Another Notion of Possibility Box Cutter Knife

Box Cutter is one of multiple pieces which Tobias Wong made in response to the terror attacks of 9/11. With this object he also builds upon and updates Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci’s conceptual approach to the relation between word, signs and the effect they create in art.


Made in 2002, Box Cutter directly points to the fact that on 9/11, the terrorist hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon were reported to have been armed only with box cutters.1 The macabre darkness of this reference is at once reinforced but also displaced by this object’s design. Box Cutter is zinc-cast and chrome plated. It is slightly curved and has a small dimple on the bottom for better hand grip. Combined with the absence of ornamentation, its general shape and smooth, shiny finish, give this object a streamlined, purified and quite mesmerizing look. In a disturbing way then, the viewer is brought to admire it before quickly being reminded of its dark implications. In a simple font Nannucci’s deliberately open ended and ambiguous phrase: “Another Notion of Possibility.” By placing it so prominently on this object Wong is inviting us, if not forcing us, to decide for ourselves how we understand this object. Does he mean to highlight the tragic absurdity that such a small object caused the death of hundreds, prompting us to ask: couldn’t this have been prevented? Or does he mean to signal that despite their form or initial function, objects are ultimately defined by their use as this tool turned to weapon so strikingly illustrates? Was he encouraging designers to engage more frontally with difficult but relevant topics in their work?


Inversely, wasn’t Wong also minimizing the macabre reference embedded within Box Cutter as it was sold in hardware stores but also the Terminal 5 exhibition at JFK airport in 2005, making it become just another commodity in the eye of the everyday consumer?








Tentative conceptual interpretation of box cutter:





There are no definite answers here, but what is certain is that by borrowing Maurizio Nannucci’s sentence “Another Notion of Possibility,” Wong was positioning himself within the wider conversation about the conceptual value of art. A major contemporary conceptual artist, Nannucci was close to the Fluxus movement in the 1970s as highlighted by his founding of the Zona Archives in Florence in 1968. Nannucci is most famous for his neon installations which feature open ended phrases and have been displayed in galleries, museums and public spaces throughout the world. Through the light, color and shape of neon he imparts symbolic value to his words with which he aims to create for the viewer a mental or virtual image of the infinite and inexhaustible possibilities that exist in our way of understanding reality through our perception of the relation between word, image and meaning, and how we apply those within society.


By engraving Nannucci’s sentence on a box cutter, rather than a wall, Wong was building on the Italian artist’s conceptual understandings but also updating them. Embedded within Nannuci’s words “Another Notion of Possibility” is the idea that our understanding of the world, an event, an art piece, or even a simple moment can be other if we learn to reconsider and open-up how we make meaning through the relationship between word and image. According to Nannucci, using neon allows him “to shape and reshape space into sensations and concepts that come very close to the degree zero of representation.”2 It is this notion that experiences and thoughts can become abstract sensations and concepts through an almost absence of representation that Tobias Wong seems to be responding to. The Canadian designer uses the box cutter as a physical materialization of the concept encapsulated within “Another Notion of Possibility.” In doing so Wong was building upon Nannucci’s idea that our understanding of reality forms itself through the relation between space, language and signs, by adding objects and material culture. With Box Cutter he shows how language conditions our reading and interpreting of things around us, but also that simultaneously, our understanding of language also takes its full sense through the function and uses of objects. They are the physical proof that a concept is not just something that exists within an abstract realm of thought. Instead, Wong shows that a concept can be materialized and that it is through an object’s function and aesthetic that the validity of said concept is made real and tangible. It is in this sense that Wong’s self-characterization as a ‘para-conceptual’ artist can placed within the wider conversation on the conceptual value of art which had been debated and reshuffled all throughout the 20th century.




Footnotes:

1The 9/11 Commission Report, https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf, pp. 8-9.



2 As cited in Lelia De Lucchi, “Neon Art Icons: Maurizio Nannucci,” Signs, 06/01/2017,


https://www.sygns.com/blogs/magazine/neon-art-icons-maurizio-nannucci

Another Notion of Possibility Box Cutter Knife; Designed by Tobias Wong (1974–2010); Collaborator: CITIZEN:Citizen; chrome-plated zinc-cast metal, plastic (handle); steel (blade); L x W x D (box cutter): 15.2 × 2.9 × 1.6 cm (6 in. × 1 1/8 in. × 5/8 in.); The Tobias Wong Collection, Gift of Phyllis Chan and Gordon Wong; 2024-4-6