by Cira Brown
“Look closer”, “dig deeper”… if you’re doing that, you’re the type of museum visitor that we love. But how do we foster that level of engagement? “Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Every Day Things”, currently on view at the MIT Museum, aspires to do exactly that. The exhibition showcases seemingly-mundane everyday objects, such as paperclips, matches, and rubberbands, and heralds them as heroes. But this isn’t a show that simply seeks to celebrate various inventors’ ingenuity. Design narratives share the stage with manufacturing processes, historic advertisements and artistic recontextualizations (ranging from ornate sculptures to reconfiguring the object itself).This is an exhibition with themes of consumerism throughout, yet it doesn’t explicitly confront these issues — instead, we examine the objects and their histories free of the associated tensions between sustainability and disposability (almost, at least). These no-frills devices represent the extreme of function over form, yet when you see an array of illuminated clothespins in starbursts, it’s easy to forget their utility for a moment. I enjoy that type of reimagining, and the unstructured and non-linear presentation of these items is a refreshing change of rhythm from standard museum displays. That adage, “design has to work, art doesn’t”, whether true or not, was present in mind throughout the visit.
