Waste Not, Want Not
Generation T, by Hella Jongerius and Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory (image: courtesy of Jongeriuslab).
It’s a Tuesday evening in early May when I slide through glass doors and into Die Neue Sammlung in Munich. To my right, little treats fan out across a conference table: chocolate truffles with miso caramel and Korean gochugaru chilli flakes, purple Turkish delights infused with a butterfly pea flower kombucha, and koji rice petits fours. A photographer darts through the conspicuously well-dressed crowd, dewy with sweat from the first warm day of spring. I stand on one side of an Alfredo Jaar installation under the glass rotunda in the museum’s lobby. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot David Zilber, the Canadian chef and author best known for directing Noma’s Fermentation Lab in Copenhagen. That explains the snacks, I think.
We’re here for Munich Creative Business Week, and specifically for a panel dealing with circular sustainable design strategies – a Silicon Valley-adjacent euphemism for recycling. As we snack, we’re invited into a long hallway to see Phoenix – reborn beauty (2023), an installation for which plates from the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory have been arranged into place settings at a banquet table.
Hella Jongerius with Nymphenburg porcelain (image: courtesy of Jongeriuslab).
These plates are old, but were recently refired to set new hand-painted scribbles and splatters that cut across the original floral prints on their surface. Some plates are ringed with waxy monochromatic drips in blue, black or gold glaze; others are adorned with delicate line drawings of the 12 scrappy weeds that are propped up in the narrow planter in the centre of the table. I’m struck by the passing resemblance to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979): we’re not here for a feast, but as observers of a ritual. Among other things, we’re here to think about pretty porcelain plates.
To understand porcelain, you must first understand desire. Porcelain is intoxicating to the senses. It can be turned as thin as eggshells, or wrapped thick around an electrical conductor for insulation. Its silk-soft surfaces are so smooth and nearly translucent that, in a certain light, you might catch a faint, fuzzy blue halo reflecting off its glaze. When run under water, stubborn tea rings, rich gravies, and sticky cakes slip off porcelain plates and saucers without leaving a stain. If you strike a true porcelain tea cup, it sings clearly like a bell. When pressed against your tongue, porcelain tastes of nothing. When cupped gently in your hands, its weightlessness hints that yours may be the strongest hands in history. For centuries, royals and rich families organised their cabinetry, their ceremonies, and even their inheritances around porcelain dining sets. To receive one as a gift or bequeathment was a source of great pride.
Detail of a Generation T plate (image: courtesy of Jongeriuslab).
But desire is a fickle, finicky force.
It morphs a grandmother’s tea set (tacky, outdated) to our grandmothers’ tea sets (sentimental, priceless), and it can be reversed just as easily. As with gold and diamonds, this socially constructed value can eclipse the material qualities of a substance when cast in the glow of desire. Porcelain can be a wedding gift, but also a dental filling, and a treasure locked in glass cases, a toilet bowl, a family fortune, or a tacky tchotchke at a car boot sale. In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, author Katy Kelleher describes porcelain as having been “a form of consumerist propaganda for the middle-class self” throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Intellectual historian Suzanne L. Marchand, writing in Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe, suggests that the production and sale of porcelain is a lens through which we might even understand European economic development from the 18th century to present day, first as a foreign luxury, then a domestic good. Now, porcelain is often considered a piece of worthless tat.
Today, consumers favour earthenware dishes, stainless steel kettles, and lumpy colourful vases. We drink our coffee out of KeepCups while commuting, and we eat our toast over the sink. At weddings, my friends collect cash for their honeymoon, or charitable donations. I browse porcelain dining sets for pennies in charity shops, or on eBay, and rummage past them in abandoned curbside boxes in hopes of finding a cast-iron pan. What was once an exotic import – something akin to the tea and coffee with which it was filled – is now an art form that may soon be forgotten. In 1959, an estimated 31,118 porcelain workers were employed in Bavaria alone, but by 2016 the number had dropped to 3,400. Porcelain, it seems, has lost the lustre of desire.
“When Jongerius speaks, she concerns herself with design as labour. She refers to newness as a burden, and one that designers should be weary of by now.”
When the panel at Die Neue Sammlung is set to begin, we’re shepherded down the stairs into a warehouse lined with the design museum’s extensive back stock: space-age chairs and Kartell cabinetry, but also Game Boys and bicycles and bookcases, all displayed on tall stacks of industrial shelves. It feels like Costco for post-war product designers, or the Library of Congress but for material fetishists. At the front of the room, the panel take their seats. There’s Zilber, of course, and Kai Langer, the head of design for a BMW sub-brand. Sitting beside them is Hella Jongerius, a Dutch designer and the artist behind the porcelain plates that we’ve been admiring.
The conversation is grounded in questions about what to do with waste, or “unwanted” materials. Langer says his work for BMW makes sense of these undesirables by asking, “How can we add value?” The work of a sustainable designer, he supposes, is to work with this trash until “the material itself is then accepted as a premium, almost luxurious product”. He calls it “added intellectual value” – another tech-adjacent euphemism, and one he uses to refer to transubstantiation of plastic from the sea (icky, gross, worthless) into car seat upholstery (cool, sexy, commercially viable). In his view, the designer is a Midas figure, a market force – a change maker, and the source of our desire. To be close to a designer’s product is to break bread with their brilliance.
Range of Generation T ceramics (image: courtesy of Nymphenburg).
When Jongerius speaks, she concerns herself with design as labour. She refers to newness as a burden, and one that designers should be weary of by now. “We need to develop things that add to the world,” she stresses. Jongerius points out that she’s taken a step back from working with commercial clients in recent years. Her collaboration with Nymphenburg is a rare exception, and one that she’s proud to put on view at the museum. “I’m happy to dive into materials, and search within these materials to find new ways to show it in museums – to show people what a material or what a craft could be without [having to] buy it,” she explains.
It’s an interesting proposition: Phoenix – reborn beauty is effectively a showroom for this collaboration between Jongerius and Nymphenburg, which has been dubbed Generation T. The idea is that anyone who owns or who wants to buy Nymphenburg porcelain will be able to ship their pieces to the manufactory in Munich. For a modest fee, they’ll be hand painted with new drips or sketches of flowers (titled Dripping and Weeds respectively) that Jongerius has designed herself.
Generation T in process (image: courtesy of Nymphenburg).
The goal of the project is to extend the life of porcelain pieces that were once passed down through generations – pieces that have only recently been rendered undesirable by a generation that’s perfectly satisfied with what they find on Wayfair or Zara Home. Jongerius’s designs complicate this absent desire, raising their worth through what Langer might term “intellectual value”, but what Jongerius refers to as “building a relationship” between the consumer and products that they might not want, but reluctantly have. The exemplars on display in the museum were unwanted themselves. She found them on eBay, in attics, or at flea markets for cheap.
Design – and especially circular sustainable design – is often framed as a strategy through which we find solutions in a world with too much waste and too few resources. When Jongerius says, “You don’t build a machine to get an answer, but to get another question,” I let the words replay in my head. Jongerius’s project is not a solution to the excess consumption and excessive waste that have come to define our times. If anything, it might accelerate consumption: I can imagine collectors elbowing their way through auctions to find a plate that can be painted for the project. But that’s not the point. The project inspires a series of questions that hang over the audience of well-to-do urbanites with tailored trousers and Apple Watches and spotless vegan-leather handbags: what should we do with what we have, but don’t want? Can we love what we don’t desire? And when what we want (fresh food, new furniture, fast fashion, first dates) just a few clicks away, why would we bother?
“New is a qualification – new is nothing.”
“New is a qualification – new is nothing,” Jongerius tells me the next day as she leads me through the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory. We start in the water powered mill where kaolin clay is pounded to a pulp, then move to the turning shop and moulding shop, where a ceramist shows us a case of tiny porcelain rat arms that will one day hold up rings at Tiffany & Co., and then we enter the painting studio, where a painter is attentively studying watercolour illustrations as a guide for the rainbow stripes she will apply to a ceramic giraffe.
Jongerius is famously blunt on what this qualification – this newness – can mean, and what it cannot. In 2015, she and design theorist Louise Schouwenberg released ‘Beyond The New’, a barnstorming manifesto that identified “the obsession with the new” as an animating force in the design industry. The industry is organised around authorship and products are an extension of their maker. But good design adds meaning to the world, they argued, and that meaning cannot be added post-hoc. “It is absurd and arrogant to begin the design process with an empty piece of paper,” one section begins. Then: “Cultural and historical awareness are woven into the DNA of any worthwhile product. Otherwise the designer is merely embracing newness for its own sake – an empty shell, which requires overblown rhetoric to fill it with meaning.”
Phoenix - reborn beauty at Die Neue Sammlung (image: courtesy of Jongeriuslab).
As we speak, I notice that Jongerius’s relationship with the language of design expands past the products and material libraries with which she works. Throughout the manifesto, the panel, and our discussion, Jongerius frequently returns to the language of interpersonal connections. Design is all about relationships, aesthetics are a form of communication, imperfection is about humanity. Design is a system of desire, but not one that privileges the designer’s desire for their work, nor the designer’s desire for paying end users. Design is a way to organise our desires, to express them, to recognise those of others, and to respond to them as well. Above all else, it’s a way we can show that we care.
I see this in Phoenix – reborn beauty too; when I ask Jongerius what guidelines she’s set for the application of her drips and drawings, she shrugs and says it’s up to the painters to decide. She trusts them. She repeatedly mentions that introducing drips and drawings to an old plate could commemorate a wonderful memory, or write over a painful one just as easily, if that’s what is needed. When she shows me a few prototypes, she points to one plate where she used stickers and hand brushes to make inky strokes. I tell her it’s beautiful. “I had one at home to try [eating off of] it,” she replies. “You feel like you’re eating mud.”
Image: courtesy of Jongeriuslab
The problem with desire is that we don’t always know what we want. We learn quickly what feels wrong, but struggle to identify what might feel right until we’re granted relief. Then, we get drunk off the pleasure of both knowing what we want, and having it too.
When we do name our desire, it can feel urgent. In Kelleher’s book, she posits that “the meaning of [porcelain] has changed”, and what was once associated with family meals and sophistication now symbolises something entirely different. For Kelleher, it symbolises a ritual for which she now yearns. When she reflects on her need for something reverent, she feels conflicted, as I do too.
“But these explanations are all distractions. They refuse to name the root of the issue: that we worry that we might be disposable too, or even disposed of. ”
This could be for many reasons. Kelleher suggests that for her, the source of this desire for tradition may be motherhood and pandemic. For me, it might be commodity fetishism, or ageing, or my fear that – as the people around me couple up, settle down, and plan for their futures – I will be left behind. I worry that the relationships I value might also be governed by fickle, finicky forces, desire being one of them. I fear that the comfort I draw from these relationships may be just the warmth of being desired.
But these explanations are all distractions. They refuse to name the root of the issue: that we worry that we might be disposable too, or even disposed of. We hope that we might be outlived by the traditions we participate in, both big and small. We hope that in our absence, these traditions might be revered, or committed to, or at least remembered when we ourselves are not. They’re an offering to those we love.
As she reflects on the act of eating together as one of these traditions, Kelleher observes that “while [the figure of the mother] can be polluted or manipulated, there’s always going to be value in the act of caring,” and I’m inclined to agree. We cannot always fix desire, or how or when it’s experienced. But to redress this transience – to make our desire permanent, to commit its warm glow to memory – all we need to do is care.
Words Nathan Ma
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #2. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.