RON ARAD II: THE COMEBACK

摘要

Every so often, time emits signals that are unexpected, mysterious or just difficult to explain. An archaeological find arrived in the mail at Domus one recent morning: 20 35-millimetre slides of my work from the past century, returned to me by a Japanese archive after 16 years. Two days earlier I had visited the Centre Pompidou to see the Ron Arad exhibition - one of Paris's excessiveh/ abundant cultural offerings of art and architecture. The public is always entertained and, apparently, happy to watch the acrobatic development of architects and designers. Ron Arad's "No Discipline" show well illustrates a different type of development. His objects, in large, medium, small orno series at all, tell of an artist who went from being an underground phenomenon to performing on the stage of superstardom with an eagerness that visibly snakes through the exhibition, from the record player (another item from the dark ages of technology) called Concrete Stereo (one of his very first designs in 1983), embedded in a roughly poured reinforced concrete base, to the This Mortal Coil bookcase (1993), possibly the most poetic title ever given to a design object.