PhD- As you know, in Belgium one goes from one excess to another. People were allowed to demolish the now famous 'Maison du Peuple' by Horta (view 1 - view 2) and thirty years later one cannot touch one brick of a house built by a student of a student of Horta because a small detail of it would have an Art Nouveau touch. I had just completed a collection on iridescent glass, was developing an interest in Plexiglas, and I also had a polyurethane chair from Peter Ghyczy in the shape of an egg because I found it a beautiful piece, when one day I found a plastic chair from Joe Colombo on a builder's skip in my district. So I said to myself, so here we are, making the same mistakes as we did with the 1900 period. And I thought that one should save the memory in exactly the same way as we did with Horta in the 1900's. Each generation has the right to have its creativity recognized, and as one had already recognized the 1900's and the 1930's, it was obvious that the generation of the sixties had the right to be respected for its own creativity. Moreover, what is interesting with a material such as plastic, so dependent on high technology, is that it induces a style that is amazingly coherent. And even though at the time, people didn't put together as many objects relating to that same creativity, what is fun here, with the Plasticarium, is to put them together and automatically, the style leaps to your eyes and it is a masterly demonstration. The proof is that it works, one can demonstrate this coherence today.
PhD- I find all that very negative. Concerning the 'Boalum', if Artemide produces it with the same bulbs as before, it will maybe help the collectors to recuperate the bulbs that one couldn't find on the market anymore. That's a positive aspect, but otherwise, I always find it stupid to make money with creativity from the past. When a firm like Cassina (to talk about a company famous for its re-editions) makes a re-edition, it prevents to today's artists from being recognized for their creativity and it falls backwards towards something that has already been proven. Now, what is interesting is to support the artists, and not the memories. Collections and museums can support memories but copies certainly can't do that.
Is there an object that you don't have and that you really wish to add to your collection?
PhD- Well, here I am taking a huge risk! Because I know that if I tell you that, it will inflate the price of the object immensely! What I am still looking for is a chair in Rhodoïd, a material not easy to conserve. It's from Jacques Famery in France. And also the Totem chair in pink fluo plexiglas. These two are missing from the collection, but this is just to quibble over trifles, because I think that the collection as it is now is enormous. I also tried to acquire, not a copy as one has proposed to me, but the original Futurohome of Matti Suuronen in Finland, which is a huge Smartie, a flying saucer, 8 meters diameter and 3 meters high, with oval portholes on the side of it and with a staircase that opens from the base towards the ground. These houses were used as hunting houses in Finland. Two or three were exhibited in Watermael-Boisfort (near Brussels) in the seventies. The Smartie is 8 meters long so I wouldn't be able to show it in the Museum because it's half a meter too high and too wide. But I would like to put it on the roof to give the impression that Martians are coming to town! That would be the 'grand finale' at the end of a visit to the collection. One would enter the Smartie!
The collection has reached a kind of fulfillment. How do you see the future? How do you dream of it?
PhD- Contrary to you two, I decided not to live with my collection, so obviously it isn't a part of my direct environment. It's a folly that I imagine, a total environment. In the perfect plastic house, one has plastic tables with plastic chairs. On the table there is a plastic ashtray with a TV and a radio with plastic housing, and on the walls, polymer art works - all that together is very coherent. I collected so many objects that the house that shows the Plasticarium on 500 square meters is not big enough any longer. It would need 2000 square meters to show the whole collection in its entirety. There comes a time when the collector should be modest and pass it on to a museum. Whether this collection is mine or not I don't care, but I would be very sad if the collection would be split up and sold by bits and pieces all over the world, through Christies for instance.
