Three concepts to enjoy – Monday edition pt. 2

What Schiaparelli, conceptual art and Egyptian pottery have in common?

This week once again the newsletter comes on an early Monday for people on the western hemisphere. Next week, it will come probably again on a Monday and then the week after, we’ll be back to the Sunday edition.

Yesterday I visited the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and enjoyed the central patio, love when art museums are pieces of art by themselves. This patio in particular is not fully “functional” in the sense of serving the main purpose of the building (experiencing art) but it is absolutely functional in the sense of providing a relief space for people that have been walking for hours. This space inspired the theme of this newsletter, which loosely is: function does not always needs to determine form.

Designed by architect Kao Er-Pan, inspired by the metabolism movement

People that know me know that I’m a big fan of Mies Van der Rohe, Adolf Loos (ornament and crime) and the form follows function architecture. I’m highly practical and appreciate when objects have defined features based on their functionality. People that know me also know I’m a big fan of kitsch, the whimsical, fake, visually melodramatic and normally useless pieces of “art” or “craft”. This edition of three things to enjoy is here to reflect about instances where it is interesting and provoking to think of form not directly following practicality, where functionality and some level of unnecessary decoration coexist in relative harmony.

One of my analog pictures of the Barcelona pavilion by Mies Van der Rohe

1. One of my favorite fashion house is Schiaparelli, this video (17 min) talks through the history of Elsa and how her dissatisfaction with aristocratic life plus a desire to experience life combined with immersion in surrealist and dada circles led to the birth of her experimental clothing brand, with Highly Provocative and Groundbreaking elements like visible zippers (gasp!) and surrealist buttons. Elsa putting the fun in functional since 1930.

When function does not determine form and we decide to experiment with materials we can create fun mismatched buttons, huge sleeves that look great, garments that can caught fire and also move forward the ideas about what is possible, while creating things that will shock current generations and inspire future ones.

2. Marcel Broodthaers developed his conceptual art in the 70s, influenced by his friend Rene Magritte and his “work” as a poet for 20 years (can poetry even be a job?) some of his works engage with language and the notion of art in objects. This artwork I’m presenting here is an evolution of another artwork called “Musem of Modern Art: Department of Eagles” where he made a fake museum and presented artworks depicting the sentence: "This is not a work of art". Challenging the notion of a museum, he then made The White Room (pictured below) where he created a room that looks like a gallery inside of the gallery room and instead of paintings, words related to art.

Art objects can take on different functionalities, Broodthaers asks: what is the function of art? what is the difference between these words in a wall and the actual object? If the function is what the object is supposed to do, and the function of art is to _________ (you can fill in the blank) what is this work of art supposed to do? Fascinating instance of challenging the idea of form (artwork form and museum form) and of course, not following “any type of function”, or following function perfectly and making incredible meta-meta-meta artwork.

The White Room, 1975; Marcel Broodthaers

3. The last thing is actually the first, because it is the origin of me starting to think about form-function and also receiving an interesting response from a fellow aesthetics theorist and enjoyer, is this very pleasing figure of Egyptian clay pots. I tweeted (exxed?): “All of these objects serve the same function each in its own different way”.

Unsorted clay pots from various times and places in Egypt. Manfred Heyde / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

I believe when the ceramists, that were probably not called ceramists back then, created this vases they were all thinking of form following function: all the vases hold something. I’m sure back in ancient Egypt they were reflecting on the words of modernists Sullivan and Le-Duc while creating them. But why is the form so diverse? Most have handles, most have a smaller part that seems made to fit a hand, one has eyes and eyebrows, some can stand on their own, some can’t. They are all fulfilling their function, but the form that they’re following is distinct.

There is a phenomenon in current design where apparently there is one rigid way that objects must follow in order to fulfill their function, and comments are open if you disagree, but practicality seems to be bound to a set of strict rules that very casually end up in the exact same way of solving problems. Maybe why everything looks the same lately, and if you search that exact phrase you’ll find a million articles debating that idea, so this is not a groundbreaking thought from me.

These ancient jars are here to say: there are a million ways of solving the problem of form while continuing to be highly functional. I still can’t answer the question of why they’re so different but thanks to my tweet, someone suggested chapter 2 of Introduction to design theory by Michalle Gal and Jonathan Ventura so I have a read for my upcoming 30+ hrs journey back home next Saturday. I’ll let you know what I learned in the next newsletter.

Hope you liked this lengthy edition, the initial function of this newsletter has been for you to enjoy and I hope you did. But if not, mission accomplished anyway because the newsletter will be fulfilling exactly what I set out to do today, which is transposing the functionality of the object and doing everything at the whim of the Author (me, Author with capital A lol).

Have a great week!