I don't wear jewels. I drive them

Artist list

Gijs Bakker, Ted Noten

Gijs Bakker

belongs to the select group of Dutch designers who have risen to international importance. His work is regarded as exemplary of the waywardness of Dutch design: modernistic and minimal, at times combined with an absurd sense of humour. Although it is his jewellery designs that have made the biggest splash, a major part of Bakker's design practice is geared to industrially produced objects for everyday use.

His influence as a teacher, his contribution to the often tumultuous debates in the Dutch design world and Bakker's most recent undertaking - setting up the Droog Design Foundation - have helped define the current quality and popularity of Dutch Design. In that sense Bakker's response, his design method and his ideas about the profession and the designer's social position are just as important as the resulting products.

Gijs Bakker is active in many different fields - equally at home in jewellery, product and furniture design, and in architectonic projects. All these areas are linked by a constant strand of irony. His bracelet design was inspired by the slogan from a car advertisement: 'I don't wear jewels, I drive them.' The characteristically distorted nature of the computer design was transformed into a three-dimensional product using rapid prototyping and stereolithography.



Ted Noten

Mercedes Benz - especially vintage models - is enjoying something of a comeback. Carriages of the chic, salt on the wounds of good taste, as second or third hand car it is no longer the prize possession of builders, immigrants or gypsies. The old Merc has become an icon for a new cultural consciousness: the aesthetics of camp.
This is why Ted Noten chose a brand new model Mercedes instead. He carved up the car's body into small squares, each square being a new model, to be worn as a brooch? A port-ˆ-Mercedes for everybody, fashioned out of the door, splashboard or the boot. Of course one can philosophise endlessly about the meaning of a project like this. But this is not what Noten wants. You see, the images designate some existing thing. None of it begs explanation.

The Mercedes-project would lose its ambivalence, and hence its power to penetrate the essence if it were labelled with a definitive meaning. To do so would turn the project into an issue about taste/no taste, story/gut feeling. Choice it seems, is about where to place the Black & Decker on the Merc. After transplantation, the fragments take on a life of their own: for builders, heart surgeons, gym managers, jewellery collectors and travelling salesmen. 'Surely I don't need to add anything to that?'



Avec la participacion de Droog Design, Ferrari, des travaux des étudiants de l'Ecole Municipale d'Arts Plastiques de Monaco, du Musée de l'Automobiliste de Mougins.

Commisariat de l'exposition: Frédéric Braham