Has anyone our our regulars from Flanders (gerrit, and others) seen the Nanny Still exhibition in the Design Museum Ghent, and if you did is there a catalogue? The Design Museum Ghent website does not provide us with that information. It would also be nice to read the reactions and impressions of a younger generation of designers after seing her work.
yes
yes koen, last week i went to the exhibition (at the opening).(i didn't saw your question about this topic so excuse me for this late answer) i must admit that i did not really knew her (and apparently she lives in belgium!). mmm her style is for me, and that is personal, a bit to 'romantic', a bit like borek sipek. so i must say i did not really liked it. except for some more 'pure' peaces like a set of glasses (made for a hotel, i believe it was the hilton but i am not sure) and some cutlery (the Mango). but nevertheless the exhibition on its own, i believe is very good and gives a really nice image of her work. worth visiting.
http://www.gentblogt.be/2006/02/16/nanny-still-ambassador-of-design
catalogue
normally i buy mostly every catalogue when i visit a designexhibition, but this time, (because it was not really 'my style') i didn't. Maybe i should have, because as designers we should allways keep an open mind (shame on me). But i believe that there was one available. tomorrow i'll pass by the museum and ask them.
Dag Gerrit
I have to agree that a lot of the glass pieces are over the top. I think that her best work is still in the mass produced products of which the Mango cutlery realy stands out. I believe she lived in Belgium ever since her (first?) marriage. Her husband made it big in shipwrecks and was based in Belgium. For some time (in the sixties) she was a very active part of the design community and you could meet her almost at every exhibition opening. A very colourful and joyful personality with unusual talent. I am sure she still is.
Go over the top
I'm sort of happy that she does go over the top, and stretch things. Who cares if it looks bizarre? Who cares if it has no functionality? Who cares if it has no real use or aesthetic quality? 🙂
I just like the fact that she's exploring, and when she gets back to the mass market stuff, she'll know her materials so much better, and she'll have a better sense of the material boundaries. Who knows, with that knowledge she may yet surprise us all.
Perhaps
Perhaps there is a function to the bizarre, that is not evident at first sight?
That is, perhaps the function is to try the bizarre. Then again, I suppose we can get into subjective/objective discussions, nihilism and absolutes, aestetics or non-aesthetic, art and non-art, and that old well-beat horse about what art is...
Or just let her play and hope that when Nanny returns to the mass market her new experience will astound us. 🙂
dear MrMercutio...
I agree that eccentricity is one of the better spices in life, and as such I love this word of basque origin: bizarre. Maybe I tried too hard to express my personal feeling that we could have seen much more interesting things from Nanny Still in the realm of design. A career is also a matter of choices and although I knoe the importance of re-generating one-self in other creative fields, I just would have liked to see more of Nanny Still's great talent in design.
And I'm not arguing against...
And I'm not arguing against you. I just offer an alternative view. Sometimes functionalism is a straigh jacket that gets in the way of design. If functionalism was the end all of everything we would not have things like Oiva Toikkas glass birds - who after all have no use except as expressions of mastery of a material, and possibly to delight people with that mastery.
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