The Unstable Object: Glifo, Blow and Sacco at MoMA, 1972

Abstract

Summary This article discusses three radical objects—the Glifo shelf from 1966, the Blow chair from 1967 and the Sacco chair from 1968—that were all exhibited at Museum of Modern Art’s ground-breaking architecture and design exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in 1972. The article proposes that these early postmodern objects should not merely be considered a new stylistic development, a new aesthetics or as expressing new conceptions of sociopolitical ideologies; rather, they can be considered as instigating a new epistemological status of objects. A close reading reveals how the structural element of Glifo, Blow and Sacco is hard to trace and how these objects’ physical limits seem to soften or even dissolve. By engaging with the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Manfredo Tafuri, this article claims that the poststructuralist landscape of ideas has a material counterpart in some objects from the late 1960s and then discusses the political and intellectual implications of such unstable objects.