& Timeless Objects

nytimes.com

Design

Seeing Design as Intellectual Rather Than Just Practical

By ALICE RAWSTHORN

LONDON — They look like very ordinary objects. A jug. A bottle. A plate. A table. A lamp. They’re ordinary in shape and size, but there’s one odd thing about them — they seem to have been made from the same sort of metal as historic monuments.
The jug, bottle and so on are part of the collection of Timeless Objects now being produced in the Brooklyn studio of the designers Constantin Boym and Laurene Leon Boym. They really were “ordinary” objects until the couple coated them in what looks like bronze, but is actually their secret formula for a tough type of polymer. “The ‘secret’ is in the way it is applied,” explained Mr. Boym in a joint telephone interview with his wife. “It turns this quite mundane material into something beautiful. The idea is one that has been part of our work for years, to give new life to discarded objects and make people look at them differently.”
You can see the result in “Design USA,” an exhibition of the work of the Boyms and other winners of the first 10 years of the National Design Awards opening Friday at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. Diverse though SpaceShip One, Google Earth, Apple’s PowerMac G4 computer and the other exhibits are, most of them have one thing in common: they conform to design convention by serving a practical purpose. Not Timeless Objects.
“While the Boyms’ work isn’t typical of product design, it is significant precisely because it questions the nature of that discipline in a way that is simultaneously humorous and serious,” observed Jeannie Kim, co-curator of “Design USA,” in an e-mail interview.
“By obscuring and unifying mundane objects through the application of a material that looks something like dripping bronze, form becomes apparent, function becomes unnecessary and bits of Americana typically found at a flea market suddenly gain the status of a Morandi still life.”
Everyday objects aren’t the Boyms’ only targets. Over the years they have created witty, idiosyncratic, often sinister pieces inspired by the Sears mail order catalog, “missing” monuments that were never built or have been destroyed, and disaster scenes, like the Chernobyl power plant and the tiny Montana cabin where the “Unabomber” plotted his terror campaign. Seen in isolation, their designs can seem kitsch, even tasteless, but together they create a powerful commentary on modern life, especially the dark, unpalatable parts of it that we often choose to ignore.
“Constantin and Laurene use design as a forum for exploring contemporary culture,” said Zoë Ryan, design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Their singular approach illustrates the notion that design is not only about industry or formal and functional considerations, but also about ideas.”
Until recently, treating design as an intellectual medium, rather than a practical one, was rare in Europe and rarer still in the United States, where designers are more deeply rooted in the “build a better world” optimism of 20th-century modernism than in other countries. For years, the Boyms’ conceptual approach cast them as outsiders in American design, as did their obsession with the “undesignerly” phenomena of tragedy and neurosis. They had other “outsider” traits too: Nationality for Mr. Boym, who was born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the United States in 1981 on a legal technicality; and gender for Ms. Leon Boym, as design is still a boys’ club in America and just about everywhere else. They also came to design from other disciplines. He from architecture, and she art. Those differences remain, but “conceptual design” — or “critical design,” as it is sometimes called — has become increasingly influential, even in the United States, particularly among young designers for whom the Boyms, who are 54 and 45 respectively, look like seers, not mavericks.
The Boyms never planned to work together, but have done so — bickering coquettishly — ever since Mr. Boym asked his wife to help him out with a project. “We flip roles all the time, and pass things back and forth,” she explained. “Working together is still a learning process for us, and we wouldn’t enjoy it as much if we were stuck in caricatures.”
Unlike many younger conceptual designers, the Boyms have also worked commercially, by developing “real” products for companies like Alessi and Authentics, and consulting for Vitra and McDonald’s. “It’s important for every designer to learn how the design world operates, but at a certain point we said enough,” said Mr. Boym. “We wanted to concentrate on our exploratory projects and to control not only the idea but production, timing, marketing, distribution — everything.”
Their involvement in these activities helps to define their work as design, not art, or so the Boyms believe. Since moving their studio from Manhattan to Brooklyn last month, they have extended their experiments with production by opening a workshop. “It’s a little Wedgwood assembly line, where we teach people to work side by side with us,” as Ms. Leon Boym put it. They are also testing new distribution models, including the sale next month of a limited edition of Timeless Objects by Wright, the online auction house. That said, they insist that their work conforms to the traditional definition of design by being functional, even though it doesn’t fulfill a practical role.
“I firmly believe that the idea of function should be redefined to include immaterial uses,” said Mr. Boym. “You can use a Building of Disaster to hammer in a nail, or to elicit an emotional response. What’s more useful?”