Fabian Stech

Until the 16th of march you can see in the Centre Pompidou a Ron Arad exhibition.

Normally architecture and design exhibitions are simply boring. The best way to experience architecture is inside or outside a real building. Walter Benjamin calls it a tactile experience and transposes it to other media, as film and even photography. Now way to find this kind of perception in an exhibition with models, plans and autocad simulations which are mainly used to present a project to a client. Design exhibitions are annoying because all along the visit you try to recognize your own furniture. It is like art for the poor. In the Arad exposition most of the displayed pieces are unique or limited edition and it becomes pointless to identify your own furniture. The exhibition has a really dramatic scenography which tries to animate Arads armchairs and their quite ambiguous mixture of baroque formes and high-tech materials. Most of them have a strange similarity with the chirurgical instruments in Cronenbergs film “Dead ringers”. Even worse is the fact that they want to hide this ressemblance under their aesthetical surface. If you have ever seen books on Ron Arads bookworm rack, you can feel how it is like to sit on some of his chairs, except perhaps on the Big Soft Easy.