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DING des Monats
(THING of the month) May 2009:
Picnic Case
Not even a blanket can fit into this little green picnic case (29/24/14 cm) that - in a closed state - might be judged as a box to store technical devices or stationery. It is just a modernized version of the traditional British willow picnic box that was produced in 1950s Germany. Being easy to handle and light it promises a quick escape from everyday life, from narrow cities and the past into an idyll for two. The interior of the box provides space not only for a plastic service and aluminium cutlery but also for the ingredients for a little picnic. This includes the dreams of and the longing for private happiness of West Germany’s society whose country had quickly developed from a place of ruins to a wonderland of economic success. With only 1,5 kg weight the box suites the Germans’ increasing mobility and fondness to travel they developed in the 1950s. The little green box serves the dreams of private happiness while de-historicized Nature itself is juxtaposed to society. The plastic service contains the trace of a "sudden transformation of nature". As Roland Barthes remarked, plastic’s ability to change is total: "Hence a perceptual amazement, the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter, and the connections he detects between the singular of the origin and the plural of the effects. And this amazement is a pleasurable one, since the scope of the transformations gives man the measure of his power, and since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through Nature". A picnic box is always a suitcase of desires and dreams and often just a fashionable accessory or part of a decorative scheme of an apartment rather than a device for everyday use.
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