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BEAUTY - COOPER HEWITT DESIGN TRIENNIAL
OCTOBER 7, 2016
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FEBRUARY 19, 2017
BEAUTY
With projects ranging from experimental prototypes to interactive games, fashion ensembles, and architectural constructions, Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial presents work by 57 designers and teams from around the globe. The exhibition explores seven kinds of beauty: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, transformative, emergent, and elemental.
Beauty: this intoxicating idea has been pondered by philosophers and pursued by artists for millennia. It’s a concept that speaks to both change and permanence. Beauty happens when we see, touch, smell, and otherwise activate the world around us. While beauty is a fleeting human response, it also embodies our search for enduring objects and ideals. In his 2001 essay “On Beauty and Judgment,” philosopher Alexander Nehamas explains, “To find something beautiful is, precisely, not yet to have finished with it, to think it has something further to offer.”
Why beauty now? Many conversations about design focus on function and problem solving. Yet designers do more than solve utilitarian problems. Designers tell stories and ask questions. They communicate ideas, stimulate the senses, and construct narratives about nature, culture, and making.
Beauty enters the eye as reflected light. The ever-changing phenomenon of light appears throughout this exhibition in materials and artifacts that shimmer and shift, modulating the illumination around them. Inspired by nature, designers are using 3D printing and computer-aided design to create new structures based on patterns of growth. Designers are tapping the energy of the Earth and cosmos by employing gravitational force and elemental materials, bringing weight and power to a piece of jewelry or a soaring work of architecture.
Beauty varies among individuals and cultures. Strange or damaged forms transgress the norms of beauty, pushing viewers to expand their expectations by encountering forms that are odd, uncanny, or outlandish. Designers revive past traditions and celebrate a mix of cultures in order to illuminate local customs while engaging in a global discourse.
The experience of beauty is visceral and embodied, not just visual. Beauty strikes the senses. It erupts from sensual invention, and it adds endless value to the world we inhabit.
The presentation of Beauty – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial at the San Jose Museum of Art is sponsored by the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Applied Materials, and the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation. Additional sponsorship support is provided by Casey and Jack Carsten, Tad and Jackson Freese, Muni Fry, Pamela and David Hornik, Sho-Joung Kim-Wechsler, McManis Faulkner, Alyce and Michael Parsons/Universal Style International, and Theres and Dennis Rohan. Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial was organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
BEAUTY - COOPER HEWITT DESIGN TRIENNIAL
The exhibit playlist includes a collection of videos related to the exhibit and the artists.
Brown Bag video not available
Brown Bag Video URL
Exhibition Themes
Here lies the domain of glamour, seduction, and excess. Rich materials and shimmering, sometimes deceptive surfaces create an aura of luxury and erotic possibility. Extravagance feeds desire, rather than following function.
Whether handmade or mass-produced, intricate images and objects revel in richness of detail, complexity of form, or a multiplicity of elements. Performing astonishing feats of craftsmanship and physical construction, designers and artisans create textured or patterned surfaces that engage the eye in a wandering journey.
Designers create forms that shape space, time, light, or air, sometimes defying permanence and weight in favor of ephemeral materials or fleeting effects. An object or building might exist in the space between or the space left behind more than the thing itself.
These objects challenge normative standards of beauty, gender, genre or behavior. Embracing androgyny, anti-form, the grotesque, the formless, and the fantastic, transgressive beauty blurs established boundaries and definitions, challenging us to see and live differently.
These contemporary designers employ digital systems to generate unexpected forms. Emulating nature and embracing code and mathematics, they create rules and processes that determine the final outcome of a project, working with data flows and user interactions to create responsive forms.
Some objects seek permanence, purity, and rest. Serene geometries and uncluttered forms draw energy and character from basic materials: wood, glass, stone, copper, a block of lava. Unassuming, almost anonymous objects invite intuitive interaction from users.
Beauty mutates, shifts, and erases its own certainties. Familiar materials, vocabularies, and forms assume new and surprising identities. A powerful process of change takes place as sculpted surfaces reshape the body, found materials become precious things, or objects and images tell stories that unfold over time.
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