Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O'Callaghan

by StevenHeller (Author), Deborah Hussey (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.40

  Kevin T. O'Callaghan is a wizard who can find the monumental in anything and the potential genius in everyone, and Monumental is his manifesto, featuring hundreds of entertaining design objects made out of obsolete, useless, cast-off technology. O'Callaghan is a designer, comedian, entrepreneur and social critic. Since 1985, he has taught a now-legendary 3-D design class at New York's School of Visual Arts, where students solder, rivet, and weld the flotsam of mass-produced consumer culture into new, different and, most importantly, functional objects: TV sets, gas masks, pushcarts, mini-golf courses, full-size beds, cars and even a carousel. After O'Callaghan's students have funded and fabricated their works, the course culminates with a single themed exhibition that is invariably a tour-de-force of design ideas. His most celebrated exhibition, Yugo Next,A toured the United States, mesmerizing the media wherever it went. In this project, students transformed so-called uselessA Yugo automobiles into a piano, a barbecue, a shower, a confessional, an accordion, a gigantic telephone and a working toilet stall, among other things. O'Callaghan's Monumental is a celebration of imagination, ingenuity, recycling and individualism.