Get Herald RSS"The Rhode Island School of Design collaborated earlier this year with Gap, the clothing retailer, to produce a series of unique cardigans that sold out hours after they were put on display at the G.A.P. Adventures New York Concept Store, a space adjacent to Gap's flagship store in New York City," ("At trendy Gap store, clothing by RISD students," March 13).
Following the overwhelming success of the Gap cardigan project, RISD administrators have been deluged with requests from major American corporations looking to hire RISD design students as artistic consultants. RISD President John Maeda expressed surprise at the sudden outpouring of interest. "I've never seen anything like it," Maeda said. "We've heard from Ford, American Express, Delta Air Lines - maybe half of the Fortune 500 companies are calling us, wanting to hire our students."
Last month, a team of RISD students made a consulting trip to the headquarters of Random House, the venerable New York publishing house whose widely-publicized financial troubles earlier this year required company-wide layoffs. Random House CEO Markus Dohle extended a personal invitation to the students, who were paid a six-figure consulting fee and tasked with "re-energizing Random House's artistic mission by challenging our notions of creativity in business settings."
On their first day at Random House, the RISD team - who arrived in Manhattan on blue bicycles, wearing plaid pants and one-shouldered leotards - spent the morning examining the artwork in the offices of several Random House employees. Upon seeing a framed print of Thomas Kinkade's "The Christmas Cottage" hanging above the desk of senior editor Robert Littrell, RISD senior Megan Lafleur-Ramirez pronounced it "beyond tragic," and replaced the Kinkade print with "Awareness of Self and Non-Self Entities," a sculpture consisting of a bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos dipped in honey and tied to a Betamax player. RISD junior David Harrison spent the afternoon replacing many of the Dell computers in the office with cardboard signs reading "COMPUTER + COMP-YOU-TER = THE SIGNIFIED (???)" and sophomore Hannah Benton joined senior Rachel de Compt in the accounts division, where they spent several hours dropping long green threads onto pieces of canvas, attaching them to glass slides and putting the slides in a toaster. The project, de Compt said, was inspired by French surrealist Marcel Duchamp's "Trois Stoppages Etalon," and was meant to represent the plight of America's poor.
"It's been hard to get any work done since they got here," said associate publicist Eric Kleiner, whose fourth-floor cubicle was unexpectedly ransacked by a long-haired RISD student wearing a "Kitsch Police" badge. "I mean, I know they're supposed to be artistic geniuses or whatever. I just hope Markus knows what he's doing."
Art consulting for businesses is no new concept, of course. For decades, top American corporations have retained in-house art managers to maintain existing collections and acquire new pieces. But under the pressures of the economic recession, some firms have begun looking to art-scene outsiders - like RISD alumn Shepard Fairey, whose "Hope" poster became an indelible icon of the Obama campaign - for unconventional inspiration.
"I really think this is the wave of the future in the corporate world," said Maeda, who assumed the top post at RISD in 2008. "Robert Rauschenberg once spoke about inhabiting the space between life and art, and I think that's what our students are doing."
Not every consulting effort has been successful, though. Four junior executives at the advertising mega-firm Ogilvy & Mather were injured when RISD freshman Benjamin Marchese ran through the office hallways swinging nunchucks made of human femurs, part of a living installation he titled, "Rapture and Rupture: Towards an Aesthetic of Suffering." Elizabeth Wilson, a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, reported being accosted by RISD senior Amy Goldstein, who attempted to paint her forehead with yellow latex. And one RISD design team was forcibly escorted from the offices of State Farm after they suggested replacing the 85-year-old insurance giant's logo with a picture of a leprechaun chewing on a syphilitic penis.
"We didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings," said Jessica Williams, the RISD student who designed the offensive logo. "We just wanted to re-construct a semiotics of stability." Williams then performed a monologue from David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and renamed herself Coco Fantastico.
Perhaps the biggest test for the RISD design students came last week, when Maeda was contacted by Bank of America, who asked for help re-designing their Charlotte, N.C. headquarters. A 10-student team was dispatched to the beleaguered bank, where they immediately began improving the workspace. Workers stood in disbelief as RISD students removed a conference room table and replaced it with a kiddie pool filled with chinchillas. Aeron desk chairs were fitted with chocolate pinwheels, and a photocopy machine in the bank's Global Wealth and Investment Management division was turned on its side and covered in Russian dressing.
"I don't know what these kids are doing here," said Dick Thornton, a senior analyst at the bank. "I asked one of them - a girl named Francesca - what she thought of my tie, and she did a somersault, faked a seizure and started humming 'Ride of the Valkyries.' How is this helping?"
Reached for comment in an igloo made of cigarettes, Francesca defended her actions. "I mean, I guess you can't expect bankers to understand biomorphic symbology. God, this is so Brancusi-at-U.S.-customs of them."
Kevin Roose '09.5 is an English concentrator from Oberlin, Ohio. He can be reached at kevin_roose(at)brown.edu.
