Origins: Philippe Starck

Having never attended art school, and so having skipped indoctrination into the prevailing homogeneity of thought associated with such institutions, I have traveled an understandably crooked path to my aesthetic such as it is. Those persons, ideas, or events, that I now recognize as formative, often perplexed or bored me when I first experienced them. Among such unsuspected opportunities was a visit to the Centre Pompidou in Paris made many years ago.

Having only recently glimpsed the rudiments of the slipstream operating around me, I approached the trip as someone bound to miss the point and carry as my companion the cloth and pinhole often used to view foreign landscapes. I can't even recall how I would up at the Centre Pompidou as I was more interested in complaining about my aching feet than experiencing a retrospective of a man I knew only for his hair shape and orange juicer.

These many years later, I recall fondly what to my younger self felt like a prank and a cheat, when drawing back a heavy velvet curtain I found not rows of objects orderly arranged, but a dark circular room the size of a gymnasium with small groups of seating focused on doric columns topped with busts, featureless save the then iconic haircut, whose surfaces danced with the projected images of Starck's own face as he presented the works on the more traditional screen behind them.

I don't recall staying long and I don't think the experience stood out in the years immediately following the trips, but as experience pared away the excess memories, this one was left as essential to my memory of Paris and indeed my perspective on design.

To me, Starck represents the big truth of design, that it is inherently a farce and dependent on conceits far beyond its reach to achieve relevance and often walks a tightrope suspended perilously over a chattering crowd of non-participants jeering it toward the loss of balance. To say that Starck has a healthy sense of humor about himself and his work is entirely insufficient to understand his work. He's remarking so much on the emperor's particular nudity, but in our foolish belief in clothing.

Is there a distinction to be made between products based on the perceived intent of the designer? In other words, if I design a toothbrush that looks like a candy bar, is it freighted with anymore irony than one sold in the same store as candy bars? Than one sold at all? Than modern hygiene proper? It's not so much an issue of definitively answering such a question, but understanding our context in a way that recognizes its dimensionality beyond our understanding.

The best illustration of this concept I've ever come across is a cartoon where two young goldfish are talking to one another and an old goldfish swims along and asks, "How's the water?" and swims away. Having been thoroughly perplexed, one young goldfish asks the other, "What the fuck is water?"

Starck, to my mind, understands the water the way very few people do. It's one thing to tune out, and one thing to rebel, but to operate with a fuller understanding in familiar arenas alongside those animated only by their immediate influences is another thing altogether and can generate some of the most interesting work we may be capable of.

Starck has taught me that design is most fundamentally about seeing rather than creating. Creation is small and flawed and fleeting. It is balanced against oceans of perception and cognition that bears directly on the product but is rarely considered in tandem with the product.

In short, Starck has taught me lens management.