Institutional property suitable for urinating into

“There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use.” – Bruno Munari (1966, p.20)

At times, it seems like this warning from the dearly departed legendary designer/artist Bruno may have gone unheeded. In the general consciousness of the consumers - despite the existence of a multitude of university courses such as Art Design or Design Art or Architectural Design or any study which smashes together an artistic discipline with Design - the practices of Art and Design just don’t seem to naturally merge.

Certainly, there are exceptions to this, such as the Fender Stratocaster, any Rolls Royce car, the Uniball Eye Fine rollerball pen, the Colt M1911 pistol, the list really goes on. But the number of objects littering this world that, sure, look good but work atrociously, or worse both look and work atrociously, makes one scratch their head at what’s going wrong.

Whether it’s to make a product look more beautiful, prestigious, elegant, what have you, or just to slash production costs, corners are cut on the functionality side to allow more room for form. This leaves us with things such as ornate porcelain taps engraved with nautical patterns but with separate hot and cold water taps rather than a single adjustable one. Or splendid-looking gold handles on a door which give no indication of whether to push, pull, or slide. Or the Dollar bill. Or the Fiat Multipla (this one fails in both form and function).

From where comes such a fixation to sacrifice function for form?

We do, after all, live in the age of the image. Appearances are all that really count. This demand for lovely-looking objects to adorn our surroundings is unspoken yet omnipresent. And designers are only responding to that demand when artistic pretences are seared onto the product with a red-hot brand, mutilating its function. So when a half-cooked product hits the market, its good looks and Instagramability are seemingly enough to forgive its inimical design flaws. And designers just continue making more of these mutant commodities.

Can we fashion a world such as what Bruno Munari envisioned where Art and Design join in blissful communion? Before we can join the two in matrimony, stock must be taken on their commonalities and where they depart from one another.

One thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that Design belongs to the utilitarian sphere – “objects made in order to be used” (Ahmed, 2019, p.23); everything from a chair to a bed to a house to an aeroplane to a ballistic missile. Art, on the other hand, belongs to that shapeless and abstract world of emotions, contemplation, and spirit.

Let’s conclude from that, for hypothetical reasons, that art is useless. Not in the traditional sense of the word, but that it’s unavailable for use. Karl Marx supports this when he wrote, “usefulness does not dangle in mid-air”. (Marx, [1867] 1990, p.126) After all, has the compulsion to use artwork in a gallery ever gripped you? Maybe you’ve wanted to take a painting down from the wall and use it as a table. But you’re also aware that apart from the contingencies in place which prevent you from touching or using the artwork (being humiliatingly kicked out of the gallery or possibly prosecuted), there’s something in the nature of the artwork which defies usability.

Let me posit a simpler example; the Readymade art of Marcel Duchamp. Apparently, if the artist desires it, any old object they find around them, as long as they’re inserted in the right circumstances (a gallery), becomes a piece of art. A concept quite anachronistic by today’s standards as any artist attempting it now will be branded as a lazy, talentless hack. However, it serves as a pretty little scapegoat for this meditation. Say you’re in a gallery and you encounter Fountain (1917) – the infamous urinal – or In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) – a snow shovel hung by a wire – what’s stopping you from turning the urinal upside down and pissing in it, or pulling down the shovel to clear the snow outside? In theory, nothing other than the gorilla-like gaze of the gallery invigilator. In fact, these objects have abdicated their utilitarian status; no longer are you pissing in a urinal but onto a priceless possession of an art institution.

It so transpires that artworks teeter a wall which divides Art from Design, wobbling back and forth perpetually, threatening to but never falling into either camp. Because of course, Art involves elements of Design and vice versa.  

I imagine quite a lot of you have visited museums. You also must’ve viewed an expansive array of ancient artefacts belonging to bygone people; vases, bowls, silverware, weapons, chairs, and just about any utilitarian object you can think of. All of these are meticulously decorated with engravings, paint, fabric, and feathers. Each item tells a visual story from behind the glass wall which cordons them off from the rapacious hands of visitors. As is noticeable, art institutions have a strong predilection for these items. Their historic age only elevates their artistic resplendence.

But the craftspeople behind these relics, centuries ago, didn’t envision such a fate for their creation. They were designed as everyday objects to be used. Bruno Munari (1966, p.21) echoes this point and adds that these objects were “made by a designer of those times when art and life went hand in hand and there was no such thing as a beautiful object to look at and any old thing to use.” Their functionality as effective objects of use and their formal brilliance synergise effortlessly. This could be why they’re kept under transparent lock and key; they represent the possibility of a happy union between two entities that, in most cases today, couldn’t be further apart.

However, the point still remains that the only thing stopping you from eating spaghetti out of an ancient Arabesque bowl is a glass wall and a gallery invigilator. A hammer would take care of both obstacles. But no one will do it, not even I despite my shamelessly typing this atrocious notion. Because a) causing blunt-force trauma to gallery invigilators is wrong, and b) these objects no longer belong to the utilitarian realm.

With that in mind, bring your attention to the things around you. Will the chair in your room be taking up a regal space in some museum or art gallery belonging to the distant future? Well, it depends on the chair. An ordinary chair wouldn’t catch the eye of future art historians and gallery curators, as much as an elegantly embellished one, covered in gold leaf and carved in Afrofuturist patterns. Although in an iconoclastic defiance of logic and history, the most ordinary chairs exist in galleries today – and not for the invigilators to sit on. One and Three Chairs (1965) by Joseph Kosuth stand, or rather sit, as a tantalising rebuttal to the fact that Readymade art is idiotic today.

Let me return to that beautiful Afrofuturist chair that will be preserved behind a glass wall in some gallery centuries from now. What is it about that chair, and many of its creed that respect functionality and form as equals, that earns it such exalted status-to-be? Bruno Munari provides some insight from the grave yet again. To him, an object is “beautiful because it is just right. […] because it is only like itself.” (ibid. p.28) What he means by this is that the Afrofuturist chair is beautiful first and foremost because it adheres to the principles of being a chair. It isn’t a sculptural simulacrum of a chair, it isn’t a chair-shaped canvas meant for artistic expression, it is only a chair. Once that all-important condition is fulfilled by making it functional as a long-lasting and comfortable chair, with good lumbar support and perhaps an armrest to sweeten the deal, then allowances can be made for decorative additions.

That word I just used, “decorative”. It stands out grotesquely in this context of art. I’ve always tried to keep art and decoration from contaminating one another, the former being a second-rate Ali-Express version of the latter. But in simple terms, a craftsperson adding beautiful designs and patterns into their creation is decoration. Where is the artistic element?

I’ll venture to say that it’s the spirit of beauty and creation itself which imbues the object with artistic preponderance. When a person creates something, they put a bit of themselves into it. Those delicate polygonal shapes cut out of gold leaf, gilding the ultramarine coat of our Afrofuturist chair represent the culmination of our craftsperson’s efforts which would be incomplete without the significance it holds for them. It is the same reason a drug kingpin will goldplate their Desert Eagle and engrave its slide with paisley motifs because to them it will look beautiful while punching .50 magnum holes into a human body. After all, the functionality of the object has been secured, so might as well suffuse it with an artist’s touch.

To avoid this ramble about the spirit of beautiful things turning into wishy-washy rubbish I’ll smack it across the face with some legitimacy based on another insight from the loquaciously deceased Munari.

The designer is, therefore, the artist of today, not because they are a genius but because they work in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public. They have the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of them by the society in which they live because they know their job. (ibid. p.25)

So art then is in the intention of the artist or designer. Except a designer has the added responsibility of ensuring the function of the object. “An engineer must never be caught writing poetry” (ibid. p.23) Munari writes, but I think even an engineer should be allowed to indulge in a bit of creative expression, once they’re satisfied that the object on which they’re writing poetry on is designed to carry out its role.

I realise that situating this piece in the vague no-man ’s land of artistically decorated utilitarian design won’t take this discussion any further. So let’s turn our attention to Art proper; paintings, sculptures, performance art, all that stuff. Can it be used in the utilitarian sense to ally it with Design?

The short answer is no. Thanks for reading.

But as I still have just over a thousand words left to explore Art and Design in relation to one another, here’s the long answer.

First, let’s put the word ‘use’ under the microscope. Sara Ahmed (2019, p.4) notes how such a small, monosyllabic word does such heavy lifting in the way we interact with the utilities of our daily lives, a word that would be nearly impossible to follow given its multifarious branching applications.

Perhaps it might narrow things down by inspecting a common phrase involving the word in question: “Use it or lose it.” An excerpt from an article in The Economist about languages encapsulates the nature of usage perfectly.

The phrase ‘use it or lose it’ applies to few things more forcefully than to obscure languages. A tongue that is not spoken will shrivel into extinction. If it is lucky, it may be preserved in a specialist lexicographer’s dictionary in the way that a dried specimen of a vanished butterfly lingers in a museum cabinet. (2012)

Noteworthy that the nameless hive-mind of The Economist would bring up ossified objects in museum displays like this. Let’s, for argument’s sake, infer that as they aren’t being used for any utilitarian purposes, objects in museum displays and exhibited in art galleries exist in this diminished state. In this context, at least, “use comes to acquire an association with life, disuse with death” as Sara Ahmed (2019, p.5) puts it. This transfigures artworks as these cadaverous curiosities that are only supposed to be interacted with over a distance.

Hold on! One could just as easily make the argument that, in fact, the artwork is being used. When you look at an evocative piece of art like a painting, sculpture, tapestry, architecture, dance, read a stupendously written sentence or verse, or listen to a supernal piece of music, you’re letting it affect you, allowing its impressions to burrow its way deep into your consciousness to be used in your life. And that doesn’t account for all the ways reproductions of artworks (prints, vinyl records, photographs, films) are used.

Admittedly, I’m stretching the definition of ‘use’ a bit here, but historian Carolyn Steedman would beg to differ. To her “stuff just sits there until it is read, used and narrativized” (2001, p.68), and isn’t the process of an artwork emotionally moving a spectator I just described up there quite precisely what she terms as “[narrativization]”? Applying this to utilitarian objects; a chair becomes embroiled in the narrative of the person sitting on it; a weapon becomes complicit with the person who used it and tangled up with the life of the victim it took; furthermore, an artwork represents the sum of all the artist’s efforts which went into making it. Although sometimes that narrative isn’t apparent at first glance, often requiring a supplementary, pathetically worded description full of made-up pseudo-philosophical language by an institution that only sees their relationship with the artist in terms of ticket revenue.

In Marx’s mind, something acquires use value through labour; it is the combination of labour and materials which gives an object usefulness. ([1867] 1990, p.133) Last time I checked, almost every piece of art constitutes both. And perhaps art isn’t being used in the traditional sense of eating your food out of it or using it to get to work, but there’s an invisible use going on without us even touching the thing. It’s an emotional, spiritual, and psychological use where, if the work is impactful, we put ourselves under the influence of it. And just like all other kinds of use, the way we use art leaves marks of wear and tear.

Using up any object is to simultaneously grind it down. Knives blunt with each cut. Clothes begin to fray each time you wear them. You lose a minuscule bit of your wooden spoon when stirring a sauce. Chairs weaken at the joints each time they’re sat upon. Paintings also lose their colour, their paint begins to crack and chip, each time they’re looked upon. Ahmed (2019, p.54) deems this effect of use as the life being taken out of something.

When enough life has been taken out of a painting, the restoration team take it off the wall and subject it to microscopic tinkering, bringing vibrancy back into its jaundiced coat, so that its used-up life may be prolonged.

More on the invisible use of art. Thomas Wall (1999) writes that “matter can be used in such a way that it vanishes into its uses.” (p.68-9) What he’s getting at here is that when something is put to use, a knife or a hammer for example, the object itself is eclipsed by the thing it is doing. If a hammer can effectively drive nails through wood and a knife can thinly slice a tomato, then little thought is given to the hammer or knife itself.

I propose that in the case of the artwork, a thing that resists explicitly utilitarian use by teetering the boundary of Art and Design, that dynamic is reversed where its action becomes obscured by the form of the artwork itself.

If an object disappears into itself when it carries out its job effectively, inversely a thing lousy at what it’s supposed to do becomes conspicuously exposed. It intrudes into the consciousness via its malfunction, as Martin Heidegger ([1927], 1962, p.200) suggests. This is why questionable design choices engender such revulsion in the user. But if the terrible design is deliberate, it ambushes you with a sly surprise that’s characteristic of an artwork.

The Uncomfortables (2012-13) by Athenian architect Katerina Kamprani comes to mind, a series of everyday objects (both 3D models and working prototypes) that come pretty close to failing their function. A ruler only 1cm long. Two mugs interlocked by their handles where it’ll be impossible to drink from one without spilling the other. A water sprinkler with its spout aimed back at itself. You get the idea. Simply looking at these monstrous objects seems punishing enough, imagine actually using them. But there’s something so unabashedly mischievous about them. They’re such an affront to the notions of Design, that, in a way, they highlight how little consideration is given to the design of everyday objects. Maybe that’s why they’re such an insult to the eyes.

The manner in which Art and Design are handled in today’s products is similar to getting two similarly charged poles of a magnet to attach. No matter how forcefully they’re shoved together, they’ll only slide off one another. If designers and consumers both change their approach a bit, they’ll realise that Art and Design are already interconnected parts of a single whole.

What contributes to this notion of Art and Design being divorced from one another are very rigid ideas of what Art is and where to find it (the gallery we’re told). But Art is all around us; in nature, in the sturdy furniture we use, in the cars we drive, in the lampposts which illuminate the night; when these objects fulfil a purpose for people, they are an artistic statement by an unsung artist who is making life more convenient for us.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2019) What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press.

“Embracing the Future,” The Economist, February 25, 2012.

Heidegger, M. ([1927] 1962) Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.

Marx, K. ([1867] 1990) Capital: Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics.

Munari, B. (1966) Design as Art. Bari, Italy: Editori Laterza.

Steedman, C. (2001) Dust. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Wall, T. (1999) Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. Albany, USA: State University of New York Press.