Designing a new world
- 6 Apr 06, 10:36 AM
As of today there are two iconic exhibitions to be seen in London that define our relationship with 鈥渕odernism鈥 in design. One opened this morning at the ; the other has been running for some time at a place called
Alfie鈥檚 used to be a place where you would find old ladies minding cramped stalls full of bric-a-brac and brown furniture, in the company of a mouldy dog, a monochrome TV set and - if it was raining - a few customers. Its a place I like to wander around in.
But in the past few years a new kind of dealer has turned up there: the bright young thing in a polo-neck sweater looking like an extra from a Jaques Demy movie. And while you can still find the odd bit of Georgian furniture or Haviland porcelain, there are now whole floors at Alfie's devoted to (Mum, we could have been millionaires) fifties, sixties and seventies tat.
At weekends this bit of Alfie's is usually swarming with young people, credit cards at the ready, and to my mind it forms an inadvertent counterpart to the V&A exhibition in explaining how we see modernism.
In the first place I blame lofts. Young professionals like lofts, and lofts are basically blank spaces that invite eclecticism. You need a lot of money to furnish one, money that鈥檚 likely to be going on paying the mortgage on the loft. A 1950s chair upholstered in the colours of the can be mixed and matched with stuff from Ikea without looking ridiculous 鈥 and that is Reason One for the popularity of kitsch furniture.
Reason two is that inevitable law of human behaviour: incapacity to be embarassed about owning stuff made before you were born.
Reason three is the law of rounded corners: any technology which allows you to put rounded corners on things will lead to an outbreak of rounded corners when it is invented and a reaction against them later. This happened with Quark Xpress in publishing in the 1990s; power lathes and plastic extrusion methods did it to furniture in the 1950s. Much of the furniture described as "Mid Century Classic" at Alfie's and places like it, has needlessly rounded corners - but people are buying it like candy.
Meanwhile there is an almost total absence at Alfie's of true modernist furniture from the period 1914-1939, the period covered by the new exhibition at the V&A. This may be, in part, to the amount of hot money around in London: especially fine examples of Bauhaus or Deco stuff are a good way of turning dodgy dollars into legit assets. A more depressing explanation is this: modernism is not modern enough for the modern generation of home-makers.
And the reason for that is clear once you take advantage of the wide-angle view of 1914-39 the V&A provides. Modernism was a product of the positivist, collectivist social visions of the inter-war period: fascism, communism, the American Dream. These, as we at Newsnight know from viewer feedback, are not so popular now. Irony is popular instead.
There is no possibility of irony with something like the , the Standard M枚bel or the radio. The designers of these things were deadly earnest people who believed they could change the world by fitting form to function. I don鈥檛 know what the designers of the range of Poole Pottery had in mind back in 1963 but I suspect fitting form to function was not part of their design aesthetic.
To my mind 鈥 and bombard the comments box if you want, I am trying to goad you here 鈥 a chair, compared with the masterpieces celebrated at the V&A, is just a kitsch folly. Like it is charming but you can only take so much of it.
Fifties kitsch and honey-coloured Arts & Crafts are the two big design fashion fads of our time, closely followed by Southeast Asian minimalism. Everything before 1890 is deeply out of favour ("Nobody buys brown furniture anymore - we just ship it all to Japan and the USA," says my friend who dabbles in antique restoration). But popular taste has learned to skip deftly around the true modernist style.
Maybe we will never warm to the austere straight line with which the pioneers of modernism sought liberate the world until we understand it better.
Tickets to the V&A exhibition come at a fashionably ironic nine quid, but it might be worth it if it makes you think twice about blowing your wages on a 1950's vintage bamboo cocktail bar.
PS: Designing the World is on at the V&A and will be reviewed on Newsnight Review on Friday 7 April. The Review production team has been enthusing about it but none of them will reveal if they own any Poole pottery. Watch on Friday night to see what the Review panel think.
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You raise a very interesting point, Paul, and one which taps into my deepest fears about popular atitudes towards architecture and design. I agree that it's the kitsch, 'funky' and (heaven help us) retro items that seem to be widely available, rather than the academically pure examples of design from c.1919-1980.
I'm interested professionally in the British relationship to modernism at the time it first rose to prominence here in the late 20s and early 30s, and I see many parallels with today. Then, as now, there seemed to be an acceptance (in some quarters) of the movement as a surface style with none of the serious-minded commitment to a deeper understanding of what it was attempting to say. We see this in modern retailing - I give you the styles 'DFS Modern', 'Argos Contemporary' et al, all of which imagine that the use of glass, chrome and birch constutute a modern aesthetic for today's savvy consumer. I'd argue that IKEA is the closest we come to a genuine continuation of modernist principles in mass design, but even there we see the 'retro' tosh placed in the range for those who simply can't deal with the beauty of the simple.
This is the same reason, of course, that there aren't more works of the modernist masters in the antiques sector. The truly revolutionary tone of these pieces meant that the mass-production they demanded never materialised, making them virtually collectors items at the time of their creation, let alone now.
As you suggest, education offers a way out of this sorry state. Let's hope the V&A show sparks a genuinely higher level of interest in modernism across the media. Modernism, after all, belongs not in lofts or anywhere specific but in people's lives and the way they live them. A difficult message to convey, but I am not without hope. Jonathan Ive's iPod designs alone point to a vital modernist design culture of today, and one which the public are willing to subscribe to in their millions.
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