Cover – A Second Generation Artefact for Reflecting on Parents’ Wasted Potential

Statement

Good utilitarian designs tend to go unnoticed because they serve us with great ease; it is only when they malfunction or are poorly designed that we stop and contemplate them. Conversely, works of art are meant to be noticed and contemplated. What function, then, can coordinate the “good” design of a work of art?

Speaking the language of everyday utilitarian objects, but with a surrealist flair and a title that undermines the appearance of utility, A Second Generation Artefact for Reflecting on Parents’ Wasted Potential calls attention to the (often contextual) distinction between utilitarian and artistic (non-utilitarian) functionality. It features a level of technical specificity and coherency characteristic of serviceable objects, yet spells out something where at a certain point its logic becomes somewhat lazy: it makes sense… it makes sense… and then it stops making sense.

Nevertheless, if the result is disorienting or cognitively dissonant, it is because this heteroclite object was designed to achieve precisely that. Rather than seamlessly leading the audience from A through B to C, its idiosyncrasies create a meandering engagement with the object that frustrates any attempt to identify a clear correlation between its form and function.

Attempting to conflate “use-value” with “useless-value,” thereby subverting the capitalist notion of functionality, this object hopes to negotiate the binary opposition between utility and futility, and promote art as a rational mode of material production that does not serve means-end rationality.

Work details:
A Second Generation Artefact for Reflecting on Parents’ Wasted Potential (2012) (Jesmonite, stone powder, brass, stained jelutong wood, electroplated plaster, canvas,“suede” coating; 92x28x24cm).