Exhibit of the week: Ron Arad: No Discipline

Museum of Modern Art

New York

Through Oct. 19

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In 1981, Ron Arad stumbled across “two discarded red leather seats” from an old Rover automobile,” said Carmela Ciuraru in The Forward. Clamping them onto tubular steel frames, he devised a chair that was “both a crude art object and a functional piece of furniture.” Since then, the Israeli-born Arad has become one of “the most influential and inventive designers in the world.” He now oversees his own creative workshop, which over the years has turned out concrete speakers, steel sofas, “interactive chandeliers,” and upholstery that doubles as clothing. That makes experiencing this Museum of Modern Art retrospective “less like seeing a museum exhibition and more like walking through a carnival fun house.” Arad’s designs are notable not just for their unusual materials but also for their sense of humor. The Narrow Pappardelle chair looks like a piece of pasta. The Looming Lloyd chair is tilted vertiginously forward.

But how do you sit in one of these things? asked Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. “Do I perch? Can I recline, curl up, or drape myself across it? No clue.” Arad’s creations occupy a position somewhere between design and art. “Some conceivably functional, others frankly forbidding,” they are almost always more compelling to look at than they would be to actually use. (Anyway, MoMA won’t let you try.) But none is quite original enough visually that it qualifies as art on its own terms. “The makeshift funkiness” of Arad’s early work seems like knockoff surrealism. Even his Rover chairs recycle “Picasso’s way of playfully welding found objects into organic forms.”

The show’s title—No Discipline—apparently refers to Arad’s working method, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Rather than master a single style or form, he simply lets loose an “ammo belt” of ideas and sees what hits the target. Fortunately, many do. His “Big Easy” series of chairs consists of whimsical, pop-art creations with enormous arms reminiscent of “Mickey Mouse ears.” The “FPE (Fantastic, Plastic, Elastic)” chair, from 1997, is a “breathtakingly spare” design made of wavy red plastic and extruded aluminum. In general, though, “the works that justify Arad’s reputation are scattered a bit too thinly throughout this exhibition.” If the show were half the size, it would be twice as impressive.