by Morce Ambler
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by Morce Ambler | |||||
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After Charles & Ray Eames' work is 're-discovered' at least twice every decade, another process predictably comes into play: the aesthetics of mediated distortion. The degeneration of appreciative value through photographic touting, depending on which editor this month, "rediscovers" what ever piece of the Eames' work is passing through a London auction house. This winding up of interest is really the inadvertent winding down of interest. What begins a couple of decades ago as a regeneration of the awareness of the designers' work, begins to unravel as after-waves from the original launch forty years earlier is now re-processed as the alchemy of auction-room directors offering art editors the free use of their studio-shot pictures. Given the media-driven addiction to serialising new formulas for "creative interiors", and the readiness to turn design-shopping into a design-editor's drama to bring low-budget solutions about, there is a cumulative effect. The momentum of increased, secondary market commercialism on pre-existing modes of 'orthodox consumption', changes the modus operandi altogether. And then the vivandi, too. Made to measure, interior design solutions, executed and shot for the page, or by a production company, to be shown on TV, shifts debate away from furniture based on plundering past periods for the certainties of tradition, to something 'modern'. Whether new design, or vintage/'contemporary', modern design is not the same thing as modernist design. So modern design, offering as it does repeat selling, introduces IKEA buyers to the idea that there were designers of design classics whose work can be found in London auction houses, galleries, and specialist little shops, if you know where to go. The explosion of experimental formulas for what can be chosen as your cultural identity are experiments with new ways to culturally transform domestic living space. All this is now taking over. The generation described as thirty-plus, now do the leg-work to make the programmes, or feature lay-outs, that blend all this mix-an'-match shopping together. A sub-cultural interest, balloons into a main-stream flood, pulling down the classics of the last fifty years to include them as the brand-name 'design futures', competing with the status of old brown wood antiques. Instead of hierarchies of orthodox interior design solutions based on harmonious colour blending and "the period look", there is a thousand islands effect ... where diversity fragments into consumer variation outside of categories of normative taste-cultures. The flood splurges out into a delta of personalised solutions. What else! There is no loaded value-judgement in that, either. People are going to buy what is in the market place. 'Ethnic-peasant', village crafts can all sit alongside newly-minted Wassily chairs by Marcel Breuer. Indonesian hardwood, veranda furniture can sit on maple parquet, as the living-room equivalent of what once would have been, formal, three-piece, cushioned upholstery. So-called post-modern, can sit with economically-produced, mainstream modern... and all this can be kitted out with ethnic pots and rusty tin, patched an' riveted, bowls, unfinished candle-sticks and Moroccan floor mats. | ||
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With more and more magazines and TV programmes, there is a cumulative effect as aspirations to modernity begin to outstrip feelings of social insecurity that find their resolution in reclaiming a pre-modern past as the rock on which build personal identity. Here a much larger subject rears into the rear-view mirror... that of a transformation by which identity can be re-assessed, now that old social-class identities have, to use a phrase, 'withered away'. This has happened in the context of a disintegration of class distinctions based on industrial stratification. A culture accruing to industrialism, gave way to Daniel Bell's post-industrial society, forty years ago. Since then, de-industrialisation has cleared the ground for an evolutionary culture to emerge, all based on a revolution in communications, despite the aesthetics of a pre-modern world of 'privileged power', still holding out as Tradition, personified [with a capital 'T']. There is a tension here between evolutionary change and the certainties of traditional furniture-forms that are deemed to transcend whatever is 'modern'.... (Self-delusion was always the prerequisite belief for those wedded to heroic denial.) Evolutionary change was always going activate cultural emancipation from the rigidities of "good taste" always a question only of how much money is required to acquire it. Now, this regime of "good taste", has been found wanting. So has anybody who has dared to assert what that holy grail might be. On the magazine shelves of the biggest retail distributor in the country, in a town 200 miles north of London, in Halifax, there are currently 15 titles that can be counted that cover home decor and kitchen design. (Other titles covering antiques, of which there were many, are not included.) With the liberalisation of multi-channel television, plus the disintegration of a class system based on industrial class management, the new pop-media can now present issues of cultural identity on a par with... cheffing programmes that show how it can all be bought reasonably, and cooked with a few flicks of the wrist. And, served con brio, of course. Here, the camera-work wins every time, plus slick editing. However, the in-your-eye flaunting of Eames' lounger-with-ottoman (deliberately not shown here ) leads inevitably to the induced refutation of their work: a latent counter-reaction, slowly building up. Effectively, media manufacturing will induce it, as exposure over several years of monthly publication, or weekly, multiple TV slottings, becomes 'info'-tainment soliciting in public recognised on this website matter-of-factly, (rather than the groaning of the writer's disapproval). Furthermore, furniture designers, along with their brain-children, become in the hands of editors the equivalent of soap stars, fully implying that tabloid-type spadework remains to find a way of digging the dirt on the infamy of the famous. Frank Lloyd Wright 's reputation has been altered by this process, and not just because of the speech-defying atrocity committed on his family. (That left them all dead). There were also issues of womanising and consequent betrayal. So gradually, Eames' rosewood lounger with ottoman, has become, to use a term, appropriated by the media, and with a little photo-alchemy turned into an icon-cliché. Forcibly over-ripened under the photographers studio lights the icon-cliché takes on the status of the semi-retired pop-star of conspicuous success. In a world over-flowing with rackfuls of lusciously printed, end-of-the-week supplements and hybrid-sponsored glossies (with set-piece, fashion-shoot scenarios, covering 'lifestyles for loft-style living',) there is no chance that design-gurus working in the fifties would not be role-cast for nineties soap-melos, in whatever formula, especially when they have easily identified names for their creations. Recall George Nelson's "Marshmallow sofa", Harry Bertoia's "Diamond Chair" or the same, high-back variant, "Bird Chair with ottoman". Think of Hans Wegner's "Peacock Chair", or Jacobsen's high-backed "Egg Chair"... never mind his Butterfly cafe chairs, one of which was roped into a reverse position in the mid-Sixties in order to mask out Christine Keeler's body, as she sat astride it with the back of the chair covering her otherwise unrobed pose. (For web-visitors from outside the UK, Christine Keeler was "that woman" to the British Cabinet Minister, John Profumo, who shook the Government of 1963, by lying to Parliament over his relationship to a call-girl... who, herself, had another compromising relationship going at the same time, with a high-ranking Russian diplomat. Profumo had to resign, of course. The ripple effect, one year later, probably helped voters to tick their ballot paper for the Government-in-waiting, thereby ejecting the Conservatives from office.) | ||
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In this context, the re-producibility of the chair image with or without notorious women in them has the same impact on readers/viewers as the well-known photo-posing of fifties' Hollywood divas, repeatedly proffered by photo-press agencies as their stock-in-trade, inadvertently pimping for editors who see no other choice. The result, is that ongoing reproduction of the fixed-in-time image has the opposite effect, when it is shown and shown again. The chair's structural originality, especially the designer's freshness of vision, incrementally fails on the page, as promiscuous replication of the two-dimensional icon has the effect of diminishing its significance as a chair form. When used to perpetuate the notion that the popularity of a period piece can be married off to ubiquity in the pages of design interiors' magazines, the intended regeneration of interest becomes seriously unstuck. Showing art-directed pictures of successful couples in their thirties, "chosen new home" , is obviously art-worked to stimulate the flush of desire in readers/viewers. Desire and aspiration obviously comes into play. But pushing design gurus with their named chair-designs, has the effect of calling attention to the icon in public. That kind of attention is little different in character to pimps 'window dressing their women' in the red light district. It is none other than showing off.... The price to pay for that, of course, is a damaged reputation, not for the person who is the agent of all this, but for the commandeered photo-image brought into play. (In order not to add any further damage to the Eames' reputation, any picture of the lounger that could be shown, will not be shown here.) Overexposure in the colour mags, becomes a kind of emptying out of the power of the quasi-talismanic object. Appetite is affected because consumer taste dies on the spot. Personal discovery is pre-empted by the editor's choice. The attempt to enhance readers' interest, intimates 'mass popularity' and the publicising, yet again, of "the chair designed for Billy Wilder in 1956", indicates that the piece comes with fame attached (!). Billy Wilder may have his well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest of Hollywood's comedic film-makers, but this adds not a thing to any model of a given lounger that was series' production, even if it was supposedly built for the back of one person. (! -- all of which is ludicrous, once the terms are put to print.) So far as the influence of one aspect of retrospective design is concerned, a savvy-smart public shies off the over-publicising of icons and a natural sense of exclusivity dictates that any other choice be made. Whilst it appears that the magazines have it, discriminatory taste has long moved on, when it comes to un-rediscovered furniture designs from the innovators of fifty years ago. Even so, the new magazines, with page-layouts increasingly plundered from format-leaders like "Wallpaper", will have their day, so long as readers' cupidity stays intact and they do not question how something is being presented on the page, rather than take their eye off the intended editing effects, and their ear off the sound bites of who is saying what...along with the ambience of the interiors being shown. The moment critical realisations are reached, and questions asked about process, then there may be one person less, buying into the magazine/TV programme. | ||
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