This show ? Fifteen black resin pieces, fifteen white resin pieces, thirty pieces in all, that when displayed become the « museum pieces » of the title.
Where is Jasper Morrison going with this gesture of enclosure ? Is he shifting the territory of his pieces, here, «museum pieces» ? Does it mean that his pieces are leaving expected territory and that he has suspended their use through this movement of enclosure, put function on hold to make them pieces to be looked at exclusively ?
The second gesture, their making, abolishes all possible use, some pieces are solid or single blocks, others give the impression that here, too, something is awry, when others seem to retain the promise of use.
We could start by describing the first ones by calling them vases with blocked necks, but we must go further, these vases are solid, their function is not merely suspended due to the display case, they can have no function.
A bowl ? We can just about use the term receptacle, even though we would be hard pressed to find an element that could be contained in it, the impression of a suspended use, a distant functionality returns.
A jewellery box, a receptacle for medicine? We could perhaps associate them with archaeological pieces, cosmetic accessories for Ugaritic women, but the container and its lid are one.
What will these thirty pieces, enclosed in display cases, become exactly ? Pieces to show, to look at of course. These museum pieces resemble Morandi’s work in places, perhaps they are objects from Chirico’s metaphysical period, perhaps also, they remind us that the painter used to say he could only capture certain objects when « surprised by certain arrangements of objects » and that the whole mystery of the question was, for him, contained in that word : « surprise ». So with these pieces, a new understanding of objects, seen up close, from afar, but always enclosed in a display case, what have they become? Can we possibly envisage a return to Jasper Morrison’s archetypal figures, objects finally rid of all formality ?