Casual visitors might find the installation easy to overlook, or might even feel awkward about the demarcation line creating an ambivalent no touch zone around the display. Nonetheless “normal people” should be an important target group to get involved in the discussion about design and excess, whereas any professional or student designer that isn’t entirely rotten from the outset should easy to convince about the relatively trivial ethical conclusions presented. So it might be forgiven that the original exhibition and it’s proponents we’re making it easy and overly clear in putting the ordinarily simple in the spotlight once again.

So here’s essentially an exhibition about an exhibition. What could it add? A quiet critique? An embracement of ideals? Well, as it starts with the question “Too Normal?”, and knowing how these issues have been beaten to death over the last century, one must be impressed that the energy has been mustered to fill up the extents of the display: The background neatly summarizes the position of let’s say Morrisson and Fukasawa, some of their examples and a few quoutes from the equally inevitable and predictable debate that seems to have entrailed. The foreground however bids us the piece de resistance, Morrison’s design of a bedside table.
The story goes: being asked to come up with a new design for a producer, Morrison is dumbfounded by the solution he’s been applying at home and the reverts into thinking that how could he possibly improve on the simplicity of putting an empty wine bottle crate on it’s top, container, platform at no extra cost, besides the price of the wine. This is where the question posed in this meta exhibition comes in. By dismissing any further attempt at thinking and possibly abusing his client’s design brief, he goes on to bling the archetype of the multifunctional box with luxury material and probably the most unrewarding manual labour in the history of furniture, he undoes all credibility that he’s been amassing throughout his career as a proponent of the unspectacular. Symptomaticaly he’s “putting a nail in” by ornamenting the coffin with a subtly noticeable logo branding this particular producer of haute couture furniture. Oddly enough, catharsis in the design profession usually goes the other way, passing through the existential doubt of creating unnecessary junk that seems to wear out failing to deliver the promise of spotlighting the consumer ego.

The exhibition omits the ostensible divorce situation that might serve as a clue to the material context in wich
this professional anomie was performed, but where it is simple to charge it with high treason it becomes pretty genius if looked at from the perspective where bombs are dropped more often than not, in the visual arts domain. The display includes an overshadowing little cloud hinting Duchamp, and duh, didn’t this readymade come down as hard on it’s target market of devourers of exclusive design?

All in all it can be concluded that however being the most interesting item in the exhibition, The Crate really doesn’t represent anything “Super Normal”. The other of the two objects in the display, the Fiskars Scissors that surely cut the tape that holds it onto the wall, make a great example of no frills, pure, functional design (left hand model available). The Crate, meanwhile, is not functional, and an undesigned item, possibly an estimate of the archetypal bed side table, or possibly an example of necessity as the mother of invention, either way platonic. It belongs to an entirely different class of objects, but of course it is an exellent agent of provocation, when it ends up in the usually banal context of design exhibitions.