Money Boxes

A sit­u­a­tion and design frozen in porcelain.

The point is a min­i­mal­ist post­pro­duc­tion ges­ture (cut­ting of a coin slot) that in a sim­ple DIY man­ner cat­a­pults a dec­o­ra­tive arte­fact into the util­i­ty area of design.

It thus becomes a lit­er­ary sym­bol of invest­ment into art sar­cas­ti­cal­ly con­nect­ed with encour­ag­ing icon­o­clasm, as the val­ue of this spe­cial cash box is two-fold, hid­den in both the form and con­tent. Each own­er faces the same dif­fi­cult choice: how to sup­press one of the objec­t’s functions.

A sen­ti­men­tal his­tor­i­cal lev­el is also at play here. Some of the cash box­es are mod­elled on sculp­tures of exot­ic ani­mals that were syn­ony­mous with dec­o­ra­tive lux­u­ry of the social­ist work­ing class­es, despite the fact that their ori­gin para­dox­i­cal­ly point­ed to the hat­ed aris­toc­ra­cy. Symbols of feu­dal­ism that sur­vived on top of social­ist wardrobes.