A COMPLEX LEGACY.

The Works of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum New York, New York

October 12, 1999-January 9, 2000

Saint Louis Art Museum 

Saint Louis, Missouri

February 19-May 14, 2000

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

Los Angeles, California

June 25-September 11, 2000

Charles Eames declared in 1977: "Art isn't a product. It's a quality." Yet how is a quality remembered, entombed, embraced? The works of Charles and Ray Eames are ubiquitous; any adult who has sat in an American airport lounge (in the prototypical mass-produced seating they designed for several decades) or seen a multimedia slide show (a format they pioneered in the late 1950s) has been steeped in their influence, if not their names. But in the recent fervor of more institutionalized appreciation for all things mid-century, of which "The Works of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention" organized by the Library of Congress with the Vitra Design Museum is a part, the names Charles and Ray top the list of American visionaries who transformed decades of American everyday life through design and media. With their colleagues such as Eero and Eliel Saarinen, they seized the tools of mass production in an unabashed lunge for a utopia of honest materials, democratic spaces and a deeply integrated design practice ; over the course of 50 years, they extended their joint vision to encompass furniture design, textiles, collections, print media, architecture, filmmaking, installations and photography. Their greatest hits would, of course, include the fiberglass-reinforced plastic chairs manufactured by Herman Miller from 1950 until quite recently, the extraordinary though much-circulated film journey (atom to universe) in Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero (1976) and the house they designed in 1949 near Los Angeles (part of which still serves as the Eames Office) as a case study in low-cost and pre-fabricated modern building.

The retrospective celebrates the unity of art and life embodied by the couple who met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and married six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Each brought to the partnership and eventually consolidated into the business of the Eames Office, different trajectories of modernist training: Charles in architecture and industrial design, Ray in abstract art under the tutelage of Hans Hoffman in New York City. In the best of their work together (from the furniture of their early period to the films of their later years), one can see the elegant combination of their respective talent and vision; a catalog essay by their close friends and colleagues, Philip and Phyllis Morrison, stresses, for example, the "aesthetics of finish," a richness of accessory information in every detail of their films that is the unique product of their collaborative work. The exhibit also extends the idea of alliance to the many partnerships the Eameses formed with corporate entiti es and government agencies (the United States Information Agency [USIA] foremost among them) through which they demonstrated a commitment to a Depression-era populist conception of modernity, becoming in the later years ambassadors of American postwar commodity-culture. But even as the exhibit is careful to insist upon both the organicity of their vision and its joint nature, the seams of an optimistic vision of their collaboration split to reveal a more troubling occlusion of Ray from the work which was signed simply "Eames." Her marginalization reflects other contradictions of modernist art.

No doubt the Eameses' work did, as the catalog puts it, give "shape to the twentieth century," as it also followed three axes of that century's movement central to understanding the Eameses' influence: "the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's shift from making goods to producing information and the global expansion of American culture." What is at stake, however, in investigating their work now (both in the museum and elsewhere) has precisely to do with how we take the measure of those shifts. In their embrace of corporate projects and underwriters (such as IBM, Polaroid, Boeing and Westinghouse), in their polemical anti-Cold War democratizing worldview (best seen in their 1959 slide show, "Glimpses of the USA," but also in Charles's appointment to the Nixon administration's National Council on the Arts [NCA]) and in their dedication to producing affordable, yet high-quality, furniture, the Eameses' work contains the kernel of modernity's own contradictions. In such optimistically American projects we see that innovation invariably contains dystopian seeds, that the rational calculation of value and progress can spill over in into quasi-imperial conquests and exoticism, modernism-for-profit or anti-democratic idolatry.

Nowhere in my own encounter with mid-century design are Marx's insights into the modern universe and into commodity-fetishism more pertinent than they are to the work of the Eameses, for the Eames Office was, if nothing else, preoccupied with making the process of production part and parcel of the objects they produced; their endeavor was an aesthetic response to alienating labor. An example in "A Legacy of Invention" stands out: a set of drawers from the Eameses' own office, in the section entitled "Spaces." One of the few interactive elements of the show, these drawers are paired with Eames-designed walnut stools so that viewers are perched at precisely the right height and angle to open and peer into the drawers. The objects in each drawer are sorted, in abyssal playfulness, by theme and by interest for any combination of their utility, their shape, their color, their packaging, their origin: pens, candles, clay, tacks, brads, pins, paint swatches, ribbons, string, ink, tape, dolls, miniature animals, str aw ornaments, matchbooks, playbills, stamps, greeting cards, perfume, soap, etc. These things, in their arrangement and in their individual juxta-position, provided the Eameses with not only the raw materials but with a way of seeing that is evident in their entire oeuvre. One of the Eameses' variant picture decks, House of Cards (the originally version was produced in 1952), displayed in the exhibit, is a direct translation of the drawers into a kit for new vision: each element contains beauty or interest on its own, yet in combination (e.g., thread paired with leaves) aesthetic and pragmatic possibilities are revealed with each gleeful opening of a drawer or positioning of a card. Much of their early design work, in fact, anticipated the combinatory pleasures at play in the multimedia installations and films. In the final drawer of the exhibit lies a cardboard box, containing a pink plate with a tag that reads, "Depression glass pattern called American sweetheart.'"

Everything about the exhibition is calculated to emphasize symmetry and cooperation. An enormous photo of Ray in a cat mask is answered by one of Charles in a clown mask; Ray's early fabric designs are encased next to Charles's first architectural project; the photographs display them together constantly (editors of the Cooper-Hewitt brochure went so far as to circle them on a black and white group photograph). One feels a bit curmudgeonly in introducing any discordant notes into this harmonious whole, yet it is clear from testimony in the introductory Eames Office Video Oral History Project--produced for the Eames Office by Charles and Ray's grandson Eames Demetrios and including interviews with their colleagues and former employees--as well as from a catalog essay by Joseph Giovanni, that Ray faced a struggle for recognition. This is in part due to sexism:in "The Office of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser The Material Trail," Giovanni suggests that Ray was "a victim of common contemporary prejudices, which wer e perpetuated even through her obituaries in 1988." Such a view is echoed by a female Eames Office coworker interviewed in the oral histories who describes the sexist pressures of traditional domesticity that forced Ray into Charles's shadow.

But it is not sexism alone that is responsible for burying the traces of their collaboration. Several other Eames Office coworkers faced battles for credit for their work and ideas; some (including the prominent designer Harry Bertoia) quit over the issue of attribution. A third perspective from another female coworker confirms Charles's lust for the limelight:

I saw this in action when he designed the house for John Entenza (Case Study House #9). He and Ray came here for dinner one night, and he was thinking about the design and asked what I would do if I were designing a house. I said I'd have a room, a studio without any windows, just a skylight because I would want it to be a room that would be completely private in, turned inward, so I wouldn't be distracted by looking at anything outside. And literally, three weeks later, he came over with a model of the house and said, "Here is a room without any windows, it's a study, completely private, turned inward." He used my words, and innocently--he didn't even remember. I was staggered. What Charles did was to organize the whole thing.

Since many of their joint projects (as well as, curiously, those of their heirs) have borne Charles's signature alone, one of the daunting tasks of "A Legacy of Invention" is to restore a sense of parallel inspiration and joint work, yet the tug of accumulated histories of imbalance and misattribution often renders such parallelism strained and artificial. Another catalog entry, from the section entitled "Beauty," remarks: "Charles heard the music of Bach in the splash of soapy water on an asphalt school-yard--and made the film Blacktop [1952]. Ray saw beauty in the shape of a utilitarian leg splint--and made elegant sculptures." In each beauty was revealed, despite the inherent differences. Giovanni's essay seeks to revise the history of the couple, suggesting convincingly that it is not a simple matter of fairness that is at stake. Instead he argues that the eclipse of Ray "obscures an entire body of thought deeply indebted to a major artistic tradition [the American Abstract Artists movement] that otherwi se remains unacknowledged." The occlusion of Ray thus stems from an emphasis on structure rather than on richly dimensionalized space (the preoccupation not only of the Abstract Artists but of European abstractionists as well); their ideas were products of distinct genealogies, and, in Giovanni's words, the "complexity and ambiguity of the work lies partially in its hybrid character."

The exhibit's parallelism and the catalog's correctives remain, however, formal answers to a denser social problematic: the undertow of social transformations challenging the ideology of inspiration and self-invention that subtends the Eameses' distinctly American practice and pedagogy. The Eameses, in other words, worked at the juncture of corporate and national interests that cannot be subsumed by the rhetoric of individual or joint inspiration, precisely because such rhetoric elides the "unity of disunity" on the underside of the modern: the forces of transnationalism, feminism and other social struggles and the limits of representation itself as a rationalist enterprise. Such pressures are especially evident in the multi-media slide shows, many of which Charles and Ray produced for corporate events, museums or educational institutions. Their slide show produced under the aegis of the USIA for the 1959 American National Exhibition, "Glimpses of the USA," stitches the rhetoric of the later Powers of Ten to the Cold War: Americans and Russians wake up under the same stars, travel through their days under the same physical organizations of time and space and feed themselves from the same earth. This literal American grain is assured in its social progressive vision, much as the British documentarian John Grierson group's investment in social reform was in the 1930s' EMB/General Post Office films; the narration (male "voice of God," as with much of their other work) confidently bolsters the power of its multiple projection, which, said Charles, "was simply a method to employ all the viewer's senses ... [to make] the American way seem credible." The scientism of "Glimpses of the USA" now seems astonishing if not naive, its faith in rational explication to bridge antagonistic political structures either melancholic or quaint. Through such retrospective projections, though, we are challenged to ask ourselves, "What succeeded in this modernist project?" What has changed? And, incidentally, is the language of postmode rnism adequate to characterize the shift?

The films provide a partial answer, for it is in the latent photographic image that the Eameses' scientific approach to vision found its objective correlative. The couple made roughly 110 films over more than 30 years, and they produced a slide library of over 350,000 entries for reference and use in their various projects. Again, one of the interviewees in the Eames Office Video Oral History Project provides context: Richard Donges suggests literally that "Charles saw through the camera." Elsewhere in the catalog, the citation reads "Charles and Ray saw through the camera," again foregrounding the politics of attribution. Images of the two of them at work on the films confirm that Ray's artistic vision was crucial to their production. The films' obsession with vision, as evidenced particularly by their dependence on macro lenses, strategies of magnification, the manipulation of motion (stop motion and changes in speed) and animation declare a practice based less on formal experimentation and structural inte rvention than on the documentary capacities of the image to reveal the hidden physical and mathematical structures (and beauty) of everyday life.

The method of exhibiting the films in "A Legacy of Invention" is two-fold: video monitors throughout the exhibit display those films that are ostensibly relevant to the exhibition's sections: "Space" (which encompasses their house and the film about it, House: After Five Years of Living [1955]), "Culture" (which includes the current Eames Office recreation of "Glimpses of the USA"), "Beauty" (which includes Tanks [1970-1] a film on the Eameses' aquariums produced for the Charles Norton Lectures at Harvard), "Science" (which includes the Eameses' 1976 version of Powers of Ten (made with IBM funding) and the second version of their study of motion Tops [1969]) and "Furniture" (which includes the Herman Miller production videos).

In order to give due attention to the films, the curators have strung together nine in a video loop in a separate auditorium, and they have reserved entire rooms for a ceiling-to-floor projection of Blacktop (1952) and for a video presentation (on a horizontal monitor) of Powers of Ten. (It is worth mentioning that the titles and dates provided for the videos are often at odds with information provided elsewhere in the exhibit and in the catalog.) However, the auditorium sound was poor and overwhelmed by the crowds outside the open room testing the few pieces of furniture on which visitors could actually sit. While the furniture may be the most widely acknowledged element of the Eameses' output, the films are the most telling reminders of their visionary concept of modern design as an element for social change. The nine films on display (a portion of what is now available on videotape in a five-volume set from 'the Eames Office) bear witness to the Eameses' preoccupation with the capacity of cinema to produc e and anatomize motion toward beauty and "the good." Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), an examination of old toys in macro proximity, puts the agenda baldly in its narration: the film pays homage to the lost knack of making toys that were "direct and unembarrassed," wherein there was "nothing self-conscious about [their] use of materials" ("what is wood is wood"), and that may provide for us a "clue about what is the best of its time, including our own."

Forthright, mass-produced, unselfconscious, rational, close-up and well-constructed, the toy trains are as much a model for the Eameses' own film practice as they are for mass-produced design. To see the genius of objects regarded as quotidian and outmoded is the task, for example, of Babbage (1968), a film on the mechanical antecedent of the computer called the "Difference Engine," invented by the Englishman Charles Babbage. To see in the variable motion of people a form of mass calculation rationalized by mathematics is the focus of IBM At the Fair (1965), produced as a souvenir of the IBM pavilion at the New York World's Fair. And a vision of the renewal of science in architecture as belonging to photographic and cinematic time is the result of the still-photography meditation on the baroque in Two Baroque Churches in Germany (1956).

That such an investment in unmediated perception, scientific rationality and the beauty of the everyday could glide from the camera to the chair to the arrangement of objects on a floor is the achievement of the Eameses' project. Its investments and its mobility do rest on the light (aesthetic and political) of a fleeting moment in Los Angeles, on the promises of plenitude of postwar production and on the vigorous stakes in the arts of the NCA and schemes of international exportation of American culture. The current interest in this moment of the middle of the century, however, is not so much millennial hoopla as it is a mode of processing its passing and seizing upon the fluidity, piracy, sampling and hypertextuality in a new world brought to us by digital technology. To see the Eames retrospective can trigger nostalgia with its attendant pain or can challenge us to produce and embrace the struggles for new designs for living in the face of decreasing arts funding, corporate control over public space, anti- democratic household labors and rigid separations of art and life. For those of us living with Eames artifacts, we might sit on them anew as residual traces of modernity in the mirage of the postmodern. They remain comfortable, beautiful and honest in their plasticity, but there are new chairs, new imprints, new visions and new names to discover.

AMY VILLAREJO is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Film at Cornell university. She is author of Queen Christina (1995) and Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, forthcoming from Duke University Press.