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RON ARAD, b. 1951 Prototype "Oh-Void (No Solution

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RON ARAD, b. 1951

Prototype "Oh-Void (No Solution No Problem)" chair, 2006 Silicone, steel.  Produced by The Gallery Mourmans, The Netherlands.  Prototype from an edition of six. 26 ½ in. (67.3 cm.) high

Provenance: Friedman Benda, New York

Literature: Ron Arad: The Dogs Barked, exh. cat., de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich, 2007, n.p.

"I'm solving problems that don't exist," Ron Arad stated in a recent interview (Interiors, April 2008). Or rather, he's not solving. "There is no solution because there is no problem." And so the riddle: how to design in a world full of design? Even Arad admits we don't need more chairs. The Greeks hammered out that problem three thousand years ago. If the klismos was good enough for Athens, it's good enough for us. But we'll never cease wanting, or building. A solution represents termination, a breach of continuity—full stop. Let's not.     The steel skeleton of this prototype "Oh-Void" approximates a running spiral: it winds, unwinds, winds again. In geometry a spiral is an open curve constantly receding from or approaching a fixed point; it never ends. But the chair's outer silicone structure comprises two ellipses. An ellipse is a closed curve; it never begins. Those pesky contradictions circle back.     On one side of the skeleton, Arad incised Marcel Duchamp's famous riddle: "Il n'y a pas de solution parce qu'il n'ya pas de probleme." Its English translation echoes on the reverse. Perhaps Arad (and Duchamp before him) read Wittgenstein: "For an answer which cannot be expressed, the question too cannot be expressed." Which way out of this maze? The answer is clear, we need only express it: design, like language, is embedded in our lives. No problem with that.

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