The final gallery, the one that isn't really part of the exhibition, is a rather different affair to the others. It is a gallery filled with furniture and tableware designs and while some of them a rather interesting - and one so startling that you just go, "I want one!" it raises an interesting question about art.
Before we get to the question I'd like to give a better idea about what's in the gallery. The guide book continues its theme of florid overblown descriptions by describing an array of spoons by Max Lamb as "one of the sweetest and purest explorations of form and process. It is and will always be an array of spoons.
Elsewhere, there are oddly designed though strangely appealing chairs, drinking glasses, knives forks and plates and all other domestic items. One hanging mobile was quite interesting, being a white square with a light bulb shaped hole in the middle, the illuminated background and dark centre making a kind of negative space lamp. The gem though was Bastian Bischoff and Per Emanuelsson's Clock Clock which is an array of twenty-four analogue clocks whose hand positions form the time in the pattern of a digital clock. As the the minute changes the hands of all of them rotate rapidly and hypnotically before settling into a configuration representing the new time. Utterly Brilliant and I can only repeat, "I want one!"
Anyway, to that question.
We have discussed frequently and heatedly the question of "what is art" and the equally vexed question of "what is good art". Neither of those is the question raised, though, by this exhibition.
That question is, "What is art for?"
My answer, and I stress that it is purely my opinion, is that art seems somehow less when it is functional, that art should be pointless - that pointlessness is part of the point. And I realise how confused that sounds. Let me try to explain it this way. If I have a painting on the wall it remains a piece of art if I take it off the wall and wrap it in a cloth in the attic. And the wall remains a wall, still separating the inside of my house from the outside - functionality undamaged by the removal of the art. Art doesn't need to have a purpose for it to be art.
Of course, like everything, it's rather more complicated than that. What do we make of the masks hanging on my landing wall. They certainly have a function, albeit a ceremonial one, in the cultures where they originated. Does that mean they aren't art? Am I saying that the existence of a purpose automatically negates the possibility of art?
The truth is that I don't know. So I am undecided if the designs in the gallery constitute art or not. I suppose, if we take that clock as an example, we could argue that its function in telling the time would be served better by one single analogue clock and that everything beyond that is useless and therefore qualifies as art.
I'll need to give this more thought but for the moment I'll, at least tentatively, agree with Wilde that all art is quite useless.
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