Ever push a door open and then it jams? Then you push a bit harder and it still won’t budge? A voice behind you says “pull”. A sign on the handle reads pull, but you push and push until bitter self-awareness strikes. You’re dumbstruck, and you’re also an idiot, and an apparent illiterate who can’t even exit a building without incident. At last, you pull the door open in shame.
Happens to the best of us. It happened to the cognitive scientist Donald Norman so often that he obsessively harps on bad door design in his book The Design of Everyday Things. An academic bashing shitty doors sounds petty, but the book does get interesting when he argues that no object should require instructions to operate. Norman believes objects tell us how to use them, and he names the ways they communicate that affordance. Most objects have a clear affordance; their design guides their function; we sense how to use them with our brains on autopilot. Our critical faculties only switch on when object interactions fail, frustrate, or limit our imaginations.
Foreground Cacilia Brown Background Bianca Pedrina Series of 18 Photographs, 2021-2025. Credits: Simon Veres / MuseumsQuartier Vienna
A lot of design concepts are referenced at “The Material Show”, a group exhibition curated by Andreas Fogarasi and Astrid Peterle at MuseumsQuartier Freiraum in Vienna, but affordance isn’t one of them. Still, the concept is spelled out in the exhibition’s introduction, stating the 12 artists were selected because “through their artistic and research practices, they draw attention to those essential components of our environment that we often take for granted without giving them much thought, [...] that only draw our attention when they malfunction.” Affordance is also a fair frame for understanding where the show succeeds and where it veers into the chasm between its ambitions and actual impact.
For better or worse, you do need an instruction manual to figure out some of the pieces on show. Even then, the instructions aren’t super clear. The prime offender is Hannes Böck’s Sammlung Bau- und Schmuckstein altes Rom., a 15 minute film loop of static shots of 47 stone surfaces that reflect an “interest in constructing meaning” according to exhibition text. The film I saw reflected no such interest. Not only is it shot in a soft focus that washes out concrete detail, the composition is so tight the surfaces could have been filmed anywhere from an Ikea outlet to Vienna’s Natural History Museum.
Böck’s isn’t the only piece that radically decontextualizes everyday materials for aesthetic contemplation, but it is the most egregious mismatch between the curators’ socio-historical concerns and the post-Duchampian lexicon informing much of the exhibit. It really was filmed at the Natural History Museum’s archive of Roman construction materials. And the curators are right to observe that those materials were plundered through war and exploitation, but their claim that we “see power displayed on several levels” in the film strains credulity. We see out-of-focus surfaces. If anything, the film swaps meaning for ahistorical superficiality. A calculated disregard for the analysis of power is baked into its structure.
Hannes Bock Sammlung Bar-und Schmuckstein altes Rom, 2022. Credits: Simon Veres / MuseumsQuartier Vienna
Nonetheless, Böck’s film is hypnotic. And the exhibit’s homelier conceptual pieces succeed on their own terms. Lara Almarcegui’s Construction Materials, City of São Paulo, 2006 translates São Paulo into an educated guess about the weight of the raw materials used to construct it. It reads like the apocalypse as written by an accountant, a pointless exercise in categorizing and measuring piles of rubble without hinting their utility. For sechs komma vier, Christoph Weber mixed cement from a limestone block, cast it in molds to replicate the original limestone block, and repeated the process until he exhausted the limestone. It’s the sort of piece that only comes to life when you read about it, but the text isn’t tacked on. A tidy allegory about limited resources and mass production in the form of counterfeit limestone.
Weber is the only artist who directly addresses labor in the show, a theme I assumed would pop up quite a bit given the theme. More curious is that humans are almost absent from “The Material Show”. Despite the curator's intention to spotlight “social terms,” humans appear in only two pieces. Neither depicts actual people.
Nick Relph’s video What’s Going On Here collects low-fidelity scans of the architectural renderings posted on New York City construction sites. These posters are designed to inform the general public about the finished construction project, but they unintentionally depict a city designed to serve money and not people. Relph amplifies that impression with zooms into ultra-pixelated faces, inhuman distortions of CGI commuters, and glitching pedestrians that walk off ledges and into oncoming traffic. As a New Yorker, I think it’s an accurate portrait of the city before its recent moratorium on new construction, a montage that navigates the humor and horror of an environment designed with humanity as an afterthought.
Little Warsaw, Marble Street, 2000. Credits: Simon Veres / MuseumsQuartier Vienna
The largest piece in the show, however, also depicts a human figure. Little Warsaw’s Marble Street is a silicone recreation of a building’s façade, nondescript except a militaristic male nude perched on the doorway. The source building was constructed in 1920s Budapest as a club for soldiers. Little Warsaw transform its foreboding façade into drapery, stage curtains that reveal the pageantry inherent in power that power wishes to hide. The piece feels monumental, though monuments rarely limp, hang by a thread, or open into rips, holes, and gashes. Maybe Marble Street is a monument to the vulnerability of power, to the reality that behind authoritarian structures and stagecraft power is much weaker than it appears.
A more expressive humanity shines in Daria Koltsova’s The Kiosk, an installation that elevates a common, cobbled-together kiosk with colorful stained glass. In place of merchandise, Koltsova’s Postcards from Home ornaments the kiosk with abstract glass landscapes. The effect is more transcendent than sentimental. Expressive playfulness is also present in Cäcilia Brown’s freestanding arrangements of reclaimed support beams, gravity-defying sculptures that the curators are right to compare with dance. Bianca Pedrina’s exploratory photographs capture the unusual contrasts she encounters in urban terrain. Her sense of spontaneity and discovery stands out in an exhibit dense with heavy matter.
Curator Andreas Fogarasi contributes sculptures from his Nine Buildings, Stripped series that bundle detritus from demolished Viennese buildings with an element from the new constructions that replace them. In each arrangement new material is placed on top of the old, bound by a steel band, and displayed so that the past frames the present. Or so the bland utilitarian present blocks out the personality of the past. The pieces invite a wealth of perspectives. And their iterative compositional logic gives each variation a singular feel, achieving a rare balance of historical research, conceptual procedure, and poetic sensibility.
Andreas Fogarasi from Nine Buildings Stripped. Credits: Simon Veres / MuseumsQuartier Vienna
The curators contextualize Fogarasi’s portraits of demolished Vienna, and the exhibition as a whole in the light of upcoming renovations to the MuseumQuartier and various corruption scandals surrounding the city’s failed construction projects. I felt there was a missed opportunity to highlight the city’s recent eviction and demolition of St. Marx Skatepark, an autonomous, self-designed open-air DIY space. St. Marx Skatepark modeled a future where communities reclaim materials from an environment that doesn’t suit them to construct a world they want to live in. Though the show hints that the use and ownership of raw material is monopolized by power, the articulation is never specific enough to ground that relationship in a tactile sociopolitical reality. The curators direct our attention to the playful malleability of material with the unspoken caveat that only experts get to play, and even then only where permitted.
The exhibition’s curatorial ambitions are frustrating. “The Material Show” presents some excellent work, but it also presents itself as so far-ranging and consequential in scope that there is no way it could succeed on its own terms. A more pragmatic approach aligned with the actual qualities of the pieces may have made the exhibition less eloquent and also less mystifying.
But maybe it’s impossible to set people’s labors, desires, and histories aside and address material in the abstract without creating ever-spiraling mystifications. Maybe the next time I push a door I’m meant to pull, I’ll smash its glass and install prettier glass. Or I’ll smash the door to dust and make many new doors. Maybe I’ll tie a new door on top of the old one and take photos so close that it stops looking like a door. Or I’ll cast the door in silicone and hang it from the ceiling. If I hang a door on a gallery wall and no one can open or close it, does it matter if the design sucks? Did I solve its dysfunction? Is that the best solution?
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- Cover Image:
Daria Koltsova, The Kiosk, 2026, and Postcards from Home, 2025. Credits: Simon Veres / MuseumsQuartier Vienna
