Swiss Institute - CURATOR TALK | ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS AND BEATRICE GALILEE lyrics

Simon Castets: Hello, and welcome to Swiss Institute. This is the very first public program of the very first edition of the Swiss Institute Annual Design Series, entitled Fin de Siècle and curated by Andreas Angelidakis. Tonight we will be witness to a conversation between Andreas Angelidakis, the famously Norwegian Greek curator of the exhibition and Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, without further ado please join me in welcoming Beatrice and Andreas with a very, very warm round of applause. Beatrice Galilee: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation to be part of this series and to have the option to talk with Andreas, whose work I have been a fan of for some time and whom I have had the opportunity to have a short discussion with in the last year. To start the conversation I think that would be most instructive for me to ask for a succinct overview of your ideas behind the exhibition and an introduction to some of the themes that you brought here, as well as your thinking behind the show. Andreas Angelidakis: When Simon approached me about this exhibition I spoke to my an*lyst about what I should do because I always talk with my shrink about work. And so he asked me, “What are you going to do in this design exhibition?” and I said I wanted to put the furniture, not as objects on display, but as kind of characters in a conversation, so it would seem like scenes with furniture. Then he says, “Oh, there is this Ionesco play called The Chairs ,” which I didn't know because the internet and theater are not always so compatible, so I am not a big theater fan. But I started looking into the Ionesco play and it was a perfect kind of conceptual background for what I wanted to do so I appropriated it, thanking my shrink. In the Ionesco play, which was written in 1952, there is this elderly couple on stage and they begin to describe how the world ended to their audience. Their audience is a cast of characters onstage, but what's curious is that this cast of characters, the colonel, the policeman, the school teacher, the rich lady with fur, they are not played by actors, but instead by chairs positioned onstage. The whole setting is a kind of tragic farce. The elderly couple commits suicide in the end. And it's described as a setting where we see the remains of a party, so the sad space of a party that pa**ed. So this was the perfect beginning to start this exhibition by looking at what this furniture, what these chairs would do, after they heard how the world ended. That's where the titles comes from, Fin de Siècle , which literally means end of the century. But it is also an expression that describes things related to destruction and ruins and the aesthetic of the end of the world. So first we looked at what Vitra had in their collection, as a kind of Swiss connection, and then we added the fantastic collection of Dennis Freedman here in New York as a kind of counterpart. I would say I picked three types of chairs: one group was Modernist chairs, trying to focus mostly on Swiss chairs. The other group was early Post-modernist. The group of Modernist chairs was interesting because it was the “good,” functional chairs. They were designed to be efficiently fabricated, and they were good to sit on, and they were ergonomically designed. The Post-modern chairs, on the other hand, for me started from the series that Alessandro Mendini did, which was called Objects for Spiritual Use. And these chairs were almost not even meant to be used as chairs. They were including the ideal of a chair, the notion of this object, but not necessarily for the use. Like the Andrea Branzi couch that you see, which is not really meant to be properly sat on because it will break. So I enjoyed imagining the discussions that these two types of objects would have if they were in the space. And then there is a third group, which doesn't really fit in either category. There are the H.R. Giger pieces, which are a cybernetic nightmare sort of design, so neither Modernist nor Post-modernist, but rather their own surrealist type of thing. There are newer pieces like Nacho Carbonell. There are pieces I found, one on the street and one on the internet. So those are the three groups and those are the kind of chairs I see in the conversation in there. Beatrice Galilee: When we walked through the exhibition together you were explaining the stories, like here is the suicide scene, here is the school room, here is a chair being bullied by other chairs, and it was really vivid and totally convincing. To what extent do you expect people to confuse the objects as they project their own ideas onto them, and have you had conversations with people about differing opinions and maybe more compelling arguments for the storylines that you put forward? Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, I mean I have my own reading of what these things are but I am totally for user-generated content, so these are more suggestions. Like when I was describing the mugging scene, which involves a Marcel Breuer – one of these experiments in ma** fabrication, very efficient and very “good,” almost like a school chair – and the three very menacing chairs by Martine Boileau – who is a French sculptor, and in the 60s she invented this method of fabrication using fibergla** and cloth that produces these objects, which look sculptural and intuitive but in fact are identical. For me, they were playing this kind of scary monster from the future, this kind of sculpture object that existed in triplicate. So this was the mugging scene and someone said, “Oh yeah, to me it looks more like an interrogation.” So I said, “Yeah, also it could be an interrogation.” So what I am interested in is just that people perceive that something is going on in these scenes. It could also be just an exhibition because they are all interesting pieces and each one has a story behind it, but for most of the people that I talk to there is a sense that something is going on between these chairs. An obvious one is the psychoan*lytic scene. I was talking to a friend who said “oh yeah, the psychoan*lytic room, perfect!” So yeah, it's there to be perceived but it's not necessary to have to understand exactly what's going on. They can also project their own understanding on this. Beatrice Galilee: And to what extent do you expand the conversation into a contemporary approach to these type of objects? For example, I have my apartment in London on AirBnB, and I know if I put two Eames chairs in the photo that I can add another £100 a night onto the cost of that room because those chairs speak, they are semiotic and they communicate on their own certain things about taste and wealth and so on. So how much of that goes into this type of show? Andreas Angelidakis: I mean, an idea that I thought of just now is that you can Photoshop design chairs into your apartment. And when people get there they don't find the chairs – oh yeah, it's an older photo, sorry. Yeah, I mean I guess the first two groups of chairs also represent two types of economies. The Modernist chair is a modernist economy, so early capitalism, a Fordist economy, where a good object is produced and because it's a good object and because it's efficiently manufactured, it goes on to become a popular thing. Of course, also this modern chair becomes a fetishistic object, so when you Photoshop these chairs into your apartment it goes for more. The Post-modern chairs belonged to a second economy, which we can say is from the 70s onwards where the economy became psychological with the stock market. For example, when Steve Jobs died the stocks of Apple went down, and the product they were selling was just as efficient and had not changed, but the value of the company went down just because of people's psychological anticipation of what would happen. So the Post-modern chairs kind of represent this psychological economy of desire. Post-modernists were producing objects that were not necessarily better, and in fact you couldn't even sit on them, but they were desirable. And then the third group -- maybe we can call it the viral economy, or the economy of the internet, where we don't know exactly what is going to be desirable. Maybe you make a masterpiece documentary and you post it on YouTube, and then your kid makes a video of the cat jumping on the dog, and maybe the cat and the dog gets more likes than your masterpiece. So our economy is kind of more abstract. In that group there is the Nacho Carbonell, but then there is a chair that I found on the street in Athens in the garbage, which is the walking stick chair. And then there is a chair that we have ordered from Amazon, which is a yoga ball chair. So that is more random, unexpected, you don't know what is going to be in this group, that type of economy. Beatrice Galilee: Can you talk a bit more about the ‘like' economy? You also wrote in an essay that you were interested in the idea that we can like things and we don't necessarily need to own them. Our affections are so brief and fleeting, and I also see that in the results of your Instagram feed, that you want to just like things and it doesn't necessarily mean you need to own them. I was wondering if you could explain some of those kinds of ideas that you had before? Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, the text was actually written for the show at the DESTE Foundation, which was a Dakis Joannou collection, reloaded. It was called The System of Objects , based on this Baudrillard book, which talks about collecting and the capitalist economy. The idea of this economy of like came to me from this website which, sadly, doesn't exist anymore. It was called Supply, but spelled with a V, so Svpply, I guess? And it was a website where you would see products and you could not click like but click want, so you would just click and want things, but you didn't buy them. And then if you clicked three times more – opened the page of the product and then clicked on the shop and then click – you could actually eventually buy it, but you were just collecting the things you want, and that was it. And I thought that was a great thing because you look at that amazing leather jacket by Rick Owens and you really want it at that time so you go there and register your want. And then of course the next day you see something else and you don't want that $4,000 leather jacket anymore. Who would? So, I think that the internet is making us fulfill our desires much faster than before. Sometimes it happens, especially in Europe, you buy clothing from asos.com, which is super cheap, and then the shipping is free so it takes two weeks to arrive. And in those two weeks you have forgotten what you have bought until this bag arrives and you are like, ‘What the hell is in here? What is this?' Which means you never wanted that fuchsia tie-dyed t-shirt to begin with, but it arrived. So it's this shopping therapy idea you can do on the internet, and there is just this two week time span between when you get the thing, and it just shows that our desire is much shorter. Obviously you don't need another T-shirt because you are cold or anything, it is just a desire. You need to fulfill that desire. So the yoga chair from Amazon represents that. It costs like $50 and it arrives quickly, and then you realize that your original chair was better, so just leave the yoga chair on the side. Beatrice Galilee: Something that I also noticed is about our relationship to objects, which I have also been thinking about a bit more now that I am responsible for a lot of them – there seems to be something interesting about the idea that objects that we own change themselves, so they update or iPhones have systems that update and then they get better. Not necessarily that they are disposable but that they literally change, so the software inside them is better and improved, and maybe our relationship to those objects is not so transient. Maybe we have expectations that the object will evolve in a way that we wouldn't have a relationship with a chair that would evolve. We are surrounded by these almost alive things. Andreas Angelidakis: That is true, but I think also our dead objects have this power to reanimate. That is also the idea with the show that, you know, everybody is seeing all these Modernist chairs in MoMA, but I think this sort of thing is more fun, to see the Modern chair being mugged by three kind of French sculptural chairs. And then you might notice anew this Modernist chair that you have seen a million times in a million art books. So maybe curating is what updates software and these things. You might find something that has been forgotten or something that looks new again. Just like the iPhone – there is a new life in it. The same is true of objects: our desire is fleeting, but it is also kind of recurring. You might like something from five years ago because it is already so vintage. Beatrice: How did you get into curating? You are an artist, architect, and designer, and you've curated this show, as well as others, and so how did that come about? Andreas Angelidakis: Honestly, I think it came from blogging, which is something I used to do a lot. And it's a kind of curating on the spot. I was working a lot with curators, collaborating on the space for exhibitions. And so a couple of years ago I had this idea, and I found this artist in Greece. She was not exactly an artist, she was an activist from the early ages. Her name is Paula, she is a transs**ual, and she published the first punk gay newspaper in Europe, like an anarchist gay newspaper in '78. She was doing photography, and she was doing anarchist manifestations in Athens and reporting police brutality and all these things. So I found her on Facebook, and I said I really would love to do a show with you. I just decided to organize and curate a show. That was a very instinctive thing because I really thought this person was amazing and I wanted to do something with her work. It was accidental, but it was always in the back of my mind to go in that direction. I really enjoy when I have the chance to both select the things and then place them in the space and arrange the lighting, so you can tell the full story. I am also very interested in the history of exhibitions of contemporary art and how it is developing and how exhibition methods are developing, and that for me is a very key subject of my work. So with curating and doing the space for a show, you get to do both. Beatrice Galilee: This exhibition also made me think of how cats observe you all the time and seem like they have an opinion about you. Somehow I think the chair might also have some opinions about us, like I think I'm going to get rid of that chair for looking at me funny this morning, or that kind of thing. Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, I have to admit that sometimes I have this fear that there is a Walt Disney mentality, like all things are alive. But for me it is interesting to scroll through a collection and just pick things that could go well together, even as if I was browsing them on the internet and I didn't know what chair it was. Then if I know something about the chair, I might play out and twist the story a bit more. There is basically this progression with Harkonnen , the H.R. Giger chair and then there is Mendini's, which is part of the Objects for Spiritual Use , and then there is this demonic Ugo La Pietra, and then in the end of the space is a non-chair, all in a line. So if somebody bothers to look at the notes and sees that the last chair is called Non-Chair, then they will have another reading into that. …There are also two chairs in the show that are playing the elderly couple. Beatrice Galilee: That's true. Isn't one of them dead? Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, one of them is – in the play both of them commit suicide. But here there is another person committing suicide and the couple is watching but one of them is in the crate, so it's dead. Beatrice Galilee: Yeah, but then there are a ton of crates in the show. Was that to show the kind of history of the objects? Or their journey here? Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, it's that. More for me it's a really quick exhibition device. Because those crates, we have to store them somewhere so they would be in the space. Why not just put them right in the space and make them do something instead of paying to have them shipped somewhere else to be stored, etc.? It makes a pa**age and a space for that Venturi chair to sit on by itself – that grouping is two strange chairs, the Mendini chair, which is a repurposed Joe Colombo chair that he painted on in marble, just to piss off his designer friend, and the Venturi chair, which is the most girly chair in the show, it's done by an architect, it's like pink roses. He did a series of Queen Anne chairs, one is like draping, the other is with pink roses. And a funny coincidence: I was in MoMA today and I saw that same chair in their design display, and what are the chances of that? Because that's not a normal chair for a design show. Theirs had a different pillow, so I almost walked onto the display and took that pillow. And then I would be arrested, so… Audience: You used the term ‘dead chairs' earlier, so what is a dead chair? Andreas Angelidakis: A dead chair is the chair in the coffin, that's a dead chair. And also it's a chair that you don't know where to put it in the show. There was one Mario Botta chair that I really like and I didn't know which chair to put it with to talk about stuff, so I also play k**ed her. I put it in a crate, which is also a way to get the visitor to think, “oh, what the hell? There's a chair in a crate here.” So to wake it up a bit. Audience: There is something erotic feeling about this show with the lights everywhere and the sort of anticipation of waiting to sit in a chair, that chairs are like waiting to be filled by a human. I was wondering if you felt that too? Andreas Angelidakis: You should read the disclaimer at the door. It says like you are not allowed to sit and not even to touch these chairs. Erotic, I don't know. I did this Buzz Feed test the other day and it says I think about s** all the time so maybe it is like subconscious. It is like erotic funerial maybe. Because somebody else said every scene here is about d**h. What is going on? I said well, yeah, that's life. Audience: It's funny because on that tip, on the d**h tip, I experienced that show completely different. There is a whole other Beetlejuice element, and do you remember that the parents, Lydia's step-parents moved in and she was completely so obsessed with the Memphis-ed out crazy house, and there is the one chair with the circle and the triangle, the really big one. And so I want to talk about the fun part of the chairs. Like, what is that collection – what was it like? Andreas Angelidakis: Dennis Freedman's collection? His collection is quite varied. It contains a lot of contemporary pieces, which I didn't like because contemporary, who cares. I mean, I am not a design guy, so I think that's why the Swiss Institute picked me to do this show – because I am not a design fetishist at all. So I looked at the chairs as real as characters. The Vitra collection is a very extensive collection so it has every kind of chair you can image. But Dennis Freedman's is much more particular. Like, he has this prototype for the Gaetano Pesce, that big foot, which doesn't exist anywhere else. And also he told me that he bought it at auction quite cheaply because nobody wanted this kind of thing. Even Vitra started as a personal collection of course, but then it became institutional. And then Dennis Freedman's is a very personal collection. And then also another collection that we looked at and were trying to get, but it logistically didn't work was from Dakis Joannou who has an even more focused design collection called '68, so objects from '67 to '73, only Radical Movement, but not so many chairs for some reason. The fun part was discovering chairs I didn't know about so much, like the Lawrence Weiner chair. That for me was the fun part, going on Tumblr and somebody is posting a weird chair that they found in a weird library in a weird book and you have never seen it before. Or getting to see the Corbusier chair and then seeing how beautiful it still is. It has this kind of animal quality – you have it in the picture – but when you see the object and it is a really old object, it has this kind of charm to it that you can expect from the black and white photograph. That's also the fun part, unpacking the actual object. Audience: Is there a richness in unpacking or eventually using that might be worth more than just the idea? Or is the idea enough? Andreas Angelidakis: I mean, I didn't unpack the chairs myself so I didn't see that. But of course it's different when you see a picture or an object in a photograph and then you see it in the real space. Sometimes the object has a much stronger presence than you expected and sometimes it will play the dead chair, it will be in the coffin. So you can never really know unless you have seen the piece in real life. Audience: Did you consider the designing a chair? You mentioned you weren't crazy about contemporary chairs. Andreas Angelidakis: I mean, I like of course the contemporary design, but it has been consumed a lot on the internet already, so I am more interested in finding these chairs that we haven't seen and that haven't been endlessly published in the last five months, in that sense. There are a lot of chairs already designed. I mean, that's in general my attitude in everything. There are already many things designed, you don't have to design any more. Audience: The foot chair, is that in reference to the degree of the monument that we're seeing? Andreas Angelidakis: I guess it's like the foot of a giant or something, that was his original reference. Gaetano Pesce is a very particular case, he still lives in New York. His work always has this mythical level to it, where he did a piece for the 1972 show at MoMA, The New Domestic Landscape . He did this weird house for The Age of Great Contaminations. So his work is always half mythological, kind of spooky. Beatrice Galilee: It's also like so handmade, it has this real touchy kind of making-ness to it, which is quite interesting. Something, also, that occurred to me ages ago when we were talking was Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can ask people do things for you. So you can ask people to design a chair. You can say, “I will pay you $1 to design me a chair,' or, ‘I will pay you no money to design me a chair,' in the next half an hour. And then whoever reads that post just sends you a chair, and then you give them $1, or you can give them no money at all. It is this kind of crazy kind of manufacturing or task – what's the other one? Task Rabbit. It would be so interesting to imagine another version of this where you ask people to do task-oriented projects. Andreas Angelidakis: Maybe you could just tell them you are curating an exhibition for $5 in the next ten minutes. Audience: That has actually been done. Yeah, there have been Mechanical Turk curated shows. They weren't good. Audience: You said you weren't a design fetishist – what do you mean by that? Andreas Angelidakis: What I meant is that at home I don't save money to buy design items. I fetishize more conceptually, ideas and the work of people Beatrice Galilee: But not contemporary people? Andreas Angelidakis: Yeah, why not? To be honest I don't really think of the date of things. Like, when I am looking at stuff in the show there are chairs from 2011 and chairs from 1928. So it's not like I would reject something new, not at all. Then the show is the proof of that. I changed my mind.