If you share your life with a toothbrush collector (collection
and obsession are also sometimes very close), some aspect of your life will be
different. For example, before leaving for holidays and visiting the nearby
drugstore, you will be asked if you have enough humor for German flagged toothbrushes.
I answered: “As long as they stay in their packaging, everything is OK, but my
humor stop at the second they come out of it!”
Few days later, I read this:
“So, the toothbrush, trivial by definition, because
belonging to the intimate register of personal hygiene, with Philippe Starck,
comes out of the bathroom, without losing its role over there. Pleasing for the
dentist, it stays interesting also for its esthetic.
Beauty doesn't
participate to an external essence of the object, it flows and emanate from it.
Ironically, the object frees itself from the classical surrounding of expensive
and rare to be immediately accessible through its direct, efficient and seductive
shape on the intellectual and esthetic level. Triumphing in the most unexpected
area for art, the toothbrush works as a manifesto for the transformation of the
trivial use in real pleasure.”
(Michel Onfray - Écrits sur Starck)
I read this to the
toothbrush collector at the breakfast table and he wonders if Ai Weiwei is
close to Philippe Stark in the perception of the common object. I have to tell
that it is a totally opposite approach. Ai Weiwei takes a common object (the
Chinese stool) and put it in a wonderful frame (the Martin-Gropius Museum) and does
a “ready-made” à la Marcel Duchamp. The frame makes the art. Stark conceive a
beautiful object (a design toothbrush) and put it in a very common frame (the
bathroom).
Ai Weiwei use crystal,
bronze or marble (classic materials for art) to design common objects (the
cloth hanger), when Starck favorite material is the plastic.
The German
toothbrushes will lose the whole soccer mania aura which surround them once
they will be used, so the packaging (the frame) transcends them as an art
object.
The packaging of
it doesn’t define my humor but my art perception!
