LINDA FRANKE: UTILITY FATIGUE

Every object has its function, and with it a set of implicit instructions about how it should perform. In this way, our objects—in their suggestion of prescribed use, narrative, and meaning—organize our surroundings and compel us to perform accordingly, as Baudrillard theorized in his 1968 book The System of Objects. But what if objects could be peeled away from their function? Utility Fatigue poses this question by disrupting the narrative of everyday found objects and rearranging their given grammar to invite new forms of language and behavior.
 

Franke's sculptural practice is an extension of her performance and video work as well as her experiments in virtual space, in which she questions why we do the things we do the way we do and wonders what it would look like if we don’t. In these scenarios, she stages altered or invented routines to exhibit the close relationship between futility and freedom, agency and chance. Working in between the virtual and real space, she captures the physical body’s limitations in contrast to the always-intact and transformable objects created with software.
 

Here, a chair is cast in silicone becoming heavy and tender. With the familiar rendered unfamiliar, the viewer is confronted with the emotional, narratological qualities of the object. Interested in the threshold between chair and chair-ness, Franke simultaneously explores the functionality that it once held—with its meaning embedded into its materiality and shape—and the possibilities that it could hold, with its meaning estranged from its materiality and leftover fragments of its original shape. In doing so she shifts the object's value from one that is tied to its function to one that is indifferent to those demands.

Unfastened from their utility, the objects are unsteady and unwieldy. At once appealing and abject, they stagger in space, unable to stand up independently. As if to provide some framework, however makeshift, Franke constructs armatures for these forms to drape over, lean against, or hang from. The tension between the object and its environment speaks to a precarious limit of recognition, allowing a liberating futility that undermines the semiotic order objects insist on.
 

Utility Fatigue is full of these starts and stops—gestures towards trying even if failing, becoming something only to turn back into nothing—in acknowledgment of the moments of mundanity, ubiquitous and invisible, that ultimately comprise meaning. Every object is a solution to a problem. Their existence is justified by a human need, even if the need is to be without a solution.

~Caroline Ellen Liou.