Exercising Novy Byt

Exercising Novy Byt* consists of two pieces of reconstructed furniture made after designs by Alexandr Rodčenko and his pupil Nikolai Sobolev, paired with two sets of photo-collages made as instructions for the use of the furniture. An office table and a sofa/bed are multifunctional objects designed in the first years after the Russian Revolution as part of an attempt to redesign the everyday life and help create a new efficient human. The bourgeois separation of private and public is manifested in the object of the bed where the bed is a dedicated object for leisure or procreation set apart from daily, namely public, activity. The bed for the new human, hence, needs not to be separate but needs to change its shape and function for a new daily/public activity. The office table changes from a table for a singular practice into the practice for many, it bridges the space of privacy and a public space. Almost a century later these principles are easily recognized within the register of flexible, precarious working conditions where an individual is endlessly able to erase every distinction of private and professional. The reconstructed furniture is accompanied by photo collages that borrow the form, both from user manuals and body exercises. The instructions show how even the time needed to adapt the furniture from one type of use to another can be utilized as an exercise device to enhance body’s ability to ever greater achievement.

* Novy Byt is a Russian term for the new quotidian.

Details

technical info: furniture prototype & photo collages / dimensions: variable / year 2014
exhibition view: A Taste for Work (opens in a new tab), ŠKUC Gallery, Ljubljana
photo credits: Dejan Habicht, Vladimir Vidmar