Offjects
Decorative Arts Museum. Barcelona, Andorra
OFFJECTS
Concepts and desingns for a change of century
The exhibition might have arisen from a joke by Hal Foster in his book Design and Crime (2002). Talking about Adolf Loos, with his famous Ornament and Crime (1908), Foster makes the following point: “Those who use the urn as a “urinal” are the designers of Art Nouveau, who want to infuse art (the urn) into the utilitarian object (the urinal). Those who do the opposite are the modern functionalists, who want to elevate the utilitarian object (the urinal) into art (the urn). A few years later, with his dysfunctional urinal Fountain, presented as art, Marcel Duchamp took the wind out of everyone’s sails, but that is another story”. And that other story is precisely what we are trying to discover in “Offjects”.
Creuats/Cruzados/Crossed
2003. CCCB Barcelona
Creuats/Cruzados/Crossed.New avant-garde design territories
The frontiers between the traditional disciplines of design are blurring. This interdisciplinary space, at times vague, at times unclassifiable, engendering all sorts of exchanges, blends, transactions, frictions and superimpositions, sketches a map of the territory with new points of convergence and new crossings of information and action, and suggests heretofore unexplored paths of investigation.
Hidden Graphics
HIDDEN GRAPHICS
commissioner: Jaume Pujagut - Òscar Guayabero