We Have Standards

I recently bought a pair of jeans in the kind of shop that I wouldn’t have dreamt of buying jeans in a few years ago, before they became the potentially perfectible item that they are today. Pushing them through the curtain, the salesman insisted that they were ‘normal black jeans, like you can’t find any more’. Once on, their tubular legs and waist-high waistband do bear a superficial resemblance to the jeans of old, but in reality they are anything but normal. A myriad of details sets them apart: a cosy tapering at the small of the back, for example, and their odd hook-and-button fly. Rather than being normal, they represent a self-conscious bid for normality. Having seen the exhibition curated by the designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa, I now have a term for them: ‘Super Normal’.

The story of the derivation of Morrison and Fukasawa’s expression has been told in the design press so many times that it has acquired the scent of myth. Having seen some new metal stools by the Japanese designer Fukasawa on a stand at the Milan Furniture Fair, the British Morrison was moved to congratulate him on their extreme ordinariness. Fukasawa expressed a concern that, rather than sitting spotlit on a platform, the stools had been pushed to one side, becoming seating for tired visitors. Morrison responded with a compliment he had learnt only a few hours earlier from another Japanese designer, Takashi Okutani: ‘That’s Super Normal.’ The second revelation of the Super Norm came after Morrison bought some old hand-blown wine glasses in a junk shop. ‘At first it was just their shape which attracted my attention, but slowly, using them every day, they have become something more than nice shapes … If I use a different type of glass, for example, I feel something missing in the atmosphere of the table.’

In the first of these anecdotes normality has been designed; in the second it has simply been recognized. Morrison and Fukasawa’s show, which was staged first at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo and more recently at the London furniture shop twentytwentyone as part of the London Design Festival, seeks to merge unremarkable instances of both kinds. A plastic bottle from the Salt Industry Centre of Japan and a bucket picked up in Italy sit alongside a solid glass magnifier-cum-paperweight designed by Fukasawa for the high-end manufacturer B&B Italia and a set of stainless steel containers created by Morrison for Alessi. Other named designers endorsed with the ‘normal’ tag include Achille Castiglione, Dieter Rams, Enzo Mari, Konstantin Grcic and the Bouroullec brothers.

The display of ‘Super Normal’ is suitably understated, with smaller objects grouped on tables (the ‘Less’ table designed by Jean Nouvel in 1994, made of sheet metal with minimal right-angle folded legs) and larger ones placed on the floor. The colours are mostly Tupperware greys (I saw a car this colour recently; it looked quite extraordinary), with the odd flash of coloured plastic or muted shine of matt steel. The show’s London outing comprised 206 objects, the largest of which (apart from two slightly unsatisfactory images of furniture systems by Rams and the Bouroullecs) was a bicycle and the smallest a paper clip. Of course, it was a paper clip that provided the starting-point for the man who Internet-traded his way up to a house (via such dubious items as a walk-on film role). More than being merely normal, it has become the currency of in-your-face normality, the ordinary Joe’s penny piece.

The curators blur the categories of the designed and the recognized ordinary with the argument that, while an object primarily ‘becomes Super Normal through use’, it is also possible for a new design to contain ‘the essence of something that everyone recognizes and perceives as normal’. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that nearly half the exhibits had something to do with the preparation or consumption of food and drink. Of the remaining, a large proportion concerned non-computerized studio and office activities such as making notes and drafts, rubbing them out again and clockwatching. By contrast, there were only two playthings – a ball and some small plastic vehicles – and one piece of print: the International Herald Tribune. It appears that some activities confer the properties of normality more easily than others.

Possibly the most important element of the show, and one that is easily muffled because of its quiet hues and modest forms, is the spirit of protest. Morrison believes that the combined forces of media and marketing have distracted designers from their ‘historic and idealistic purpose’ in favour of creating the ‘noticeable’, and Fukasawa argues that the design of the normal ‘raises the stakes’ by running against design’s ‘prevailing scheme’. The category of Super Normal only crystallizes in reaction to its other. Normal only becomes Super when it is pitted against the unnecessarily bizarre. Morrison and Fukasawa’s exhibition is a manifesto in off-white plastic.

Emily King is design editor of frieze.