The Function of Dysfunction. By Dore Bowen
Can artists refigure the world by altering the way users engage with equipment? Clearly, the functional objects we users engage with on a daily basis have social values imbedded within their design. Cutlery, for instance, presumes a certain distance and civility between a diner and her meal; handkerchiefs rest on the assumption that bodily fluids are unsightly and are best disposed of in a decorative fashion; picnic benches encourage a communal sort of outdoor gathering and privilege the family-unit. Toothpicks, coin-pouches, bucket seats, light switches, mailboxes, all have a social function. . . and the list goes on. It stands to reason that if an artist alters equipment, this also shifts the way users relate with the object, and thus the shared social values that inform its design. What would a picnic bench that affords a certain amount of control on the part of each individual-allowing each participant to isolate and convene as desired-do to the nuclear family and its dynamics, or to family law? Unfortunately, this proposition is more complicated than it seems. For to design such equipment already presumes the social values that inform conception, design, and production to be otherwise. In other words, unless the notion of the family unit as a self-organizing entity already exists, and unless social convention-and by extension the economic and political structures within which the bourgeois family is an essential element-shifts, the picnic table I described would not be designed, produced, sold, or used. Certain works produced by Fluxus artists working in the 1960s and 1970s get around this design paradox by uncoupling and reorganizing equipmental structures. This uncoupling produces a "missing link" which, in turn, makes the equipment open-ended or, in certain cases, dysfunctional. The user must therefore imagine the larger system, which the object is a part of in order to complete the work. Employing twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger's theory of equipment in Being and Time, I find that in visualizing the missing link the viewer must also consider the practice of equipment, its functional assignment, the encounters it makes possible, and the social activities it participates in. http://switch.sjsu.edu/mambo/switch23/the_function_of_disfunction_3.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
