Design Real is inspiringly strange
Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine, is on a one-man mission to emulate the Ringstrasse in Vienna.
By which I mean that, like that famous boulevard of museums, opera houses, concert halls and theatres, he is attempting to embrace all culture.
Having taken on art and architecture - and, with a "poetry marathon" at the Serpentine, literature - he is now tackling industrial design.
With Design Real, he has invited the German product designer Konstantin Grcic, perhaps best known in London for an installation of clocks outside Canary Wharf Tube station, to put together a collection of contemporary industrial objects, and exhibit them as if they were art.
Placed on plinths, or hanging on walls, they are minimally captioned, in capital letters: BABY CARRIER, MEGAPHONE, CARAFE.
You are invited to look at them and think your own thoughts before reaching a central space where video screens tell you a little more.
To get all the detailed information about how they're made and what they're for, you have to go to the website. It's an elegant way of combining the physical and the virtual.
The collection is not trying to deliver a message, except to say that there are different valid reasons for designing something.
Such reasons can be function, as with a humidifier, or style, as with a pair of Zaha Hadid-designed shoes.
There are things designed to look good and things where the look is irrelevant, like the usually unseen battery of an electric car.
It could all be sprawling, or mushy, or pointless but, thanks to Grcic's sharp eye, it is not. Instead the show makes the everyday inspiringly strange.
It is like those Magritte paintings where objects are deliberately mis-labelled, except that here the weird object calling itself a BROOM is precisely that. So I'd recommend a trip to this bonsai version of a Museum of Applied Arts.
Until 7 February 2010. Information: 020 7402 6075; www.design-real.com.
Design Real
Serpentine Gallery
