Heaven and hell

s. 98

Other design belief systems are questioned in a project by Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk of 2004 entitled Underdo|ma. Fur is a contested material in both fashion and design. The designers' response was to make a pair of slippers from discarded moleskins. An active mole catcher might dispatch up to 500 moles in a day, the moles' carcases being regarded as waste, but in a different context they regain value. Like the work of Lohmann, the slippers record and celebrate the life - and death - of the creatures that went into their making.
The slippers reflect a renewed interest in taxidermy in art and design.

s.111

To designers Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe, The Divine Comedy represents the most essential story of all; the story of life and death. The epic poem, written by Dante between 1308 and his death in 1321, has long been considered one of the greatest works of world literature. It tells of Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, and is an allegorical representation of the Christian afterlife. Accompanied by the Ancient Greek poet Virgil, he enters Hell on the eve of Good Friday, emerging in Purgatory on Easter Sunday, thus turning the tale into a representation of the solar cycle as well as a metaphor for the resurrection. The work was largely overlooked during the period of the Enlightenment with the notable exception of William Blake, but it was later championed by the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century.
Twentieth-century writing, by Modernist poets and authors with an interest in mysticism including T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, shows its influence. Dante's graphic descriptions influenced many visual artists, too, most notably Gustave Doré, whose engraved illustrations completed between 1857 and 1868 owe more to the romanticism of Blake than to the medieval context of Dante's world view.
Since Van Eijk and Van der Lubbe graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven, and founded their own studio in 1998, much of their work has been concerned with the narrative potential of design. When pressed on the meaning of their objects, they respond, (They (the objects) try to tell you a different truth. They will always refer to things you already know from your past, like a material use, a pattern, a decoration, or a function or use. But they will give you something new as well. They cause a pleasant confusion and change your perspective to things and challenge you to look in a different way (at) the world around you. Their work entitled La Divina Commedia, which comprises a chair and a lamp, contains references to their many sources of inspiration: (Behaviour of people. References to non-mentionable experiences. Everyday life. Machinery. Production techniques. History. Both objects are decorated with scenes derived from Doré’s illustrations of Dante's poem.
The eighth and ninth circles of hell, as described by Dante, are the deepest, reserved for those guilty of treachery and deliberate, knowing evil. The eighth circle is divided into ten concentric stone ditches, and in one of these are the souls of thieves, guarded by a centaur and pursued and bitten by snakes for all eternity. The snakes are a metaphor for the reptilian secrecy of theft. It is Doré's engraving of these thieves' torment that appears on the lower portion of Van Eijk's and Van der Lubbe's chair.
The impact of La Divina Commedia relies on our recognition of Dante's original tale, part of the fabric of Western culture, and of Dora's engraved representation of it. But these sources have been manipulated so we see them with fresh eyes. Further disjuncture is provided by the means that the designers have employed. The chair and lamp are both made from thick white polypropylene sheet, which has a luminous quality that resembles marble. Van Eijk and Van der Lubbe have laser-engraved enlarged sections of Doré's illustrations onto these forms, wrapping the two-dimensional images around edges and corners. Modern synthetic materials and digital techniques married to historical content is an approach we have encountered frequently in this book, for example in the work of Jeroen Verhoeven, and the 'pleasant confusion' that arises from the disjunctive of materials and style is characteristic of the narrative approach adopted since the early I99os by Dutch designers.
Like the works produced by Meta, La Divina Commedia is the result of a partnership between avant-garde designers and highly skilled artisans. The combination of flat, engraved surface pattern merging into relief carving is a technique the designers used for a previous work, Godogan (2006).
This comprised a table, made by Indonesian craftsmen, which featured a highly complex computer-rendered pattern of tadpoles and frogs in a lily pond, inspired by an Indonesian fairy tale about a frog (or godogan) that turns into a prince. The purpose of the table, which was presented by Droog Design and NewYork's Friedman Gallery at the 2006 Art Basel/Miami Art Fair, was to emphasize the level of craftsmanship it is possible to commission in the Far East, where such skills are generally exploited as cheap labour. High quality craftsmanship, according to Van Eijk and Van der Lubbe, is scarce in the West, malting the products that utilize
it necessarily expensive and exclusive. La Divina Commedia demonstrates the craft skills of Belgian carver Donaat van Overschelde, who overcarved some parts of the engravings in shallow basrelief. As this work is not intended to be mass-produced, and will only ever exist in a small 'design art' edition, the designers' point about the exclusivity of craftsmanship is revisited.
Suspended above the chair is a monumental lamp, not dissimilar in form to an enormous axe, hanging like some divine judgement. It is decorated with extracts from a second Doré illustration, which shows the angels that supported Christ on the cross. Dante described God as a point of light, represented here by the light source of the lamp. In Hell, the bodies of the thieves writhe below our sight line while above us, floating in light, is Heaven. The designers have chosen not to represent Dante's Purgatory, but perhaps this state is embodied by anyone bold enough to sit on the chair, metaphorically inserting themselves between Heaven and Hell.
Presented together, these objects are contemporary representations of both Dante's and Doré's stories, and their peculiar proportions - particularly that of the massive, counter-balanced lamp - lead us to regard La Divina Commedia as a sculpture for contemplation rather than functional furniture. Yet function lies at the heart of the designers' purpose, and when asked if they make art objects or design works they
Reply (somewhat cryptically), ‘Design. They are always products, but they can differ in an object way of approach or a product way of approach.

Gareth Williams