from the early twentieth century when Werkbund was founded, through the second World War period, on to the technical and design innovations of the latter part of the post-War period and ending with the post-modern design styles of the 1980s. Nevertheless, many of the displays break from this vaguely chronological structure to contrast specific Werkbund products with mass-produced lambda goods; handcraft with industrial manufacture; high-designer names with no-name products: it shifts from specific German Werkbund products, to products that took influence from the Werkbund , to products that rejected modernist ideas: aesthetic commodities produced by company- members of the Werkbund . Werkbund -developed taste and aesthetics are challenged by kitsch and the modern use of the German old- tradition that also embraces Nazi products. Another curatorial section has such a sense of apparent material chaos that you can only assume the curators of the museum simply ran out of time after their methodical work on the first part of the museum – simply stashing all the remaining objects haphazardly onto the shelves the evening before the Museum’s opening. Or, you may suspect that a curatorial play is in operation, one which seeks to speak confidently because of, rather than in spite of, the looseness of display methodology. In fact methodology is not absent, but the viewer needs some theoretical help to decode the curatorial objectives as the accumulation of random objects introduce product culture unusual in the context of a museum space. This section includes objects from daily life reminding one of the inventory of an auction house, a laboratory, a folk history museum, antique shops or flea market boxes, sales from the back of trucks, attics, cabinet of curiosities or even some Pennyland (bargain-bin/discount) shops.
These presentations challenge the characteristic of things and thing-ness 3 . For example, there are collected artefacts based on the quality of the products, or because they all imitate another material; or they are based on aesthetic codes (for instance, a famous 1950s yellow-black pattern) or on the common material of some hand-made objects; there are those made for emergency situations (often related to historical or military contexts); those resembling body parts, made for the body or suggestive of the body from dolls, to corsets, to prostheses; those imitating reality but without functionality; souvenirs or physical media for memory-based culture; those based on specific functional categories such as leisure or religion; those based on popular culture images – Dürer’s praying hands, or Star Wars, or which are politically- and historically-representative. GDR (East German) products are also presented, either as mass-produced objects based on West-German products (copying, imitating or confrontationally mirroring products from capitalism) or with educational and often propaganda purposes.
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In all exhibition displays, much like the Werkbundkisten sets, the names of the designers and producers are not given, the dating of the thing is rarely to be found, and the objects are not chronologically ordered. All the things use every single centimetre of the cases, reinforcing accumulation and the de-aestheticisation of the collection. If some things still retain their coded label from the inventory, no codes or guides have been made to help the viewer finding a way through the alleys: the presented artefacts are neither explained nor displayed in an attractive way. But, in
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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