Miyoung's The Dumbest Exhibition Ever
On a freezing day, I went with Donny to an exhibition about the industrial design of Dieter Rams and his company Braun’s home appliance products built according to his concepts. The exhibition is running at the Daelim Art Gallery near Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul. His design, and thereby Braun as well, is famous for its simplicity, and is the inspiration for Apple's iPod design.
I was so intrigued by past products which inspired current popular device design.
However, the structure and the way they exhibited the products were so disappointing. People are not allowed to touch; we couldn't even push the buttons of the radio... they even covered some products within glass displays. I found that so peculiar, as all items on display were originally consumer products meant for use in our daily lives. Electric razors, audio systems, kitchen appliances, and so on...
The thing that angered me the most was the audio buttons. The accompanying captions detailed how much thought and design-weight Braun put into even the smallest audio control buttons. I think design cannot be completely understood through its visual. It also requires the ability to touch, smell, and use any of our other sensory or emotional capacities. Designers design everything, not just the visual. Design is an experience. However, the gallery didn't give the viewer any sense of how much care the designers took in crafting the details that appealed to other the sensory aspects of design, especially tactile.
Without that tactile sensation, how is it any better than reading about it in magazine?
It was so boring. I had no idea of the significance of the items beings exhibited. There was little explanation and absolutely no touching.. better just to search internet to see them in the photo. At least from the internet I could get a better background and deeper information.
Donovan's Museums: Unamusing
Are museums not meant to inform and inspire? Then why is it that I always walk away from museum experience feeling a sense of guilty dissatisfaction at not seeming to attain the sort of edified state that you would expect having thoroughly meandered through its offerings, conditioning in me a feeling of near trepidation of wasting time and energy trying to glean something meaningful from something that almost always proves to be deficient? How is it that so many museums fall so short of their basic purpose?
My latest museum endeavor brought me to the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum near Gwanghwamun. Perhaps not surprisingly in a country as tech obsessed as Korea, the work of industrial designer Deiter Rams, whose design concepts informed the minimalist design structure of the iPhone, passes for the amorphously defined contemporary art. Despite the initially jarring realization that there was little more to this exhibition than consumer products parading as art pieces, I was willing to keep an open mind and allow myself to take in whatever the exhibition had to offer. But there proved to be little more substance to this art exhibition than what I could have taken away from twenty minutes spent walking down the aisles of the home appliance department of Home Plus. In fact, a trip to a department store may have been more edifying as there, at least, we can get some hands-on interaction with the products. Here, the items were languishing behind glass cases or “do not touch” signs, their cords reaching out for outlets they will never encounter. No doubt Deiter Rams contributions helped to redefine home appliance design, but there was little to no emphasis on placing him in a historical context, showing what designs his contributions were advancing away from, or how these contributions can be linked to what we find on store shelves today.
The capstone of the exhibition showcased (in a display case) not even an iPhone, but the package in which the iPhone is sold. What was so ridiculous about this anti-climactic summation was not so much that they were displaying something that half those in attendance were carrying in their pockets, but that even here no effort was made to explicate the connection between Deiter Rams’s work and this ubiquitous product, as if their own saying so were evidence enough. Not only that, but it seemed as if half of the displayed items of the exhibition were designed not by Deiter Rams himself but by his collaborators or by, we are made to assume, those whom his work inspired. Without sufficient clarification through vigorous information displays or other means, it was impossible to grasp the scope or depth of Deiter Rams’s influence. If we are to take this museum’s effort in organizing an exhibition on him as evidence enough, then not even that does the trick, as effort definitely seemed to be lacking.
Perhaps fault can at least partly be placed on my shoulders for going into the experience with little idea of what to expect and a high degree of ambivalence. But how can museums be approached with anything but ambivalence when most of them leave the attendee high-and-dry and with a feeling of shame for not absorbing the significance of the subject they so negligently explain? Maybe it’s a matter of finding the right museum or of lowering one’s expectations, but it seems as if the museums that provide the most satisfaction and appeal are those that offer kitsch over education. With that in mind, I’ll be making my next museum stop at Bukchon’s Owl Museum.
Posts
