CultureLabel

At this year’s Venice Biennale, even the café and reading room push boundaries. With artists having been commissioned to create beautiful yet functional spaces the results are bold and dynamic designs that starkly blur the line between the roles of artist and designer. The Italian pavilion has been enlarged with a new café designed by German artist Tobias Rehberger, a strikingly bold combination of fluorescent orange features that strike a dazzling contrast to the black and white striped floor. Next to the café is a reading room come educational space created by Italian artist Massimo Bartolini. The room is described by Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune as a ‘revelation’ with the main feature, a spiraling reading table acclaimed to be a ‘fun, functional and original’ piece. In the neighboring space one finds a quietly styled bookstore by the Argentine-born artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Such projects raise the question as to where the line between artist and designer lies and whether it even makes a difference. According to Rawsthorn this is an often ‘fraught and ambiguous relationship’, whereby there has long been a ‘sweeping generalisation’ of art being ‘subversive, introspective and free from the grubby constraints of the same commercial concerns, which were compromising design.’ Yet the work of these three artists at this year 53rd Venice Biennale highlights an advancement in such thoughts. In today’s consumer society, people demand more from product and retail space with some of the purest expressions of old fashioned beauty now executed by industrial designers.