F*ck Function: A History of Absurdist Furniture

Extrusion/Gardening Bench, Jurgen Bey for Droog Design, 1999

We talked about Droog Design and Jurgen Bey this week, and how the 1990s saw furniture designers taking a turn towards the surreal and fantastical with a social commentary bent - and Jurgen Bey’s Extrusion or Gardening Bench, which he designed for Droog in 1999 fits that mold, no pun intended.

Here, Bey has created a non-durable seat that’s a commentary on both the nature of recycling, the impermanence of furniture, and I think the blurring of lines between industry and craft that we talked about this week as well. According to a writeup, Bey called this bench “research for staying in nature” and it makes use of the natural cycle of decay without disrupting it, because the natural consturction material will continue to decay into soil over time. 

Bey said about this project, “The hay of the Summer, the leaves and the pruning of Autumn, all these can be used for this short-lived piece of furniture. A machine to extrude a gardening bench from park waste, such as hay, leaves and tree bark. It looks different every season. Garden rubbish is pressed into an endless bench in extrusion containers. Any length is possible. Nature decides when it is time to have the organic material back.”

But of course, this is not actually a functional extrusion machine - you can see in the images on the right members of the studio or craftspeople working to carefully treat the materials and form them around the wire frame of the bench to the create the illusion of a machine-made product when its actually handcrafted. And of course, because this is high-concept art furniture and design we’re talking about, an iteration of the bench (which I assume was treated with some sort of preservative), recently went on the auction block with an estimate of $50-70,000 - not exactly the natural cycle Bey was thinking of.

Various Reed Furniture, Prawel Grunert, 1990s-2000s

Lastly, just because it’s an interesting and really contsistent take on the fantastical furniture that forsakes functionality to make a statement, I wanted to quickly take a look at the work of the Polish artist and furniture makeer Paweł Grunert, who really loved creating chairs, saying “'I dream of fields sown with chairs that grow just like grapevines in France.”

Here you can see that over the period of the 1990s and 2000s, he’s been working with reeds, wicker, straw, hay to create pieces that are almost grotesquely organic and that lie somewhere between furniture and sculpture and applied art. They’re more about honoring the materials and creating these arrangements of spatial intrigue.

These conceptual chairs, which were never produced, or even intended to be produced, have names like A Chair for the wind, from 1996 on the right,  the Drought Chair from 1998 below that, and the Confessional Chair from 1999 second left on the top. They are thought provoking and lead to questions about where the line falls between sculpture and chair, the importance or unimportance of functionalism, the limits of ecodesign, and how far we can strech and bend traditional furniture forms to come up with new solutions.

So all in all, really a striking statement that draws on deconstructivism, with its uneasy, jarring, physics-defing forms and the 1990s trends around  statement making concept furniture that eschewed functionalism for fantasy.