Symposium: Interior Design: Dead or Alive

Professor Ben Kelly, Chair of Interior and Spatial Design at University of the Arts London, hosts Interior Design: Dead or Alive.

This symposium will take stock of the ability of iconic interiors to affect and influence the direction of popular culture and the wider world. A range of speakers with the widest variety of perspectives and disciplines explore the cultural significance of the subject and practice of interior design in relation to the contexts of art, design, business, media and culture.

Speakers include:

Michael Bracewell - The British Art School and the Interior

Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and several works of non fiction, including England Is Mine (1997), Perfect Tense (2000) and The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art, edited by Doro Globus (2011). He writes widely on modern and contemporary art, and is a contributor to Frieze and The Burlington.

Fred Deakin – The Digital Interior

Fred Deakin runs the collaborative organisation Fred & Company, which specialises in interactive art projects. As half of the band Lemon Jelly with Nick Franglen, Fred has been Mercury and Brit nominated, sold over half a million albums, headlined stages at almost every major UK music festival (Glastonbury, Bestival, Big Chill, Reading, Leeds, T in the Park) and made three albums. Fred was previously founder and director of ground-breaking London design agency Airside with Nat Hunter and Alex MacLean which was nominated for two BAFTAs, nine D&ADs, four Design Week Awards including Best In Show, and a Webby. He is Chair in Interactive Digital Arts at UAL.

Paul Gorman – 430 Kings Road

Paul Gorman is a journalist, author and commentator on visual culture. He will narrate the story of the most significant address in the story of post-war design, fashion, lifestyle and popular culture, Malcolm McLaren and Vivien Westwood’s shop at 430 Kings Road, which has morphed from Let it Rock and Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, from Sex and Seditionaries, to Worlds End.

Lucy McKenzie – Art and the Interior

Lucy McKenzie is a contemporary artist based in Brussels. In 2007-2008 she studied at a private school for decorative painting and the commercial techniques learned there have been central to her work ever since. Her work often uses contradicting forces by employing essentially conservative artistic methods (historical interior decoration and trompe l'oeil) to express antagonistic ideas. She will discuss her interest in decorative painting and it's alternative history parallel to modernism. She will also outline her current project, renovating De Ooievaar, a 1930s villa in Oostende with a complex history and unique interior into an 'appropriated artists house'.

Barber & Osgerby – The Ace Hotel

International designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby (of Barber & Osgerby studio) will talk about their work with their interior architecture firm Universal Design Studio on the Ace Hotel. Discussing their approach to tune in to the authentic voice of Shoreditch, engaging with local artists, crafts persons and builders to foster a sense of place at home with its surroundings. They will discuss how they were able to translate the Ace ethos of making the Shoreditch hotel ‘of London and for London’. 

Peter Saville – The Apartment

Art Director and Graphic Designer Peter Saville will talk about the Mayfair apartment he occupied during the 90s as his home and studio. The immaculately preserved 1970s apartment featured smoked glass, tinted mirrors, velvet clad walls and an original Verner Panton floor to ceiling shell light fitting. The apartment was transformed by Ben Kelly and Saville adding colour, texture, a glitter painting and a soft sculpture telephone number in pink satin. The apartment became Peter’s salon where he held court with visitors including pop stars, models, journalists and artists. Album covers, advertising campaigns, texts and artworks were conceived in this extreme hybrid space. Peter will talk about the environment, his time there and its context within popular culture and the interior

Bridget Smith – The Social Interior

As an artist, Bridget Smith works within the documentary genre. By photographing places of fantasy and escapism, however, she creates work that refers to, but is atypical of, the archive model according to which the images appear to be staged. She is interested in the places where people go to seek refuge from the outside world: to escape boredom, to be diverted, transported, absorbed. Places to lose oneself in, where pretence and reality are often confused. Smith is represented by Frith Street Gallery.

David Toop - The Sound of the Interior

David Toop is a musician, author and professor, and is Chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation at the London College of Communication. He was a member of the notable group The Flying Lizards and a prominent contributor to the British magazine The Face. Since the 1970s, Toop has been a significant presence on the British experimental and improvised music scene, collaborating with Max Eastley, Brian Eno and Scanner. His pioneering book on hip hop, Rap Attack, was published in 1984. Eleven years later, Ocean of Sound appeared, described as Toop's ‘poetic survey of contemporary musical life from Debussy through Ambient, Techno, and drum 'n' bass.' In 2001, Toop curated the sound art exhibition Sonic Boom, and the following year collated a 2-CD collection entitled Not Necessarily Enough English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain, 1960–1977. Toop has also actively engaged with 'sounding objects' from a range of museums and contributes regularly to The Wire.

Andrew Wilson – Richard Hamilton and the Interior

Andrew Wilson is curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain. He was deputy editor of Art Monthly between 1997 and 2006. Wilson’s book Swingeing London 67 (f) examines the eponymous Richard Hamilton painting of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the back of a police van. For Hamilton, Wilson argues, Pop art was the expression of an open-ended, critical and artistic process that reflected his own direct engagement with ethical issues.