A Perfunctory Affair is a minimalist bookcase designed by Brooklyn-based studio Objects of Common Interest. The elemental, almost perfunctory gesture of putting two or more as-found elements together to create an abstract but usable tool, a tool to dine, a tool to sit to display to rest and so on. Basic common geometric notions such as resting, stacking, rolling result in improvised articulation exercises, in juxtapositions of seemingly polar materials, in an illusional childlike engineered art piece. A conceptual idea lives in the act of making and not in the end result, as the idea becomes the machine that makes the art in the notion of Sol leWitt’s instructional drawings.

By delegating the actual production of the idea to others, the exhibition piece turns into an improvisational act as he or she who performs the production has the full control in assigning a material, a shape or volume, a layout or an alternative use, further extending a concept into personal variations. The visual outcome is a snapshot, a random freeze of a moment in a certain line of thought that resulted after a series of decisions as a response to a particular context – physical or cultural – followed by a repetition of unique improvisational acts.