Products of Our Time combines works by an international array of designers and artists who comment on the current environmental, economic, cultural and political zeitgeist using a common medium—products. For the last ten years or so, this growing cadre of designers and artists has been choosing the formal and conceptual language of products as a form of expression—and revenue generator.

Some of the works pose theoretical questions through the form of one-of-a-kind objects imagined as a prototype for future products, such as Dominic Wilcox’s Bird Cage for Exactly One Bird. Other works, including those made in Mike Libby’s Insect Lab, take a singular concept and create customized variations on the theme—for Libby, the mash-up of real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components. Still others have been conceived and engineered to actually go into mass production. There is an endless supply of Tobias Wong’s chrome-plated Box Cutter.

A closer look at Box Cutter provides an opportunity to illustrate a salient theme of Products of Our Time—beneath seemingly ordinary objects runs a subtle subtext that belies the product’s everyday appearance. New York City resident, Wong made his box cutter in 2002, not long after high-jacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Engraved on the side of Box Cutter are the words “Another Notion of Possibility”.

All of which raises vague, yet relevant questions—why products? why now?

Design is a medium through which we shape our world. Given the spread of Western-influenced culture and the rise of consumer-based economies, designed products have become ubiquitous in our lives and increasingly function as the leading cultural indicators of who we are as a society and where we are going.

The idea that products and objects tell us about ourselves isn’t a novel one. Archeologists rely heavily on the study of human-made artifacts to reveal complex histories of bygone civilizations. The Sumerian culture existed more than 5,000 years ago, yet they produced the first known writing system. This writing, etched into objects such as tokens and clay pots, was used to record commercial transactions associated with the exchange of products, no less.

Singer/songwriter Bob Dylan was widely regarded as an artist who had his finger on the pulse of an entire generation’s counter-cultural movement. In 1965, Dylan sang “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In 2007, we still don’t require the services of a weatherman for our edification, nor would we look to a folk singer for that information either.

Design critic David Redhead wrote “The products that surround us provide an instant cultural history, a mirror in which our own preoccupations are vividly reflected.” The quote is from the cover of Redhead’s 1999 book Products of Our Time. I bought the book in 2001 and, like most designers, proceeded to look only at the pictures. While full of valuable insights into current design trends, my copy of the book is not destined to be a cultural artifact unearthed by future archeologists. Within a month of purchase, the cover completely separated from the spine. Days later, in lemming-like fashion, the pages followed suit.

A book entitled Products of Our Time that falls apart after purchase provides a metaphor too rich not to pursue. Even this mundane exercise in buyer’s remorse can tell us a lot about ourselves. On the one hand, the content of Redhead’s book suggests that we are a narcissistic society. Not satisfied to only buy products or look at them in catalogs, we also feel compelled to buy books about the products we purchase in order to learn more about ourselves and marvel at the ingenuity of our consumer culture. On the other hand, the physical construction of the book and the fact that it fell apart suggests that books, by and large, are just another disposable commodity no longer intended to become tomorrow’s historical documents or treasured family heirlooms.

Theorist Guy Debord characterized the philosophical underpinnings of the mediated environment in which we coexist with commodities in the following terms “What appears is good; what is good appears.” Products are typically concrete statements couched in positive terms, a celebration of themselves and the munificent culture that produced them. For instance, a handgun isn’t advertised as a device for killing people, instead it is presented as a device for protecting oneself and one’s family.

Imagine, then, for the next three months, the Goldstein Museum as a temporary retail outlet offering salable items that question not only the culture, but the very impetus that produced them:

Tobias Wong’s Bulletproof Rose broach for evenings out on the town; Mark Franchino’s, Totem is a painstakingly lathed from wood, roll of quilted toilet paper; For literal foreshadowing, FredriksonStallard’s Kite that evokes Edgar Allen Poe’s ominous raven; Marti Guix’s Brushkey to clean keyholes presumably for one’s voyeuristic pleasures; because being born with a silver spoon in your mouth is no longer enough, Keith Farley’s baby rattles, made of gold and silver, have precious jewels clattering inside; Kate Bingaman-Burt’s detailed drawings of her monthly credit card statements; and Raby & Dunne’s Huggable Mushroom cloud pillows, so you too, can learn to love the bomb.

As someone who is inherently mistrustful of authority figures it causes me some discomfort to position myself as an authority on this collection of work. For this reason I will not propose a grand narrative of what it all supposedly means. Instead, I invite the viewers to become their own authorities. I invite the viewers to perform their own analyses, draw their own conclusions and construct their own narrative as to what the objects say individually or collectively about the proverbial “interesting times” in which we live.

In conclusion, if you too are reluctant to accept that you are an authority on this topic, let me suggest the origin of your authority:

We are all sentient beings—living, breathing and consuming in the seventh year of the 21st century. By and large we listen to the same tonally sequenced music. We watch on television the same preternaturally attractive people selling us goods and dispensing tid-bits of information in the guise of “news.” With increasingly slight variations, the globalized economy ensures that we can eat the same foods, drink the same liquids and wear the same clothes. We experience the same invasive searches as we pass through one another’s airports. When riding public transportation we sometimes wonder, if only for an instant, what that fellow traveler has in his backpack. The winters of our youth seemed to be more cold and the summers less unbearably hot—but we still don’t need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind blows. The shadows on our shared Platonic wall seem to be cast by inorganic objects of uniform design produced in endless multiples. We sometimes wonder if the shadows are our own.

We are all products of our time.