Just outside Paddington Station in London, on the side of a corporate building at 50 Eastbourne Terrace, there is a large clock. Glance at it twice and you will notice there seems to be a miniature man inside, in a three-piece suit, painting then removing the hands of the clock, calmly marking the day, minute by minute. At first, your head cannot organise an idea of how this has happened. Clearly there is no real miniature man inside. Then you understand that you are watching a film, the painstaking result of recording one man’s continuous 12-hour performance, which someone has had the wit to insert into this unremarkable piece of street furniture. Your final experience is of delight that this public clock – a largely redundant piece of architectural decoration in today’s age of mobile phones – has become a philosophical poem, with function intrinsic to its artistry. You are invited to experience time in its existential bareness, as a medium of human action.

The clock is the work of the Dutch designer Maarten Baas, who launched his Real Time project at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2009. A trade fair largely dedicated to product design – the best new taps, the most stylish new sofas – it has increasingly seen infiltrating its artier fringe festival (the so-called ‘Fuorisalone’) a whole species of ambiguous object where furniture meets sculpture. Here, what counts is less that the chair or light or clock is comfortable, bright or even beautiful: it must arrest attention like conceptual art. The idea, conceit or story behind it must equal the value of its materials or the ingenuity of its method of construction, which sometimes themselves become part of the salient narrative.

Among such iconic objects we might count the Dutch designer Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella Table (2006). To create this, the young student fed into his computer the outlines of a sinuous 18th-century chest of drawers and an elegant table, both emblems of princely taste, to produce a hybrid conceptual object. It combines the profiles of both objects, visible at right angles to each other, and was painstakingly constructed in plywood by a firm specialising in boat building. The name evokes Walt Disney’s own fun with 18th-century furniture in films such as Beauty and the Beast and also the contrast between the humble material of the table and the luxurious woods and gilding of its grand antecedents.

Cinderella Table (2006) by Jeroen Verhoeven. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Another example are Nacho Carbonell’s gigantic irregular mesh and plaster lights, which grow like trees out of simple chairs, creating poetic cocoon-like spaces, evocative, to him, of his childhood home in Spain. Or Thomas Lemut’s sleek metal Gigognes. Olympia. 43 38 (2020) nesting tables, whose cracked glazed earthenware tabletops map the cracks in the varnish on the breast of Olympia in Édouard Manet’s scandalous 1863 painting, thereby marrying minimalist precision engineering with a gesture towards human flesh and frailty. These works puzzle, they tease. The more you look, the more you see, and the more their value as cultural objects comes into balance with their aesthetic appeal.

In many ways, it is obvious that furniture could be a direct expression of human thoughts and feelings. There is its closeness to the human body and its place at the heart of our domestic, social and political lives, both of which make furniture design a fertile medium for exploring the complexities of embodied experience. As the academic John A Fleming commented in ‘The Semiotics of Furniture Form’ (1999): ‘All the objects we make are inscriptions of the human body and mind upon the circumstances of time and space.’ Our closeness to moveable furniture – chairs, small tables – is further underlined by our anthropomorphising talk of the foot, the arm, the back, the head, the leg, the seat. The 17th- and 18th-century European cabinetmakers who rapidly expanded the types and styles of furniture were alert to the ways furniture might reflect contemporary interests. It’s not a huge step from 18th-century rococo furniture mimicking the natural forms their owners might encounter on their rural estates, to the Goodall Chair (2021) and its siblings, literally grown into chair shape by the botanical craftsmen Gavin and Alice Munro. Or compare the elaborate zoomorphic legs of much grand, 18th-century furniture with the exuberantly feminist chair The Grand Lady (2018) of the designer Anna Aagaard Jensen, with its assertively splayed legs.

Semioticians will tell you that all objects tell stories about the societies that produce them. Since the beginning of civilisation, thrones and crowns, the accoutrements of religious ritual and the varieties of stamped coinage have been valued for their symbolic as much as for their functional purpose. And as academics become better at interpreting the material cultures of early civilisations – their vessels, textiles, architecture, furniture and ornaments – so our awareness of their capacity to express a whole range of values and attitudes to the world has grown. But with the Renaissance’s valorisation of the fine artist, the entire class of often elaborately and thoughtfully constructed functional object has been consigned to the category of........

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