We visit museums to marvel at cultural artefacts, where, removed from their original context and placed in impressive storage units, they are elevated to objects of significance. Here, however, the glass-fronted cupboards reaching high up to the ceiling make you feel like you’re walking through a dated supermarket. But the underwhelming, workaday nature of the items on display here is exactly the point.
Werkbundarchiv is a museum devoted to stuff, the unexceptional factory-made detritus of daily life. Cheap wooden chairs, tin teapots, bland IKEA cooking utensils, soap powder boxes, a pink Polly Pocket toy from the 90s – each is an example of industrial design stripped of human craftsmanship, mass-produced to suit the broadest possible audience.
The exhibition comes into its own when the designs take on a political weight with Nazi memorabilia from the 1936 Munich Olympic, or a section titled ‘Jingoistic Kitsch’, featuring a plate with Hindenburg’s laurel-wreathed face, a dented sky-blue tin of Elizabeth II and a white mug with a hopeful-looking Kamala Harris in the style of Shepard Fairey.
As you’d expect, there’s a fair amount of comparison between products from the DDR and West Germany, rival political ideologies played out in the divergent approaches to consumerism and socialist material culture. For all its variety, the permanent collection is unified in its anonymity; the designers – who may or may not have agonised over an item’s shape or typography – go uncredited and uncelebrated. Like ancient sculptures, these objects exist without authorship, detached from the people who conceived them. That sense of collective anonymity gives the museum a peculiar power.
- ‘The Open Storage: Product and design culture of the 20th and 21st centuries’, open until further notice, Werkbundarchiv – Museum of Things, Leipziger Str. 54, Mitte, details.
