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The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention. - Review - book review
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2000 by Paul Betts
DONALD ALBRECHT, ED. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. 205 pp.; 243 ills., 165 color plates. $49.50
The history of modern industrial design seems to be enjoying a fresh lease on life. Almost everywhere these days there are revivals and reappraisals of dusty modernist artifacts of generations past, be it Bauhaus furniture, Art Deco lamps, or 1930s home furnishings. While this cultural trend has been noted for quite some time in the well-heeled world of coffee-table books, it now pervades academic and museum culture as well. A spate of new biographies and exhibitions of late recounting the work of leading modernists reflects an ongoing general reconsideration of modern design's once-lampooned heritage. For many observers, this indirectly exposes the overdrawn account of postmodernism itself, whose oedipal efforts to ceremoniously kill off the dreams and delusions of its famous forebears in a dark round of laughter and forgetting have apparently lost their punch and, in turn, their publishers. But those who greet this development as a kind of Second Coming of High Modernism are poor prognosticators. Much of th is has to do with the fact that such modernism is less invoked as guidance for the future than renewed retrospective appreciation and historical orientation. Not to suggest, however, that this fin-de-siecle focus on modernism is simply the result of auction house antics and flea market economics. For it is precisely modernism's old grandiose visions that have attracted special interest. In large measure this is because a good number of the long-range trends predicted by design's avantgarde decades ago--including the miniaturization and dematerialization of technology, instant global communication, "cognitive engineering," and above all the rise of the designer as the main liaison between people and information systems--have all become the common coin of cyberculture. Even if its original visionaries may be long dead and the current generation of designers less inclined to drafting manifestos announcing these revolutionary changes for lay readers, the point is that the interwar dream of design as social engine ering has effectively come to pass. True, its realization has scarcely ushered in the leftist utopia that many of yesteryear's design crusaders imagined, as today's WTO protesters and environmentalists plainly recognize; yet it is a brave new world all the same.
Still, it is an exaggeration to say that design history is now unduly preoccupied with turning its not-so-distant past into a sort of prehistory of the Internet. Certainly there is some of that taking place, as a range of relatively obscure figures from the world of science and design have been rediscovered in recent dissertation theses and magazine profiles as forgotten soothsayers of the Digital Age. More striking, though, is the extent to which many modern designers of everyday things (especially household goods and furniture) have enjoyed a surprising renaissance in design and cultural studies. Indeed, it is a telling and quite unremarked reaction to the advent of virtual reality: the more digitalized and abstracted the world becomes, the more people seize on a more real and palpable one. Put differently, the global design trend toward ever more sophisticated software has in turn produced a kind of compensatory longing for yesterday's designer hardware. Not that design is unique here; by and large it is following more general developments in the visual arts. Consider the way that postmodern art's initial penchant toward video and television has created a marked backlash preoccupation with physical immediacy and in-your-face sensate experiences, what Hal Foster rightly calls the "return of the real." Such a turn of events is not as rearguard as one might imagine; after all, this kind of rethinking of the familiar and tactile in the face of rapid technological change goes to the very historical raison d'etre of modernism itself. In this way, these new trends in the visual arts (including the new "historicist" nostalgia among design publicists and curators) mark a direct return to the very font of modernist sensibility, namely questioning the very place and possibility of the aesthetic object in a world in which "everything that is solid melts into air."
It is in this context that the 1997 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, "The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention," is of great interest. Sponsored by both the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, this high-profile show attracted a sizable number of visitors and a good deal of attention. This is not so surprising in itself. The Eameses remain America's most famous design team, whose work exhibited remarkable variety and achievement over four decades. Arguably no designers were more important or influential both domestically and internationally during the first two decades after 1945. Certainly Donald Albrecht is justified in writing that the Eameses "gave shape to America's twentieth century" (p. 13). Simply recalling their many partnerships with such diverse corporations as IBM, Westinghouse, Boeing, Herman Miller Furniture Company, and Polaroid underscores their wide-ranging capacities as designers. But it is not only the high quality and evergreen n ovelty of their design work that invite praise. No less significant is the extent to which their collaborative design rests at the crossroads of various forces: abstract art and design, craft and science, reason and emotion, hardware and software, America and Europe. While the catalogue is sometimes too unreserved in blurring historiography and hagiography, perhaps best noted in Vitra Director Alexander von Vegesack's comment that the Eameses "combined an innovative use of specific materials and technologies with the timeless shape of a perfect industrial product" (p. 8), the contributors generally present a balanced and quite comprehensive view of the dramatic origins and pioneering development of what is often called the "Eames design aesthetic." They elegantly recount the Eameses' impressive output from a range of perspectives; the photo-essay "Evolving Forms" also amply chronicles their design reach across the media of fiberglass to film, plywood to pedagogy, aluminum to advertisements. One particular poi nt that several of the commentators rightly foreground as central to the Eameses' design philosophy was their unwavering belief in the power of design to marry science and culture. This was notable in the essay contributions by Philip and Phylis Morrison, together with Alan Lightman's suggestive piece on the sense of mystery and wonder suffusing the Eameses' well known science films. But their love of science went far beyond their effort to apply principles of technological rationalism and mass production to the design of everyday objects. It also found expression in their pedagogical task of "how to make fundamental scientific principles accessible to a lay audience." The numerous films and exhibitions that they made for IBM on the interface of design and science, as well as their justifiably famous 1968 film, Powers of Ten, neatly reflected this populist impulse.
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