Design Talks

Observations on design

Frieze London 2022: Nikita Gale’s artwork ’63/22′ explores the politics of sight and sound

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Nargess

LA-based multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale at Frieze London 2022

Five custom-made electric guitars are mounted on the makeshift wall at at Frieze London. These intricate objects form part of a larger artwork called ’63/22′ by LA-based multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale. Each guitar is named after significant Black female guitarists of history: Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Barbara Lynn, Big Mama Thornton and Joan Armatrading. Every few minutes a spotlights directs our gaze from one guitar to the next. Later in the day, three musicians will activate the guitars through live ten-to-fifteen-minute performances.

This is what happens when seemingly disparate industries overlap – when ideas collide. ’63/22′ is an artwork loaded with meaning. It takes on the current discourse surrounding the politics of sight and sound, what we are guided to see, and what we are told to hear, and of invisible voices. Through the medium of design and sound, Gale is asking us to review our biases, question what has come before, and make change happen.

’63/22′ is directed by Gale in collaboration with a team of car designers and the luthier Ian Malone for BMW Open Work by Frieze. The initiative itself aims to bring together art, design and technology, and to show this in a setting outside of the auto world.

The 63 in the title refers to the year 1963, when Gibson Guitar commissioned a car designer by the name of Ray Dietrich, who had pioneered the concept of the custom-built car designer in the age of classic cars. The idea was to bring in a creative voice from outside the traditional music world who would investigate the possibilities of the electric guitar in shape and feel.

Conventions were broken with Dietrich’s asymmetrically shaped Firebird sporting a taller horn positioned on the right rather than the customary left. The wooden neck had nine strips of alternating mahogany and maple, layered for strength and stability, spanning the full length of the instrument. It featured some wonderful quirky details too, with the wings thought to resemble the car’s tail fins. Naturally, the Firebird sounded different to other electric guitar of the time.

One of five custom-made electric guitars for ’63/22′ by Nikita Gale

I meet Nikita Gale at Frieze London to untangle the complex artwork, ’63/22′.

Why an interest in the politics of sound?

My mum was a music teacher, and music was always happening in our house. Alongside teaching me the piano, she would speak about historically significant musicians. Growing up on an air force base in Alaska, she was often a visiting music teacher to our school, giving lessons on Black music history and so on. For me, it wasn’t only about enjoying the music but thinking about the histories that preceded it.

Your project at Frieze continues the investigation into the politics of sound but through the lens of the car. How did this connection happen?

At grad school, I began thinking about cars not just as technologies but as objects that we project cultural and political information into, in that the modes and the means of production of these technologies are not neutral. Decisions are being made that are informed by political positions: are the cars powered by fossil fuel versus electric, or the designs and shapes they take? What cars look like is largely determined by the understanding and biases of the people designing them.

Most of whom would be of a certain gender. How did you then circle this back to music?

While investigating cars, I began encountering interesting information about music, particularly American blues and rock. Early blues and rock songs were largely about cars, such as Ike Turner’s 1951 ‘Rocket 88’ – considered the first rock and roll record. Cars are metaphors for personal freedom, sexuality, and gender expression. The overlaps kept happening during my research, which is when I came upon Ray Dietrich and his work with Gibson in 1963. It is the first time these two industries overlapped on such a large, mass-produced scale.

It must have seemed quite a surprise then to be approached by BMW for the Frieze project. Speaking with the curator Attilia Fattori Franchini earlier, she was unaware you were already thinking along these streams of ideas.

Crazy, right? I had this idea in my back pocket for seven years, so when BMW reached out to collaborate at Frieze, I already knew what I wanted to do. It was an incredible coincidence, and I knew we had to do this. Added to this, I’m a real car fan.

And how do you feel about the project that is displayed before us?

It never ceases to amaze seeing an object born out of a concept that exists in space. This project has truly taken this to a new level. These guitars are not just aesthetic art objects but functional technology; they are all playable guitars that Ian Malone helped make possible.

The guitar you’ve designed have clearly questioned the conventional shape of the instrument, its masculinity.

Yes, absolutely. During the design process, I discussed the profile of the types of users of these technologies with the BMW designers. We looked at who would be playing the guitars and how we should be designing with other bodies in mind other than the typical type who were determining the shape of things in the 60s, which would have been primarily white men. The musician St. Vincent recently designed a signature guitar that has a much narrower body to accommodate people with breasts. I asked our designers to consider ergonomics with all body shapes in mind.

Can you explain the performative side when these aesthetic objects neatly lining the wall are played?

We’ve invited three diverse musicians to perform at 3 pm each day, giving them carte blanche to do what they want and choose the guitar they like. It’s been fascinating to see which ones they go for. Luckily no two have gone for the same guitar.

’63/22′ interrogates the politics of sight and sound, what we are directed to see and allowed to hear, and how this manifests itself in invisible voices. What were you hoping to achieve with the project?

I strongly believe in the importance of modelling possibilities. So, when I think about this moment in 1963, where these industries overlap, I look at this as a demonstration of what is possible when conversations are allowed to overlap in a very direct way. I’m looking at the moment when ideas collide.

Given that general guitar design hasn’t changed so much in the last 60 years, by recreating and almost staging the scene in this context, we can shine a light on the possibilities of change.

The shapes and forms of technologies were largely determined by the biases of people designing them. As political and cultural landscapes change, those biases also shift. Where are we now? Why are we sticking to what came before? We can still change things. Nothing is set in stone. In the essay Technology and Ethos, Amiri Baraka, writing as LeRoi Jones at the time, has a great line: Nothing has to look or sound the way that it does.

The 19th edition of Frieze London takes place from October 12-16, 2022.

Images © Nikita Gale/BMW

Artwork at Frieze London 2021 explores the human/machine relation

Posted on October 18, 2021 by Nargess

Headlights feature in Madeline Hollander’s ‘Sunrise/Sunset’ for BMW Open Work at Frieze London 2021 (c) Ben Broomfield/BMW AG

Two art projects commissioned by the BMW Group for Frieze London 2021 set out to explore the human/machine relation in new and exciting ways. Madeline Hollander’s ‘Sunrise/Sunset’ is an installation of 96 disused headlights salvaged from the company’s recycling centre. Playing on the responsive nature of these automatic adaptive car headlights which react to movement, light and weather conditions, the artist has matched each to different global time zones to create a networked map that mimics the sun rising and setting across the globe. Hollander’s art examines how our erratic individual actions and everyday technologies can synchronically align, become a collective and, in the case of the installation for Frieze, turn into a cascading technological dance.

Dancers from Studio Wayne McGregor interact with the robot in ‘No One is an Island’ (c) Ravi Deepres/BMW AG

Meanwhile, dance choreographer Wayne McGregor and experimental studio Random International’s ‘No One is an Island’ is a live performance involving a multi-armed robot and two human dancers. Playing the lead role is the robotic sculpture — an enigmatic machine whose liquid movements are steered by advanced algorithms. As it transitions from robot to human likeness, the two dancers in turn interact with the kinetics, all of which is performed to the hypnotic soundscape of Tokyo electronic music artist Chihei Hatakeyama. The idea here is to visualise how a minimal amount of information can animate form so that it can be recognised as human, while the most subtle changes in information can have an equally fundamental impact on our behaviour.

See the full story here

Why businesses should support the arts post-pandemic

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Nargess

Sculpture by Leelee Chan, winner of the BMW Art Journey with Art Basel © Leelee Chan

As head of BMW’s cultural engagement, Thomas Girst is deeply passionate about arts and ideas. He involves the company in some really interesting projects which not only help these artists and institutions – many of whom rely entirely on corporate sponsorship – but the partnerships also subtly boost BMW’s brand image externally and internally.

Of course, there’s always been a mutually seductive rapport between art and money – and BMW isn’t alone even among car companies to tap into the art world. Yet, not all sponsorships and patronages feel genuine. Some are so off the rail you do wonder who signed the cheque. Girst’s work, though, is different. His choices are relevant to the brand and are topical. They can also be daring – be it exploring the virtual real, the seducing powers of technology, or the plight of the refugee. The latest partnership looks at the climate crisis with Leelee Chan, the winner of the BMW Art Journey with Art Basel, examining how ancient materials and their future substitutes from the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology inform our debate around ecological and cultural sustainability.

I spoke with Girst following the Art Journey announcement to see where he feels the art world is heading. And he spoke passionately about the vital need for corporations to sponsor and support the arts in the post-pandemic world. He also offered some valuable tips as to how businesses can best get involved with the creative world. Take a closer look here

Refik Anadol’s artwork at Frieze Art is a dialogue on humans And machine

Posted on March 1, 2020 by Nargess

Media artist Refik Anadol is using data from the color of every Rolls-Royce motor car built in the last decade to create an LED canvas to explore the challenges and the possibilities we face in the digital age. Presented during Frieze Los Angeles, ‘Art of Perfection: Data Painting’ is the latest commission in the Rolls-Royce “Muse” program, the initiative designed to help advance the medium of the moving image, explore materials and support arts and ideas. Take a closer look at his textural work here, and watch the artist in conversation here .

Also see Émeric Lhuisset’s work for Paris Photo

Frieze Art 2010: Erotic vs voyeuristic

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Mohsen Shahmanesh

In a recent television documentary The Genius of British Art (Channel 4) the novelist Howard Jacobsen reminded us of the beauty of eroticism in British art. In the same week Frieze Art in London’s Regents Park highlighted another aspect of sexuality: Voyeurism.

The difference appears crucial. Where eroticism involves at least two persons, voyeurism is a one-way relation. Where the erotic in art communicates sexuality as something to be enjoyed, to be cherished, and to be developed, the voyeuristic art reduces sex into a commodity. Where the erotic enhances our appreciation of sexuality, voyeurism reduces it to a mechanical act. Where the erotic addresses both sexes and all forms of sexuality, voyeurism is predominantly directed at men. In one sex and sexuality is celebrated – in the other reduced to a gasp.

Eroticism in art is infinite in its manifestation. Perhaps the most poignant is Portrait of Hélène Fourment (1630) by the Italian master Rubens of his young second wife. Here the fur-wrap, with its beautifully painted filaments, caresses every pore of her skin, her smiling eyes provocatively looking back at the painter – and at us.

Or in the French painter Pierre Bonnard’s numerous nudes of his wife where he captures her bathing, drying, and looking in the mirror. And in British artist David Hockney’s 1960s swimming pool paintings, where the blue water almost embraces his partner.

Or take the image of the nude woman on a bed. In Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) her look penetrates through to your secret thoughts. In another master, Diego Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus (1651), inspired by Titian, the subject faces away, not even prepared to look at us through the mirror.

Edouard Manet scandalized 1863 Paris with his subject’s insolent look in Olympia. Francisco Goya’s The Maya Nude (La Maja Desnuda) of 1862, painting a real person in the nude for the first time in Spain reflects, to quote the French academic and author Jean-Marie Le Clézio, an unattainable look.

And arguably the most sensuous of all nudes is Bonnard’s post coital 1899 Femme assoupie sur un lit or L’Indolente languid and La Sieste(1990) of his future wife Marthe. This is erotic art at its best.

Yet the line between eroticism and voyeurism is not always clear. Paul Gauguin, for instance, was inspired by pornographic photographs he bought in Port Said. Some of the paintings of Georg Grosz, Egon Schiele or more recently Jeff Koons, and many of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton, to name a few, border on pornography. Additionally, it is difficult to ignore the apparent paedophilia of some of 20th century Polish-French artist Balthus’ paintings of young girls. So where is the line between one and the other?

Fast-forward to the present day, Frieze showed us an awful amount of sex, and little eroticism. There was an enormous amount of sex and elusions to the female sexual organ – I counted three women masturbating. Two women pose in a photograph behind a cake shaped like a giant penis, women enter clear water for no other reason than to titillate.

There is arguably paedophilia with a perfectly executed painting of a pubertal girl blindfolded on her knees, helpless. A man with an erection reading a book – probably pornography. Yes there is tenderness in a series of photographs of a lesbian couple, one of the few instances of love. Yet mostly the art at Frieze was sex without emotion.

A few miles away in London’s Berkley Square, Pavilion Art and Design exhibited the erotic drawings of Viennese painter Gustov Klimt (1862-1918) – yes and there were women masturbating. Yet unlike the work at Frieze, the viewer isn’t asked to observe through a peephole – the artist is there in the drawing, unseen but seen.

That is what separates the erotic from commodified soft porn. And there is eroticism galore in Picasso’s work where the painter and his model ask the viewer to share in their sexual excitement. Even the blatant sexuality of Egon Schiele’s drawings and paintings asks us to share.

What perhaps separates eroticism and voyeurism – over and above the issue of communication between the viewer and the viewed – is the intrinsic artistic value of the piece. This is a quality that cannot be commodified. Though clearly in the world we live in, where art is above all expressed as a medium of value, it requires a Herculean effort for the viewer to rise above the dollar sign and evaluate the work outside the marketplace.

Guest blogger Mohsen Shahmanesh