Edible Apple Phones and Other Oddities

"apple phone tree" by Hannah Roisin
(St. Gregorys School)/Alan Outten

Design and the Elastic Mind
February 24–May 12, 2008

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
March 2–May 12, 2008

Museum of Modern Art

If the MoMA's last major design design show, 2005's SAFE, was a kind of dystopia of homeland security paranoia, Elastic Mind can be seen as the opposite -- an eco-chic utopian future where technology, science and nature work in harmony to make our lives more, um, elastic.

They define elasticicity as a kind of sped-up adaptability necessary due to the "momentous changes" of the Internet and cell phones. Designs that embrace tech, and better-yet, biotech, we're told, can do some strange and groovy things. Or can they?

The catch is that the bulk of these objects are prototypes. They don't work, and probably never will. Certainly, not all design has to be a fully-functional finished object like an iPod. Design is about ideas and problem-solving, even social commentary. But some of these "elastic" creations are a real stretch (pardon the pun).

What are we to make of "Victimless Leather," an imagined lab-made leather jacket cooked up in vitro? Or "BEE's Prototype," a glass vessel where trained bees might smell out cancer? Or "Sniffing Others," prosthetic nose pieces that would allow us to smell the genetic code of potential lovers? It's hard to take this stuff seriously.

Worst is an LED persistence-of-vision device that attaches to a dog's tail so that Rover can communicate to us. Woof-woof. Translation: yeah, right. This I'd expect to see in a SkyMall catalog, not at the MoMA.

Amidst this collocation half-ironic gee-whiz fakery, there are a few things that actually work: the "Power Assist Suit" is a wearable exoskeleton developed in Japan that can double your lifting strength; a diagnostic ingestible camera pill; and rapid prototyping technology that allows one to sketch a chair and table, and then "print" it to exact specifications.

The best section looked at data visualization (information design, I suppose). The "Million Dollar Blocks" project maps New York City, showing blocks where more than $1 million is spent to incarcerate its residents.

But my favorite display, called "No Robots Please!" was dreamed up by children. Asked by Alan Outten to design for the future, they imagined an “apple phone” (see above image): “…it produces apple that are used as telephones. So if you are having a private conversation, you just eat the apple.” Almost as cool as the iPhone, kiddos.

Sharing the sixth floor is "Color Chart," a show about artworks that employ and address commercial color. Despite uncomfortably appropriate sponsorship by Benjamin Moore, it's a nice bright counterpoint to the confusing and crowded design show.

The show opens with a 1918 canvas by Marcel Duchamp "Tu m'," a surreal allegory involving the light spectrum. The story picks up in the 50s with Elsworth Kelly and Yves Klein, who, appropriately enough, take a ready-made approach to color. Kelly used chance to arrange various shades of commercial color on a canvas ("Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II" (1951). Klein, who invented his own shade of blue (International Klein Blue), is represented by a charming little book, "Yves: Peintures" (1954), that purports to show reproductions of monochrome paintings, but is actually simply signed sheets of commercially printed color paper.

Things really pick up speed in the 1960s. The maestro of commercial techniques, Andy Warhol is represented by two gorgeous paint-by-numbers canvases. There's a series of smaller paintings by Frank Stella commissioned by Warhol and named after the prosaic paint colors used ("Delaware Crossing," "Hampton Roads," etc.).

The 70s highlights are Sol Lewitt (beautiful colored-pencil wall drawing) and films by Richard Serra ("Color Aid," depicts the artist leafing through sheets of colored paper) and John Baldessari ("Six Colorful Inside Jobs" shows the artist as housepainter redoing a room in various hues).

Best is a 1985 Dan Flavin room installation called "untitled (to Don Judd, colorist)" that takes color-art to light speed is Flavin’s signature florescent tubes in T-shaped arrangements, a sensuous color bath in pink, red, yellow, blue and green.

More recent works are more cerebral, and less celebratory. One standout is Byron Kim's "Synecdoche," a wall of 8x10-inch panels, each painted its own hue of pink, brown or beige, representing a skin-tone portrait of various individuals painted from life. The piece was shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Another is Cory Arcangel's "Colors," the 1988 Dennis Hopper movie tweaked to show only one horizontal line of pixels on each go-through (to see the whole piece would take 33 days). The lines are repeated vertically, creating shifting and entrancing bands of color.