Bravado That Swaggers to Its Own Beat
August 19, 2009 | Levent OZLER
The designer Ron Arad has always had a lot of nerve, and it ricochets around his rambunctious, ultimately inconclusive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art like an ammo belt's worth of stray bullets.
Sometimes the bullets hit, turning random targets into bull's-eyes.
More often they are wide of the mark, resulting in things that seem self-indulgent and frivolous.
No wonder this show, which opens on Sunday and is the first major survey of Mr. Arad's work in the United States, is titled "Ron Arad: No Discipline."
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Mr. Arad was the design world's darling, a man whose name was regularly linked to words like maverick, bad boy, visionary, influential and derring-do.
He was known for ignoring the boundaries among traditional disciplines like industrial design, architecture and sculpture before this was a widespread fashion in the design world.
He has designed buildings, though few have yet been built, and he has devised several versions of the stackable mass-produced chairs that since the 1930s have signaled serious design intent.
more: nytimes.com/2009/07/31/arts/design/31arad.html?_r= (10)
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