Wassily’s Monologue, 2025
Hi, we met before. You can call me Wassily, although my original name was ‘Model B3 Chair’. This year, I am turning 100. I was designed by Marcel Breuer from 1925 to 1926, when he headed the cabinet-making department at the Bauhaus. Here, the students were encouraged to explore the opportunities offered by rapidly developing industrial processes and materials, in an attempt to rethink craftsmanship and to democratise access to well-designed objects.
While the functionalist vocabulary has become part of the modern and contemporary design and architecture canon, we are now more wary of the repercussions of unrestrained industrial development, aren’t we? The overproduction of cheap furniture that has flooded the market in the last decades, significantly often imitating the minimalist aesthetic of the Bauhaus, has contributed to the current environmental crisis but also to the loss of small businesses, jobs, skills, knowledge, and craftsmanship.
Even the idea of integrating art and society seems perversely accomplished today. In the current phase of late capitalism, you are expected to be flexible, travel everywhere, and always be available. The bleeding of personal and professional life into each other becomes another occasion for exploitation. Yes, you also engage in self-exploitation when you submit to the demands of a cultural industry that turns care, reproductive work, and other life circumstances into a burden to be carried on your shoulders. Not to mention that your field is characterised by a certain elitism, by an often misplaced faith in its ability to bring forth change in society, as well as by a propensity to surrender to the dynamics of the current economic model. It is true, the hegemony of capitalism has pervaded all aspects of life; leisure is co-opted by market-driven infrastructures, life enjoyment partakes in the experience economy, and digital platforms monetise the time we spend feeding them with content. Moreover, this model is constitutively unable to provide solutions to the crises it produces. Still, you find yourself pondering the question of unproductive time, while at the same time getting frustrated for not using your time productively. I know, it does sound insane, but just remember this: despite all the irresolvable paradoxes, contradictions, and limitations, doing nothing is the worst thing to do.
More broadly, I see that most countries in the global north are now being affected by a resurgence of reactionary policies and propaganda in a socio-economic context that, with all due differences, presents similarities with Interwar Germany. Indeed, we are again living in a relatively open, democratic society where many experience worsening economic circumstances. Add to that an international scenario of geopolitical turmoil and overwhelmingly rapid technological developments. The uncertainty and fear thus generated fuel ultranationalist, authoritarian forces, paving the way for their establishment within democratic regimes.
How to address the practical and ethical implications of the production of cultural value in the (re)current context of ubiquitous societal violence? How can you work around your limits as a cultural worker when confronted with structural injustice on a global scale? What does artistic freedom mean when you are paralysed by images of death? How do you tackle the unrepresentable horror of war in an era characterized by a proliferation of unreliable images? What are you going to do about the ongoing erosion of democracy?
See also:
- Wassily Chair Replicas Society, 2025