CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Non-Functional Design
Objects that look like furniture, vessels or tools but deliberately refuse to work, sitting between design and sculpture.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Non-Functional Design are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Take away an object's use and its form becomes the subject. Surrealists showed how: Man Ray studded the face of an iron with tacks in Gift (1921), and Meret Oppenheim lined a teacup, saucer and spoon with fur in Object (1936). From the 1960s Richard Artschwager built blocky tables and chairs clad in Formica that look like furniture but read as sculpture. Hugh Hayden grows thorny branches from chairs and tables so that no one could sit or eat at them, and ceramicists such as Paul Scott rework transfer-printed plates into commentaries rather than tableware. Look for the tension between what the object seems to offer and what it withholds.