Henk Stallinga: Objects that are statements

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Metz, Tracy

Henk Stallinga: Objects that are Statements The Dutch industrial designer Henk Stallinga makes objects in order to ask questions and comments on the world around him. What, exactly, are the essential ingredients that make up a lamp? He wants to design for eternity but he cannot stop making new things. By Tracy Metz Portrait by Maarten Corbijn

What do Henk Stallinga's brains look like from inside? An unlikely combination, I would imagine, of the newest generation Pentium-- chip-faster than the speed of light-and an old-fashioned toolbox filled with greasy nuts and bolts, loose ends of wire, string and lots of other useful things that boys fill their pockets with. The objects he makes combine the practicality that a craftsman brings to the process of design and manufacturing, with the flash of sardonic humor that immediately distinguishes them from run-of-the-mill home furnishings. After all, Stallinga, 38, does call himself an industrial designer, not a visual artist-but we'll get to that.

Take his Watt lamp, for example, humorous and appealing in its simplicity. It consists of a plug and a bare lightbulb-no lampshade, not even an on-off switch-connected by a long, flexible wire that you can bend, fold and refold into any shape you like. Since it was launched in 1993, millions have been sold in the Netherlands and abroad including in museum collections. The Watt, like all of Stallinga's work, is a useful object that poses a question: what exactly is a lamp when you reduce it to its bare essentials?

The Watt was the starting-point of Stallinga's career in more ways than one: it taught him a lot about manufacturing and distribution, but also about business copyright and law. A disagreement with his then business partner about how to produce and market it cost him all his capital and more. He started over again, determined this time around to keep the entire process in his own hands. "I like to make things, but if you want to make a business out of it you need people who buy them, you need a market. An edition of three is not industrial design. It was terrifying in the beginning. You either are stuck with an attic full of Blisterlamps hoping for orders from the shops, or you have piles of orders and the attic is empty. And in the meantime you somehow have to pay the rent." In the past ten years he has built up a network of pilot shops where he can try out new designs, which are sometimes manufactured in government-run workshops for the handicapped. The Blisterlamp, by the way, sold by the thousands, and was installed in New York's MoMA garden cafe.

Annemarie Galani owns half the company and is Henk's partner in home and business. Asked about her role in the company she says she is Henk's first critic-that doesn't mean that he necessarily acts on her criticism, but it does help place his work within a broader context of modern-day design and art. Stallinga's business savvy is regarded with some suspicion by his fellow designers in Holland, who are accustomed to what he thinks is a rarefied greenhouse atmosphere of subsidies and flatulous mutual admiration. "There is indeed a lot of experimental design in the Netherlands, but too much of it is subsidized spielerei rather than a solution to a problem."

Henk Stallinga always did have a lot of opinions. After school he spent a few years travelling the world in a bus, but when he discovered that the original feeling of freedom was turning into superficial spectatorship, he enrolled on a whim at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. He found it uninspiring and moved to the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where the teachers would jokingly ask him, `Well, Henk, any new opinions today?' and then listen to what he had to say.

His opinions may be salty, but they are artfully integrated into his designs. Object and statement are one, as it were. "I'm not trying to be funny, nor am I out to improve the world," he says earnestly. "As an artist whose theme is industrial design I comment on the world around us, and the vehicle for that commentary are my designs." That is why he has a booth at all the major furniture fairs. Being there is a subversive act, he says. His work often irritates the "regular" furniture people, who feel that a chair with the glue clamps still on is somehow making fun of their products. So they make snide remarks about it, about how it will never sell, and they wonder out loud who in the world is going to buy a handbag made of two dustpans connected by a piano hinge and a piece of garden hose. And they are non-plussed by his Set-Seat, a big steel plate folded into a bench with a big carpet attached in front as a counterweight.

He has taken the idea further and made a computer table and chair out of one continuous piece of folded steel, and is now working on a covered picnic table. His newest discovery is a material by the Dutch linoleum manufacturer Forbo Linoleum called Furniture Linoleum, which not only makes this steel furniture more comfortable but also enables him to pursue a fascination for integrating furniture and architecture. As an example he mentions the vernacular architecture of countries where the building material is adobe or wattle, and where when you move you only take a chest of blankets and clothes with you because all the furniture is part of the house. "What I would really like to add is design furniture that is added to the architecture, which is in fact architecture." That same research into integration of space and object was behind his design for MoMA's Officina (his commission to the Workspheres exhibition last winter). His contribution was an office kitchen with individual refrigerators, a coffee machine, a dishwasher and a long sink in which-how clever-the taps spout away from you and not over you.