To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time’… To be con-temporary … can thus be understood as being a comrade of time.1 — Boris GroysIn his 1925 essay ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Towards a Formulation of the Question)’ Boris Arvatov announced the need to dissolve the dualism between everyday life and modes of production. Do this, he claimed, and a new system of exchange between modern citizens and the trappings of existence would ensue. The challenge? To make a thing that would function not as a commodity, but as a comrade.2 Examples of how that conceptual ideal was to be realized? Scarce. However idiosyncratic his premise, the lure of this transgressive logic endures. The recent proliferation of curatorial departments and scholarship dedicated to design has engendered a renewed institutional interest in the cultural capital and discursive possibilities entrenched in quotidian objects. As such, Arvatov’s central thesis of the subject formed as much through the process of using objects in everyday life as by making them in the sphere of production is as pertinent now as it was in the Constructivist era.3 Boris Groys’ notion above can be used to repurpose Arvatov’s idea for critical means. Now that the display and interpretation of objects is increasingly at stake, how effectively do cultural producers ‘work with’ these items in order to communicate the impact they have on contemporary existence? Simone LeAmon and Edmund Carter’s Design Wall: Design in Everyday Life in Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, 22 November 2012 – 23 March 2013) and the Rapid Response Collection in All Of This Belongs To You (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1 April – 19 July 2015) represent the attendant tensions, oscillations and possible resolutions of exhibited responses to Arvatov’s proposition. LeAmon and Carter’s flagship exhibit comprised 678 projects, many in multiples, originating from 21 Melbourne design studios. The curators hoped audiences would see these objects — which included footballs, eskies, sustainable coffee cups, satchels, wetsuits and bike locks — as they passed on their way into or out of the exhibition, in everyday life. This doppelganger effect was intended to communicate the local creative intelligence, emotion and resonance with the city of Melbourne with which these objects are imbued.4 The universal mounting system used to display these items brings a taxonomical approach to the integration of objects of consumption and production that Arvatov prescribes. A key passage of his text describes the various tenets necessary for a modern Western citizen to have a meaningful existence. Meaning is brought about by the fluid use of personal objects, like a cigarette case and cap (or in the case of Design Wall, centrepiece bowls and coffee cups: porte paroles for objects of consumption), as well as technological advances like the skyscraper and revolving door (or, tram grab handles and brooms: objects of production) in a seamless ‘new world of Things’.5 According to Christina Kiaer, Arvatov does not envision a one-way passage from the sphere of production into that of everyday life, but a more complex integration of the two.6 The formal assemblage of Design Wall reflects such an idyllic existence, as the seriality of luxury items blends seamlessly with the relatively mundane in an infinite number of combinations and patterns. While LeAmon and Carter’s installation reflects Arvatov’s proposed integration, it falls short of acting on Groys’ advocation. It is illustrative in the sense that these items were selected because they garner meaning from their site of production and consumption: they were created in Melbourne, for Melbourne, by Melbournians. Design Wall frames its components as a hyper-local survival kit, where humble subject matter and functional appearance can belie innovative materials, a global demand or new attitudes to sustainability.7 Objects capable, as Kiaer points out, of responding formally to the ideal experience of everyday life in their portability, flexibility and transparency.8 The universal mounting system forms an integral part of this mechanism, bringing numerous visual triggers and possible lived experiences to the fore. But ultimately, as a sum of many so-called everyday parts, Design Wall relied heavily on the logic of an ideal, design-conscious crowd for its curatorial objective to manifest.9 What becomes significant at this stage is Arvatov’s desire to rework the commodity fetish in order to return a kind of social agency to it. The impetus should not be on doing away with the object altogether but to reciprocate by working within its prevailing limitations. In other words, regarding it in socially productive terms by virtue of its material form and use value, rather than its exchange value.10 Stephen Duncombe’s notion of the ethical spectacle helps us picture such an object experience, and therefore, how Arvatov’s conceptual ideal could become an actual. Duncombe theorises that the ethical spectacle is achieved when the power of the commodity is retained but re-endorsed as a transgressional apparatus in order to achieve progressive goals. Similarly, the purpose of an ethical spectacle is to remind viewers of the spectacular nature of their conditions. This is done not as a form of critique that creates distance from the situation, but rather brings spectators back to the real conditions they are in.11 Through this prism, the accent Design Wall projects onto the commodity is unequivocal. Mobilising familiar objects in an unfamiliar gallery context encourages unadulterated enjoyment of formal congruence rather than reflection on the subject matter. Arvatov’s proposal demands more of LeAmon and Carter’s offering. Instead of bringing into focus the tipping points that exist within the commodity and spectacle that could be leveraged to create a productive camaraderie, a closed circuit between cultural capital and an audience assumed a priori is revealed. The ethical spectacle has not been achieved because its objects’ conventions have been reinforced rather than displaced by contingency.12 While the work that went into Design Wall didn’t ‘work’ towards reifying Groys’ retooled conception of the institutional comrade, the Rapid Response collection in All Of This Belongs To You might be considered a more robust attempt at reworking the conventional object and the subject’s relation to it.13
…collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties. And under the conditions of our contemporary product-oriented civilisation, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless.23In this context, Arvatov’s theory encourages institutions to work in the space between, in order to remedy ‘unproductive’ time. Whilst the local example may have languished in such a state, its London counterpart’s triumvirate of explicit transgressive logic provides a particular institutional framework for communicating the importance of contemporary design objects as part of a critical and rigourous curatorial standard. Recognising the use-value of the resulting tensions or partial-resolutions of this universal travail, however, doffs a cap to the perennial quest of cultural institutions to achieve con-structive moments, that continue to form responses to Arvatov’s self-confessed, almost-formulated question.
Deirdre Cannon is a writer and independent curator based in Melbourne.
1. Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, Going Public, Berlin; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 94.
2. Phillip Glahn, Socialist, Digital, and Transgressive Objects: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/06/artseen/socialist-digital-and-transgressive-objects, June 3, 2013.
3. Christina Kiaer, ‘Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects’, October, Vol. 81 (Summer, 1997), p. 105.
4. From a promotional video for Melbourne Design Now, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/melbourne-design-now-simone-leamon/.
5. Boris Arvatov and Christina Kiaer, ‘Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)’, October, vol. 81 (Summer, 1997), p. 126.
6. Kaier, 1997, p. 108.
7. The yacht cord system by Ronstan, Tom Kovac bowls for Alessi, and the Keep Cup respectively.
8. Kaier, 1997, p.113.
9. Maitiù Ward, ‘Dossier: Melbourne Now’, Architecture Australia, Jan/Feb 2014, p. 61.
10. Kaier, 1997, p. 110.
11. Stephen Duncombe, ‘Imagine an Ethical Spectacle’, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, New York: The New Press, 2007, p. 126. Available online http://tinyurl.com/ngz6hnf.
12. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Cited in Duncombe, 2007, p. 136.
13. Glahn, 2013.
14. A recording of this delivery can be found at https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/all-belongs-you.
17. Arvatov and Kaier, 1997, p. 126.
18. See Hilde Hein, ‘Philosophical Reflections on the Museum as Canon Maker’, Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 293–310.
19. Glahn, 2013.
22. Art of Dissent, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/opinion/the-art-of-dissent.html?_r=0.
[^23]: Groys, 2010, p. 94.