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 hundre
ds of entertaining design objects made out of obsolete, useless, cast-off techno
logy. O'Callaghan is a designer, comedian, entrepreneur and social critic.
Si
nce 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-produce
d consumer culture into new, different and, most importantly, functional objects
: TV sets, gas masks, pushcarts, mini-golf courses, full-size beds, cars and eve
n a carousel. After O'Callaghan's students have funded and fabricated their work
s, the course culminates with a single themed exhibition that is invariably a to
ur-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 barbec
ue, a shower, a confessional, an accordion, a gigantic telephone and a working t
oilet stall, among other things. O'Callaghan's Monumental is a celebration of im
agination, ingenuity, recycling and individualism.
