United Technologies

In 2009, Lismore Castle Arts presents United Technologies, a group exhibition featuring artists Stefan Brüggemann, Rita McBride, Corey McCorkle, Jason Rhoades, Ai Weiwei, and curated by Philippe Pirotte.

In Design and Crime, art historian and critic Hal Foster states that, at our time when aesthetics and utilitarianism are being subsumed into commercialism, everything – from architectural projects to art exhibitions, from genes to jeans – seems to be considered as design in a world driving towards cultural in-distinction. It featured the work of Corey McCorkle and Stefan Brüggemann alongside highly recognized artists Ai Weiwei, Jason Rhoades and Rita McBride, the exhibition United Technologies explored the relationships between art, design, architecture, nature and technologies, dealing with notions such as the decorative versus the practical and humanism versus corporatism. Against the highly symbolic background of Lismore Castle’s history and environment, the artists’ tribute to the formal legacy of minimal art is entangled with a critical rereading of the modernist doctrine through the use of objects, references, materials and shapes belonging to our daily environment, which they take out of their utilitarian context.

United Technologies pays tribute to the history of Decorative Arts and famous theoreticians such as Adolf Loos, William Morris and Augustus Pugin (who incidentally designed the furniture for Lismore Castle). Their disputes about the relationship between Beauty and Utility relied on their activity as architects, designers, engineers or artists and were connected to the social and political realities of their time and the work featured in United Technologies seeks to explore the same multi- layered relationships.

The exhibition title could have been borrowed from one of these multi-national conglomerates that claims to offer continuous improvement and comfort for consumers by spreading hi-tech products all over the world. In Design and Crime again, Hal Foster quotes the Canadian designer Bruce Mau who in Life Style wrote a candid praise for a wholly designed world: "In this environment, the only way to constitute a true capital is adding a value: wrapping the product in intelligence and culture. The apparent product, the object attached to the transaction, is not the real product at all. The real product is from nowon intelligenceand culture". In response to that context, United Technologies will reflect upon the status, the value and the destination ofthe work of art as part of a networkof material and immaterial economies.