Non-Modernism
Studio Job
“I could never do a Mickey Mouse installation, and I think that someone from the U.S. could maybe never do a “Mona Lisa.” It has to do with the place where you were born, with your influences, with language, your cultural DNA.” — Job Smeets
With an approach more akin to that of traditional guilds than industrial design, Studio Job, founded in 1998 by Job Smeets (b. 1970, Hamont-Achel, Belgium), focuses primarily on decorative arts for the contemporary age, producing lighting, furniture and graphics as well as conceptual objects that seem to exist somewhere between art and design, past and present. Job’s craft-driven, limited-edition designs, often cast in bronze or from laser-cut, inlaid woods, are marked by a fanciful dose of whimsy and an extreme level of ornamentation that could easily be labelled “neo-baroque”. Unlike a lot of Dutch design, Job has no interest in optimistic, quirky pseudo-functionalism — his work has a sinister pan-Low country aesthetic, sharing more in common with the tradition of 16th-century dutch and Flemish painters like Pieter Bruegel (1526-1569) and Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516); the designer’s furniture and objects not only err on the side of dysfunction, but are distinguished by an increasingly dark sardonic streak.
Like pop-artists of the 1950s through to John Baldessari (1931-2020) and Jeff Koons (b. 1955), Job cleverly elevates mass-produced motifs and symbols into costly objects of desire. Drawing inspiration from high and low culture in equal measure, the designer’s one-off pieces elevate everyday objects as well as icons, archetypes and clichés with a panoply of new and novel materials and techniques. As well as stratospherically priced haute couture pieces, painstakingly detailed in the Job’s Netherlands ateliers, there’s a prêt-à-porter line of more than 300 licensed products ranging from tiles to tableware (much like Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Koons — both serious pools of inspirations for Job — who licensed their work to everything from baby carriages to, most recently, Louis Vuitton bags). In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk — a “total work of art” or a synthesis of different art forms into one all-embracing unique genre.
Table from the “Robber Baron” series, executed in 2007 by Studio Job
Cabinet from the “Industry” series (detail) executed in 2008 by Studio Job
Whilst inspired by his inherent European cultural DNA, Job frequently appropriates and reinterprets U.S. clichés of late 19th and early 20th century. “You know, the best juggler of icons in the U.S. is Jeff Koons,” Job explains in an interview with the New York Times. “He’s also the best executor in icons. Sometimes I feel more connected with the world of somebody like Koons than I would ever feel to the work of Philippe Starck.” A contemporary version of the applied arts of the Renaissance, Job deploys humour as a means to address such serious subjects as capitalism, taste, and the legacies of art and design. In his “Industry” series (2008), for e.g. cabinets, screens, tables and pedestals are veneered in lacquered black dyed tulip and white dyed bird’s eye maple; their intricate laser cut compositions evocative of the seventeenth-century marquetry methods of French cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle (1642-1732). (“If ornament is an immoral and degenerate practice, as Adolf Loos described it, then Job [is] the most immoral and degenerate designer of our generation,” declares Juan Garcia Mosqueda of New York City’s Chamber gallery.) The inlaid subjects depict modern capitalism in rorschach like arrangements; helicopters, nuclear power plants, high voltage pylons, guns, bullets, hunting knives, submarines, satellite dishes, tanks, missiles, bombs, radio towers, cranes, planes, grenades, tools, AK-47’s, depiction of surviving animals as well as skeletons of those unable to escape. The viewer is forced to recognise the dichotomy between the natural or organic, and the man-made or destructive. The apocalyptic imagery — appearing almost as if fossilised — serves as a modern momento mori, leaving the viewer with an unnerving sense that both will face destruction and eventually become embedded within the strata of history.
Table from the “Bavaria” series (detail) executed in 2008 by Studio Job
Similarly allegorical, Job’s surreal Robber Baron suite (2007) (released on the eve of the most disastrous economic crisis since the Great Depression) is a tongue in cheek commentary on wealth and power, conceived as an office for an apocryphal Robber Baron; a megalomaniacal plutocrat who might have been plucked from the Renaissance, 19th century America, today’s fallen Masters of the Universe or the Russian oligarchy and subtitled “a tale of power and corruption, art and industry in bronze”. Originally commissioned by Moss Gallery, this suite of five cast-bronze furnishings, all figural, functional pieces consisting of a cabinet, mantel clock, table, floor lamp, and jewel safe, are constructed from iconic works of architecture or modelled after precious objects housed in the world’s great museum collections. Their mirror finish reflects the outrageous excesses of the so called robber barons of America’s Gilded Age, such as the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Fricks, and Vanderbilts. Laden with stories and iconographic images of missiles, falcons, gas masks, warplanes and wrenches, Robber Baron both celebrates and shames art and industry in equal measure.
The monumental Robber Baron floor lamp merges three important icons of architecture: the Parthenon, Empire State Building and Saint Peter’s Basilica. A Zeppelin docked at the pinnacle symbolizes technological failure, referencing the Empire State Building, whose top spire was originally intended as a mooring station for Zeppelin airships. The semi-functional pieces are deliberately absurdist, parodying the trappings of power with a surreal accumulation of iconic imagery: a desk top rests on clouds of noxious fumes billowing from a miniature bronze factory (almost church-like with its four smokestack “steeples”), while a garishly painted clown head is mounted trophy-like on top of a “Jewel Safe”, transforming it into a nightmarish jack‐in‐the‐box, reminiscent of Stephen King’s “It” (to open the door and access the vault requires turning the clown’s red nose and confronting the grimacing figure face to face). Job describes his work as “Orwellian” and remarks, “these things have a dangerous allure, and you know it’s scary but you are fascinated.”
The designer’s Bavaria (2008) suite of five marquetry furnishings in Indian Rosewood — a bench, table, mirror, cabinet and screen — depict quaintly child-like scenes of farm-life; a complex visual lexicon of red barns, silos, horse corals, sunflowers, shafts of wheat, vegetables and luscious fruit-bearing trees in brightly-coloured “book-matched” inlays. A depiction of Eden, or rather a naively happy rendition of rural paradise, it marks a return to rural elements in design and society. Inspired by the 17th and 18th century tradition of hand-painted furniture in the Southern German province (as seen in the collections of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), Studio Job use marquetry, a traditional craft of the “applied arts”, to impersonate the “fine art” of painting, declaring “In marquetry you are free as a painter; the veneers are like paint and the furniture piece functions as the canvas”. While in style simple, sturdy and antiquated (reflecting vernacular furniture making traditions), their rustic iconography and exuberant colours reminiscent of story-book illustrations, these furnishings are so finely executed that they are entirely unsuitable for everyday wear and tear.
Jewel safe from the 'Robber Baron' series (detail) executed in 2007 by Studio Job
This glorified rusticism has significant historical precedents including Marie-Antoinette’s “Pleasure Dairy” at Rambouillet and the “hameau de la reine” the model farm at the Petit Trianon, where Louis XVI’s Queen retreated from court life; there she enjoyed the fashionable fantasy of “returning to nature”, dressing up as milkmaid and acting as a peasant, whilst toting pails made by the royal porcelain manufactory of Sèvres — gilded and painted to imitate wood. The sharp sense of social critique lurking beneath the surface is a constant theme in Studio Job’s work. No doubt we shouldn’t ignore the contemporary relevance of Job’s decision to reference the faux-primitive idyll that — completed in 1783 in the run-up to the French Revolution — caused Marie-Antoinette to be chastised for her profligate and imprudent expenditure at a time when France was reeling under acute food shortage, poverty and depression. Whilst on one hand these quasi-monumental forms celebrate the designer’s rural roots and a Rousseauesque idealisation of the natural world, on the other they raise darker global concerns at a time of mounting environmental fear and crisis in food production and how we will nourish the world’s rapidly growing populace.
Job is a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design; his work was, in the beginning, rejected by the ruling modernists in the industry, but undaunted, Job created a market and a genre, which he term “non-modernism”. His idiosyncratic, highly crafted works are characterised by a unique library of iconography, pop cultural allusions, a cartoonish humour and excessive ornamentation. Often described as “neo-gothic,” Studio Job’s pieces are fanciful whilst remaining firmly on the right side of kitschy. Usually one-off or limited edition artesian works, Job sees his oeuvre as continuing a European tradition that was briefly interrupted by industrial design and mass production. Employing iconographic, pan-historic imagery, Job’s designs are at the same time both heraldic and cartoon-like, expressive and yet somehow primitive; his mysterious, dreamlike elements lend them a playful, allegorical quality, encouraging a contemplation of their larger symbolic meaning. That Job should describe his work as “trophies for the end of European Culture” reflects simultaneously how deeply he feels his art historical roots and a profound despair for the future of humankind.