Paola Antonelli’s “Pirouette” at MoMA Is an Ode to the Power of Design

To the opening, Antonelli, named one of the world’s top 25 Style & Design Visionaries by TIME magazine, wore a pair of turquoise ankle boots by Martin Margiela, inspired by the Belgian designer’s original white leather Tabi Boots featured in the show. Dramatically spotlit on a pedestal in a darkened space of their own, with vintage footage of their fashion show debut unspooling beside them, the effect is precisely what Antonelli was after for each of her choices. “I wanted the presentation of the show to be different,” she says, “to show fewer objects, to isolate each and every one of them, and invite people to focus.” She still ended up with nearly 100 selections from the early 20^th century forward, an array of intellectual and creative prowess in objects as familiar as Margaret E. Knight’s versatile Flat-Bottomed Paper Bag or the story of Apple, Inc.’s Mackintosh 128K Home Computer and as gorgeously complex as Virgil Abloh’s transparent DJ equipment, or the deceptive simplicity of Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji imagery.

Together they also gel into a kind of statement of democracy: the best of intentions and outcomes, whether for information systems, seating design, malnutrition detection, communication devices, traffic symbols, the plainest possible vegetable peeler, or sophisticated climate change mapping can offer a sense of commonality at times when it feels most under threat. “It’s about substituting hope for desperation,” Antonelli says.

In the curation process, she repeatedly encountered history’s pivotal choreography, with surprises in almost every step. The idea for M&M candies came to Forrest Mars in the midst of the Spanish Civil War as he noticed soldiers snacking on small chocolates with hard sugar coatings that kept them from melting. The Moka Express coffee maker emerged during the Great Depression when many Italians could no longer afford to drink in cafes. Post-It notes resulted from a failed adhesives experiment. Every day brings a new sense of history: the names of Charles and Ray Eames, integral to the show, have been particularly present in design world minds as wildfires ravaged Pacific Palisades. There’s not a little of Eva Zeisel in astronaut Don Pettit’s 2008 cup, the first patented product invented in space. Telfar Clemens’s capacious, anti-luxury Shopping Bag nicknamed the “Bushwick Birkin” will carry over into a Design Store launch of Telfar Tyvek products in the coming weeks.

“Pirouette” is animated by the passion to collect for posterity. The Ray Tomlinson @ symbol, blown up in size so that it’s visible on a window-facing wall from the garden three stories below, “is one of my proudest acquisitions,” Antonelli says. The flowery acrylic Miss Blanche Chair by Shiro Kuramata is a testament to acquisition in the name of friendship, its provenance “Gift of Agnes Gund in honor of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.” Antonelli says, “I don’t mean to be gendered in saying this, but there’s such an elegant affection in that.” It’s hard not to miss the significant number of women singled out in the show. At the same time, great design serves to bring out momentous pride: the show’s staggeringly multipart Donald T. Chadwick Aeron Chair is a “Gift of the employees of Herman Miller.”

When the Afghan-Dutch designer Massoud Hassani was a child in Kabul, he played with a paper toy on which he later based the life-saving Mine Kafon Wind Powered Deminer, a device that might warm Princess Diana’s heart. Stationed at the beginning of the show, it illustrates Antonelli’s aim to locate the universal in particulars that embody the forging of ideals. Even the graphic signifier for Do Not Touch in front of each display becomes its own small tribute to dispelling the differences contained in worded languages. The oversize @ symbol is flanked by a giant version of Jens Ellstrup Rasmussen’s 2005 Google Maps Pin. With Antonelli seated on a bench beneath it, it suddenly resembles a flag planted to signal her ongoing determination to point the brightest way forward in design.  She stopped taking ballet lessons at six years old, she says, yet “Pirouette” sends the world spinning in new directions.