“The main subject is the shift in my personal career from physical manipulation of materials to digital – from mallets to pixels” ….  “Normally you manipulate materials to make them functional. Here I did the opposite – took a functional object and made it delightfully useless.”

Ron Arad  has been working with metal for over three decades to create a comprehensive series of works that transcend art, architecture, design and installation.

He effortlessly moves across these three domains, showing an infinite curiosity for new materials, production methods and technologies. His impact is continuously felt in the world of design, whose boundaries he continues to challenge

Arad, who comfortably moves between gigantic industrial gear and delicate computer screens, seems to collect new sensory information wherever he goes, later weaving them to form new perception of the material object itself.

Arad’s “In Reverse” exhibition is a unique show in which museum and display are fused to one, and marks an important stepping stone in Arad’s challenging ongoing journey.

Housed at the Design Museum Holon, his largest steel creation to date. ( designed by Ron Arad in 2010 with the aim of turning the city into a design hub for the Middle East and triggering worldwide interest in the creative output of the area ), the show presents three decades of Arad’s work in metal.

In Reverse is a unique, one of a kind exhibition, not just because the museum building constitutes its single biggest exhibit, but also due its sincerity and ingenuity in presenting Arad’s complex and multilayered work process, both through its individual stages and end-products

“I owed Holon an exhibition for a long time and I really didn’t feel like an another retrospective. I wasn’t interested in investing effort in an exhibition that I have already seen and I know what to do,” said Arad

It took me until now to agree to do a show at the museum ( which he designed) , mainly because I think of it as my piece, so I don’t want to use it for my own work as well !

This show was so successful though—I’ve been at the Pompidou, MoMA, the Barbican, and so I was excited to end the journey here. I know the museum so well, so it made it easier to plan. And now it’s pretty thrilling to see people enjoying the show and the building

The Forward-Thinking Designer Ron Arad returns to the Israeli Museum he built

Holon is a museum, a design museum. Their expectation of me is to have some sort of retrospective. The museum thinks it has a responsibility – an obligation to the visitors to show and put things in some historic reference.

The way I relate to this is by looking at the last three decades (yes, three decades) and observing the shift from physically handling raw materials (and at times found objects) by bending, forming, forging, casting, beating, cutting, and welding (a lot of steel in the beginning), to create usable if not useful objects, towards digitally and virtually making things on screen with the aid of light pens, mice and pixels.

In the old days you had to first make a mock-up or a prototype, then produce something, and then photograph it.

Today you start with a photograph or a film of something that doesn’t exist yet, and like with a police photo-fit, you then try to catch the suspect, the real physical thing.

“In Reverse” runs through Oct. 19, 2013

The exhibition was curated by Lydia Yee (Barbican Art Gallery, London), is a concentrate of ideas and thoughts on all-round craftsmanship and technology, about the past and the present.

“In Reverse is an exhibition about the shift from the physical to the digital – except in reverse. Rather than manipulate materials to render them functional or render digital models towards a functional object, here I ‘reverse’ perfectly functional objects and render them useless”, explained Ron Arad

‘I used to bash metal to make things useful, or useable,’ ‘Here we’re doing the reverse.’

‘In Reverse’ showcases the Israeli-born designer’s extensive explorations with his this, his favorite material, as evidenced in his furniture developments.

A number of his designs, mostly chairs made from steel, are presented documenting his manipulation of the medium from his works of the 1980s, to his more recent developments which still carry similar properties to their early predecessors.

While the exhibition includes examples of his designs from the 1980s to the present, Ron Arad didn’t want it to be a conventional retrospective, so he added a new component: a project that explores how automobile bodies behave under compression.

The show includes new experiments in metal based around the Fiat 500, a family of small cars first launched in 1936, with six of the cars having been crushed and mounted on the wall.

The six crushed Fiats are shown as almost flat forms, looking to ‘resemble the outcome of an accident in a cartoon or a child’s drawing that lacks a sense of depth’, according to the museum.

The show also includes Ron Arad’s digital simulation of the crushing process, and a sculpture that is the result of applying a 3-D printing technique to one frame of the film.

Elsewhere in the gallery is Arad’s Roddy Giacosa – a sculpture of the Fiat made from stainless steel rods positioned on a metal armature, displayed alongside a forming buck, a structure used to shape the panels of the car.

Forming the backdrop to these surreal vehicles is a group of Arad’s older steel design pieces, such as 1980s chairs, and a crushed a toy police car that the designer found 40 years ago in a street in Tel Aviv..

Pressed Flowers

Roddy Giacosa, Fiat Wood Mold & Pressed Flowers

The focal point of the exhibition is a major new project Arad has been engaged in which has seen him investigating–through physical experiments and digital simulations–the way in which automobile bodies, with particular focus on the Fiat 500, behave under compression.

The pulsing heart of the exhibition commands the center of the museum’s upper gallery – Pressed Flowers: six vintage Fiat 500 cars embalmed as giant memorial centerpieces – a work that perfectly embodies the passage of an object from the vibrating world outside into the closed one of the museum – a space traditionally entrusted with the task of collecting, classifying and preserving.

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The central installation sees six Fiat 500s in a crushed state, flattened in such a way that they resemble the outcome of an accident in a cartoon or a child’s drawing, lacking any depth and dimension.

This oversized series of Pressed Flowers is on the one hand evocative of a collective childhood memory from bygone times, and on the other hand it acts as a reference to the very methods by which flowers, plants, butterflies and insects had gained access into the first museums – being pressed first and then pinned with needles, to be neatly arranged and spread in display trays.

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Hung on the walls of the gallery, they surround the wooden Mold (on loan from the Fiat Museum ) that has been used to shape and fit the metal panels of the vehicle.

Before CNC, before 5-axis milling machines, before stereo lithography, selective laser sintering and fusion depositing machines – in other words, before computers – the industry relied on artisans, genius artisans.

The wooden model, a forming buck of the first Fiat 500, designed by Dante Giacosa, is a skillfully crafted object of beauty. The problem to be overcome was that it resided on the fourth floor of the Fiat Museum in Turin and difficult to move.

Roddy Giacosa

The only way to contain an object of beauty made by others in your show is to audaciously try and match it with one of yours.

Roddy Giacosa (an homage to Giacosa in rods) is a stainless steel-rod shell of the Cinquecento, based on its wooden rival from the 50s.

To win (or even come close to) Giacosa we had to draft not only our best drafting computers, the most sophisticate 3D software and computer controlled laser-cutting  instruments but also our best crafty artisans and their veteran tools.

This beautiful homage to the Fiat 500 was created by scanning the car, then dissecting the scan into slices to make the Mold.

The making of this piece relied on total fusion between the virtual and the physical, man and machine. ‘Roddy Giacosa’, is ‘the perfect symbiosis’ of ‘physical’ and ‘digital’ making

” Roddy Giacosa ” (2013)

Each contoured section takes the shape of one of the vehicle’s panels and the parts fit together to form the body of the car

A sculpture which has been created through the use of hundreds of polished stainless steel rods worked over a metal armature, the contoured sections resembling one of the car’s panels so that collectively they resemble the body of a Fiat 500.

Construction of Roddy Giacosa on a laser-cut stainless steel armature at Realize, Como, 2012

The laser cut steel components are completely made by machine, but the only way they could be assembled into the final sculpture was ‘by amazing, genius, loving artisans who perform things that we can only sit back and wonder how they do it,’ says Arad.

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For a man who likes to crush cars, it’s a surprisingly poetic emblem for the relationship between artisan and computer.  And it’s a piece in which visitors can’t help but wish they could drive away.

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“Lets Drop It” study

The first thing that greets you in the museum is a giant screen showing ‘Slow Outburst’ (2013), a virtual experiment revealing the simulated effects of the crushing process on the body of a red Fiat 500, made in collaboration with specialists in crash safety design.

Says Arad, “when I see a can on the street that was run over time after time, I can’t not pick it up. It’s like in nature, a sort of unbelievable beauty that stems from the force on things, and all the interest after that is in the choice.”

He was a never-ending collector of such things and he still has a collection, he said. “So there is on one side the physical crushing of things and on the other side the digital crushing,” says Arad.

In the film Slow Outburst (2013), the effects of the crushing process slowly appear on the body of a red Fiat 500, but without any visual force acting on the material, and then the procedure is reversed and the crumpled panels and shattered glass are slowly restored.

Like the intertwined processes of going forward and reversing in Arad’s new film, this exhibition looks at his work from both directions.

With the title In Reverse, we wanted to highlight especially the transition from 2D to 3D and the relationship between the car and the man’s hand, between what they do the one and the other and how important and always preponderant, man.

Digital Prints

“The starting point was the wooden model, recomposed in sculpture Roddy Giacosa, created by hand by placing hundreds of polished stainless steel rods on a metal frame in the shape of a 500. But mostly hand-made skeleton that highlights the constructive lines and their explosion in fall, then render to your computer. Before we did this fall as the game Mikado sticks, to see live their behavior “.

In this continuous passage between technology and craftsmanship, there is also a sculpture made using 3D printing techniques derived from one frame of a movie – Drop in view – which incorporates the results in slow motion of an impact against an invisible machine of a new Fiat 500.

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Digital prints on paper document the results of the compressions of ‘Roddy Giacosa’

“We received super secret, state-of-the-art 3D models from Fiat – and we signed an NDA so we can’t share it with you or anyone – to exercise the digital crushing on.

We are working with the film and digial effects company Framestore (they are responsible for all the stuff that you think is real but isn’t really in films like Harry Potter, Avatar, Warhorse and many others). In the process we were also joined by the HyperWorks car crash simulators, who are scientists, not artists.

We are working on a film of the Fiat crushed flat by an invisible press and then reversed it to revive the car – with stationary camera, minute details and a soundtrack. Although we have a notion of the film there are lots of unknowns and a lot of room for improvisation – very much like a wet canvas.

We also plan to print a full-scale, 3D print of one single frame from the 5,000 frames of the three minute film. It will be like a white relief of a flattened car in polyamide.”

A sculpture derived from one frame of this film that has been made by a 3D printing technique.

“Crushing Cars” Study

In Reverse takes Arad’s work a step further into the realm of digital, as he explores how the shape and form of the Italian automobile reacts under different strains.

“Recently I spent some very interesting days in the engineering department of the Milan Polytechnic, squashing some immaculately-made parts of a huge stainless steel sculpture with very powerful presses.

“It was a statue originally designed for a roof and atrium of a house in France, a project that was cancelled in the end. They had already made the statue and it was necessary to make changes because of the scale since it was intended to be part of the building’s structure. So we crushed it at the Milan Polytechnic.

I embarked on a process where the results could only be intuitively imagined – I was prepared for some sort of thrilling chaos, but instead the machines yielded an object of mathematical beauty, surpassing my optimistic anticipation.

Fiat Topolino 500C “Giardinetta,” 1949

“The idea of crushed metal is personal for Mr. Arad: when he was a child, his family’s Fiat Topolino Giardinetta ( one generation before the Fiat 500 / Cinquecento ) was mangled in an accident, and a crushed toy police car that he found in the street when he was 11, actually ended up in the exhibition.

Early one morning a neighbor rang the doorbell telling us my father had an accident; his little car was run over by a huge garbage van.  My brother and I (aged 13 and 7) rushed to the scene of the accident on our bikes.

We saw a flattened Fiat Toppolino ( which was made from a mix of wood and metal ).and could not believe that anyone could get out of there alive. Then we cycled to the hospital and I will never forget my father’s first words to us – “had my car not been made out of wood I wouldn’t be alive now. ”

He’s now 96 and unfortunately refuses to stop driving”

Hydraulic press crushing scale model of a Fiat 500, Milan Polytechnic, 2012

“I practiced with model cars, then graduated to real-size ones. It’s not a complex idea, but I talked about the car with the museums who got very excited by it, so there we are!”

Additionally, Arad is displaying a group of crushed objects, such as a toy police car that he found forty years ago in the street in Tel Aviv, as well as other objects that were studies and tests, including a bottle rack that he had flattened by a steamroller and a crushed camera

Why Fiat 500’s

On a flight coming back from Rome some thirty years ago, I was contemplating Fiat 500s.

How come Rome is full of them, old cars from the 1950s, while there are hardly any Fiat 600s left on the streets ?  The 600s I think were slightly better looking, slightly more comfortable – how come they didn’t survive?

I thought the answer must be that ideas should not be compromised. The idea of the smallest thing that qualifies with the necessary conditions to be called a car (though it never qualified in the US), has survived over its compromised sibling.

Making my way back from Heathrow, I saw one, a 500, at a traffic light. I shouted to the driver “are you selling it?” and he answered “yes.” “How much?” “500.”

By fluke the address he gave me was in my neighborhood and the car is still  parked in our driveway. It is now rusting away, growing moss and not going anywhere – the functional has become useless but delightful. At one point in its life, it was painted in a glow-in-the-dark paint by two of my students, Arash and Eddie.

It is a real bureaucratic conundrum to get a car off the road in Italy. I thought it was a joke but it is very serious – it is illegal unless you hand it over to be crushed and shredded by an authorized, official scrap metal dealer.

We sought the help of lawyers, museum directors and second hand car dealers – lots of promises but so far no good news.

The original plan was to go back to the Milan Polytechnic and flatten the cars there. Roberto Travaglia suggested doing it closer to Realize, near Como (Italy), the factory where he makes our metalwork (he also masterminded all the Cor-Ten work in Holon).

Roberto decided to take the risk, buy a Cinquecento and experiment. He didn’t want to tell me how he planned to do it; he didn’t even want me to come and see the first experiment (but finally he agreed to have Michael Castellana, from my studio, there with the camera).

Discussing this in London, I did a sketch in front of Roberto saying, “you’re not going to do it like this, are you?” He went sort of white and admitted, “yes.”

He sandwiched the car between two steel plates connected by six threaded bars, and manually turned the nuts, squeezing the car down from one and a half meters to half a meter thick. It needed a second stage.

A week later we received some images of the car almost as flat as I wanted it. I assumed Roberto found a power press in the neighborhood with which to do the final squeeze.

Back in London, Roberto hesitated before revealing to us how it was really done. He then showed us on his iPhone a film that even Tarantino couldn’t have directed, with driving rain and all.

The poor car was tortured by an obsessive anthropomorphic monster of a digger. What footage! Even the number plate of the little car spelled “MI NO.”

This footage is invaluable, but I’m still looking for ways to crush the 500s in a similar way to how the toys were crushed.

Achieving the same flattening effect on a larger scale proved tricky – one poor Fiat was even pounded by a digger – yet Arad wanted to go further than the crushed car sculptures by César Baldaccini and John Chamberlain in the 1960s.

‘Their work stopped being about cars,’ says the Tel Aviv-born but London-based artist. ‘They used cars as a source of raw materials to make sculptures out of. The idea here is to allow them to stay cars, yet show them from a new perspective.’

“Getting Fiats out of Italy proved to be more difficult than selling ice to Eskimos.

There is a nice little family garage in London, the Proietti family, specializing (still) in Fiat 500s. They looked after mine for 30 years. They have a nice yard with lots of rusting, rotting, moss-growing 500s (as well as Viscount Linley’s immaculate blue one).

At first it was very difficult to explain my project to them, “I’m not destroying them – I’m immortalizing them.”

Then they came around and prepared six cars for immortalizing – white, yellow, dark blue, metallic blue, and two shades of red – emptying the shells, waxing and buffing them.

A 500-tonne press capable of an almost instantaneous crush was found in the Netherlands at CentraalStraal BV, Groningen .”

“It’s always nice to see things happen in front of you that you are not totally in charge of, that are not exactly the fulfilment of your blueprint,” Arad explains.

After crushing, the pressed cars were then shipped over to Italy for some post-production, or ’embalming’.

So why attack the Fiat 500? ‘ = The car is a national symbol for Italy and our generation, and it’s a very endearing vehicle.

Everyone has stories about their first ever sex in a Fiat, or first kiss,’ says Arad.

“We’re not destroying the cars, we’re immortalising them.”

“Fiat’s involvement was important and was crucial,” says Ron Arad. Who else would a company like Fiat have been willing to cooperate so they could crush its cars and hang them on the wall?

“I had the green light by John Elkann, who after an initial hesitation was enthusiastic and gave the willingness to expose the original wooden model used by Giacosa to develop 500, realizing that the gesture was not destroyed, but the establishment of a scale of values”.

Back Stage – Furniture Pieces

Behind the walls displaying the crushed Fiats is a group of Arad’s designs, primarily chairs made from steel, tracing his experimentation with the medium from his earliest works in the 1980s to more recent pieces that share some of the same properties as their forebears.

The six ‘Pressed Flowers’, as they affectionately titled, are joined in the Design Museum Holon by a number of metal icons from his past, including the ‘Rocking Big Easy Chair’ (1991) and the ‘D-Sofa’ (1994).

In fact, the show was first mooted as a survey, a notion to which Arad has always been averse, despite such shows at the Barbican and MoMA.

The new works were a fairly recent introduction. ‘About nine months ago the script was entirely rewritten,’ says curator Lydia Yee, who also masterminded the Barbican show. ‘We decided upon a mini survey alongside a brand new body of work.’

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For example, one of his iconic works, the Rover chair, which he created early in his career in 1981, where he made use of the leather seat of a Rover car he found in a scrap yard near his studio.

In addition, there are also copies of his chairs that he found in Italy and which sat in his studio − and that he didn’t know what to do with.

“They were heavy and annoying, until I decided to turn them from something fake into something original. ‘Original Ron Arad,’” he says with a wicked smile.

Beware of the Dog, 1990, Two Nuns

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In Retrospect / Lydia Yee

At the 2009 opening of his survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ron Arad wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the image of Ed Ruscha’s famous painting I Don’t Want No Retrospective (1979), featuring the artist’s eponymous quote.

Arad, who has always been forward looking, does not take pleasure in the exercise of looking back at his past work, as retrospective exhibitions are wont to do. Thus, it may seem paradoxical that his exhibition at Design Museum Holon is titled In Reverse.

Although it is not a retrospective, In Reverse does suggest various relationships to the past – looking at one’s earlier work for inspiration, going in the opposite direction, or the metaphor of a vehicle moving backwards – which are all fitting in this case.

In Reverse focuses on three decades of Arad’s work in metal, his favorite material, and culminates in a major new project, exploring through physical experiments and digital simulations how automobile bodies, specifically the Fiat 500, behave under compression.

On clean white walls in the upper gallery, Arad has installed six crushed Fiat 500s, each flattened in a manner that resembles the outcome of an accident in a cartoon or a child’s drawing that lacks a sense of depth.

The crushed vehicles surround a bulbous wooden forming buck, a mould that was used to shape and fit the metal panels of the 500, which is on loan from the Centro Storico Fiat. Nearby is Arad’s Roddy Giacosa (2013), a new sculpture created by painstakingly positioning hundreds of polished stainless steel rods on a metal armature in the shape of a Fiat 500. Each contoured section takes the shape of one of the vehicle’s panels and the parts fit together to form the body of the car.

Behind the walls displaying the crushed Fiats is a group of Arad’s designs, primarily chairs made from steel, tracing his experimentation with the medium from his earliest works in the 1980s to more recent pieces that share some of the same properties as their forebears.

Additionally, Arad displays a group of crushed artifacts, such as a toy police car that he found forty years ago in the street in Tel Aviv, as well as other objects that were studies and tests, including a bottle rack that he had flattened by a steamroller.

The lower gallery features Arad’s digital simulation of the crushing process, using the most recent model of the 500, as well as a sculpture made by a 3D printing technique, which is based on a single frame from a related film.

Digital prints on paper capture the results of simulated digital compressions of the Roddy Giacosa. Also on view is a selection of Arad’s recent work, sculptural forms that were designed with the aid of 3D modeling software.

Arad’s crushed Fiats trace their line age back to his earliest design, The Rover Chair (1981), a leather Rover car seat salvaged from a London scrapyard and mounted onto a frame made from steel tubing and key-clamp fittings.

Both works depend on relics from the post-war automobile boom and its cycle of planned obsolescence.

They also owe a debt to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, ordinary industrial objects – such as a urinal, bottle rack or bicycle wheel – which the artist selected, signed and presented as art with little or no modification.

Arad’s Aerial Light (1981), a halogen lamp attached to a car aerial which can be adjusted by remote control, is also a readymade, albeit one with a more significant intervention.

When he made these works in the early 1980s, Arad was among a handful of young designers in London, including Tom Dixon, Andre Dubreuil and Danny Lane, tagged with the label “creative salvage” for making furniture out of found materials and a do-it-yourself, punk attitude.

Arad, however, did not fully embrace this label. He saw his practice as a response to th Duchampian strategy of appropriating found objects, with affinities in both the worlds of art and design: Picasso’s Tete de Taureau (1942), a bicycle seat and handlebars mounted on the wall to resemble a bull’s head, and Achille Castiglioni’s Mezzadro Stool (1957), a metal seat attached to a leaf spring, both from a tractor.

Duchamp, according to Arad, made everyday objects useless by calling them art.

By contrast, Arad has taken obsolete objects and gave them another life. Throughout the 1980s, he continued to make Rover chairs one at a time as he found discarded seats, but eventually the supply dwindled and he stopped producing them.

Two decades later, Arad, working with the manufacturer Vitra, revisited the chair in a limited edition titled Moreover (2007), produced in rusted and chromed steel versions.

In recent years, Arad has been described as an architect, artist and designer; he works between these three disciplines, defying easy categorization.

Although he is arguably best known as a designer, he did not set out to become one.

Today, his designs are equally at home in large public spaces and exclusive private collections.

He trained as an architect, but it has only been in the past decade that he has been receiving significant commissions, most notably Design Museum Holon.

The son of artists, Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and came of age in an era when ideas and ideals counted more than the mastery of technical skills.

He enrolled in environmental and industrial design courses at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem before relocating to London in 1974 to study at the Architectural Association (AA).

Esther Peretz Arad wanted her son to become a respectable architect rather than a struggling artist.

In the highly experimental programme at the AA, where he studied under Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi, Arad and his peers, including Nigel Coates and Zaha Hadid, did not learn by copying the designs of their teachers; instead they were encouraged to conceive visionary architectural megastructures.

After graduating, Arad came to realize that in order to pursue a career in architecture, he would have to work for an established architect and pay his dues by turning out countless, highly detailed and tedious technical drawings.

After briefly working for an architectural firm, Arad inadvertently stumbled into design.

In the early 1980s, there was virtually no manufacturing infrastructure for contemporary design in the UK. As such, young designers were left to cut their own paths.

The rebellious young Arad opened One Off, a studio, workshop and showroom, in London’s Covent Garden neighbourhood in 1981.

His training in architecture enabled him to design his own spaces. Much of the construction, however, was improvised and experimental, and the same skills used to make his early pieces – scavenging material, pouring concrete and cutting, welding and bashing metal – were put to use in fabricating the walls, floors, work surfaces, seating, and signage.

Not merely functional, the One Off spaces were adorned with artistic flourishes, including an entrance made of reclaimed bus doors at the initial location on Short Gardens, a sculptural metal balustrade at Neal Street and “light tattoos” made by burning holes in the steel wall with a cutting torch at Shelton Street.

Arad does not make a clear distinction between the disciplines of art and design.

As a design student at Bezalel, he spent much of his time hanging out in the fine art department, learning about the work of leading contemporary artists such as Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.

He thought the AA, with its emphasis on architecture as ideas, looked like an art school.

There was, in fact, a strong dialogue between architecture and other artistic disciplines at the school. Tschumi, who was a unit master at the AA, and RoseLee Goldberg, director of the gallery at the Royal College of Art, initiated an exchange of ideas about architecture and art, focusing on conceptual approaches to space and performance.

In an essay published in the exhibition catalogue, A Space: A Thousand Words, Goldberg writes, “It is in space that ideas are materialized, experience experienced. Space consequently becomes the essential element in the notion of practice.”

Arad’s work is rooted in ideas, yet it springs from materials as much as concepts, and there is a performative quality to much of his output.

One Off afforded him a theatrical space in which to experiment and give material form to his practice. Its improvised interior of found materials and welded metal had the look of a Nouveau Réaliste (New Realist) sculpture.

The French New Realists and American Neo-Dadaists – whose work in the 1950s and 1960s built on the legacy of Duchamp and Dada and was largely comprised of detritus – offered an irreverent critique of consumer culture.

Arad had first encountered the work of Jean Tinguely, who was part of the New Realist group, at the Israel Museum, where his sculpture Eos XK 3 (1965) graces the garden. Tinguely’s 1982 retrospective at the Tate – featuring noisy, welded metal machines, such as the sound sculpture Meta-Harmonie II (1979) – also impressed Arad.

His New Descending Staircase (1984), for example, installed in One Off’s Neal Street location, had a playful Tinguely-esque quality, periodically emitting brief tunes as staff and visitors ascended and descended the stairs, formed from cantilever railway sleepers and wired to a synthesizer to trigger sounds when stepped on.

For the exhibition Nouvelles Tendances: Les Avant-gardes de la fin du XXeme siecle (1987) at the Centre Pompidou, Arad made a sculptural machine out of rough metal titled Sticks and Stones (1987).

This contraption was constructed from a conveyor belt and a powerful baling machine.

The words “sticks & stones may break my bones but names will never harm me” were cut into the metal panels on the two sides of the conveyor belt.

Visitors were invited to place their chairs, old and new, onto the belt and to watch as the baler compacted them into cubes. Over the course of the exhibition, these blocks of mangled metal, wood, upholstery and plastic were stacked to form a wall around the machine.

Recognising the connection to the 1960s crushed car sculptures of the French New Realist Cesar, Arad also referred to this project as the “Cesarian Operation”.

While the crushed objects have the appearance of small sculptures by Cesar, the machine and its actions looked and behaved more like one of Tinguely’s destructive devices, such as Rotozaza II (1967) – an apparatus, made of welded iron, a bicycle chain and a motor, designed to smash glass bottles.

For many artists, destruction can be a potent, liberating force that clears the way for the future.

Arad recalls his thinking behind Sticks and Stones: ……”I wasn’t interested in the future. All I could do was make it come a little faster. And the only way I could do that was by destroying some of the[past… I said the most important machine in the car industry is really the machine that destroys cars, because it makes room for new ones.”

Arad’s outlook has its roots in the Dada movement, and his view on destruction echoed that of the avant-garde poet and writer Tristan Tzara, who was one of the founders of Dada.

More than four decades after its instigation in the aftermath of the first World War, Tzara reflected on the aims of the movement: … “The Dada program was, despite what some think, collective destruction, it was the creation of new values, overthrowing existing values and of course, to overthrow them, we had to destroy the commonly accepted values, which were more or less academic… Of course, we can’t create if we don’t destroy what existed before.”

Beginning in the late 1950s, Neo-Dadaists and New Realists sparked a renewed interested in the anti-establishment attitude of Dada, which resonated with artists from subsequent generations.

For example, Gordon Matta-Clark, who was known for cutting open abandoned buildings in the early 1970s, felt an affinity with the early twentieth-century movement: “Dada’s devotion to the imaginative disruption of convention is an essential liberation force. I can’t imagine how Dada relates stylistically to my work, but in spirit it is fundamental.”

Matta-Clark’s oeuvre includes a performance documented in the film Fresh Kill (1972), in which he destroyed his truck with a bulldozer at Fresh Kills landfill in New York.

After crushing chairs, including purportedly one designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers for the offices of the Centre Pompidou, Arad moved into a particularly productive phase of his career, at times approaching the creative act with aggressive, if not destructive, tendencies.

He defines design as “the act of one imposing one’s will on materials to perform a function.”

Arad’s definition, minus the function, is similar to how the American sculptor Richard Serra describes his approach to materials: …. “In 1967 and 1968, I wrote down a verb list as a way of applying various activities to unspecified materials. To roll, to fold, to bend, to shorten, to shave, to tear, to chip, to tear, to split, to sever… The language structured my relationship to materials which had the same function as transitive verbs.”

Arad’s aphorism is best exemplified by his Tinker Chair (1988), made by beating sheet steel with a rubber mallet until it felt like a comfortable seat, or in the words of Arad, “until it confessed to being a chair.” Then the two sides are welded on, fixing its shape.

After making five Tinker Chairs, Arad continued to work with sheet steel for his series Volumes, improvising the shapes by drawing on the surface and cutting out the forms to be welded together and then polished.

The early versions had the quality of a rough sketch, but as his workshop team became more skilled, the chairs became more refined, with cleaner welds and a lustrous finish.

Arad experimented with a variety of forms – including an overstuffed club chair, Big Easy (1988), and several rocking chairs, such as Rolling Volume (1989). The latter was weighted at the back to shift the point of balance.

Throughout the 1980s, Arad focused on unique pieces and limited editions made by hand, aligning him more closely with artists than designers who work primarily with manufacturers to fabricate products on a mass scale.

In addition to serving as a studio and workshop, One Off was also a showroom and enabled Arad to build an audience for his work and that of his peers.

He sold pieces directly to the public and organized exhibitions and parties to bring potential clients through the door. Unlike industrial designers, he could not rely on manufacturers to invest in the necessary tooling to produce his designs and in marketing them to both retailers and consumers.

According to architecture and design critic Deyan Sudjic, he had to “assume responsibility for every aspect of the design, manufacture and marketing of a piece of furniture… It carried with it not just freedom, but a whole range of distractions and difficulties.”

Arad received his first commission to design a piece for manufacture in 1986, when Rolf Fehlbaum, the owner of Vitra, approached him to create a piece for Vitra Editions.

Ironically, the design that Arad came up with could have been realized in his studio. Well Tempered Chair (1986), a deceptively simple armchair, is made from four sheets of sprung steel, looped and held together by wing nuts. The essential quality of this surprisingly comfortable chair, its tautly curved, springy surface, is the result of the tempering process, which gives the steel a memory, so it wants to snap back to its original flattened form.

Shortly after its inauguration in 1989, the Vitra Design Museum invited Arad to run a workshop.

He asked to work again with tempered steel, but it was only available in widths of 30cm. After conducting various experiments with the material, he created prototypes for seats that further exploited the properties of tempered steel, including Bucking Bronco (1990), and Beware of the Dog (1990), some of which were produced in limited editions by One Off.

Twenty years later, Arad went back to sprung steel, looping and connecting thin strips to create a new type of bicycle wheel that gives his Two Nuns (2011) a gentle, bouncy ride.

Since the early days of One Off, Arad has documented his work in photographs and videos – not only the finished products, but also the experimentation and process of making his work.

During the Vitra workshop, Arad shot video footage of one of the experiments, in which he and a couple students roll and bounce a large loop of tempered steel across a tented work space.

This short film is not unlike those made by Bruce Nauman of his studio performances, such as Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms or Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (both 1967-68), in which he carries out the rather straightforward tasks described in the title.

Arad’s footage is not, however, a performance or an artwork per se, but as with Nauman’s films, it reveals a dedication to the process and act of making art. Nauman always appears as the solo protagonist in his films, whereas Arad is often with assistants, fabricators, technicians and other collaborators.

In contrast to most visual artists who work in a solitary studio setting, Arad thrives in a lively and challenging environment with other creative people, who bring different ideas and skills to the mix. He has likened his working environment to a kindergarten, where play and social interaction are essential to developing skills and knowledge.

Over the past two decades, Arad has taken full advantage of opportunities to work with manufacturers as well as highly-skilled artisans and technicians.

The Italian furniture manufacturer Moroso was the first to mass produce his designs, creating the Spring Collection (1990), upholstered pieces based on works originally executed in steel. Arad also made new prototypes in painted steel, some of which were put into production.

Collaboration with specialist fabrication firms has enabled Arad to take innovative forms he designed digitally and translate them into beautiful objects, composed of new metal alloys with exacting finishes.

His Southern Hemisphere and Afterthought (both 2007), produced in collaboration with Ernest Mourmans, adopt a material used in the aircraft industry, super-plastic aluminium; the latter is created from a pair of untrimmed blanks used to make the former.

For his series Bodyguards (2007), Arad inflated superplastic aluminium onto a four-part mould and welded the sections together, creating a curvaceous form that resembles a human torso. He then cut away sections to give each one a unique shape, then patinated or polished the surface and even introduced color to some of them.

When Arad first conceived the idea of crushing a vintage Fiat 500, he envisaged how it should be done – a huge hydraulic press would crush the car as if it were a toy. A test with a small press and a toy version of the car confirmed his intuition.

His collaborator Roberto Travaglia at Realize helped him crush an actual Fiat 500 by manually compressing the car between metal plates with a makeshift vice and weights, and then further flattening it under a metal plate with a small digger.

The process took more than two days, and although it came close to achieving the desired flatness, Arad preferred a more dramatic and immediate solution – crushing the cars using a 500-ton press used in shipbuilding.

The Fiat also has personal significance for Arad.

An earlier model, the Giardiniera, was the family car when he was growing up in Tel Aviv and his father survived a serious accident while driving it.

Of his early days in London, he recalls “I always enjoyed watching a demolition ball in action.” Arad understands that the process is sometimes as important as the end results.

Critics have called him a showman, but Arad appreciates that strong images and a good story can go a lot farther than a conventional photograph of an object displayed in a gallery setting. In an image with one of his Squashed Vipps (2008), which he made for a charity auction, Arad is humorously portrayed as a tough guy who is able to crush the metal can with his bare hands.

Arad’s Fiats will inevitably be compared to the crushed metal sculptures of John Chamberlain and Cesar from the 1960s.

Although Chamberlain is best known for his use of car parts, he also used discarded household appliances and other scrap metal to create his compositions: “I’m basically a collagist. I put one thing together with another thing. I sort of invented my own art supplies. I saw all this material just lying around against buildings and it was in color, so I felt I was ahead on two counts there.”

Cesar is also recognized for his sculptures made of crushed automobile bodies, which he called “compressions”. His approach was more akin to Duchamp’s found objects than Chamberlain’s collage technique and involved choosing objects from a scrapyard that have been compressed by a large hydraulic press.

Although Arad shares Cesar’s interest in industrial machinery and the found object, his concerns have expanded; issues of form, process and narrative are equally important.

There are also affinities between Arad’s Fiat project and works by his immediate peers.

His friend Cornelia Parker employed a steamroller to flattened more than a thousand silverplated objects, including cutlery, candle holders, plates and instruments. The title of her work, Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-89), describes the arrangement of objects into thirty groups and refers to the biblical story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot.

Richard Wilson’s Butterfly (2003) is another recent antecedent to the crushed Fiat project. After destroying a small Cessna with two bulldozers, Wilson then reconstructed and suspended the plane, before allowing it to crash to the floor.

In any given project, Arad expands his ideas around a central core and then allows further experiments, new materials and techniques to take his work in new directions.

Here, he has conducted virtual experiments using digital simulations of the process of crushing cars, in collaboration with a firm specialising in crash and safety design and a post-production company for film and advertising.

In the resulting film Slow Outburst (2013), the effects of the crushing process slowly appear on the body of a red Fiat 500, but without any visual force acting on the material, and then the procedure is reversed and the crumpled panels and shattered glass are slowly restored. Like the intertwined processes of going forward and reversing in Arad’s new film, this exhibition looks at his work from both directions.

And even though Arad does not want a retrospective, he acknowledges that “the biggest source of raw material that you have…it’s really your own previous work. When you work you choose to do something one way, and there are lots of other ways you could have done it, but you just think, well, maybe next time. And then later you do actually come back to it.”

About Ron Arad

Ron Arad remains one of the world’s most influential and enigmatic designers and over the last 30 years has made a pivotal contribution to the art, design and architecture worlds.

The son of artists, Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and came of age in an era when ideas and ideals counted more than the mastery of technical skills.

He enrolled in environmantal and industrial design courses at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem before

relocating to London in 1974 to study at the Architectural Association (AA).

Esther Peretz Arad wanted her son to become a respectable architect rather than a struggling artist. In the highly experimental programme at the AA, where he studied under Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi.

After graduating, Arad came to realize that in order to pursue a career in architecture, he would have to work for an established architect and pay his dues by turning out countless, highly detailed and tedious technical drawings.

The rebellious young Arad opened One Off, a studio, workshop and showroom, in London’s Covent Garden neighbourhood in 1981.

His training in architecture enabled him to design his own spaces. Much of the construction, however, was improvised and experimental, and the same skills used to make his early pieces-scavenging material, pouring concrete and cutting, welding and bashing metal – were put to use in fabricating the walls, floors, work surfaces, seating, and signage.

Not merely functional, the One off spaces were adorned with artistic flourishes, including an entrance made of reclaimed bus doors at the initial location on Short Gardens, a sculptural metal balustrade at Neal Street and ‘’ light tattoos ‘’ made by burning holes in the steel wall with a cutting torch at Shelton Street.

Ron Arad received his training from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in Jerusalem, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, in London.

In 1981 he founded the One Off design and production studio with Caroline Thorman and in 1989 he created the Ron Arad architecture and design studio.

He has also been Professor of Design Products at Royal College of Art in London from 1998 to 2009.

Brought to international fame by his Rover chair and Bookworm bookshelf, Arad has since collaborated with leading brands such as Alessi, Vitra, Swarovski and Kenzo and designed Yohji Yamamoto’s Tokyo flagship amongst many other critically acclaimed projects.

Ron Arad has exhibited his work at galleries and museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Georges Pompidou in París, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York and Barbican Art Gallery in London.

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About Holon Design Museum, Israel

Following four years of construction, the greatly anticipated Design Museum Holon was inaugurated in March 2010.

Ron Arad’s award-winning building recognised internationally for its five sinuous bands of rust coloured Corten steel is the pinnacle of Holon’s sixteen-year urban regeneration programme, a process which is transforming the Israeli city into a global epicentre for culture and education.

Design Museum Holon’s mission is to explore the impact of design and the relationship of design to urban spaces and every day life.

The museum is committed to pioneering a creative arena for the exploration and examination of design principles and interpretations.

As a leading hub for innovation in the field of design in Israel and the world, it strives to foster international dialogue, highlighting the importance of quality design and its relevance to our lives.

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