In 2011, I (Monica) wrote an article for W Magazine in which I profiled five up-and-coming designers, and got really excited to use it as a chance to talk about one of my favorite new discoveries at the time: Jonathan Muecke. When I interviewed him in February of 2011, he’d recently graduated from Cranbrook and had just set up his own studio only three months before; I caught wind of his work through the also-then-new Volume Gallery in Chicago, who were about to give him his first show, Open Objects. I had never spoken with a designer before who had such unusual ideas about design — that the “function” of an object could be to scramble the energy in a room, or to suck light in, like a black hole — and for weeks after the interview, I was telling people about it. Below is the transcript of that interview. I don’t remember the questions I asked but, 11 years later, I’m still intrigued by the answers.

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I was born and raised in Wyoming, then spent from age 16 onward in Iowa, and went to architecture school at Iowa State University. After that I worked in architecture around the midwest for a year, and then went to work in Switzerland with Herzog and de Meuron in 2007 for one year. Immediately following that, I enrolled at Cranbrook Academy for two years, ending in the spring of 2010. I still consider architecture part of my practice, and still a part of what I plan to be doing. And actually I didn’t think of it as architecture always, I just thought about it as design in a general way. The thing that interests me about architecture is that it forces me to think scalelessly. I tried to refrain from the things that make design a construct.Muecke’s newer work for Volume Gallery

I’ve made some things in design, but I have yet to work for a client, so in some ways I don’t think of myself as a designer. I never worked as an architect either, with my own clients. In a lot of ways I think I’m a theorist, but making objects rather than writing papers. I don’t call myself an artist either. I think there’s some kind of practicality in what I do. I really dislike figuring out what the differences are between design and art. For me, it’s only a practical difference — a terminology difference. You have a client, or a commissioner, or you don’t. So it’s only a difference of business terms. It doesn’t matter to me.

Working at Herzog, the overlap there with my work was trying to find an equilibrium in the object, which I think is precisely what they do architecturally. In the things that I make, if you were to have them or look at them or use them, there’s nothing about them that’s dominant over anything else about them. There’s no dominant form, no dominant color, and no dominant idea in relationship to the other aspects of the project. Somehow the object retains itself — it doesn’t just pass itself off to you as a chair or a shelf, which are the names of two of the objects I’m making for Volume Gallery. There are broad principles which everything has to reckon with, but if you have an object that’s just right, when you look at it, you think about capacity, you don’t think about what I can put inside of it.Scrambler, 2011

It’s not like I’m trying to radicalize the function of objects, to skew it so that it’s problematic or un-functional. Functionality for me is a really broad term. For instance in the Scrambler (above), its function is to destabilize the objects around it. It scrambles everything, if you put it in a room that’s somewhat stable. It’s similar to being in a room with a light that’s about to burn out and is flickering. It functions, but in a way that’s unfamiliar. Normal objects have surfaces and sides and shapes, and you can put one in relationship to another, and they can remain somewhat stable. But the Scrambler doesn’t allow that. It’s defiant. So rather than the word function, I use the term relational. How these objects relate to space and to each other. In the end, the bench is still a bench, and you sit on it. So it’s much harder for me to make a bench and a chair and still accomplish the same things, but in a way I have to test my ideas against a bench and a chair.

Mass is a low object that’s for the floor, made of coal. It looks like a volcano. It has a solid bottom, and seven sides, and each goes inward at a ten-degree angle. One side goes in at 85, the next goes in at 80, then 75, then 70. It’s made out of paper, and the paper is coated with a mixture of coal and resin. In a way you get this object which is immovable, where the texture is really rough, and it behaves like a mass, something you don’t really want to think about. It’s really sort of absent if you figure it in the context of what else is in a room. When you look down into it you can’t tell what’s the bottom and what’s the side. If you wanted to, you could put your objects inside of it. But these aren’t products. There’s something about it that makes perfect sense, and something about it that doesn’t make any sense, and I think that’s true of all of these projects. For me it’s a test — does this thing make sense rationally as much as it makes sense irrationally? It’s a litmus test. I could tell you why someone would buy it, though: It looks nice, it holds this amount of things, it’s moveable.Mass, 2011

I graduated in May of last year, and started my studio in November of 2010. I’m working on this document called Field Essays, part of a series that Sophie Krier started. It will be about my design process, a landscape of my design process — a case study kind of thing. I think it counteracts the idea of design from design, or working in that way. I don’t think about design very much, the history of design, or what type of chair is being made and who’s making it. I don’t think I’m very much or at all influenced by design culture or what’s happening in design. Sophie described my works as being out of their time. For awhile I was thinking about energy, as an idea, because I heard this story about two nuclear submarines that ran into each other in the Atlantic. Two nuclear subs — one from France, one from Canada — ran into each other, but when they did, they didn’t know what they’d hit. They both report back independently and secretively that they’ve hit something and didn’t know what it was. After a few weeks they make it public that they’ve hit something, and only then do they know what they’ve run into. It seems impossible. These things are fueled on nuclear energy and they’re also carrying nuclear weapons. So this is where the abstract for the heated shape came from — how to think about energy, or how to recognize energy as an abstract idea. The contemplation that there’s this potential for energy to happen.

I know about design history and I do think about it, but I don’t think there are always these direct sequences of this is inspired by this chair, and this idea. A lot of it has to do with what strikes me, and if I’m available to that or not. I’m hoping I can build a body of work that demonstrates that it’s somewhat reasonable to think this way, to have this type of process, to really test and push against what I ought to be doing. It seems abstract, but it’s not abstract at all. These are all fundamental ideas that are not based on where you live or who you are, but based on fundamental ways that you’re all human. Like containment, or energy, or light. I was just thinking about what’s wrong with Donald Judd. It’s hard for you to sit in a chair of his, because they’re more about the idea than about being a chair. I don’t think my work is like that. I don’t think they’re abstract in that way, based on the idea alone. I think it’s kind of equalized.
Divider, 2011

In Hyeres I was the first American applicant. I was supposed to make or design a household object. We had to design a small electronic appliance, as part of the competition, so I was designing what I was calling a “kitchen engine” — it didn’t have a function other than it provided energy to other kitchen items and appliances. It was an electric motor, housed in a shape, that was available to other appliances. The project was about, well your blender and food processor share the same type of engine, an electric motor, so there’s no real reason to have duplicates of that part of the appliance.

I use simple geometries because it helps balance the object. If you think of the form, or the shape in relationship to the idea, they have to balance out in the end. So I prefer self-shaped geometries. Something that’s, in a way, easy to consider. I’m not trying to test how crazy it can be. It seems like the project would be about form at that point. ◆

Mat, 2011