THERE’S THIS SHOWMAN on a video screen outside a gallery at the Pompidou Centre, banging the drum Barnum-style at passing punters, roll up, roll up and all that. So you go in, pay your money, give it a try.
Next thing you know, you’re in a circus tent, dark as pitch, giant globules dotted round a ring of great plinths crowned with laurel-wreathed talking-head videos, barking slogans and stories. Weird, familiar objects flash before you, accompanied by a chaotic, babbling, burbling soundtrack. It’s a cacophony. Madness. Stupid. Fun (for a bit). You have just walked into the crazy world of Philippe Starck.
Not that you’ve ever been able to leave it. There’s an awful lot of Starck in this world. He’s not, as he might suggest, the world’s greatest living designer, but, by God, he’s the most famous. Your granny should have heard of him. A Mongolian goatherd might recognise the name.
From day one little Philippe knew he was going to be famous. There are photos of him setting up his first business selling inflatable objects in 1968, still a teenager, with that puff-chested, up-for-anything pose he calls upon to this day. Ten years later he’s helping to launch the coolest (for 30 seconds) club in Paris, Les Bains-Douches. Another few years and he’s the designer of that very designer decade, plumping cushions for President Mitterrand at the Elysée and creating for the Paris cool set the ultimate 1980s hangout (for 30 seconds), Café Costes. Twenty years more and, uniquely in the world of design and architecture, he’s been awarded that ultimate prize of fame, single-name recognition. Everyone knows Madonna, Britney, Elvis. And everyone knows Starck.
Or, rather, everyone knows “Starck”, the signature stamped on products the world over, from toothbrushes to Ian Schrager hotels to this, his first proper exhibition, a big room devoted to him. It’s a vanity project, and therefore utterly appropriate. His image is a carefully constructed, cast-iron product in itself, maintained through websites, Mondino photoshoots, column inches, a blizzard of sources.
He batters you with omnipresence. He batters you with characters, all variants on the kerr-azy Frenchman, photographed hanging on a kitchen utensil rack or with a spoon hanging off his nose; indefatigable cheeky chappie; mad inventor; enfant terrible; and insufferably grand man of the people. He is man as global brand.
You could spend hours at this exhibition, prising him out of the theatrics. You’ll fail. But you’ll have a little fun failing. He is the world’s most successful designer because he realises that it’s not so much the objects that matter today as the images and celebrity that sell them.
Not that you can escape the objects either. The man has designer diarrhoea. I doubt that there’s anything that he has not made. Teddy bears, packets of rice, factories, boats and taps, dumbbells and pens, and that iconic Juicy Salif lemon squeezer. He gives his objects maddening names — the Hot Bertaa kettle, the Mister Meumeu cheese grater. He gives them ridiculous forms — the face on the fly swat, his knife factory a block sliced by a giant knife.
He wants a nod to surrealism. But it’s more Benny Hill. Or, at best, Claes Oldenburg. And there’s something definitely David Cronenberg about his anthropomorphic shapes, those drooping phallus door handles and the golden witch’s finger on the Asahi Hall in Tokyo.
After battering you with his omnipresence and craziness, he finally batters you into submission with a barely edited bric-à-brac of cultural references. The Le Moult House in Paris is pure Deco-esque Robert Mallet-Stevens. Le Baron Vert in Osaka nods to Luciano Fontana’s slashed canvases. His interior designs at Schrager hotels such as the St Martin’s Lane in London quote Louis XIV next to Chicago Art Deco beside sinuous Baroque; or film noir shadows and looming Expressionist staircases beside giant Alice in Wonderland plant pots. He throws everything at you, hoping that something sticks.
He says that the ubiquity, the silliness, the bright colours and characters are all a ploy, designed to undercut designer ponce. He was born out of that 1960s generation that thinks design can be radical: “poetic” everyday objects that change people, little by little, through everyday use. He designs, he says, for the people. “Objects should not serve as a means of representing money so that people can humiliate their neighbours,” he adds.
It’s ironic that fashionistas and lazy developers think Starck is just a byword for elitism, but most Starck stuff is cheap: you’ll get a stool for under a tenner. You can find him in cheap stores such as Target in America and Carrefour in France. His goods are “friendly”, he thinks; they “dis-elitify” design.
And at their best they do. Starck’s range for Thomson, the French state-owned electronics firm, transforms remote controls and hi-fis from boys’ toys into sensuous objects to covet for themselves. His mother-and-baby goods treat both parties as grown-ups: shocking. Even the silly jokes sometimes hit their target, such as the loo on the top floor of the Peninsula Hotel, where you can pee over Hong Kong with just a glass wall and urinal to protect citizens below.
Usually, though, it’s the quieter, serious stuff that works, such as his Starck Eyes bendable glasses or the Maisons Starck, a spirited attempt at cheap housing.
They are, shockingly, functional. They solve problems. They do what design is supposed to do. And, ironically, it’s this quiet stuff, not the fireworks, that might keep him famous when his awfully long 15 minutes is up. The trouble is that, in Starck’s crazy world of endless stuff and nonsense, the quiet ones haven’t got a chance.
Fifteen minutes in this exhibition is enough to drive anyone bonkers. And when his images fade and the one-liners and barking slogans pall, his reputation rests ultimately on the objects themselves. Oh dear. In their drive to be eager and friendly, most have an annoying habit of not actually working. The WW Chair looks a treat, but it’s a devil to sit on. The Hot Bertaa kettle is a bugger to pour. His interiors are not spaces to linger or live in; they’re designed to look at and be looked at in. That bloody lemon squeezer is famous for not squeezing lemons.
But there it is, the point of Starck. He designs objects whose function is not actually to work but to become infamous for 15 minutes, to look at, to mark you out as a designer consumer, all posture, no practical function. And when fashions change, you’ll just pop Starck, and his lemon squeezer, on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard and buy something else. He thinks he’s consumer culture’s Mother Teresa, but in the end he’s just its Barnum, banging the drum to sell more stuff for a show that must go on and on and on.
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Philippe Starck — dilettante or genius?
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