In the forward-thinking realm of digital culture, few anticipate the day when shimmering CD-ROMs will be shelved alongside unplayable 8-tracks in thrift stores. Fewer still ponder the fate of those poor Mac Pluses, NeXT boxes, and slow modems. These objects once marked a pinnacle of technological innovation but now reside in a junk heap of beige plastic.
Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 18851945 is a stately exhibition that rescues deÞnitive objects of futures past. With a careful selection of vintage painting, sculpture, furniture, housewares, and commercial art, the show traces international design history in the modern age. It reveals the considerable role designers have played in easing future shock and selling political thought.
Though the exhibit's chronology ends with World War II, the show reveals the timeless, seductive quality of effective design. The objects reþect the evolution of tech design over the last 100 years. The droopy, natural look of late 19th-century art nouveau, for example, was a cosmetic resistance to the mark of the machine. Early telecommunications systems and radios were disguised in Gothic casings.
A section celebrating America's love affair with modernization points to how change was Þnessed with ever-futuristic tie-in souvenirs: gleaming sci-Þ radios, skyscraper-shaped bookcases, and sleek chrome miniatures of the 1939 World's Fair Trylon and Perisphere. The works of futurists, the more politicized Italian counterpoint to America's love of the future, carry this visual theme into blatant propaganda. Though futurists believed in the "renewal of human sensibility brought about by great discoveries of science," the idea has inherent ties to industry- and government-controlled images. With the infamous three-dimensional Continuous Portrait of Mussolini and striking fascist political posters from Italy and Germany, the show issues a dazzling, still pertinent warning: Design can be dangerous.
Surveying the graceful Bauhaus appliances, I couldn't help but think of multimedia PCs. Like those computers, the Bauhaus objects blur the distinction between work and pleasure. Sound familiar?
Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885-1945 is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this summer and travels internationally through 1999.
STREET CRED
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