Maarten Baas Makes Time Visible at Design Miami

Maarten Baas has received Design Miami’s 2009 Designer of the Year award, presenting a commissioned cabinet alongside a selection that included his Real Time video clocks. The exhibition brought objects and moving images into the same account of a designer’s practice.

Real Time makes the ordinary act of telling time into something viewers can watch being produced. That shifts attention from a clock as a finished instrument toward the labor and performance that its image can contain. The result fits a design fair while questioning what sort of object a clock needs to be.

Baas’s presentation also included work from several earlier series, allowing the new material to be considered within a developing practice. For Miami visitors, the exhibition offered more than a ceremonial award display. It supplied a compact route through different approaches to furniture and timekeeping, with the latest project asking a familiar function to become an occasion for sustained looking.