No Discipline: An Interview with Ron Arad
06 May 2025
Ron Arad has become a name synonymous with playfulness, innovation and ingenuity across art, design and architecture. To mark the news of Opera Gallery’s global representation of Arad, we sat down with him to discuss his lack of a discrete discipline, how his canonical ideas and objects have evolved and his unyielding desire to create charming objects.
Let’s start with a word with multiple meanings: discipline. How does this word apply, or fail to apply, to what you do?
Asking this question, you must be aware of the title of my retrospectives [at the Centre Pompiou in Paris (2008–2009) and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2009)], ‘No Discipline’. I don’t have an exclusive membership to any discipline, though people might want to pigeon-hole me. I’m also not a disciplined person.
I once took part in a conference about breaking the boundaries between disciplines. To start the discussion, they passed the microphone between participants. When I was given it, I said “I think the more we discuss the borders between disciplines, even when we talk about breaking them, we make them stronger.” I suggested that we stop the debate then and there. The audience cheered; we were delayed, it was before lunch and everyone was hungry. So the MC said “OK” and the discussion stopped.
How does this lack of discipline manifest itself in your work?
You know what you’re doing when you’re doing it. The destination of an object tells you what it is: if it’s an industrial product, you’ll work differently to if it’s a studio piece destined for a gallery. In each case, you have different criteria. One is not better than the other, I like doing both.
That being said, these things can shift. For example, I was once approached by Disney to design a piece to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s 90th birthday. Sadly the project didn’t come to fruition, but I decided to make it into a handmade studio piece: Don’t Fuck with the Mouse. After that, an Italian company, Qeeboo, asked me to design a plastic version of it. So it was designed as an industrial piece, taken to the gallery floor and then became an industrial piece again. Similarly, I started the Big Easy chair as a studio piece and it has since found its way to becoming an industrial production.
So perhaps it’s better to say that there’s a lens you look at the world through, rather than a discipline.
Exactly. It’s the way I was brought up, my character, my abilities, my disabilities: all of it. If someone wants to be a devoted industrial designer and just do that, that’s good too. But it’s not that way for me.
There’s also architecture, which is more complicated. It involves more people and more constraints. I’m the oldest person in my studio but I’m also the most juvenile rebel. All of the younger architects take constraints as a starting point. I prefer to see how we can deal with them by doing what we want.
You often revisit the same form in different materials, treating it differently and letting it evolve. Is this a conscious process?
Take the Big Easy. That became an iconic piece, but the first iteration was made when I was teaching myself to weld. Those early versions were far from perfect, they were like children’s drawings. It didn’t take long for me to make the same idea look like a piece of jewelry in stainless steel. All you have to do is change the lyrics.
Once, I took the same piece to Milan. I made it an inch smaller, wrapped it in foam and had it upholstered in leather. The chair started its life as a parody of an overstuffed armchair. Then, I turned it into a real stuffed piece. Based on this, I later worked on a collection with Moroso. Later still, I discovered the joy of making the chairs out of painting and made another series named New Orleans, after the original Big Easy. There have been many, many others.
Every time there was a new idea — it could be a technology, it could be a material — the Big Easy volunteered: it said “take me”. It’s something that wants to be experimented on again and again.
When this process of development happens, these objects begin to take on a life of their own. Before you know it, earlier versions must become unrecognisable.
I gave a talk in Chicago many years ago, after which someone approached me and said “I have your first ever Big Easy chairs in a van outside, would you like to see them?”. Of course, I went with him. They were delightfully ugly. I was very jealous of him; I’d like to have them myself.
Do you find that today, when you’re making something, you are thinking of how you might apply a new technology to an existing form?
Technology is nothing more than a tool. 3D printing, a 5-axis milling machine, AI; it doesn’t matter. I think about all of these things in the same way that I think about an arm. With an arm, you can play the piano or make a fist and punch someone. You can do good things and bad things. It’s how you use it.
Importantly, you can’t block a tool. AI can be used for amazing, fantastic things and also for horrible, unacceptable things.
Your studio must have changed a lot over time – the way it looks, the way that you work in it. Have many things stayed the same?
A lot has stayed the same, because I’m a hoarder. I’m surrounded by things. We started documenting everything and there’s now a catalogue with about 600 objects called “Finder, Keeper, Maker”. It has mockups, found objects, artefacts: all kinds of things that I can’t throw away.
In these things, I’m sure you see the genealogy of some of your well-known designs, how they came to be.
Often, ideas bleed into one another. For example, while I was making the Don’t Fuck with the Mouse chair, I was looking for a word that I could print a mirror image of to create two different words. In the middle of the night, Love Song came to me. It has since taken on many forms.
During the pandemic, I had a visit from a marble company from Verona. They said “Ron, can you give us something very difficult to make?”. I gave them a Love Song sculpture that twisted in the middle to form both words. They made a two and a half metre long version.
Do you ever retire an idea or form? Do you ever decide that something has been completed?
Ideas are never the problem. The problem is deciding which ones to give time to. One easy technique is to close your eyes and think “if I went into a gallery and saw this, would I be jealous?” If yes, I’ll do it, if I won’t be jealous then why do it? I often go to galleries and feel jealous or envious in a positive way.
So you work through the ideas that you would be jealous of methodically?
I’m not a methodical person. I’m lazy, that’s why I do so much. I jump from idea to idea.
Let’s finish by returning to this idea of discipline. If you don’t identify as working within any one discipline, what would you say it is that you create?
I recently saw a prototype of mine sell at auction for a big sum of money, way above its estimate. When you sell an artwork at auction, you’re meant to receive a percentage of the proceeds as the artist. The auction house refused, telling me “this isn’t art, it’s design.” I said “this is something I made in my studio, it’s a one-off piece and it broke your record.” In the end, with the help of DACs [the artists’ rights organisation], we were paid.
Oscar Wilde tried to define art as something that isn’t functional. That’s what the auction house had in mind. I like another quote from him that says there are two types of people: charming people and tedious people. For me, it’s the same with objects. I don’t need to know whether it’s art or design. I just want to make 'charming' objects.
