’RE-CONSIDERING CANON’ Exhibition
The Design Museum, London
15-23 September 2018
in collaboration with Gallery FUMI
as part of the London Design Festival 2018
The Design Museum
Curator Polina Angelova | the Design Museum, London
Polina Angelova is one of the curators of the ‘Re-Considering Canon’ Exhibition which was on display 15-23 September 2018 in London at the Design Museum as part of the London Design Festival 2018. The Re-Considering Canon exhibition is a result of a year-long research project by MA Curating Contemporary Design and the Design Museum, London. The project shows how selecting and collecting in museums are part of the process of understanding creative practice, as a reaction to the world around us and as a way to write history. Following decades of questioning, critiquing and rejecting the institutional canon as an instrument of power, the project reconsiders the relevance of canonization today. It interrogates the structures and mechanisms, the decision makers and their intentions, the benefactors, and those forgotten or rejected equally.
Curators are creating new canons from the ever-widening body of contemporary work, telling stories hitherto untold, and reflecting the changing structures and systems, attitudes and values of society.
As with the overlapping repetition in a musical canon, designers often revisit examples of the design canon, build on the past or consciously reject it. An expressed rejection is still a response and illustrates the power of the canon.
Line Chair by Alex Hull | Curator Polina Angelova
Line Chair by Alex Hull was a commission curated by Polina Angelova and created especially for the ‘Re-Considering Canon’ exhibition at the Design Museum, London, as part of the London Design Festival 2018.
Invited by Curator Polina Angelova to respond to the aesthetic philosophy of Frank Gehry’s architecture and his belief in Visual Chaos, Alex Hull was challenged to create a contemporary design object that addresses Chaos and expresses the pleasure of unease.
Created by a single, fast, continuous movement of a pen on paper, Hull’s work is usually characterised by strictly controlled organic curves. In this instance, Polina Angelova’s curatorial brief called for relinquishing some degree of control and expressing movement through the chaotic imperfections that Gehry finds so beautiful. The Line Chair by Alex Hull was born out of the struggle between the overriding internal need to control the line and the attempt to let go, allowing the inertia to take over the hand movement at the end.
By setting up her curatorial proposal, Polina Angelova inspired a whole new series of chairs, tables, and benches created by Alex Hull including the Line Bench which is currently on display at Gallery FUMI, in London and was created in 2020.
Polina Angelova is one of the curators of the ‘Re-Considering Canon’ Exhibition which was on display 15-23 September 2018 in London at the Design Museum as part of the London Design Festival 2018.
Dean Sudjic for the ‘Re-Considering Canon’ Exhibition
Director, the Design Museum, London
Henry Cole, founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum and prime mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851, used the term ‘canon’ in his account of the choices that he and his colleagues made when they began the collection that proved to be the starting point for the world’s first design museum. They purchased what they presented as the best of the exhibits from the Crystal Palace displays. Cole was choosing objects that could be used to define a set of principles to offer students and manufacturers guidance. This was a time when mass production and mechanisation had disrupted the visual conventions of handcraft, built up over many generations, much as the digital explosion has disrupted those of our own time.
The term has religious connotations; canon law was the way in which religious orthodoxy was defended from heresy. Literature, art, architecture and music have all operated until recently in the understanding that certain key works constitute the canon; they are the works by which all new work is measured. Over the years the emergence of design history as a distinct discipline has also created some kind of Canon. It would certainly include a large number of chairs, from Thonet to Ray and Charles Eames, and might also feature a Citroen DS 19, Dieter Rams’ ‘snow white’s coffin’ radiogram, a Valentine typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King, manufactured by Olivetti. More recently it will have been expanded to include the Helvetica font and a first-generation iPhone.
As an institution that began its life as a temporary guest in the Boilerhouse of the Victoria and Albert Museum surrounded, at least psychologically, by the four million items in its collection, the Design Museum cannot but have been shaped by the idea of a design canon, even if only in reaction against it.
Curator Polina Angelova and Dean Sudjic – Director, the Design Museum, London
Curator Polina Angelova, Polina Parshina and Alex Hull, Hull Studio | Re-Considering Canon Exhibition, the Design Museum, London
CONCEPT
Design canon can be described as the history of design told through the practice of selecting and interpreting by curators. The objects that form the design canon are often considered outstanding examples of design with an enduring influence on society and culture.
As a way of questioning the contemporary relevance of design canon in the practice of designers, Polina Angelova and her MA curation colleagues, in collaboration with Gallery FUMI, invited nine designers to create new works responding to a selection of canonical objects. The range of responses demonstrated how designers are influenced by and expand on design history.
Polina Angelova interviewed four international curators to explore the changing approaches to design canon and the selection criteria for writing tomorrow’s design history. The special thanks to the curators who participated in her interview series are Knut Astrup Bull (Nasjonalmuseet – Chief Curator at the National Museum of Norway), Joseph Becker (Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – SFMoMA), Nadezhda Dzhakova (Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art – SAMCA), Maria Vassileva (Sofia City Art Gallery).
The guiding questions in the research process for the interview series were: how are designers shaping tomorrow’s world and what are the methods of curators to capture this practice? Who is taking part in this process and has the power to decide? In a diverse and complex world, can we still refer to a single canon or should we consider multiple canons that influence each other?
The guiding questions in the research process for the interview series were: how are designers shaping tomorrow’s world and what are the methods of curators to capture this practice? Who is taking part in this process and has the power to decide? In a diverse and complex world, can we still refer to a single canon or should we consider multiple canons that influence each other?
The term has religious connotations; canon law was the way in which religious orthodoxy was defended from heresy. Literature, art, architecture and music have all operated until recently in the understanding that certain key works constitute the canon; they are the works by which all new work is measured. Over the years the emergence of design history as a distinct discipline has also created some kind of Canon. It would certainly include a large number of chairs, from Thonet to Ray and Charles Eames, and might also feature a Citroen DS 19, Dieter Rams’ ‘snow white’s coffin’ radiogram, a Valentine typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King, manufactured by Olivetti. More recently it will have been expanded to include the Helvetica font and a first-generation iPhone.
ABOUT ‘RE-CONSIDERING CANON’
The exhibition Re-Considering Canon is a result of a year-long research project by MA Curating Contemporary Design and the Design Museum, London. The project shows how selecting and collecting in museums are part of the process of understanding creative practice, as a reaction to the world around us and as a way to write history. Following decades of questioning, critiquing and rejecting the institutional canon as an instrument of power, the project reconsiders the relevance of canonisation today. It interrogates the structures and mechanisms, the decision makers and their intentions, the benefactors, and those forgotten or rejected equally.
Curators are creating new canons from the ever-widening body of contemporary work, telling stories hitherto untold, and reflecting the changing structures and systems, attitudes and values of society.
As with the overlapping repetition in a musical canon, designers often revisit examples of the design canon, build on the past or consciously reject it. An expressed rejection is still a response and illustrates the power of the canon.
Polina Angelova, Sam Pratt & Valerio Capo, Polina Parshina & Alex Hull | Re-Considering Canon Exhibition, the Design Museum, London
Polina Angelova, Curator Ameena McConnell and Nadezhda Dzhakova the Re-Considering Canon Exhibition, the Design Museum, London
Gallery FUMI
Established by Sam Pratt & Valerio Capo
Contemporary Design Gallery, Mayfair, London
In addition to a theoretical exploration of these questions, the collaboration with Gallery FUMI allowed an invaluable direct engagement with current practice by embarking on a commissioning process with nine designers. The new work produced for the exhibition addressed the relevance of design history or canon for contemporary practice, as well as its borders and fields of influence. The designers relate to and query the criteria for selection, not only by museums but also by the commercial market and the manufacturing industry. The question of selection criteria was also posed to a large number of international design curators whose responses highlight the relevance of canonisation but equally show an unease, and even rejection, of an institutional canon. The exhibition emphasises the need to consider the plurality of canons in a continuous process of revision, extension and diversification.
About Gallery FUMI
Gallery FUMI is a contemporary design gallery based in Mayfair, London.
Established in 2008 by directors Sam Pratt and Valerie Capo, the gallery focuses on high-level, conceptually and aesthetically audacious contemporary designers and artists, each one encompassing the value of craftsmanship, traditional techniques and innovative new technologies. Objects are usually hand-made by the designer, in a small workshop context, or in a small batch production by specialist craft practitioners. Many use traditional techniques such as carving, glassblowing, cabinetry, lacquering and meticulous hand assemblage. Others would also disassemble, burn or apply digital technologies in their making. Gallery FUMI emphasises the satisfying tactile as well as the purely visual. Great significance is placed on the emotional as well as the practical value of craft.
Curator Polina Angelova, the Design Museum, London
About Alex Hull, Hull Studio
Hull Studio is a multidisciplinary Design Studio with an ethos that lies in exploring the relationship between traditional craftsmanship, modern technology and organic design.
Hull Studio specialises in the design, prototyping, bespoke furniture and unique finishes for superyacht, residential and contract projects.
In 2012 Alex Hull, Polina Parshina and David Winter set up Hull Studio. Alex Hull is the creative director of Hull Studio. He is focusing on contemporary design and pushing the craft to its absolute limit.