Rafael Horzon has opened the German Design Museum in Berlin, presenting a radical departure from contemporary art by introducing what he calls "room illumination objects" instead of traditional art installations. The museum, located on a side street off Kurfürstendamm, opened recently with significant attendance from Berlin's cultural community, featuring a neon-bright sign that perfectly embodies design ideals reminiscent of Bauhaus, the Ulm School, Max Bill, and Dieter Rams.
The museum's inaugural exhibition was a monographic retrospective of Horzon's own work, which comes as no surprise to those familiar with him, as he is also the museum's founder. When asked about his decision to establish the museum in a former casino, Horzon candidly admitted he created the institution because it was time someone finally gave him a major, comprehensive retrospective.
Horzon has taken the unusual step of legally challenging Wikipedia to prevent being labeled as an "artist." His lawyers demanded that Wikipedia remove the term "artist" from his entry, arguing that he has never called himself an artist and wishes to be known only as an entrepreneur. He contends that being labeled an artist undermines the seriousness of his business work and is damaging to his commercial interests. This stance is particularly noteworthy in Berlin, where many entrepreneurs and artists would gladly pay to be recognized as legitimate artists.
The confusion about Horzon's identity stems from the fact that his business ventures bear striking resemblances to conceptual art projects. He founded a gallery where he invented all the exhibited artists and their works, writing典型的 gallery texts in perfectly half-baked art theory jargon. These promotional texts alone constituted a brilliant analysis of the linguistic clichés and forms that make a space appear to be a legitimate gallery.
Horzon has been Berlin's most restless founder, long before people began proudly introducing themselves as "founders" as if it were a real profession. Around the millennium, he established an office called "Redesigndeutschland," the gallery "Berlintokyo," a fashion label named "Gelée Royale," and the furniture store "Moebel Horzon," which sold only one shelf model. Remarkably, this shelf became a great success, with even novelist Bret Easton Ellis having one shipped to the United States. Horzon says he still lives off the proceeds from these shelves today.
The fascinating aspect of Horzon's method is that a store, project, or institution initially appears to be a Dadaist parody but then becomes reality or "New Reality," as described in a manifesto he presented at the German Design Museum. This manifesto was financed by the Moebel Horzon Cultural Fund with friendly support from the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which was also Horzon's creation from 1997.
The Academy's letterhead was noble and impressive, with elegant typography resembling that of an Ivy League university. When Horzon used this stationery to contact numerous renowned research institutions offering cooperation, many directors reacted with consternation and aggression upon realizing they had encountered a chameleon perfectly capable of imitating their own pompous tone of scientific authority and the aesthetics of ambitious cultural institutions. The TU president, exasperated, asked Horzon to refrain from further correspondence regarding his proposal to introduce his "successful study concept" at the university, while the Free University of Berlin threatened to seek legal protection if Horzon continued planning to issue press releases about cooperation negotiations.
Despite institutional resistance, Horzon continued without official partners. His academy's website claims that by engaging outstanding thinkers, the Berlin Academy of Sciences has secured a place in the first rank of European science and research. The part about the thinkers wasn't a lie – Horzon actually succeeded in attracting internationally renowned curators, artists, and writers as speakers, including Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Kracht. Suddenly, Horzon's academy had greater attendance than many events at officially recognized academies.
The German Design Museum follows a similar pattern: started as a venue to give himself a retrospective, the museum is becoming a serious address for examining questions of what design is, can be, and should be. An exhibition on Dieter Rams' work is planned for autumn, while currently Horzon is showing work by Berlin architect Jürgen Mayer H., who became known early as a representative of architecture that distances itself from the modern ideal of light, air, and sun, instead making shade a central theme in an overheated world through his shade-providing parametric plaza structure, Metropol Parasol.
At Horzon's museum, Mayer H. displays not only this groundbreaking work but also house designs that, in their latent processed-cheese-like quality, embody a completely different idea of design than what Horzon does as a designer. In his angry rejection of being categorized as an "artist," Horzon is part of an avant-garde for whom the image of art has obviously tipped over.
Instead of light installations, Horzon recently designed "room illumination objects" intended to cheer up users during dark lighting conditions and gloomy moods. A wall full of neon tubes reminds one of Dan Flavin's work but is classified as a room illumination object. While Pop Art and Minimal Art tested the autonomous aesthetic potential of everyday objects in the white cube, Horzon does the reverse: he tests how art can be used and employed in daily life. What looks like art is actually design for beautifying life without metaphysical charge.
Among his creations are five room illumination objects with integrated household appliances, shown at the museum upon request. In his "Manifest of New Reality," Horzon writes that these room illumination objects should replace light installations in the future. The room illumination object with integrated toaster could also be described as a toaster with two circular, brightly glowing neon tubes attached, into which the finished toast jumps like a delighted dolphin through a ring, fusing bright light and hot toast into a novel morning happiness apparatus.
His "room decoration objects," which should replace sculptures according to his manifesto, include vertically positioned stainless steel fireplaces that suddenly look like abstracted fantasy knights in Horzon's museum. One can read Horzon's works and their accompanying texts as a hollow mirror of Berlin's cultural scene, but also as a critical linguistic analysis of strategies for cultural meaning production, with a sense for the latent madness of technical jargon reminiscent of Loriot or Jacques Tati.
Among his room decoration objects is the swirl diffuser FD-Q-Z/625 by manufacturer Trox, a type of cover installed in office ceilings over air conditioning ducts. Their design comes from designers who themselves used the arsenal of Op Art for their product design, making these swirl diffusers look like Op Art reliefs by Vasarely. For these feedback loops between art and product design alone, Rafael Horzon would deserve a design museum prize – one he might as well design and award to himself.
