Pip Culbert: Anti-Utilitarian

Utilitarian:

1. Designed to be useful or practical rather than attractive.
2. Relating to or adhering to the doctrine of utilitarianism.

Anti-utilitarian describes Pip’s conceptual approach to her objects. The scavenged, the gifted and the thrifted have been stripped of even their ability to function as intended, and that’s before they’ve metaphorically migrated, like Duchamp’s fountain, into the matrix of fine art – pinned to the walls of a white cube. When a pocket has been pinned to the wall, when it abandons contextual use, does it still qualify as the item whose very name refers to its purpose? As Christina Barton writes in her second of five questions to Pip Culbert; “what has usefulness got to do with it?”