Bourgeoisie 4
Strala creates an irritation with his latest, very raw-looking light object “Bourgeoisie”. The expected, the “bourgeois values”, is thus torpedoed. The fact that the lamp “Bourgeoisie” consists of drain pipes is not the actual provocation here. It is rather their formation. While we are used to seeing designers playfully assembling such pipes into works of art, we find no ingenuity whatsoever with Strala. The structure is almost indecently lapidary. By removing “creativity,” Tom Strala defies the basic expectations we have of an artist. He questions the “function of creativity” in today’s world: Be it in architecture, where a functional building optimized at all costs is finished off with a dramatic facade, or in design, which seeks to elicit emotions from the buyer with mock creativit For him, the application of creativity is not really able to compensate for the compulsive optimization of our time. Even more so, “creativity” has thus degenerated into a pure image commodity that is misused to dazzle a lack of content. The search for a lack of creativity is the critique of this apparent self-evidence.
