Design commentary as propaganda
Dec. 9th, 2006 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt may well be because I came to it immediately after listening to a podcast on socialism by Tony Benn and reading an article by the author of Why Do People Hate America?, but the fascinating 1958 design film "The American Look" struck me as outrageous peacetime propaganda -- a highly selective arrangement of the tools of a culture in order to show that culture in the best possible light. (Click the picture to watch the whole 28 minute film.)
"The American Look (A Tribute to the Men and Women who Design)" was financed by Chevrolet, and a chunk of it showcases the design of their 1959 Impala model at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But it could just as well have been financed by the government, so relentlessly does it harp on the themes of freedom and individualism. "By the way things look as well as the way they perform," crows the narrator over a relentlessly triumphalist orchestral score, "our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accomodations expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice."
Oddly enough, though, the film calls to mind nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda movies that were showing at Christian Kracht's booklaunch. And, just as insecurity lay behind the confident, Utopian tone of those films, so it underpins this American film too. Certainly the late 1950s was a time of optimism, affluence and consumerist expansion in the US, a time still bathed in the glow of the military victories of World War II. But there's something uneasy in the film's harping on the essential Americanness of Modernist design, when so much of the architecture and furniture design on display here looks more Scandinavian or German. Only the grotesque, elongated, decorative and gothic Impala looks like a truly American design, and it strikes a very different note to the restrained, sparse and spare Modernist designs. (Better suited, in fact, to Postmodernism -- which raises the question of whether pomo came along simply because Modernism wasn't essentially American enough.)
The Impala's Space Age streamlining points to another insecurity, one I outlined in my AIGA Voice article Creativity and the Sputnik Shock. The central thesis of this film -- the idea that good design goes hand-in-hand with American "freedom of individual choice" -- was at that very moment being disproved by the success of the Soviet space program. On October 4, 1957 the communists had successfully launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. America reeled, throughout the late 50s, with a keen sense of its own educational, technical and creative inadequacy. As a result, money was poured into creativity research -- and into design and lifestyle propaganda like this film.
All propaganda, no matter how Utopian, optimistic, and triumphalist, raises fears; all that's left unsaid seems to gather just outside the frame, a threatening black cloud. In my case, when I watch "The American Look", I don't just worry about the people excluded from the ideal scenarios depicted. I also wonder whether all design writing -- and I've done my share -- isn't just a more subtle version of this kind of propaganda. Just like the film, we design writers like to point to the "ever-improving good taste" of the public. We like to select only the most advanced and beautiful designs and suggest that, soon, they'll predominate. And we like to evoke futuristic scenarios like the ones in the final shots of this film, in which rocket cars and dome houses dominate the landscape. Yet fifty years after this film was made, mock-Colonial and faux-rustic farmhouse styles are more likely to define the American design landscape than bubble jets and space craft. Put it down to "the freedom of individual choice", perhaps.
"The American Look (A Tribute to the Men and Women who Design)" was financed by Chevrolet, and a chunk of it showcases the design of their 1959 Impala model at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But it could just as well have been financed by the government, so relentlessly does it harp on the themes of freedom and individualism. "By the way things look as well as the way they perform," crows the narrator over a relentlessly triumphalist orchestral score, "our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accomodations expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice."
Oddly enough, though, the film calls to mind nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda movies that were showing at Christian Kracht's booklaunch. And, just as insecurity lay behind the confident, Utopian tone of those films, so it underpins this American film too. Certainly the late 1950s was a time of optimism, affluence and consumerist expansion in the US, a time still bathed in the glow of the military victories of World War II. But there's something uneasy in the film's harping on the essential Americanness of Modernist design, when so much of the architecture and furniture design on display here looks more Scandinavian or German. Only the grotesque, elongated, decorative and gothic Impala looks like a truly American design, and it strikes a very different note to the restrained, sparse and spare Modernist designs. (Better suited, in fact, to Postmodernism -- which raises the question of whether pomo came along simply because Modernism wasn't essentially American enough.)
The Impala's Space Age streamlining points to another insecurity, one I outlined in my AIGA Voice article Creativity and the Sputnik Shock. The central thesis of this film -- the idea that good design goes hand-in-hand with American "freedom of individual choice" -- was at that very moment being disproved by the success of the Soviet space program. On October 4, 1957 the communists had successfully launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. America reeled, throughout the late 50s, with a keen sense of its own educational, technical and creative inadequacy. As a result, money was poured into creativity research -- and into design and lifestyle propaganda like this film.All propaganda, no matter how Utopian, optimistic, and triumphalist, raises fears; all that's left unsaid seems to gather just outside the frame, a threatening black cloud. In my case, when I watch "The American Look", I don't just worry about the people excluded from the ideal scenarios depicted. I also wonder whether all design writing -- and I've done my share -- isn't just a more subtle version of this kind of propaganda. Just like the film, we design writers like to point to the "ever-improving good taste" of the public. We like to select only the most advanced and beautiful designs and suggest that, soon, they'll predominate. And we like to evoke futuristic scenarios like the ones in the final shots of this film, in which rocket cars and dome houses dominate the landscape. Yet fifty years after this film was made, mock-Colonial and faux-rustic farmhouse styles are more likely to define the American design landscape than bubble jets and space craft. Put it down to "the freedom of individual choice", perhaps.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-09 09:04 pm (UTC)I think that there is a thread that continues onward from the Eames, although it's sometimes difficult to follow. Are you familiar with Wharton Esherick (http://www.levins.com/esherick.html)? Actually, knowing you, you've probably been to his museum in Pennsylvania. Although Esherick was a contemporary of the Eames, he stayed truer to the Arts & Crafts ethos, and produced wonderful hand-crafted stuff right up to his death in 1970.
And he wasn't alone. George Nakashima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nakashima), Sam Maloof (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Maloof), Tage Frid (http://risd.edu/about_profiles.cfm?type=faculty&profile=faculty_profile_63.cfm), Bart Prince (http://www.bartprince.com/) and other Americans have soldiered on, producing work consistent with A&C ideals.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-09 10:05 pm (UTC)I know of Maloof's rockers, but I'm still partial to old classic comb-backed windsor chairs. There's always one detail too many in Maloof's stuff, I think (this from someone who likes Emile Gallé etageres):
Guess I like my spare stuff very spare, and my busy stuff very busy.
I don't know much about Tage Frid, but I like his stools. I looked up Bart Prince, who seems to enjoy to break down the divide between inside and outside, and favors a dramatic maple leaf-ish radial/circular theme in his work, which I would like to see more of in contemporary residential architecture. The closest approximation I know here in the East is James Rose's house (http://www.jamesrosecenter.org/) in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
Many people who now work in wood, glass, metal and ceramics tend to drift away from pure form and instead resort to goofy, literal animal tropes and the like. It becomes depictive rather than evocative. There's a danger in becoming too facile, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-09 10:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-10 12:15 am (UTC)Actually, I don't have to tell "the people who rule us" (as you so grandly put it) a blessed thing, since they're already keenly aware of these facts. That's why for better or worse they're running things, and those peddling lofty ideas which often bear little actual relation to human nature are not.
In many cases this is probably for the best, since when idealistic dreamers with ambitious designs do on occasion come to power, they seem to get the common man--of which they profess love, but in reality usually harbor a withering contempt--into a great deal of trouble (war, civil strife, unemployment, poverty, economic stagnation, starvation, political purges, etc). Best case scenario is that these do-gooder apparatchiks merely infantilize John Q. Public, making him a ward of the state. Citizen? Yes. Drone? No thanks--I'd rather be a fully-fledged human being who is at liberty to exercise his faculties.
Fact is, there will always be some sort of power structure, and an elected official is easier to remove than an entire ideology. It's easy to loll about on one's high horse if one never finds oneself in a position to make tough real-world decisions; even the most noble of us wishes to remake the world in our own image, but tinkering with the economic/political machinations based on wishful thinking or ideology rather than what actually works just hurts average people.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-10 02:10 am (UTC)You imply that 'human nature' is closer to the way of life that the modern western state imposes on us than to the dreams of utopians such as William Morris or even Jesus (millions of 'common' Latin Americans and Africans would cite Jesus' vision of life as a more attractive and true to them than that hoyed on them by their governments and the G8-controlled markets). Just because the state sours and breaks many adults, don't ever doubt for a minute that they are children who want to love, play, and be loved.
In the face of goverments who are prepared to kill wholesale to protect their banks' and business' profits, surely we can only say that they are making the wrong 'tough real-world decisions'. When the World Bank etc. starts sharing out equally what the world has to offer among all the nations instead of hoarding the wealth in such countries as yours and mine, then we'll know that someone has made the right 'tough real-world decision'. Until then, we can take it as read that the people ruling us are still greedy, evil, tastless bastards.