COLOUR ME BEAUTIFUL: KARIM RASHID INJECTS PLAY INTO THE EVERYDAY
Arts Week
Blobjet d'art
COLOUR ME BEAUTIFUL: KARIM RASHID INJECTS PLAY INTO THE EVERYDAY
If Cairo-born, Toronto-raised industrial designer Karim Rashid is not a household name, he's at least a household presence. To date he has done commissions for Prada, Dirt Devil and Issey Miyake, though his work for Nienkamper and Umbra is perhaps most familiar to Canadians – especially the latter's “Garbino,” a simple, rounded, polypropylene garbage can still kicking around many a bathroom (this writer's included), and which has come to be seen as one of the icons of the '90s design renaissance.
The “Garbino” has, in fact, been added to the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, an event that is just part of a flurry of recent lectures, publications and sundry canonizations. On Nov. 8, for instance, Rashid receives the International Furnishings and Design Association's Circle of Excellence Award in New York. The designer returns to Toronto Nov. 9 for a celebration at Ontario College of Art and Design, from which he received an honourary degree last year. He will show about 50 of his favourite products at the school's Professional Gallery, surround them with custom-made wall and ceiling treatments, and discuss his design philosophy and career thus far.
On the phone from his NYC office, Rashid is nonplussed when asked to comment on his work becoming the stuff of museum retrospectives. “Industrial design specifically is not really art, is not really about museums,” he says. “Industrial design is about everyday life. My museum is the democratic context of people's homes. If I go into somebody's home that doesn't seem to buy into the culture of design, and I see a chair, a lamp, a garbage can I designed, which they're using – that's when I feel as if I've had a real impact.”
I broach the possibility that, as perhaps a painter or musician or writer would, he'd get the urge to revise after looking back at what he's done. But Rashid is adamant – he has no regrets. Then there's the phenomenon of the “blobject”: a term synonymous with Rashid's design approach (he may have invented it, though that's contentious), which refers to the rounded, plastic, post-Barbarella aesthetic that has come to dominate new product lines since the mid-'90s – everything from Oral-B toothbrushes to iMac Flowers. Hasn't the “blobject” become a bit of a Frankenstein's monster?
“There are certain things that lend themselves to coming into contact with the human body,” says Rashid, “and these, I think, should be softer, warmer, blobjectified. This is what I meant by the term to begin with. But there are certain things that shouldn't,” he admits. “Inevitably, yes, you walk a precarious line because [this philosophy] gets shaken down by the economy and becomes just a style: like in the '40s when everything looked like a spaceship.”
Still, Rashid loudly and proudly touts industrial design's freedom to be idiosyncratic, trendy and even ephemeral. “Part of designing an object is to touch on the times in which we live,” he says. “Nothing lives forever. And why should it? If we only designed things that lived forever, our world would be pretty banal.”
DAVID BALZER
“KARIM RASHID: FROM 15 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE” RUNS TO JAN 20, 2008. OPENING NOV 9, 4-6PM. FREE PUBLIC LECTURE 7PM. PROFESSIONAL GALLERY (LEVEL 2), ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN, 100 MCCAUL. 416-977-6000. WWW.OCAD.CA.
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