear to be capillaries or intestinal tracts.
In the "transformative" section, the British design team TheUnseen has created a leather jacket printed in color-changing ink that responds to environmental conditions. Layered to look like a strange sort of plumage, it slowly changes from black to peacock hues of blue, turquoise and purple depending on the movement of the wind around it.
"It's about using color and form to express these different worlds beyond the eye, the ear and the nose, beyond what we as humans see," says Lauren Bowker, founder of the design team, interviewed in the catalog.
Said Lipps: "Beauty is really a response in the viewer to the idea of sensual experience. And it is manifest in an incredibly rich diversity of forms and interpretations."