Where do we draw the line between practical items and art objects? Who decides whether something is kitsch, offensive, useful, beautiful or aesthetically valuable? Is it a great signifier of human advancement that we are so enmeshed with this world of ‘stuff’ or is it our weakness? How do we rationalise the preservation of objects in an age where physical matter can be replaced with digital reproductions?
At a time when many museums are having to re-evaluate the worth and relevance of their physical collections it seems more vital than ever that visitors can truly engage with them. Understanding and appreciating the value of objects is key to justifying their continued preservation and evolution. What is surprising, however, is how an afternoon amongst the most ordinary of objects can go so far in raising, and helping answer, these questions whilst reasserting the extraordinary power of ‘things’.
I arrived at the Museum der Dinge without really knowing I had arrived. The building looked more like an apartment block than a state-funded museum. Inside, however, was an extraordinary presentation of 20th century material culture and design.
Visitors enter a nondescript front door and, a couple of staircases later, are presented with a compact and ordered display space that is at once unfussy and cleverly thought-out. The contrast between this discreet and curious space was refreshingly distant from Berlin’s main cultural zone of Museum Island.
The museum is formed of a maze of cases offering a cross-section of everything and anything related to the everyday life and culture of the twentieth century: technology, leisure, communications, photography, games, cosmetics, medicine, sex, politics, design, arts and crafts, mass-production.
Little is offered by way of labelling or prescribed information. There is no given ‘route’ through the permanent collection and visitors are free to pass from hand-made children’s toys to anatomical models, from kitsch souvenirs to samples of iconic furniture.
The museum prescribes to its own form of display referred to as ‘open storage’. This allows sample collections to be formed by the curators, creating links between differing objects and allowing contrasts to be made, encouraging enquiry and wonder. This is realised by housing the collection in rows of tall cabinets that appear ordered only by loose themes: colour, material, function, era, style, subject.
A shelf of artificial limbs, glasses, and gaudy sex-aids may be placed next to a collection of objects with nothing more in common than colour or material, alongside a plethora of advertising figurines and kitchenalia. The traditional division and taxonomy of artist/designer, movement, location, time, is escaped completely. This is partially the result of the content itself, which requires a different treatment, but also because the aims of the staff clearly extend beyond merely ‘showing’ the items.
Rather than seeming jarring or messy, this helps the collection as a whole make sense and the resulting juxtapositions are ingenious and thought-provoking.
Alongside the free arrangement of this main display is a changing exhibition space covering more specific topics, from individual Bauhaus students to artist interpretations of the collection. Visitors are able to examine objects within a more self-contained theme as well as having the opportunity to discuss individual items with the museum’s team of ‘Thing-Interpreters’.
This mode of display also acknowledges the eccentric museum tradition from which it stems. Numerous early collectors were concerned with representing the world and ourselves in microcosm through the gathering of tangible artefacts. This notion seems particularly significant when considered alongside the collection on display here: there are surely few things that so clearly represent the modern age as consumption, as material possessions and mass production. This array of ‘things’ then can be seen as a slice, a striking, ugly, humorous, absorbing slice, of our lives and our recent past told through physical objects. What is on show is a celebration, a joyous collection of ‘our’ things, of design and creation as well as a glance into a numbingly consumerist world.
Smaller-scale museums often offer something quite distinct from their larger counterparts and the Museum der Dinge really takes advantage of this. There is an atmosphere of curiosity, a feeling of viewing a life lived through objects that feels genuinely relevant in a city that has such a clear love-affair with ‘things’ and a proud history of functional design.
You may not come face-to-face with a Caspar David Friedrich or a Kandinsky by visiting the Museum der Dinge but the everyday things around you might not seem the same afterwards.
