GET IT LOUDER
CONTEXT COUNTS
NEW DEMANDS
CRITICAL PRACTICES
ARTISTS
CHINA CALLING

GET IT LOUDER
The British design critic Rick Poynor generated some interesting discussion when he posted a review of Get it Louder 2005 on his blog designobserver.com. One contributor characterised China as typical of countries that react to their own emergence from communism with parodies of capitalism: they revel in the semiotics of mega-brands and consumerism; they cultivate infantile mythologies populated by robots and cartoon figurines and untroubled by social reality. Another points out that Chinese design is barely out of its “primitive” period and another gives an incongruously historicist plug to the “unique aesthetics of Shanghai in the 1930s”.

Whatever the true interpretation, it is clear that Ou Ning – writer, curator, music promoter, graphic designer and general energy force to whom all design roads in China appear to lead – had organised the most substantial showing ever of contemporary Chinese design. Its title, Get it Louder, not-quite-grammatical yet wholly expressive in English, betrayed both the fervent spirit with which young designers were producing, and Ou Ning’s determination to amplify their efforts. His invitation to the British Council and Newbetter to co-curate a collection of British work for the 2007 sequel was hard to resist. We are indistinguishable from most of the educated public of Europe in being hungry to understand a country from which most of the last century alienated us. Here was an opportunity to be deeply involved in an enterprise that would expose more of China’s contemporary art and design culture than any of us knew or could find by other means.

Ou Ning’s curatorial brief was simply that he wanted the exhibition to demonstrate the erasure of boundaries between art, architecture and design. As co-Curators, we reacted in a number of ways. Most straightforwardly, we would look for artists and designers whose work hadn’t been seen in China; people who graduated from education within the last five or ten years, and whose practice has become noticed but certainly not at the level of either massive commercial or institutional visibility. It would be a genuinely diverse collection of creative people (including artists, furniture, interactive, graphic and product designers, as well as architects and people thinking at a larger scale of intervention) from a generation that Newbetter themselves belong to and who are linked by the context of London.

CONTEXT COUNTS
London gets labelled one of the world's ‘creative capitals’ so frequently that it's a category close to meaning very little. Yet, despite the sometimes over-confident swagger, London does manage to cultivate and incubate a plethora of cultural thinking and production that is difficult to dismiss. In this respect, London’s clichés are its reality. ‘Diversity’ is one such cliché that our selection for Get it Louder reinforces. It is perfectly normal, when thinking about ‘British’ creatives, to invite the Swedes, the French, the Dutch, the Japanese, and whoever else has assigned London as their home. Gone are the days when nationality was defined narrowly by the place of birth. Many of us have parallel nationalities that also unfold episodically over the course of our working lives. London not only makes room for these voluntary tourist-citizens, it positively thrives from it.

A healthy uncertainty about origins inflects the work being produced too. In terms of education outlooks, the tradition whereby the Student learns from the Master via virtuosic copying and reverential repetition has been replaced by an emphasis on unpredictable individual invention. Schools—such as the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths, the Architectural Association and the Bartlett School of Architecture, to name but a few—play a critical role in the incubation process. Each school has its own agenda and knowingly competes for attention. After graduation, friendships coalesce into working collaborations. Collectives really took off in the mid-90s, as part of a generational fatigue with the cult of the singular genius-author. Today London’s porous social and professional scenes continue to foster short- and long-term collaborations. People may come together for a day. Or, for a decade. Suprisingly, the prohibitive expense of London as a place to live hasn’t managed to thwart this experimental urge to discover unknown artistic combinations and encounters.

NEW DEMANDS
2007 marks the end of a political era in the UK: Tony Blair’s Prime Ministerial leadership reaches its decade-long duration just as it comes to a close. Back in 1997, ‘culture’ played a big part in the re-branding of New Labour. Rock stars and architects were publicly courted. In the same year, a revolutionary TV advertisement for IKEA urged Britons to ‘Chuck Out the Chintz!’ (meaning: get rid of your old fashioned furniture!) By switching to New Labour and swearing allegiance to IKEA’s brand of mass-modernity for all, Britain began to look and feel very different in many respects. Culture conspired with commerce. At the turn of the Millennium, a collective commemorative urge and funds made available from a new National Lottery together sponsored a flush of capital building projects all over the country. As if overnight, every town museum had a new lobby or education pod and every national monument a new visitors’ centre; and citizens’ expectations of the architecture they deserved were raised in a stroke.

Since then, the UK's near-escapes from an always impending economic recession provided unprecedented conditions of sustainability. And opportunity. In a relatively short period of time, art, architecture and design are now staple elements of mass entertainment. Tate Modern receives 4.9 million visitors a year, the second most popular attraction in the country. In a few years time, the original architects, Herzog and de Meuron, will make it even bigger with a new addition. Around the same time, the Design Museum will move up-river to be Tate’s newest neighbour, whilst the Zaha Hadid-designed Architecture Foundation Headquarters will be just a few blocks away. None of this would happen without proven demand.

An ever expanding empire of media interest stokes and exacerbates demand for the always, newer ‘new’. There are more magazine titles than ever. Newspapers dedicate entire sections to art and design. And on-line blogs and e-reviews mean that news of the new enters our ‘In-Boxes’ even while we’re asleep. Mirroring popular culture as a whole, these magazines, newspapers and TV programmes relish and flourish in a non-stop ecology of ‘celebrity’ icons—just as likely today to be a chair designer as a film-star. What was once the province of specialisms and small audiences has shifted towards the centre. Demand has new forms and new names.

CRITICAL PRACTICES
It may be a curatorial conceit, but one of the hidden logics behind our selection is the way in which they represent what we’re calling a ‘critical practice’. Put simply, this refers to a situation whereby producers from a particular discipline question the traditional limits of that discipline, and experiment in finding innovative ways out of the expected, into the unexpected. It’s a kind of reflexivity or self-consciousness with the history of the discipline in which practice is situated. Sometimes this means doing something other than what you were trained to do, whilst using your skills in a different way. For others, it manifests in a very plural and collaborative practice with people from other backgrounds. The results are not necessarily always successsful because of these unlikely unions, but it seems to be a way in which one might begin to exit the endgame of Modernism, Post-Modernism etc. many of us felt at the end of the 20th century.

Another ‘escape’ that is performed by critical practitioners is from the obligation to be functional in a clearly signed way. The first half of the 20th century, in the West, heralded a ‘functionalist’ attitude that saw form as a practical derivation of use. It may be a caricature of historical determinism to say this, but ‘minimalism’, as a style and a fetish, pushed the Modernist credo as far as it could go. What’s left after everything has been taken away? The last ten years has seen a different kind of response to this dead-end than, say, the stylistic games of cut and paste played in the 1980s by painters like Julian Schnabel or designers like Ettore Sottsass. Today’s generation can take for granted that the fundamental questions of form have been assiduously rehearsed by a legion of imposing forebears. No one today believes we can re-boot ad re-start entirely from scratch. We’re part of a historical continuity, but we’re not shackled to its demands. The relationship between form, function, and history is thus fertile ground for the ‘critical practitioner’ to explore ideas in parallel to the expectation to produce ‘things’.

ARTISTS
The title of our UK offering, 'Everything Material, Something Immaterial', encapsulates the energetic and emphatic interplay between ‘things’ that can also be 'ideas', and 'ideas' that stand in for 'things'.

Out of such a context we have inevitably drawn a number of designers whose work signifies how far design has strayed from the manipulation of material form into light, sound and digital interaction. That is, not only designers investigating form, but also the disquieting of form by technology, like TROIKA, probing the intestinal audio life of electronic tools in a new Chinese version of their electroprobes installation; or the disquieting of form by information, like Assa Ashuach, instructing mathematical data to materialise in benches and lights and tables whose formal logic is digital; Sam Buxton’s DATA-Chair, an homage to the manufacturing power of China and based on the form of a traditional Chinese throne, is filled with electronic objects that communicate, play, store, see and monitor information associated with the sitter. D-fuse’s Small Global distorts the balance of power in the world by mapping, as an example, the increase in mobile phone use globally. Simon Heijdens' Lightweeds and Danny Brown’s animations express the oxymoron of digital craft: visions of aesthetic possibility combined with an intimate acquaintance with software.

In the more familiar realm of material objects, we witness the disquieting of form by alien materials: WokMedia defiantly uniting electricity and water, or Martino Gamper uniting disparate furniture parts in a new post-industrial pidgin. The French/Swedish/Welsh quartet Ǻbäke produce magazines, records, clothes and art gallery installations and while they all trained as graphic designers, their curiosity for authoring content takes them beyond an exclusive fascination with fonts and printing-techniques. Marloes Ten Bhömer's incredible footwear designs often don’t even look like shoes but beguiling, sci-fi mutations of the foot. She refuses to be labelled an ‘artist’, despite the art world's interest in her work, and is about to produce her first commercial design with the intricate parts sourced from China. Julia Lohman’s Ruminant Blooms are lights made of preserved sheep’s stomachs, triggering feelings between attraction and disgust; while her life-sized cow benches, shaped like a headless cow and upholstered in her hide, remind us explicitly of the slaughterhouse while inspiring universal affection for the beast.

Artists have also been exploring occasional collaborations and parallel role-playing. For a number of years, artist Shezad Dawood has had movie-poster painters in Pakistan execute his visions. The Constable series in Get it Louder is a twisted translation of quaint English ideals. From 2006-07, Shezad also hosted an ambitious project space in London where he curated other artists in the generous space of his high-end squat. Celine Condorelli, an architect, has been working with Gavin Wade, a curator, in a series of interventions in charged public and private settings. Their specially commissioned intervention for Get it Louder  with Chinese architect Wang Hui will continue an ongoing theme of offering unexpected kinds of support for the host institution; in this case, a number of shopping malls. Newbetter constantly feeds into the work of others, which is why we use our architectural background to curate shows and produce collaborative installations, such as the horror-inspired project with artist Neal Rock, called Hydan.

CHINA CALLING
The history of design in China is very different from the one we know in Europe. Breathtaking collections of bronzes, ceramics and textiles in the Shanghai Museum bear witness to a dynamic relationship between design and production centuries before Christ and unparalleled in the West for a very long time. Manufactured goods and inventions of great technical and aesthetic complexity – most famously silk, gunpowder and the stirrup – travelled West from China along the Silk Road through central Asia for a thousand years before the great flowering of art and craft re-awakened Europe’s Classical heritage in the Renaissance. Elite Europe’s love affair with the riches of the East generally and Chinoiserie in particular only came to an end when its own industrial revolution enabled it to reciprocate with the export to Empire of masses of its own goods. In 20th Century China imperial decline, a cultural revolution and latterly a fast, partial ascent to capitalism have created uniquely extreme conditions for design. The Great Leap Forward featured the most severe handover of the means of production to the people ever imagined, along with the systematic destruction of all symbols of bourgeois status and a citizenry dressed in uniform. As the century came to an end the reductive universality of communism became blurred by increasingly legitimate consumer desire and gratification; one severe interpretation of design usurped by another.

In the midst of this transformation, Get It Louder presents rich and exciting opportunities to mediate between our twin histories of art, architecture and design. An exhibition like this is as much about the whirl of weird connections made between different thinkers and doers as it is an ‘exhibition’ of objects to be consumed. Sitting here, in London, China continually comes across to us as a place rich with a multiplicity of mythic identities, some old, others new. But even in the epoch of globalisation, context still matters crucially in the production of meaning. As we’ve tried to argue, there are of course, many ‘Britains’ and many ‘Chinas’, real, imagined and re-invented. The re-location of all this ‘British’ work to ‘China’ will release new and unanticipated meanings, while the international spectacle of Get it Louder will yield greater understanding of the design products of a country whose speed of economic growth and social change almost renders commentary redundant.