In the 1980s, graphic and furniture designer Dan Friedman began living what he called “a double life.” A pioneer of postmodernism, he’d become a regular among downtown galleries and clubs; his friends included such artists as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. But by day, he consulted with corporate clients; for around 20 years of his life, he lived not in a bohemian Soho loft but on Fifth Avenue in a classic white-brick West Village co-op.
Inside, though, was another story. “It was a really humorous contrast,” says the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, a good friend and collaborator of Friedman’s. “But it was also very much like Dan — on the outside, very proper, and then in his apartment, crazy and inventive.” What began as a conventional one-bedroom in a building where his neighbors included Mayor Ed Koch and activist Bella Abzug became his personal fun house. He filled the space with garbage he picked up from the street and wrapped in tarps and rope, along with some more rarefied choices like plastic sharks, a custom water-fountain feature, and a bookshelf painted by Haring. Folding screens — which he called “the perfect object of fascination for me” — shifted around the space. “They are a kind of movable wall,” he wrote in his book Radical Modernism, published a year before his death in 1995. “I put most of them on wheels.”
Curator Stephen Markos worked with Friedman’s brother, Ken, and Laurie Mallet to bring several of these screens, along with some of his other concoctions, to Superhouse in Tribeca. The show, “Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day?,” on view through March 22, borrows its name from the question Friedman recalls asking himself while working his corporate day jobs. The exhibition displays the designer’s screens, TV set, and tables against a backdrop that mimics the colors and patterns that he had in his apartment.
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1967, Friedman trained as a graphic designer, studying in Germany and Switzerland, and eventually wound up teaching at the Cooper Union and Yale. He began working for Anspach Grossman Portugal, Inc., where he designed the Citibank logo in 1975. Later, he became the design director at Pentagram, working with fashion designer Willi Smith and Smith’s business partner, Mallet, who eventually started the fashion brand WilliWear; she contracted Friedman to design the brand’s logo and showroom.
As he moved beyond the rationale of Bauhaus modernism, his appetite for a more expansive, integrated design program took hold, and never more visibly than in his home. “During the late 1970s and 1980s, I was involved in the constantly changing process of creating a grand assemblage within which I happened to live,” he wrote in Radical Modernism. “My home has been my primary laboratory for experimentation, a visual diary referring to changing interests, moods, events, objects and seasons.”
No room was spared. Zigzag patterns jump out of doorframes, curvy valences interrupt the clean lines of ’60s window frames, and raffia skirts dress tables. Even the kitchen floor is covered in a crimson-red pattern lined with black cracks, a cartoonish desert landscape.
For those who got to see it in person, the experience was indelible. They included Milanese designer Alessandro Mendini, an influential figure in the Radical Design movement in Italy. “It was after visiting his house (this wonderfully coherent integration of design and life),” Mendini later wrote, “that I made up my mind to consider Friedman one of my masters.”
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