SuperNormal Sensations of the Ordinary
normal
normal
...what...
...are those!?
Super Normal, as we address it, refers to a text/exhibition put together by renowned designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa. They instigate the question, what’s bad about normal anyways? We’re losing normal pretty fast, to flashiness and the hustle and bustle. The state of design for these guys looks like standing in the middle of Times Square having inhaled poppers a little too deeply. More money is spent on marketing the “thing” than on the development and production of the thing. We’re stuck in the spectacle rather than getting down to business and bettering the man-made environment. Morrison talks about a set of heavy hand-blown wine glasses he bought at a junk shop. Initially attracted to their form, he finds that their presence exceeds their look. They are so quiet that they integrate and become part of the atmosphere of the room. He attributes this to a somewhatmystical quality that exceeds the normal, the banal, becoming what he (as you might imagine) terms super normal. It seems like the 80s got us a little ahead of ourselves for Morrison, who thinks we are losing our refined palette for the normal. “Design,” with its associations to luxury, makes people hungry for the special. Thus he asks, “…and who wants normal if they can have special?” “The wine glasses are a signpost to somewhere beyond normal, because they transcend normality. Theres nothing wrong with normal of course, but normal was the product of an earlier, less self conscious age, and designers working at replacing old with new and hopefully better, are doing it without the benefit of innocence which normal demands.”
Have to admit, it’s a tough time to be a designer (and design student). Celebrity designer sound bites precede their works. Philippe Starck quotes sound like a collaboration of Kanye and Nietzche, yet still he preaches a “timeless design” that bears semblance to Morrison’s idea of normal. In light of design’s schizophrenic state, returning to simplicity, to “normal” seems appealing if not apt. Though it’s the self-consciousness that Morrison highlights that kills the party. Who’s normal for? Another straight white guy? I thought after the identity politics of the 1990s we had scrapped the idea of developing a universal language of design. To preserve the beauty of the normal, Morrison has to reconfigure it into something magical that we can’t quite figure out. In an age fraught with doubt, it’s serious business to have faith.
Why is Normal disappearing, and when it’s gone what are we gonna replace it with? What makes a sexy object, and how come some objects get better with faith?
ŠBUTTER
“The things I wanna do to you My body’s calling you I’m having so much fun with you My body is your party, baby”
Ciara, Body Party
Butter is pliant, malleable, and creamy; Ciara knows it and so do you. Your body is a party. Your body is a site. Butter is performing your body. Butter actualizes and enacts fluidity and permeability. Move your buttery body in ways unimaginable, expand your horizons, flirt with the states of being and knowing. Chromed bodies, detail shots, sleek contours, oozy surfaces, melted butter running down woodgrain. These are the things that our visual appetites crave and desire. So let’s get tantalized, let’s get tempted, let’s get satiated! Bring your body, bring your friends, bring the butter.
CELEBRITY BUTTER Aspirational energy, high production, sexy innuendos, nothing quite does content like pop music. Let’s recount some of our favorite celebs Butter moments.
No Doubt’s Underneath it All let us shed down to our most liquid parts Ariana Grande’s Love Me Harder, with its unsaturated vocals, brought us feelings of awe
Madonna’s Material Girl and Die Another Day tapped into our desires to dissolve our bodies and selves
As per every year, Mariah Carey’s Christmas Album catered to our creamy yearnings
The Weekend’s Often was hot butter drizzled on popcorn
Justin Bieber’s Boyfriend made becoming solid kinda cool (and pretty hot)
Carly Rae Jepsen’s Run Away With Me was a warm, buttermilk biscuit
Drake’s Hotline Bling was decade nt and crisp, the same pleasure that comes from fresh butter on warm toast
Knoll’s website describes Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair as a club chair reduced to its elemental lines and planes, and that it “changed the world of furniture forever.” As manufacturing capabilities expanded exponentially, the Modernist ideal became To Reduce. In the face of a rapidly developing society, it became the mission to distill desire to its more pragmatic components. The woman photographed in the chair wears a mask, her formal components privileged over the specifics of her identity (a Google search fails to find her name). While revolutionary for its time, this obsession with distillation, embodied by “Less is More,” erased sex and identity for ideology. For the sake of cleanliness and communication, we got rid of the dirt and grime that renders life fun. To supplement this lack of dirt, we give you Butter.
AQQ holds that life is deeply horrible but one can still be profoundly optimistic. Possibilities are endless but not for the reasons that most idiots think. To strive for an ultimate belief in an empiric view of the world, that our senses and sequences give us, is wise when we are children, but ludicrous when we are aged. We should constantly strain our necks, and hearing, to eavesdrop on that which is unstable and strike when the mystical synapse, to that which is non-human, opens. Sometimes the expression of this can be a chair. - Matthew Sullivan / Al Que Quiere
The manifesto, half-sales-pitch half-theory-text, is a rite of passage for any designer imagining how their $2600 dining chair impacts the discourse of design. Ranging from praise of good craftsmanship to lectures on how design renders man god over his barbarian nature (here’s to you Phillipe), the manifesto is a pretty cogent way of explaining your belief in magic. While having a drink, my date’s phone alarm went off reminding him to update his Instagram. Quickly pulling his laptop from his bag, he sifted thru old caches of photo shoots of his friends and emailed them to his phone. He later told me that he recorded his first artist statement for a magazine after they contacted him via Instagram. The app has redoubled the manifesto. Your values emerge from the evidence of your acts. Artist’s interests and values multiply and organize themselves into the gridded format. Trained designers, with tightly articulated documents, are losing the game to 20-somethings. Thus emerges the casual manifesto, like the one above. The casual manifesto takes into account that ideas are absolute, but in practice they are infinitely flexible. It internalizes and embodies a game where flexibility is privileged but retaining your values is hot.
“THE GOAL IS TO SELL THEM AIR!”
Bringing butter back! Who knew how much we missed and needed her? Missy is and has always been futurity and sensuality embodied. Gaudy to the core but making gaudy crisp and full of possibility. Missy channels butter and spits out some delicious future beats because when times get tough, who doesn’t want to turn to 10ft-tall superhero flying through cyberspace?
The original butter homie, who sold us on a voluptuous-ass chair that we had to inflate ourselves (and felt sexy doing so). For Pesce, innovation = more problems = more innovation, the mathematical model of butter. His guiding principle? “Modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future at which individuality is preserved and celebrated.� He premeditated the 2015 anxiety, seeing that ideas of individuality, sensuality, and politics can all exist in a chair. Sometimes we get a glimpse into the potential of the future. Sometimes that vision is a chair.
CATALOGUE BY
A B
C D
E F
G
H
I
J K
L M
N
O
A. Jae Sae Jung Oh, Jute Chair B. Jack Craig, PVC Pressed Chair C. Jamie Wolfond, Frumpy Chairs D. Marcel Wanders, VIP Chair E. Chris Schanck, Blue Chair F. Katie Stout, Untitled G. Nicola L, Woman Pregnant with TV H. Max Lamb, Urushi Low Table I. Al Que Quiere, Glass Stepped Vase J. Faye Toogood, Roly Poly Chair K. Ron Nagle, Untitled (Thin Fin) L. Nick Demarco, Ooze Table M. Wendell Castle, Molar Settee N. Soft Baroque, Decorative Screw Caps O. Christian Biecher, Argent P. Misha Kahn, Pig Bench
H
Clement Greenberg was so scared today was gonna happen. This day when the aesthetic is the social is the political is the aesthetic. We have people serving pad thai in galleries to rich gallerists and we have to wonder, what’s a creative to do? Normcore explains to us that it’s a cultural phenomenon to shop at Whole Foods and stop at the McDonalds in the same strip mall. So how do we hold court with all of this B.S? The act of not presenting yourself at all is an explicit gesture even. In all this fear, we see the word timeless show up again in design vocabulary. But why does the way forward look like the way backwards? Why are designers like Tom Dixon, who hold corner offices in the design world, focusing on “universal” concepts that prove themselves ultimately alienating? Indulging in oneself, one’s pleasures, these things are termed narcissistic, unproductive. But in a world where the social, political, and the aesthetic get combined into one big mush, isn’t this flavor of self-care kinda liberatory?
SO WHAT’S BUTTER GOT TO DO WITH, GOT TO DO WITH IT?
We need Butter in the face of threatening dull design. We need Butter to filter, translate, inform, and entertain. Butter believes that the look of the future is obsessively timely. We need Butter to make sense of the world in the hyper-commodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism. You build new things from what already exists. We don’t have to retrofit our modernist values with racial equality, we have to reconvene what our modernist values even are! Butter brings the personal to the aesthetic forefront, rendering expression of one’s own bodily interests and pursuits into a virile political force (oooooh). Butter redefines what it means to be clean in a way that makes you want to lick a Ken Price sculpture and spit at Breuer chair. Where feelings are showcased, celebrated, and acknowledged in addition to being paired with a refined translation into something interesting, compelling, dynamic, and sexy. Where feeling is fact and those facts are fucking sensual mermaids.
Prod. is a magazine based between New York, NY and Providence, RI. It was founded by Dominique Fenichell, Reid Hoyt, and Charles O’Leary. Prod.’s mission is to develop a vocabulary for the ways that culture and affect become communicated through object design. Questions? Thoughts? Rebuttal? Wanna get involved? Email us at lessbutbutter@gmail.com