Mis-Design

Renowned US artist Adam Kalkin will stage a fully operational tennis academy in the ground floor gallery of the Potter, while also presenting a pirate radio tower in the grounds of the Victorian College of the Arts. The tower—an upended shipping container—will broadcast ‘spiritual tennis propaganda’ for the duration of the exhibition. At the museum, Kalkin will run a series of tennis-instruction workshops and a program of guest lectures on the biomechanics of tennis, meditation and sports physiotherapy. Kalkin’s motivational DVDs and other ‘products’ will be for sale. Inspired by David Foster Wallace’s celebrated novel, Infinite jest, Kalkin will unhinge the conventional viewing modes of the art museum.

Internationally renowned artist Andrea Zittel for the first time will present the entire smockshop archive – her ambitious five-year project that invited dozens of fellow artists to customise a simple smock dress of her design. The smockshop archive includes smocks, smock patterns, and associated ephemera such as drawings, banners, and blogs, and will transform the gallery into an unusual retail space where the products are not for sale and the artworks are not quite artworks. Zittel is renowned for projects that use simple design systems to offer alternatives to contemporary consumer culture, emphasising sustainability, experimentation and community.

Local artists groups, the Slow Art Collective, Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle and Flatland OK, will stage ‘interventions’in commercial spaces around Melbourne.

Guest curator, Dr Grace McQuilten, says “The multi-site exhibition re-maps the potential of contemporary art in a culture overwhelmed by design. The exhibiting artists engage with design in a consciously provocative manner, exploiting the internal irrationality of our materialist society. They make consumers conscious of the realities of industrial production, the ‘design of human life’ and the potential of individual creative freedom.”

By creating connections between local and international artists Ms McQuilten aims to inspire debate and critique about the role of contemporary art in a consumption-driven society.

Mis-design will engage audiences in unexpected ways. The exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne will present Andrea Zittel and Adam Kalkin; the Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle will occupy the Alphaville clothing store in Fitzroy for Spring Fashion Week; Slow Art Collective will install a temporary shelter in the drive-through at McDonald’s restaurant in Collingwood, and Flatland OK will present a project at Melbourne Central and Vodafone stores. Adam Kalkin’s a pop-up radio tower at the Victorian College of the Arts, Southbank, will be launched at the State of Design festival in July and in situ until 5 November.