Have we outgrown designer Ron Arad? | Justin McGuirk
He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch
Unless you die young, it's difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called "exhaustion of the will". Or they simply go out of fashion. And that's what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that's what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London's Barbican.
Arad is one of the design world's few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn't interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.
To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they'll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they've been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.
It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain's fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols' ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie's upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what's more, it looked like he was having fun.
Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it's made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors' market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.
None of that is Arad's fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It's not boundary-crossing that's the problem, it's the fact that the edginess of Arad's work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It's too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they're made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there's no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They're heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.
Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he's achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won't find much under the surface. Arad's work is all technique. It's pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will retch. He's the design equivalent of Marmite.
The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It's so bombastic that it doesn't leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it's not about people, it's about him.
The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we've moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he's been left far behind.