The ANTIDESIGN

Here is an interesting and currently ongoing project by artist Roman Ondák. "Taking place" is a temporal work existing an interior gallery space. Each visitor to the gallery room has an opportunity to have their name recorded at their height, along with the date. The concept is the slow formation of a black line at the average height. The only names that are at all legible after a while are the names of those who are true outliers. This project is 'taking place' at the temporary stedelijk until January 9, 2011.

"taking place" pictures from designboom

This piece was not created by the artist, bringing up once again the ever present question of 'what is art', but the design of the infographic itself is art. The concept is a new convenient way of recording data that is designed in such a way that the mean becomes obvious and the outliers become known.


This installation is actually a current rendering of this concept. It was previously presented at MoMa in 2007 under the title "Measuring the Universe". Roman Ondák's gained notoriety in the world of art and design from this concept, and has become quite a name to know.

A conversation is a simple concept to grasp, but as applied to design it harder to define it's limitations. Design, like language, is just a medium through which we can communicate. Arguably, design is a language in itself. When we look at designs, there is already an assumption that there is supposed to be an audience or in some cases a client. This would be the design communicating it's piece, to the audience, to the client, but a conversation goes more than one way. What is the audience giving back to the design?


One of my favorite performance artists, Yoko Ono, portrays in a more obvious way the conversation between the audience and the artist in almost all of her groundbreaking pieces. In 'Cut Piece', she sat in her best clothes and invited the audience to come and cut pieces of clothing from her. In another famous gallery piece where she met her husband, John Lennon, she invited the audience to hammer a nail into the wall.

Artwork like these are inspirational, in that they cross the imaginary boundary between the artist and the world around them. It brings to mind the timeless question of whether the artist is still the artist when they aren't doing the actual creation. Ono's invitations have become classics, and have consistently been revisited over the years.

Another amazing piece that Yoko Ono shared was called 'Play it by Trust' and featured a game of chess played with all white pieces on an all white chessboard. At this point, her models are set up in galleries, but this game was intended to be played. Not only a conversation between artist and the world, these pieces make the audience converse with each other.