Dozie Kanu at Performance Space

(link)

Art has no expectations anymore, there's no surprise, all subversion is already accepted. But furniture is a form with expectations and so allows for subversion. Too wonky, impractical, painful, these are the tools of the artist/designer. There's an air of relational aesthetics to the whole Open Room: art's questions are quietly traded for a function. Who needs beauty when you're being served excellent chili. Art's unicorn "criticality" gets replaced with being useful. Sort of like how Hirschorn passed off trash pavilions as utilitarian philosophy. A 100 years of critics inventing theoretical function for art, as MEANING, eventually confuses the issue. The old Indiana Jones slight of hand, exchanging heavy trash for gold. But Indy made that academic gaff, mistaking volume for weight, having never really held gold, didn't know the exchange rate. Then the temple collapses. 

The dust forms a question for archeologists. And then how you felt about the temple to begin with.

Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant

(link)

"Is there a distinction between furniture and works of art? Where do you fall on the spectrum?"
"Sometimes I make sculptures, but for the most part right now I’m making functional works. It’s a little bit less rigorous. Sometimes I feel pressured to load work with meaning—or, when the work doesn’t have a real function, you’re sort of trying to create a perceived function. As if it serves a purpose. Worth having an existence. That can be nerve-racking sometimes. I think it should happen very naturally, very organically. With furniture, the function is its purpose, so it’s still art in that way. You can still give it that same respect, but you can justify its existence immediately because you can use it, you know?" (interview in ssense) 

"But Kanu muddles the usual divisions, highlighting the way black vernacular making—slab culture, African textiles—is excluded from rigid notions of what art is and by whom it is made." (Review by Tiana Reid in AiA)

Kanu is right about the functional object. And one of the joys of a vernacular functionalism is the endlessly alternative, the elsewise arrival at a similar solution. Think Birney Imes documenting the solutions of an impoverished south. Kanu's project might be a similar mining of alternatives to an already existing solution, selling the artworld what it wants. 

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Robert Grosvenor at Karma