“I don’t want to over-conceptualise this,” says Ryan Gander, enthusiastically showing me the kitchen sink he has designed, “but the way you deal with this sink cognitively and emotionally is different from the way you deal with a normal kitchen sink. To get 100% out of it, you have to change your perspective on working in the kitchen.”
This is not the sort of sales patter you get at Magnet, but then conceptual artist Gander is known for his ability to theorise everything from household goods to classical sculpture, so big ideas about kitchen sinks were to be expected. To be fair, he has a point. As he moves around his creation, sitting in the middle of his studio in the village of Melton in Suffolk, he explains its system of changeable shelves, chopping boards and containers, and you can see how, yes, it would change the way you work in the kitchen. Arrange it right and you can do all your food preparation and washing in one place. If Gander contributes nothing else, he may liberate us from searching for the chopping knife.
The sink is the first product released by Otomoto, the “lifestyle venture” Gander recently founded with Tony Chambers, former editor-in-chief of Wallpaper*. “Otomoto” is a Japanese word meaning, loosely, “close at hand” and the idea is that all the company’s wares (“everything and the kitchen sink”, they quip) should be convenient, ergonomic and make ordinary things pleasurable. “It’s about elevating the mundane,” says Chambers, who has also come down to the studio. “And taking pride in the most everyday details.”
“Otomoto things should enrich your life,” Gander says. “We’re really into the idea that if you do something boring like washing up, it shouldn’t be boring. It should be joyous.”
In the 20 years since Gander graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in interactive art, he has produced work ranging from painting, sculpture and architecture to lectures, customised trainers, typefaces, children’s books and new words. He’s interested in the way objects act as vessels for people’s stories, but he’s just as happy talking about commonplace creativity as art.
Art for him is about experimenting with ideas and “trying to make some original contribution to human history and human knowledge, like an explorer”, but he thinks the way people are usually creative “is things like bumper stickers, the clothes we wear, what we serve when friends come round for dinner, or what we post on social media”. Some of his best work, such as his plaster sculptures of his nine-year-old daughter’s dens, takes that sort of creativity and recasts it as something that can be shown in galleries. In a way, Otomoto reverses that process, taking the kind of conceptual thinking you might associate with artists and applying it to everyday stuff. Meanwhile Chambers, a well-connected player in the design world who transformed Wallpaper* from a magazine to a multi-format media brand, has a creative input into the goods, but also knows how to present them as products.
The next release, when the company officially launches in February next year (on the second, because the date, 02.02.2020, is symmetrical), is unconfirmed, but likely to be either a poker or a collection of wall hooks. Gander leads us to an office where he retrieves the poker prototype from one of his staff. It is stainless steel, hollow, so you can blow into the fire to stoke it up, and designed with a magnetic clip so it can attach to a base. The second idea (which one assumes would sell somewhat better) developed from Gander’s hobby of collecting hooks. He says he has hundreds – “Hooks from the Pound Shop, hooks from Margiela, hooks that aren’t even seen as hooks” – and would like to offer an Otomoto set comprising 95 readymades and five by artists they would commission. Owners could use them how they want, but Gander and Chambers like the idea of whole walls of hooks, a complete installation of a collection.
Gander has a selection of 30 or so hooks installed in the hall of a guest bungalow outside the studio, so he and Chambers take me over for a look. As we stand contemplating them, I wonder aloud if Otomoto is really just a fancy homewares company, but they say no, their things don’t have to be designed for the home, in fact they don’t have to be designed objects at all. An Otomoto product could be a book or talk or an experience they create for people. In other words, as they freely concede, it’s a bit like the old Factory Records practice of giving a catalogue number to everything relevant to the organisation, from record releases to merchandise, a bar and even a cat, to show that everything about the Mancunian company was a creative experiment.
The big question is: are we meant to see Otomoto sinks, pokers and hook collections as “art” or “design”? Unsurprisingly, the answer is complicated. The pair don’t like the idea of producing things that would be marketed as “design”, because Gander thinks well-designed, functional objects aren’t made to be art, because they’re not given a meaning by their maker. The mistake people make, he says, is assuming art involves the highest or hardest kind of creativity, when it can in fact be quite easy. “Everyone thinks there’s this creative ladder and that artists are at the top of it. But they’re not, because the highest form of creative ingenuity by far is problem-solving. Being creative is waking up every day and starting with a really difficult problem that needs solving, with a budget and health and safety requirements restricting you. That’s design, and that’s why good designers are way more creative than artists.”
He points out that there’s a history of overlooked artists, such as the Austrian-born ecologist Victor Papanek, who had turned from art to the more interesting challenge of solving functional problems in the real world. That tradition inspires Gander and Chambers, if only for the obvious reason that, in 2019, it seems more admirable and creative to make something that helps people than to be “some arrogant, narcissistic artist character that gets pissed on telly, shouts and makes stuff that looks kind of frivolous and wasteful, do you know what I mean?”
I do, but I still think punters buying the hooks might like to know whether or not they can say they’ve got an artwork on the wall. “Well, I consider art to be about belief and associated value. Our products are only art objects depending on the belief system you instil in them.”
Do he and Chambers instil them with a belief that they’re “art” or “design”?
“Well,” Chambers says, in a smooth way that makes you think he must be extremely good at business meetings, “the primary motive for all Otomoto products is for them to be good useful design, and to make rudimentary tasks that bit more pleasurable. So design first and foremost. But we fully understand that they can also be appreciated and relieved of their function, purely for their formal and visceral qualities.”
Those qualities will not include a uniform style. Chambers and Gander both groan at the way a lot of modern designers beaver away at a signature look, with similar pieces of work released at regular intervals. “A designer shouldn’t have a style,” Chambers says. “You should be solving a problem that requires a certain material or a certain approach.” He thinks it happens because people want to consciously buy into a defined lifestyle; Gander, on the other hand, blames the internet. “Social media has changed art colossally, and not in a good way. It’s made things more retinal and less cognitive. I think in the next few years, the art world as we know it might split into two worlds. One will be cognitive, and the other will have art that functions well in places like Instagram, such as Kaws or Banksy. You know, people like to see things they recognise, so you have a high ratio of artists who repeat themselves. I don’t think that is creative endeavour, though – I’m more interested in trying stuff out and making all these mistakes. That’s how you get to things that are really good.”
Ten miles from the studio, at Gander’s home in Saxmundham, we see his sink in action. He has a stainless steel prototype (the retail version is Silestone) sitting on a wooden frame beside the cooker hob, with paulownia chopping boards at the cooker end and at the other a colander, draining rack and thin gastronorm container for compostable waste. An upper lip holds the boards in place, while a lower lip can hold various containers. The sink also has a really good plug: just a rubber ball on a chain that rolls down the sloping sink-bottom to settle in the plughole on its own.
Gander moved to Suffolk from London 10 years ago, when his wife Rebecca was pregnant with their first child, Olive. They bought “for a pittance” a dilapidated Victorian building that had been a B&B and set about remodelling it; a decade later it is almost complete, all airy, cool and restrained, with a few hidden artworks built in ($25 and €30 coins from the future glued to the floor, a bubble-less spirit level embedded in the stairs). The showpiece is the living room fireplace, a replica of one designed in 1955 by Josef and Anni Albers, the German artist couple who taught at the Bauhaus before emigrating to the US in the 30s.
The Albers fireplace is something of a cult object. Believing that brickwork could be used as a sculptural element in homes, Josef used off-white firebricks set at different angles to create a geometric relief. He made only two, for private clients in the US, but Ryan asked the Albers Foundation for permission to make a copy, and their granddaughter Lucy agreed, on condition that they could send historians to look at it from time to time. It is the only one in Europe, and has on one side a brass plaque crediting the Albers. A local bricklayer made it: “He really enjoyed doing it,” Gander says.
The studio, a former radio factory on a lane behind a tractor dealership, was bought around the same time as the house and is where Gander makes most of his art – or rather has ideas and gets other people to make them. Using a wheelchair means there are some physical tasks he can’t do, but in any case, he says, he isn’t all that good at actually making things – his skill lies in making things happen. The sink was made with the help of Matheson Whiteley, a London architectural studio, and Cosentino, a Spanish materials supplier.
For the last few years Gander has been trying to get an art school going for kids who are being pushed out of the system. When he was young, he became interested in art after being taken to Tate Liverpool on school trips, and went off to university in Manchester. “Rich kids weren’t interested in making art then. Now that’s changed, and kids from poorer backgrounds find it harder to go. When I visit art schools, I always sense that the kids from more difficult circumstances want something more – there’s more drive, because there’s nothing to fall back on, it has to work. They’re bolder and they take more risks. Which is good, because risk-taking works really well in the art world.”
Gander has had plans drawn up for a shipping container structure that could house the school, but thinks that in a way it already exists, “as a state of permanent optimism, ambition and enthusiasm”. That state is evoked on his website for Fairfield International, as he plans to call it, which consists mostly of a loop of inspirational slogans, such as: “Because art education as it stands kills your buzz,” “Because you don’t have a trust fund or a wealthy spouse” and, “Because you want to make art more than you want to be an artist.” Fairfield International could be anywhere, but it does feel very Suffolk. In some towns here, if you randomly chucked a pencil it would hit an art person – probably one who has moved out of London. Glenn Brown, Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas, Sadie Coles, Stuart Shave and Norman Rosenthal, among others, all live here; then there are all the publishers and nature writers trundling off to contemplate the Fens.
It was through this creative community, at a children’s birthday party in Saxmundham, that Gander and Chambers ended up talking about Otomoto – Chambers lives in the Barbican in London, but has a holiday home in one of the much-coveted California-style bungalows designed by great British modernist architect John Penn and built in Suffolk in the 60s. Gander thought Chambers, knowing about the design world, might be able to help him sell the sink. Chambers was sceptical because at Wallpaper*, he had people pitching him ideas about conceptual furniture all the time. His first thought was that “there were enough kitchen sinks in the world, to be honest”, then he couldn’t believe that no one in Europe had thought of the close-at-hand idea before, and finally he found himself taken with “the philosophy and approach”.
Back at the studio, Gander and Chambers catch up on work, the latter revealing some of the typefaces he’s had made for Otomoto. Both men love them because the faces make the letters perfectly symmetrical (like the launch date), which means, to their font-nerdish delight, that not only is Otomoto a palindrome, but it can also be read in a mirror.
While this is happening, Gander’s mother appears. She and his father moved to Suffolk from Chester a year ago and like to help him out; today she is dropping off a denim jacket on to which she has been sewing patches of corporate logos, a prototype for one of his projects. As he examines the patches, he and Chambers discuss whether or not youth style tribes have been supplanted by identity politics (Gander dislikes the latter, and never ticks the disabled box on forms because he doesn’t identify as “someone in a wheelchair”). As they adjust their clothes for the photograph, they talk about the effect they would like Otomoto to have. “It’s not just about commercial success,” Gander says, “It’s also about – I know it sounds cheesy, but inspiring people. When I was a kid, I just buzzed off people who made loads of work that was all really different. I was, like, ‘I want to do what they do! I want to get up and do something completely different every day, and try something out!’ Because that’s what’s great about the world, isn’t it? There’s so much you can do.”
• This article was amended on 30 September to clarify that Papanek was born in Austria, not Brazil.
