Plastic and Ethnography?

By: Dora Gyarmathy, Hungarian Radio

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At first sight plastic as a material of the modern age is strange in the museums of ethnography. Despite of that a new exhibition takes place in the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography with the title: Plastic proving that the museums don’t have to deal with traditional things. It is part of their tasks, but it isn’t the whole picture. This exhibition reflects what is happening nowadays, it is about our everyday and present exhibits. There are such casual objects which are continuously present in our everyday life but exactly they are so simple we don’t even think about them. These things are about us, our culture, and our society which we live in so it’s high time to think about it. The main aim of the exhibition is to place plastic in the centre of attention, that is why plastic is in the Museum of Ethnography.

There is a quotation from Psota Irén, the famous actress in the brochure of the exhibition: “The modern woman’s enthusiastic; all she owns is made of plastic”. it can be the motto of the exhibition and this is also the beginning of the exhibition. In the first room we hear Psota Irén singing a song with this lyric. This song connects this retrospection with the present, while Psota is singing we can see a videoclip about the present.

Plastic had an ubelievable carrier in the last decades. It is hard to imagine our life without this material and that is how the idea of this exhibition started. Plastic and modernization are unimaginable without one another. They go hand in hand, they strengthen each other. And with plastic so many new things have been born and it has changed us and our life.

We enter the first room under a plexi wall where the word “plastic” is can be read as Turai Tünde, my guide and one of the organizers of the exhibition says: “Using plastic in the installations as well was a very important principle while we were organizing this exhibition – as far as it was possible. That’s why there is the plexi.”

When we enter the second hall she continues: “The exhibition had two basic ideas. Firstly, since we are an ethnographical museum we tried to react to the traditional topics of ethnography and present them from modern point of view. These are the material, production, consumption, nutrition, dressing, design, entertainment and finally accumulation. These are classical, ethnographical terminologies at the same time we tried to have them met the classical, ethnographical representations which are used by museology to present a topic.” The family tree in the second hall is one of these representations. This is the family tree of the plastic. In one hand it is impossible to compile it; on the other hand it is only a game. More to say after the 70’s the quantity of the material has been growing and growing, new and new types of plastic have appeared, some of them remained, some of them dropped out of usage so the family tree is ready only up to the 70’s.

Wrappers, furniture, toys, hair dryer, tights and computers… The following exhibition halls prove the importance of our everyday life although maybe we can’t recognize it. When I ask my guide about the source of this collection she answers:

“When the idea of the exhibition started we announced a call and asked our visitors to bring us plastic objects with a personal story. We got more than 1500 objects and it is really interesting how deep we can look into the life of people through an object! We used some of these objects in the exhibition. And it is also interesting what the people think about our museum. When we began this conversation you mentioned that the view about the Museum of Ethnography was dealing with tarditional, old things. Our visitors sent us old objects because they thought the Museum of Ethnography was open for these older things. Of course we were happy about these objects and there are some older objects in the exhibition as well but we wanted to collect many new things. So we borrowed some of them and asked producers to contribute to this unique exhibition. It was a very special collection because when a museum organizes an exhibition it usually borrows the objects from the partner institutes. As we present objects from 2005 and 2006, we asked for exhibits the producers so we addressed a special audience.”