How to use a chair: wrong answers only. In the late 1990s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm started a series of “sculptures” entitled One Minute Sculptures that subverts the conventional ways we position our bodies in relation to objects. 

Instead of defining sculpture as an object, Wurm sees it as a way of calling attention to our relationship to objects - in this case, both the body and everyday objects are torn away from premises of usefulness and comfort. This allows us to observe formal qualities of the objects we would have otherwise overlooked - the gap between the backrest and seat of a chair, or the bottom side of a bottle, for example. 

In the words of Simon Baker: “In a context when … meaning itself seems in a terminal process of contraction, and truth has become fugitive, it is precisely at this moment and in these conditions that the involuntary, the inadvertent, the unpredictable, and even the idiotic come into their own.”