Interview

HADEN-GUEST: Let’s wait until afterward.

ARAD: Okay. This is my first piece of furniture. I didn’t even know I was going to be a designer when I did it. It’s the Rover Chair. And now, 28 years later, we are doing two things: limited-
edition sculptures of it, more or less, and then putting it into production with Vitra. It’s going to be what the new Mini is to the old Mini. [Another chair appears. It looks just like a comfy armchair, except it’s made of steel. But I have sat in one, and I can tell you that it feels just like a comfy armchair too.]

HADEN-GUEST: I know this chair.

ARAD: This is the Well Tempered Chair. It’s made of tempered steel—tempered steel, what an amazing material! It’s steel with no memory. [Another form appears onscreen.] This one started as a component for a sculpture in the center of Milan. And then it was translated into a best-selling piece by Vitra. I know there are about 11 companies in China that produce copies of them. And then there’s the sort of sculpture version of this. So sometimes industrial pieces find themselves translated into studio pieces.

HADEN-GUEST: Nowadays, how do you anticipate what a project is going to look like? Models? Computer simulations?

ARAD: Often now, before we see an object, we can see a film about it, and know exactly how it’s going to be. [The image of a structure appears onscreen. It is captioned “Bodyguards.”]

HADEN-GUEST: Why “Bodyguards”?

ARAD: There is a reason. I did a show one year at Dolce & Gabbana’s Metropol in Milan. It was an old cinema. There were more bodyguards than pieces in the show, and I was sort of mocked by my friends about the number of bodyguards. So when I exhibited there again the following year, to preempt the mocking, I called the show “Bodyguards.” You have to give something a name. Once you call it a bodyguard, it looks a bit like Grace Jones! It’s a piece that I cut and do different things with. The bodyguard theme goes on and on . . . [more images] This is the last Maastricht art fair. You see, that red piece is one of these chairs. So you can see inside . . . This is a piece called Thumbprint, which is pretty amazing, because it’s like a landscape, the general shape, and then when you look closer it has its own fingerprint . . . [another image] This is a table for a collector in L.A.—in Hollywood.

HADEN-GUEST: It’s a word piece?

ARAD: Yes. It had Adolf in the piece. And he said I can’t have the word Adolf in this table. This is an installation in Miami. It was made out of 70 tables. Some of them were bent to go up the wall, and after the installation, each table was going to a different address. So they met only one time in their life . . . And that’s an early installation, in the Fondation Cartier. But here all the tables were identical. [The image of a table appears.] This is at the Bologna art fair. This is a Ping-Pong table. It was in the Royal Academy Summer show. And on the opening day, Anthony Caro told me, “This is marvelous! And we can also play Ping-Pong on it!” But the funny thing is that you couldn’t play in the Royal Academy. [film ends]

HADEN-GUEST: Okay. How were you going to save the world with the two chairs?

ARAD: It was a design situation. There’s a technique called rotational molding. Rotational molding is like making a cake. Having the mold, putting the molten plastic inside, shaking and rotating it, the plastic adheres to the inner surface of the mold. And then you take it out like a cake. Tooling cost is cheaper, but it’s very slow. So that’s why it’s used by young designers, young companies, because they don’t expect to sell that many. So I felt that I make a piece in the mold, and then I cut it into two. And each one is a chair in its own right, then I cut the production time by half. But not so! Because normally when you take a piece out, it’s ready. You don’t have to take it to another side of the factory, stick it in another machine. It’s sort of saving time and a waste of time. You know, it happens that you think you are doing something good and you are actually doing something not so good. Like the guy who invented a “safe” CFC to replace CO2 was the same guy who introduced lead to petrol. He was lauded for his contribution to the environment. And he was the biggest enemy of the environment, the biggest villain. But he was a good man. So I was a good man there!

HADEN-GUEST: Well, Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.

ARAD: So did [Menachem] Begin, with [Mohamed] Anwar al-Sadat.

HADEN-GUEST: When we last had this conversation, we were talking about Art Basel, and you said photography has been accepted into the art world—or, at least, that the art world can decide what is good photography and what isn’t.

ARAD: Right.

HADEN-GUEST: You said that there is no photography ghetto at art fairs. But that there’s still a design ghetto.

ARAD: Uh-huh!

HADEN-GUEST: Do you still feel that?

ARAD: Absolutely! It’s gotten even worse. The thing is that the design ghetto got sort of more established. There’s a design ghetto outside Frieze, another outside Basel, one inside FIAC . . .