Ali Noble

An installation by Ali Noble and Nuha Saad. ‘Glitter is going under!’, so declared Le Corbusier in his critique of ornament. I like to imagine him emphatically banging a lecturn with his fist when he says this, or maybe it’s uttered with a cool and confident voice in a smoky mens club while sipping whisky. There’s no glitter or gilded edges in our installation; but there is flocking, felt, golden curves and ornament with no formal function. ‘Decadence’, mutters Le Corbusier. The original intent of our collaboration began as a mutual tension within our practices between ornament and minimalism, or ‘Ornaminimalism’. Ornaminimalism occurs when ‘the result is neither pure ornament or purely minimal… the work is without frills and with frills’. We aimed for reductive abundance and discovered decorative reduction. Certainly not Rococco and definitely not Minimalism. Today it’s not difficult to predict that the continuum of Le Corbusier’s ornament free and ‘civilised’ society will eventually arrive at civilised/primitive, intellect/ emotion, straight line/ curve, hard/soft, man/woman. But dogmatists love black and white and abhor the tricky grey areas. Or in our case, the radiantly colourful areas. ‘Glitter is going under!’ is an installation that is frilly and not frilly, serious but not serious. Ali Noble 2015 Ornaminimalism is a phrase coined by Christopher Willard in his 2007 essay on artist Laurel Smith.