Objects
László Beke, Budapest 1994
For a design minded analysis of object theory it is inevitable to keep in mind the following scheme:
- old function - old form
- old function - new form
- new function - old form
- new function - new form
This scheme could very well be a model of a dynamic, evolutionist and functionalist historiography of design where attention could be focused on the phenomenon of "re-functioning". However I am not going to provide an outline to design-history here, but simply attempting to classify in a way the objects, i.e. everyday objects surrounding us. More precisely, I wish to present a few types of objects with a few examples, knowing that it is a typology similar to that of Borges´ Chines animal classification. My only excuse is that I am familiar with each of these types of objects.
Further aspects of object classification could be: - animate - inanimate (are there animate objects at all? Shells and coral for instance?); - big - small. This involves the relation of objects and architecture. Borderline cases of this field: interior design, "street-furniture", environment culture. A real forerunner of all these was Slovenian architect Joze Plecnik who even ventured to design lamp-pots and kerbs. Probably the most distinguished contemporary follower is Siah Armajani of Iranian origin who among other things designs garden bridges and bookstands. Their activity leads us to reassess the relation between movable ("mobile", "mobilier") and unmovable. We are to mention here the contrast between mobile and immobile objects as well (vehicles and mobile sculptures belonging to the latter category). - old - new (see archaeological finds, archaic objects, products of the Homo Faber); - natural objects - artificial objects (artefacts). A special category here is the objects created by the non-human hands (archeiropoietos in Greek for the religious, or UFO-s for followers of mysticism and esoteric disciplines); - artistic - non artistic objects (with special regard to "applied art" and inventions); - real - virtual objects (problems of illusion and illusionism; in computer technology the field of virtual reality and artificial worlds in relation to artificial intelligence research); - objects as opposed to ideas (concepts, theories); idealism, materialism; - objects and subjects (creation and creator). My classification outlined in the following, obviously do not completely refer to the notions of "objects".
1. indifferent everyday objects (e.g. tables, hammers, shirts etc. as a matter of fact all objects). Their classification is a problem for museums collecting various articles of archaeology, ethnography, cultural history, technology or even works of art; see also store catalogues. It remains a question whether it is possible to compile a thesaurus of all existent objects (or types of objects) in the world. Or is it possible to systematise conceptually all the branches of industries (crafts or sciences) designing and creating objects? The French encyclopaedists tried hard to solve similar problems. What's more, we can get to know other objects, like lampoons, netsukes, or gongs, in the Far East, created by various craftmanships.
1.1 Ready-made objects are ordinary, mostly mass produced ones taken from their functional environment and provided with a title and thus elevated onto an aesthetic level. Any ordinary object may become a ready-made. Should the artist use natural objects (stones, twigs, roots, bones etc.) instead of the everyday ones, we speak of "objets trouvés". The genre has been re-invented by the surrealists, who thus have revived the medieval and Renaissance tradition of "Kunst -und Wunderkammern". (Their inventories are full of such item as fairy stones, unicorn horns, minerals and stones with "landscapes", ginseng roots etc. The two famous museums in Vienna, "Kunsthistorisches" and "Naturhistorisches" also follow this tradition, (characteristically enough the Venus of Willendorf is exhibited in the latter).
1.2. An essential part of the ready-made is the title. Any object can be given a new function by giving a different name. Children's toys are very often based on substitution (Let's call this stick a horse! Let's call the piece of wood floating on the water a boat! Let's call the brain computer! The computer a brain!) Similarly a corpus delicti can be regarded a special kind of ready-made, and criminological collections as museums where the criminal act is the analogy to the work of art.
2. Superdesign. This concept was created by Gabor Attalai and myself back in the 70-ies. It was in some respects influenced by ready-mades, pop-art and object-art. This category contains functional, unique and "congenial" objects regardless of the facts whether the designer is well known or unknown.
Such objects are the classic Coca-Cola bottle, Rubik´s cube, the ice-cream cone (a distinguished Hungarian designer, Jozsef Cserny, is at present involved with all aspects of bread-design), the propeller, the check-book, bank-notes, credit cards, medical pills, capsules, roller-bearings, gridlocks (with its folk and at versions, designer of the latter is Romanian Mihai Olos), military camouflage garments (as I first saw it served both as raincoat and as single and double military tent-flap, its pattern was akin to puzzles), hats, jeans, cigars, boomerangs, carabine swivels, photos, books, mirrors and clackers etc.. Just an example why these objects are so "congenial": clackers, which is a pair of balls, bone or plastic tied onto the end of a pair of strings. If moved deftly and quickly, the balls hit one another - that is next to impossible - giving a loud clacking sound. Who on Earth has invented this game by accident if even learning it is almost impossible?
The same question crops up in connection with the bicycle based on a delicate state of balance!
3. Special objects (originating from specialisation or division of labour), tools (to create further objects, on a higher level, instruments), machines (another step of specialisation is when machines to reproduce series of objects or models are made, i.e. toolmachines, automatic machines, robots), prostheses (clothes as mobiles, minimal architecture - make-ups, masks, jewels, disguises, wigs, artificial limbs - prostheses of the eye: eyeglasses, their ancestors, the magnifying glass and the concave lens, and the further version, the microscope, the electronic microscope, the telescope, the camera - artificial internal organs like pace-maker, the artificial heart, kidney and others), vehicles (the human being as a metabolic vehicle, the wheel-chair as prostheses-vehicle, the respirator as anti-vehicle; any vehicles, what's more any man made object as prostheses), sports, gears, toys, musical instruments, stationaries and other equipment, even medicines (as special types of medical instruments). With the same logic turned upside down, we call genetic interventions genetic surgery. Finally we have the scientific models (see especially the collection of the Palais des Découvertes valued by the Surrealists) and last the works of art.
3.1. If clothes are prostheses to the body, what is the skeleton and skull to the hero?
4. Arms (also special objects among others they can be considered as prostheses like the armour, brass-knuckles, the helmet, the shield and the Kalashnikow). The finery of arms lies in their assimilation to other objects, or just the way round, they assimilate other objects to themselves. The machine-gun assimilates the guitar, so does the revolver, the camera or the "grip" of the video the butt of the gun. Tactics and strategy assimilates sports and so does the art of war. It is evil incarnate and the same time it is the top quality of functionalism (and functional aesthetics at that) and in first world industrial countries the art of war is one of the important conditions of technological progress and the upkeeper of economic prosperity (art of war, i.e. arms trade) It is often heard that no object in itself can either be bad or good, it is only its use, the human intention that determines it. (Another pro argument besides the linguistic nature of objects, since Wittgenstein, too, argues that it is use that determines meaning). However, we can say that the "moral indifference" of objects does not apply to intentional objects, works of art and designs.
5. Sports-vehicles and toys. One group of these tries to overcome or even utilise the forces of gravity and friction. First there were the cars, bicycles, sledges, skies and skates. Then came a series of combinations. Ice-skates were modified into roller-skates, then to wheelers. The roller-board also appeared (a predecessor of these was the ski and the surf, and in Hungary "gágyé", which is nothing but a board with four roller-bearings. Another step further was the snow-board, and the water-ski, and also the "grass-ski". All these can be combined: water-ski and ski-jumping with parachute, hang-gliding, motor-gliding. A new way of using the other significant member of this group, the ball-bearing revolutionised stationaries, i.e. pens. (Its inventor is supposed to have been the Hungarian Lajos Biró, just like that of the predecessor of the famous Parker-pen was Lázsló Moholy-Nagy)
6. Media - electronic media (in Moholy-Nagy´s, Marshall McLuhan´s, Paul Virilio´s and Morito Akiro´s, one of the founders of Sony's wake). Within this field we may notice parallel and crossing lines of progress, like with the vehicles. Let's take the television as an ad hoc example. Its predecessor as an instrument was the radio, as recording technology the film-camera. The predecessor of film was photography, audiotechnically it is related to the tape-recorder (which in turn has its roots in the gramophone). Further progress brought miniaturisation starting from integrated circuits to micro-processors: transistor-radio, transistor-tape-recorder, walkman, CD-walkman - where the introduction of laser-technology into information storing was inevitable (the latter had, of course, earlier prepared the way of holography and the holographic motion picture). In the meantime film and its raw material were developed into video-tapes and cassettes (now largely replaced by CDs).
While cassettes have inspired the traditional bookform - various authors have published cassette-form oeuvres, there still are cassette + book combinations - another line of development leads to digital photography without the traditional film material (and to uniform compact cameras that are often mistaken for miniature video cameras). A feedback to an earlier phase: on the analogy of the motion picture, videos became projectable. It was followed by the emergence of high-definition giant screens. - Formally it may be an accident that the progress in the tv set-design went along parallel to the trend of "window-washing-machines", "panoramic" refrigerators and micro-waves.
6.1. This process might have continued without computers, but by then each and every of communication and information technology had been computerised. Film and video-editing instruments are directed by computer programs (just like household devices). Electronic news lines are digitized and so are voice-synthesisers. We read large audio-visual libraries of CD-ROMs from computer-screens. Liquid crystal technology has revolutionised screens and manufacturing and use of digital watches, (pocket calculators and digital toys) too.
6.2 With the invention of television and the computer, but however, the "Gutenberg-Galaxy" has not died but has been modified in a great deal. To enhance writing and composition a word-processing software has been invented, and in typography light composing has appeared. Pocket diaries have been replaced by electronic ones (manager calculators), laptops and after that the notebook. The traditional slide-viewer looks more like a notebook now too, and certain briefcase-designs follow that line as well. Modern diaries and calendars with removable and insertable pages sometimes follows the logic of notebooks.
- Computer technology influenced weaving as much as it did typography.
6.3. Picture transmission has not only been revolutionised by semi-conductors, glass fibres and the application of satellites-aerials combinations, but strangely enough by the new functions of traditional telephone lines. An ordinary phone line is enough to operate the telefax (whose electrostatic principle owes a lot to similar photocopiers or "Xerox-machines"), or the video-picture transmission (also combinable with scanning), or the electronic mailing (e-mail). The combination of telephone and tape-recording provides a chance of recording messages (answering-machines). By the way, the development of printers connected to computers slightly promoted the production of electronic type-writers with memory. The tape of the type-writer is contained by a similar cassette as that of the tape-recorder. And as magnetic card operated pay phones become more and more wide-spread, magnetic information storing continues in connection with safe and hotel-room locks, transport season tickets, credit-cards and various automatic machines.
6.4 There is a striking similarity in style and form among various cordless (radio or infra-red etc.) devices of information transmission: the radio-phone looks like the tv or video remote-control, we "aim" with them like we do on the car's door or the slide-projector. The remote-control looks like a pocket-size calculator too. Remote-controls can naturally be built into digital clocks as well.
6.5. New trends in electronic information storing and transmission lead to the formation of various systems and networks. How these systems join the other systems of society, politics, economy, stock exchange and banking, to the interdependence of multinational companies is the post-modern history of our age.
7. Souvenirs of sentimental value - Tourists abroad try to find the souvenirs most typical of the country (in Russia Matryoshka dolls, in Holland clogs etc.). My own personal memories related to objects were in fact motivated by a similar wish, but these radically differ from the characteristic tourist taste. My objects are associated with special stories and sometimes accidental coincidences.
I already wrote an essay on a CAMEL-logo in Florence decades ago. When I first saw a Japanese wearing a bright textile mask on his face I thought he was ill. Then it turned out that many people wear the mask against air pollution (?), it is available in each corner shop. The grey letterbox on a block-house in Warsaw reminded me of Donald Judd´s minimal art installations, as an anonymous arte povera version. Those large, strong plastic bags, originally used for carrying chemicals, at present used for carrying smuggled clothes and other textiles by dealers, were first associated with Poland, then with the so-called "Polish Markets", then with all Eastern Europe. (They are now being replaced by giant-sized sport-bag-like red and blue versions).
I have the most striking memories of rusty phone-boxes in a horrible state of repair from Arad, of an Italian wooden space model from Marosvásárhely (that helps understanding János Bolyai´s non-Euclidean geometry; see also other topological formations like the Möbius-ribbon, Klein´s jar etc.). My memory associates Bucharest with an iron police-shield with a bullet-proof viewing-window (policemen lift it in front of their face, so it becomes a tiny portable bunker; see also what has been said about arms) near the American embassy. And also from Bucharest I remember most vividly the blue-grey field-uniform (used on what field we may wonder?).
I was mostly attracted in Swedish Gotland by the exceptional "patterned" fences, in Slovenia by the varied forms of wooden barns, sheds and dryers and also by the bow-stringed scaffoldings for hop-vines (as folk installations) or the three-pyramid badge designed after the buckwheat grain (in Slovenian: "aida"). It was that year when I first understood why the Czech capital was called "golden Prague": wherever you look, you can see gilded tower-balls, clock dials, trade-signs glitter towards you. I also managed to understand why Ruskin had to write a bulky book on the "Stones of Venice".
8. Gadgets. Eiffel-tower shaped key-ring, football shaped pencil sharpener or bottle opener, tricky and funny giggling-machine, artificial snot or simply utterly useless objects, e.g. colourful gleaming electronic "feathergrass" ornament etc.. They are just within a hair's breadth of being Kitsch or not even that much, see A.A. Moles´s book on Kitsch. But should we start collecting them, they'll be suddenly within a hair's breadth of being a cultural-historical object or a memory of social history and life-style. The French periodical "La vie du collectionneur" in its 1994 edition presents perfume bottles, cheese-labels, hair-dressing devices and corkscrews as the "In Things" besides typewriters and faience bowls.
9. Sacred (symbolic, meditational, ritual, esoteric etc.) objects. I would not want to enter into the endless treasury of amulets, charms, fetishes and talismans, but I must mention that objects of religious cults, liturgical devices, relics, and the rosary have only been analysed from culture-historical and art-historical aspects and never from a design aspect. Objects of "minor architecture" belong here as well, baptisteries, tabernacles, pulpits and confessionals. The Hungarian poet János Pilinszky has written wonderfully about everyday objects becoming sacred, like battered the tin mug.
10. According to Hungarian dictionaries works of art are A/ of industrial, architectural character - in fact these are structures and constructions - B/ of artistic character, the products of the creative process.
10.1. Landmarks (usually manufactured by industry) like bridges, culverts and triangulation points are defined in Hungarian as "mütárgy" ("works of art", the exact English term is "engineering structure").
10.2. I will only pick a few design points from this huge bunch of problems as to the objective aspects of works of art. Certain designers seek to make their products fashionable by analogy to genre and style-character of work of arts. In this sense "styling" means "tuning up" and "touching up" an ordinary object for marketing purposes. Thus various forms and motifs - like sharp, pointed, aggressive shapes, so fashionable these days - appear together in deconstructivist architecture and industrial design, in graphic design and "free painting", in installation and performance. They would be interesting to analyse regarding what has been said about arms. Talking about the problem of naming objects: while etymological analysis may throw light on symbolic meanings of objects naming new objects and object types can define functions respectively. Is that by accident that the great 20th century language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein also designed buildings, constructed haemometers and aeroplane engines and created photographs of non-existent people with photo effects? Objective references of this theoretical activity can be traced linguistically in "family or branch-relations". See product branches, systems, also the above mentioned computer-networks, commercial-, marketing- etc. systems, object systems formed by collector's habits (Jean Baudrillard), systems of national heritage (patrimonium) ...
The computer is the most redefined of all prostheses (intelligent machines) invented so far. It is a complex based on linguistic and electronic principles, where hardware and software are supposed to imitate the harmonic unity of body and soul. It is the most perfect example so far for our mechanisation.
I have written this article with a word-processing program on a notebook - not in linear chronology but with regular insertations. So this piece of text reflects a way of thinking basically influenced by a new medium. It is not more than an enlarged outline, almost all parts, each cue can be elaborated on cues which would have been earlier called keywords (maybe titles). Now we start the searching program of our computer with cues. We may search on note-pads, the note-pad maybe in a file, the file maybe in a compartment and the compartment in the library. There is a saying: His brain is like a computer. now the simile is upside down; man has tried to imitate nature and invented the computer. But with the help of the computer he re-invented the libraries. The most up-to-date library form is the CD-ROM. And so on...