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For a few dollars less
Words by Howard Byrom
Designer Michael Marriott spent a month on the road in a old Chrysler, collecting dice clocks, plastic chairs and pink string for his new museum of cut-price Americana.
Fashion designers like Alexander McQueen may thrive on capricious flights of fancy, but when it comes to furniture designers, the rules are somehow different. They're expected to pare down, sober up, and kowtow to functionality. But someone forgot to tell Michael Marriott.
This celebrated creative has more in common with anthropologists of the late 1890's than the rectangular-spectacled trendies of the 1990's. Marriott, who recently added the prestigious Jerwood Applied Arts prize to his resume, pulled down the shutters on his studio this summer and sallied forth on the grand tour.
Like Augustus Henry Lane-Fox, Pitt-Rivers, who founded his eponymous museum in Oxford, and Sir William Burrell, the fervent Scottish hoarder, Marriott's grand scheme was to create his own museum. Only this time it wasn't the Egyptian pyramids of the African savannah being plundered for valuables, it was the modern equivalent: his road trip took him around the junk shops, dime stores and garage sales of America, the font of 20th century civilisation.
It all started when the brewing giant Budweiser invited the 36-year-old south Londoner to participate in Exhibit-B, a group show featuring such disparate British design companies as Inflate, Urban Salon, and the Light Surgeons. The programme's brief encouraged an exploration of Anglo-American cross-cultural themes.
Seattle - home of Microsoft, birthplace of grunge, and a great place for skinny lattes - was, figured Marriott, the perfect starting point for the expedition. You might expect such an ambitious project to be a logistical nightmare. Not a bit of it. Marriott has already dazzled the design cognoscenti by using second-hand cardboard fruit boxes in his furniture and transforming old tea crates into flat-pack chairs, so orchestrating this fin de siecle frolic was child's play.
The only criterion for buying Americana, Marriott said pointedly before leaving, was "whether I like it or not". This opened up plenty of buying possibilities. From a mummified horse, sourced from a Native American reservation, to a squeezy yellow French's mustard bottle, or even a used car with three careless owners and a fading "pro-life" bumper sticker. In fact, once he'd arrived the car took priority - it would provide not just the transport, but essential storage space for his treasure, as well as the shows centrepiece.
Marriott soon found something for sale in Burien, a small town beside Highway 99 in Washington State. "You don't get many kids driving around in gas-pigs like these," the vendor drawled, hoisting open the 1971 Chrysler Newport's huge bonnet. "It's an old man's car."
Quite apart from its three good tires and a relatively clean bill of health, it was the car's impressive dimensions that really clinched the deal. At a whopping 20ft from fender to slightly rusting fender, it was certainly and eye-catcher - and just about the largest conceivable vehicle that would fit into a shipping container without the aid of a crusher.
After handing over the dollars, Marriott filled the tank, found an oldies station on the dial, and headed south on Interstate 405 towards Portland. For one whole month he hung out in hardware stores, truffled through "swap-meets" held in disused drive-in movie parking lots, and blackened his fingers with the classified ads in local newspapers. The hulking, chugging Chrysler, meanwhile, slowly filled with artefacts.
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