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: 2006-12-12 10:49 pm (UTC)If I were alive in the 1930s, I don't believe I'd be saying "Germans are bad, Germans are guilty". The majority of Germans were good people, they just happened to have been used by some very clever, charismatic and bad people in positions of power. And Germans today are more or less the same as the Germans during the Hitler Administration -- good, decent people. (Most Germans over 70 today were de facto Nazis; should we still be guilting them merely for having been alive in that milieu?) Nor would I have said "Japan is bad; Japan is guilty". Japan has been around for millennia, and during most of that time, it wasn't being an expansionist aggressor. Japan and Germany were "good" before, and they're "good" now (or rather, they've always been neutral envelopes). The Japanese and Germans have always been predominantly good or neutral people. I find it astonishing that some people can have such a black-and-white view as to say that America -- a nation that has done much good and relatively little bad (especially compared to China, the USSR, et al) over the past century -- deserves to be vilified by otherwise intelligent people, and that its 300 million diverse citizens -- some of which are themselves refugees from Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere -- are guilty by citizenship. And never mind the fact that only 16% of Americans voted for Bush in the first place, nor that the criticism of his administration has been resounding from inside America for the past six years.
Your claim that Americans (in whatever way you're trying to collectivize us) are guilty of an "aesthetic and ethical wrongness of a certain habitus", which I find equally simplistic. For every example you might give of such a fault, there exists a very different example to offset it. For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln () or the 1963 Studebaker () -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time. The "American look" was distasteful to you? Well, the "British look" at the same time was dowdy (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1957TriumphTR3photo0006.jpg), fusty (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/N101.jpg) and no less garish (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/gr_daim-sp250.jpg). But I'm not going to try to claim that a "look" or the national industries which promote it, reflects anything more than the taste of some automakers; it doesn't impugn the British or Britain, no matter how much jingoism might've been trotted out in their service at the auto shows, the Festival of Britain, or anywhere else. Equally, for every Iraq or Vietnam, there's the fact that America entered WWI and WWII, even though the US had not been attacked, and without American assistance, the other Allies would surely have lost. (Were you aware that more American soldiers died in WWII than British soldiers?)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 11:03 pm (UTC)For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1961_lincoln_continental.jpg) or the 1963 Studebaker (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/avanti63rf.jpg) -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time.