This week: the passing of a nonpareil genius, an earthquake, a solar eclipse, auctions, addressed in a staccato manner out of respect for the man who has passed. But, first:
Housekeeping:
I’m the 12th topmost design newsletter according to
— thank you to Substack. Here is the list: https://substack.com/top/design. Every newsletter ahead of me on these standings appears to be either written by a chick or is about UX design. So what I am saying is that I am top boy.Subscribe to the newsletter paid tier for the best and most thorough design education you can get outside of Cambridge, Ma. or New Haven, Ct.
I researched out and wrote a nice long brand history of Stone Island over for my friends at Ssense. SI is fascinating, and goes on forever. Much of what I found written about SI in my research (not books) tended to be about the novelty of the subcultures based around it. Only some IG posts went deep on the clothes. The subculture stuff is interesting, but not as interesting as other subcultures—say, skinheads. What’s more fascinating, and what requires more depth, is the work. I tried to; thank you to my editor, Ross, and Archie, whose SI archive is featured in the story and is worth spending time with.
I also weighed in on the Donald Judd (Foundation)—Kim Kardashian lawsuit for my latest Dwell Magazine column, thank you to my editor, Duncan. Pit beef. Some have said it was unfair Judd went after Kardashian, but I don’t think this was a bully pulpit; the Foundation was just being sticky about grammar. It is nice, if brutal, to see someone in the design world give a real shit about USAGE. Imagine if more people in this country, irrespective of social rank or net worth, were taken to court over grammar. The law isn’t the answer… but maybe this fixes some problems.
Hats are for sale: https://snakeusa.bigcartel.com/product/embroidered-fanclub-hat-white—buy one today.
Decent showing for Ferrari.
Not going to Salone; too much work keeping me in New York—as well as the eclipse. (Was breathtaking….) Happy to report from the next one, get at me if want to make it happen.
Gaetano Pesce
Gaetano Pesce and his work prompt a lot of thinking to begin with. He passed last week at the age of 84. He worked until the end, made very good stuff until the end. There is a lot to say… I would say initially what’s really worth remarking is how special… and correct it has been, lately, that his work has been… digested and understood, shared and loved and revered greatly by lots of young people, people outside the design world, people in it… many people, this past… I’d say… seven years. It is one of those rare situations when everyone is right. That happens now and then. (It does.) What is nice about it, beyond the work itself, is that it slashes through the stale idea that often pops up outside design, and, sometimes, within it, that items more left of center than an Eames or an Ultrafragola have a moat around them, and are not able to be understood, and are hidden… and that the world at large is more comfortable with bad furniture. This wasn’t the case with Pesce.
More than this. If one looks at Pesce’s work—there is so, so much… but for our purposes, we can look at his output over the past 45 years, in resin specifically, when his items became less encumbered and more free…—so much of it is completely on (or over) the edge. It is out there… it is wild. Lines aren’t straight, shapes are (at first blush) half considered… colors meld… pieces seem off the cuff. Work seems irreplicable. It is arresting. But beneath all of this is an insane, all-time level of formal grounding here—the half-shapes, like his shaggy lamps:
Simply work organically… as do the shaggier tropicalplant-like lamps, the oblong and choppy and round table, the orange meeting red meeting blue and yellow. All the work makes more and more sense the longer you look. And it all looks direct. Not overstated… but flowering. (On a formal level this is breathtaking. Almost no one has done this with furniture.) But beyond the X and Y axes, and beneath (or through) all his work there is a… humane and optimistic (or, if you want, beautiful and alive) quality that shines through even more than this. These aren’t happy pieces, that would understate them. They are just vibrating on a much higher frequency, full of light. It is rare for avant-garde work to be so… for lack of better word… positive. His were. Just look at this chair:
Tell me after looking at that that there there isn’t a wide open universe for where design could go. For anything. This is unbelievable work.
For a while, after writing my profile of Pesce (in GQ, last year’s issue), I mentioned him often in this newsletter, regularly, in glowing terms, whenever an item of his came up in auction (about 100 items have been listed since Friday; way more than usual), and in so doing, thought a bit that I may have been rooked (or charmed) by my interview subject… as is often the case in this business… and so sat down with it. Was it that? I don’t know; we didn’t talk about anything else besides his work, and it was all fairly cordial… besides, it’s not like we watched Longhorns games together. It’s more that… sitting in his studio (for just one afternoon) and reading everything I could find about him (for a few days)… I did get slightly more insight here into the work… and when the piece was done, I got to look at these items in a different way. Much of the press about Pesce in the past, gee whiz, 30 years, was him talking about his thought process (why he changes his mind, why he’s a futurist) and not about the specific decisions that go into some specific pieces. (If you’re curious, this Q&A, by Emmanuel Olunkwa at Pin-Up, was the best piece I read.) Some items were explained—the Broadway chair requiring several prototypes, early work like the Up—but not really. The how of Pesce’s work was impenetrable. It all made me believe he was probably the only artist working in furniture. Or the only person who used chairs as a theoretical/conceptual/religious (I’ll say it) or eternal medium… I don’t want to overstate it. (I’m also not a design historian, and am sure I am missing people.) It’s that the things people did 500 years ago, with paintings of fruit or Christ on the cross, he did with chairs and lamps and anthropomorphic furniture. It’s just his medium; it happened to be furniture. All the interviews he gave strained at this point, none stated it.
One thing I came away thinking about, after we bull-crapped together, was how little progress there has been in furniture materials since Pesce. Pesce has said, repeatedly, in these interviews, that how he chose to work with resin and plastic because they were futuristic, forward-looking materials—optimistic ones…—and that concrete and wood and metal were materials that belonged to the previous generation. He was right. They do. This is old garbage. But we haven’t moved on. (We have with food; that’s another story.) For a few reasons, he was the only one who did.
To be sure, a nice blip of ABS plastic furniture came out of Italy in the 1960s and ‘70s—subscribers will doubtlessly be familiar with my glowing opinion on this work—and it’s obvious that not everything we buy is concrete and wood. But there isn’t a school of design that is post-Pesce, and no other designers (or artists) have experimented with, much less perfected, newer materials for functional furniture. Pesce started working with resin decades ago; nothing since has been close.
Why is that?
I’m not sure. Well, I have some ideas. There is a structural/dialectical element: rent is expensive, furniture production has advanced and become mechanized. It costs money to make furniture, and factories are equipped to use older materials. Most design schools favor wood and metal over resin. I don’t know what a skid of resin costs. Maybe Pesce was a technical genius and the only person to figure out how to make a chair out of this stuff that doesn’t collapse? Pesce was transparent about his ideas, and his philosophy about life, but, on the record, not so much about the hows of his work. He was an artist, not a carpenter; there aren’t as many, say, blueprints and how-tos about his resin chairs as there were with, say, Judd’s work in wood (as described with some acuity in my column for Dwell).
Really furniture and design, on a materials level, is closer to how it was when Pesce was in school, 60 years ago than one would think. It is not disappointing—the industry is still alive—but it feels like a cheat, or unfortunate that there haven’t been any schools of furniture slash art using Pesce’s futuristic approach, either in his medium or in one that’s even more advanced. To be sure, in the past several years there has bubbled up lots of 1-of-1, experimental furniture (Bruises Gallery, all that good stuff)… much of which is not aesthetically indebted to him… which is great. May it only grow. But there is no steady clip of production—happenstance, experimental and then stable techniques, or processes, like Pesce had—in furniture that trails this artist. Pesce didn’t mass produce items in a factory; Jim Walrod said in an interview somewhere that the industry didn’t know what to do with him. In the past few years, it almost did. But we’ve only figured out Pesce’s aesthetic, not his mode of production. We’re worse off for there not being all these small movements coming out of his work. Even artists are only beginning to understand now what he did.
Ultimately, though, Pesce has been immortal for decades. There is a timelessness here, not limited to design or art… I don’t know how else to explain it except that real shit is ultimately frictionless, and that people… probably all of us, have the grammar (and then some) to understand these things deeply. People clued into Pesce’s work, simply, because in the past five years it was presented to people, repeatedly, in different contexts. With enough time and space, with some context and history, working people can internalize eternal items such as these. I think this just goes without saying. That’s what life’s all about. What a genius. What a massive, life-affirming and powerful body of work. A gift to have been there to see it as he made it—I mean all of us, being around at the same time as GP. What a trip that we can do something like this ourselves as well. Rest in peace.
Quick Hits:
Sottsass dick lamp, $325, Pa.:
Def the most phallic piece of furniture since the Deco period, maybe first trans piece of furniture since the Louis XIV chair? Deal if under 2 large.
8 Verner Panton style Z chairs, $950:
These are like Rietveld Zig Zags but for coupon clippers. I don’t understand the green….Panton is G, he’s the only Dane to throw the hammer down with color; these, though, are only inspired by him. I’d say fair under $1,400. Close to NYC. Good auction.
Acerbis modular storage on wheels, $150, Pa.:
Acerbis is such an ape-shit brand, I love their back catalog… this is a very 1975 Milan-looking storage item… but with the simple metal pulls. It breaks rules here. I just don’t think you can do better than an item from this era. I do not.
Sottsass Mandarin chairs, pair, for Knoll, 1980, $100, Pa. (perfect)
Salotti chair, $200, N.J. (not perfect…. but not bad)
Thanks for reading. Love goes out to Eddie Sutton of Leeway.
Snake
While it's definitely true that the primary materials used in furniture production haven't changed much, "no other designers (or artists) have experimented with, much less perfected, newer materials for functional furniture" feels like a genuinely wrong take, unless you're not counting sustainable materials made from plants or byproducts? There's so much amazing shit these days made from things like crushed oyster shells, kelp, pigmented foam dust, recycled compact discs... etc!