Exhibition Reviews

to the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins College of Art
and Design abounded in the exhibition, and many of the featured
designers arrived in London as students at those institutions, and
then stayed. What “Super Contemporary” unintentionally suggested,
then, is that rather than celebrating the increasingly restrictive city
itself, perhaps it is the role of London’s design schools that merits
closer examination.

Design Real
Serpentine Gallery, London, November 26, 2009–
February 7, 2010.

Reviewed by Shirley Surya

DOI: 10.2752/175470810X12863771378996

Shirley Surya is an M.A. The buzz about Design Real was largely due to its status as the first
Student at the Royal
show to focus on contemporary design at the Serpentine Gallery,
College of Art, specializing
in the history of design. famed for its conceptual art shows and commissioned pavilions. Yet
shirley.surya@network.rca. inviting a noted industrial designer like Konstantin Grcic to curate such
ac.uk
a show demonstrated an awareness of landmark exhibitions such as
Machine Art (1934) curated by Philip Johnson at the Museum of
Modern Art and Mathematica: A World of Numbers . . . and Beyond
(1961) curated by the Eames Office for IBM at the California Museum
of Science and Industry. In the context of historical precedents and
today’s prevalent design shows, Design Real had surprisingly fresh
insights to offer by atypically raising often-destabilizing yet necessary
ontological questions about design.
By claiming the centrality of “the importance of good design,”
and selecting the exhibits based on the criteria of having “a practical
function in everyday life,” the show’s opening thesis seemed, at first,
narrow and didactic. Yet its method of installing and communicating
the selected forty-three items incited playful ambivalence and mul-
tiple readings that went beyond the aestheticization of products or
linear design narratives typical of design shows. From Zaha Hadid’s
plastic shoes to the titanium-plastic heart implant (present only in
the form of a fold-over card with the words “unavailable for loan”),
items ranged from the authored, attractive, and extravagant, to the
technologically driven, anonymous, and anti-aesthetic, representing
Design and Culture

fields such as healthcare, transportation, and leisure.

Items were arranged in the U-plan gallery space without any cat-
egorical or hierarchical division, in a non-linear and unlikely fashion,
with surprising contrasts and shifts of scale that expressed their
animated diversity and individuality. With a soulless electric sports
car battery on the floor next to a transparent polycarbonate lamp at
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the entrance, the tip of an advanced ceramic blade knifed through

 Exhibition Reviews

Figure 1
Installation view, Design Real, Serpentine Gallery, November 26, 2009 –
February 7, 2010. Photograph courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery.

a chipboard plinth, and a mechanical welding robot staring down a

sleek donut-shaped humidifier, the items were installed to induce a
focused engagement with their physicality and performance. Such
an encounter was intensified through semantic incongruity by the
use of broad generic headings printed on the wall – such as “Bed,”
“Mask,” or “Heart” – for each highly specific item, and by displaying
only one component of the entire object for some items. For a
heading such as “Bed,” one would expect a set of mattress and
frame, not a polymer bed spring system hung flat on the wall, while
a three-meter long helical fin horizontally suspended from the ceiling
resembled an elegant piece of sculpture more than a component of
a wind turbine.
The fractional form and separation of the complete data from the
exhibit (apart from a one-page list of credits for every item available
at the entrance) not only questioned one’s assumptions of “good,”
“real,” “functional,” or “purposeful” design but also exposed the
viewers’ established object-language systems as the notion of a
Design and Culture

word and an item did not overlap. But the gallery’s central space,
which included stacked sandbags as seating and television monitors
that broadcast statements on global issues, provided Kindle readers
through which visitors could engage with the exhibits in greater
depth. The generic headings of the exhibits became entry points on
the Kindle through which visitors could click their way into an online
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database of each item’s technical, social and cultural significance.

 Exhibition Reviews

While these data revealed each item’s broader relevance to

society and culture, as posited by the show’s thesis, the above
experience is not a representative one. For those who made no
reference to the list of credits or the online database, objects on
view would be perceived very differently. Yet could such room for
slippage in the show’s positions on “design” be of any value to how
the mercurial state of design today maybe communicated today?
With the increasing hyper-specialization of design, and the inter-
dependence between products, services, industries and politics, it
seems that only a narrative characterized by a lack of philosophical
unity may truly reflect the realities of design. Perhaps only through
the breaking-down of entrenched Modernist meanings of design can
we rethink the concepts of “good” or “real” design. But whether or
not the license for such ontological exercise is only possible in the
setting of an art gallery, or whether design exhibitions could reinvent
their typically pedagogical and prescriptive agenda through more
poetically imaginative means that allow discursiveness, are ques-
tions worth pursuing – and ones that the show effectively raised.
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