Massive Change
A positive vision of change where the designer plays a key role
Anthony Marasco
photo © Adi Nes. ‘untitled (The Featherless Chicken) courtesy The New York Times Magazine and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
2 October 2004 saw the opening of an exhibition curated by Bruce Mau at Vancouver Art Gallery called Massive Change. Despite the fact that the theme of the exhibition was the present and future of design, Mau and his studio – the unabashed Institute Without Borders – decided to start from with problems that design must resolve, as opposed to what has been presented in many similar exhibitions in the past. The result of the exhibition has been condensed into a book published by Phaidon as the exhibition catalogue, this too entitled Massive Change.
At first sight one might say that the volume appears to be a positive view of another book born from a rather ambitious exhibition at the Fondation Cartier of Paris in 2002, Unknown Quantity by Paul Virilio (Thames & Hudson). In that exhibition, “dromologue” Virilio examined the theme of disaster, not adding anything very reassuring to his conclusions. Seen from Paris, the world appeared to be on the verge of an imminent and widespread catastrophe.
Images from the exhibition Massive Change left Orientation Gallery photos © Greg Van Alstyne & Bruce Mau Design; right Wealth and Politics Gallery photos © Vancouver Art Gallery
Two years later, an altogether different vision of the future has been obtained from the New World. Instead of starting from disasters in order to arrive, through hypothetical exaggeration, at a neo-Baroque styled aesthetic of disaster, Mau and his studio start from the consideration that in many high technology frontiers we are fine tuning techniques and equipment that could resolve many of the more pressing problems of our time.
Mau has consulted an impressive number of specialists about various design matters in order to propose this optimistic vision of the future. From them an exhibition and an informative, plausible and stimulating book have emerged. The editorial work put into the latter is particularly well done – I continue to call it a book because the term “catalogue” doesn’t do it justice. Uniting the “voices” of specialists with the “visions” of the designers, Mau has produced a graphical framework that unites the revival of illustration work done by Quentin Fiore for the texts of Marshall McLuhan (initiated by the Californian magazine Wired in the Nineties) with today’s inclination to legibility put forward by the third series of the graphical theory magazine Émigré (published by Princeton University Press, but now considered an outsider by the University of California, Berkeley). The result is a truly successful synthesis between text and visual material, which strengthen each other without tiring the eyes.
The message appears to be just as good, or, should I say, the two messages are. The first is that the moment has arrived when the designer has definitively abandoned his artist’s smock which was gladly worn in the eighties by Memphis gurus, Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass, Jr.. The second is, that if faced intelligently, problems can be resolved and in this perspective design has a positive role to play. A message that even a country like Italy, that considers itself in “decline”, should be able to appreciate.
