Ron Arad

Early 'Tree Light', designed 1983, produced mid-1980s

Footnotes

Provenance
One Off, Covent Garden, London, mid-1980s
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature
Deyan Sudjic, Ron Arad: Restless Furniture, London, 1989, pp. 54, 81, 85
Deyan Sudjic, Ron Arad, London, 1999, pp. 21, 32
Gareth Williams and Nick Wright, Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage, London, 2012, p. 137


Turkeys Can Fly

By Nick Wright

The co-author of Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage, London, 2012.


"I don't like Creative Salvage, as a term and as a band wagon," Ron Arad said.

"Why?"

"I don't like wings."

Whatever his antipathy to wings, there is an interplay between Arad and Creative Salvage (Tom Dixon, Mark Brazier Jones, Nick Jones and André Dubreuil). Arad staged
Dixon's first solo exhibition at One Off and the dialogue continued through their work.

Drawing on a lost chair designed by Jean Prouvé, the 'Rover' chair's (lot 23) form was a readymade of sorts, the seat chosen from a scrapped Rover P6. Choice is integral to any design process and Arad's choices were honed at the Architectural Association. Designed by Spen King and Gordon Bashford, the Rover P6 had innovative suspension, an engine bay engineered to accommodate a gas turbine and an ergonomic interior
an architect could appreciate.

In fact, just how right was Arad's choice of the P6 seat is illustrated by just how wrong the choices of his copyists are: Jaguar seats look antique, the Rolls
Royce seats of the Top Gear rip offs are lumpen. The Rover seat seems the only choice for a chair now so famous one thinks of it as a post-production prototype for Jean Prouvé's lost original.

Choice also lies at the root of Arad's antipathy to Creative Salvage. Lacking his architectural education, Dixon, Dubreuil and Brazier-Jones junkyard choices were based on decorative value. Ornate railings, Victorian fireplaces, overblown castings – 'wings' – were sampled. Moreover, because they fitted no preconceived design, the results were hit and miss.

For all the naivety of Creative Salvage however, for all the 'mistakes' – what Andre Dubreuil recalls as the "stupid things we made" – a development from talented scrap merchants to designers became evident.

Dixon first tried something resembling his 'S' chair in 1986. He said the idea came from a chicken. James Garner, his engineer, said it came from the tank badge on his BSA Bantam. The result was a kneecapped turkey. Dixon took another shot. Following Arad's example, he used car components. The base was formed of a steering wheel, the frame continued down from the knee and was wrapped in rubber cut from a Land Rover inner tube. A now resolved form, it was "the smell of road" which impeded sales. The final version was rushed. They flew.

Young designers in 1980s Britain were hindered by a furniture industry uninterested in innovation so they began self-producing using ready-mades. As they developed, both Arad and the other members of Creative Salvage employed fabricators to realise their increasingly complex designs. Dixon employed James Garner (who still makes his chairs), Michael Young and Thomas Heatherwick. Arad worked with Jon Mills, a metal worker from the Black Country making automata in a Brighton workshop.

In 1987 Mills came to London to show Arad slides of his work. Six weeks later the 'Little' chair (lot 26) was exhibited at One Off along with larger works like the 'Reading Couch'. Sheet steel mimics upholstery, steel buttons add to the illusion of plush comfort. A similar illusion was created by Arad in his 'Big Easy'.

When asked about his pioneering work in volumetric steel Mills replied: "It would be very nice if Ron had been inspired by something I'd done. I'm sure I'd seen Marc Newson's 'Lockheed Lounge' chair in Ron's gallery".

All designers borrow from scrap yards, from each other. The question is less about where the idea originates than to what extent it becomes recognisably its author's. The 'Big Easy' may resemble an overstuffed Victorian chair rendered in steel but it is Arad's 'Big Easy'. Definitively.

Dixon began sampling Victoriana from Chelsea Harbour junkyards yet produced a design classic. No matter its "spectacularly ugly" antecedents or its borrowings
- from a chicken or Bantam, from Rietveld and Marzio Cecchi, even Arad; in its final form the 'S' chair (lot 28) is a beautifully resolved design by Tom Dixon. Definitively.