Culture

Prospect recommends: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design at the V&A

June 10, 2009
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You might have thought we would hear less about the much-vaunted design economy in these chastened times. This V&A show, however, chooses to focus not on the sleek mainstream, where design aspires to furnish “Cool Britannia,” but on contemporary design’s most eccentric outpost, design art.

The objects in this show—wardrobes, chairs, consoles, lanterns, chandeliers, tables, sofas, mirrors, vases and even bathtubs—take function as merely the starting point for extended forays into fantasy, history and cultural anthropology. The pieces are called design because they are dreamed up by trained designers and masquerade as household objects, but they operate as art—provoking thought, exciting our imaginations, joking, seducing and terrifying by turns. You can be charmed by Tord Boontje’s Fig Leaf Wardrobe (left), marvel at Maarten Baas’s charred mirror or Vincent Dubourg’s Napoléon à Trotinette console, or shudder at Kelly McCallum’s gold maggots in a stuffed fox’s ear.

Rather than prototypes for industrial production, these unorthodox objects are turned out in ones or twos or threes, often by hand, sometimes requiring the collaboration of teams of craftsmen. They cock a snook at many of modernism’s most cherished beliefs about ornament (“baubles, charming entertainment for a savage,” as Corbusier had it), economy and mass production. Instead, they embrace irony, excess and idiosyncrasy, and command a high price.

The show was conceived because the commercial market for these pieces has been growing substantially in recent years. But even in a recession, for those who cannot afford to buy, only to gaze, this exhibition usefully reminds us of a parallel history of taste, previously explored in the V&A’s “Baroque” exhibition, which runs sweetly alongside the austerities of minimalism, and is ready to break out anew at the first sign of affluence.

Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design is at the V&A, 14th July-18th October, tel: 0207 942 2000, www.vam.ac.uk; free

Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer