My wife got a text around noonish advising her that my donkey would be taking me home. She was not particularly surprised. Sure enough, a little bit later, I appeared, tottering and indistinct in mien. I was still under the influence - again, no surprise, since that morning I had been unable to form the word for “wheelchair” - it was, I said, searching about le mot juste, a “chair with wheels.” I was also convinced that the dentist would use a tool that was both a scissors and a pliers, and was known as a plizzers.
I couldn’t get to sleep last night, which of course keeps you up even more - but then I realized that I had farg-all to do in the morning. I mean, I was waking up in order to go back to sleep. This took the pressure off. Woke at the proper time, took the pills. It was 6:20. I did not not have to leave for 50 minutes. So! What shall we do?
Why, webwork, of course. Rote webwork. There’s a lot of the August Main Street features that need to be resized, sharpened, and given a 1 px border, so let’s get to it.
(By “August” I mea”August 2022,” he humblebragged. Well, no, straight-up bragging, I suppose)
After half an hour I was feeling a bit like Kirk after the . . . what were they, Melosians? Slowlosians? Arseonians The “Wink of an Eye” ep. Sigh; googling.
Scalosians! Close. I always hated those guys. Never liked the female character. Did not know she was married to Darren McGavin. Anyway. She drops a pill in his coffee, and everything starts to get reeeeeaaaaaal slow. It was like that. Well, better go shower before it really starts to hit.
The effects continued in the shower, which led to a command decision to disengage and concentrate on drying and dressing. This was achieved, after which I made a cup of coffee for my wife and woke her. I have a dim recollection of getting into the car; arriving; nothing about the wheelchair; then, handed a cup of Lethe juice.
The next thing I remember I was making a London Broil sandwich. Later, however, I did not recall eating it. Straight to bed. Woke two hours later, looked at my watch, and was horrified: I’D MISSED THE APPOINTMENT.
Oh - wait. Ah! Right.
So that was today. More or less. Now I'm awake and it's back to work.
What do you do when everyone else is finding horrors in the past - slithery alabaster horrors sliding their tentacles through the loam of the human record, injecting poison into every stratum - and your discipline doesn't seem to be loaded with evil? You're eager to help! You want to be an ally! So you reexamine the past, interrogate it. That’s a commonly used word, and it’s amusing, as it makes you think of some hard-boiled precinct captain propping up a dead body in a chair under a single light and grilling him. Confess! You were there, we know it! The more you deny you had anything to do with it, the more we know you’re guilty!
So what has to be tossed on the pyre this week?
Furniture.
Mid-Century Modernism’s Racial History
What do we know about the history of these designs? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?
The author is a modern academic, which is to say a kite in the sky, twitching in the breeze on a cloudless day and pretending it’s calling down lightning. Well, let's investigate.
You might brace yourself to discoverthat the designers were Nazi-adjacent, the furniture was endorsed by George Rockwell, it was wildly popular with Klansman, who bought it because of its Pure Nordic Origins?
Not exactly.
Many pieces of modern design furniture sold today are indebted to popular designs of the postwar decades: chairs, tables, and storage devices by highly collectible names like Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Paul McCobb, T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Hans Wegner. Clearly these designs have appeal now — but what do we actually know about their history? Who was buying this furniture when modernism was new, and why?
The first thing a savvy reader of this article will note is that, of the names I listed in the previous paragraph, all but one are male, and all are white.
Savvy readers know that these attributes are intrinsically bad, unless immediately modified.
Such demographics reflect a massive power discrepancy in the mid-century design world. It was a career marketplace where white men predominated; women and designers of color were less numerous, and their work as an associate in a design office meant their creativity often went uncredited.
I watched “Mad Men” too. Is it any surprise to anyone that white men predominated chair design, given that white men pretty much dominated everything? Here’s another shocking fact from perfidious history: white men also dominated refrigerator design and automotive dashboard design and aircraft bomber design and probably canned dog-food label design.
But the history is more complex than just the question of who designed this furniture. The meaning of these designs for mid-century consumers can be found in how the designs were advertised, how they were used to advertise other products, and how — in short — they appeared in the media landscape of the postwar decades. When we look at “mid-century modernism” through the lenses of mid-century media, it begins to look different from the design attitude we think we know.
Or, as they say: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. Let me summarize what follows: the clean spare lines of the furniture were used to populate suburban houses, which were in redlined neighborhoods, and also cleanliness = whiteness = racial purity. Also, women were used in ads that objectified female beauty, if you can believe that.
Really.
. . . in the mid-century years, chairs by white designers kept white women both on view and in their place.
Sure they did:
There's nothing helpless about Rita, unless you consider the difficulty of getting out of that chair. But I don't think that's the point of the ad.
The designs were somehow invested in exerting control. Interestingly, when you take a broad view of modern design in Life magazine over the decade of the 1950s, one of the places it appears most frequently is in advertising for cleaning products — floor waxes, vacuum cleaners, rug shampoos — as well as products that would make your home seem newly cleaned, like paint or wall-to-wall carpeting.
If you are still absorbing that H-bomb, let me repeat: modern ads for modern products used modern furniture. Also, they did not, as you see in the ad from which I took the Bleat banner. That one used "traditional" styles, Williamsburg hangovers. I suppose that was also a matter of white supremacy, given the origins of the country.
People often talk about modern design seeming very “clean,” but in the 1950s it was the prop of cleanliness. Modern design’s vigilant stance against dirt in the advertising realm of Life is not just a form of control — it is also a form of exclusion. The protagonists of these advertisements are invariably white women. The modern designs in their clean homes in racially segregated suburbs become props to reinforce their whiteness, and to insist on racial exclusion.
Using a modern chair in an ad is literally insisting on racial exclusion.
Let’s find an example. Do I have any? I do. Lots.
Well . . . it's Orientalism! That's othering.
The protagonists of these advertisements are invariably white women.
Well . . . patriarchy!
LOOK AT ALL THE EXCLUSION GOING ON HERE
Etc. BTW, I just swiped them at random from my own collection.
To repeat: The modern designs in their clean homes in racially segregated suburbs become props to reinforce their whiteness, and to insist on racial exclusion.
The modern designs become props to insist on racial exclusion.
If you see that in this, I think you're looking for something that is not, in fact, contained in a picture selling color-coordinated fridges to middle-class women.
She goes on to say that Ebony ads featuring modern furniture were different, because they were aspirational, and used the furniture to indicate a social position, an attainment of modernity and success - as if that wasn’t the exact same message in the Life magazine ads. This is what racial essentialism does to people’s brains: White people were obsessed with cleaning their house, but Black people wanted to look like they had money.
Why is “mid-century modern” so popular today?
Today? It’s been revived for two decades.
These designs have, once again, taken on new meanings in our 21st-century world. But, to the extent that they still signify exclusion or control of bodies — to the extent that the singular lounge chair, silhouetted against a window, puts the sitter’s body on display for everyone else in the room — we should all think twice about how we use modern design.
Ah. Ahhh. There you have it.
We should all think twice about how we use (this thing no one else pointed out was problematic but now I have and it was brave and I'm already getting death threats on Twitter)
I don’t think the author thinks she should think twice, because she knows what’s what. But WE - meaning, you - should really interrogate and unpack what you’re doing when you express an aesthetic opinion that favors the blonde-wood end tables with tapered legs that culminate in copper footings. You may mean well, but it’s important that you need to know the whole story.
Yes, yes, who cares? Stupid article. Another White Woman finding sins from seventy years ago to expiate her own complicity.
Inner Party members may have these chairs, because they would appreciate them for the proper reasons, but Outer Party members are discouraged from expressing a preference. Continued insistence on separating the aesthetic from the apparatus of systemic whiteness is grounds for a note in the files. It may not be sufficient to open an investigation, unless the subject expresses an interest in other problematic elements of interior design.
We do not know what those are at the moment but we are certain we will find them soon.
It’s 1929, again. I don’t know why I keep returning to this year. It’s always had a strange, doomed appeal, for obvious reasons, but you’d think I’d give you 1928 once in a while.
Well, this is what I clipped, for whatever reason. Sonoma County, Cal-ee-forn-aye-ay. There’s not a lot of interesting stuff here, but that’s a lesson in itself. Right? Right?
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Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?
Keep in mind this story when you see the next. |
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Air Festival.
It seems odd to have an aeronautics festival at the same time people are talking about stage routes, no? As if one era had been laid atop the other. |
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Snappy stuff from the popular Mr. B.
The LeHavre expansion was just the latest addition.
From 1825 until 1865, the capacity of ocean-going vessels doubled, and steamships began to call at the Port of Le Havre. New port facilities were required, and the Port of Le Havre decided to expand to the east. The Vauban Basin was built in the early 1840s, and the Leure Basin opened in 1958. In 1845, the Port of Le Havre's entry was widened from 32 to 45 meters, and the Florida Basin was built in 1947. In the early 1860s, the Transatlantic lock and the New York Quay were built.
Despite these ambitious expansions, the capacity of ocean-going vessels doubled again, and new expansions were necessary in the Port of Le Havre. The Bellot Basin came into operation in 1887, forming (with the Leure Basin) the "great basins." The Tancarville canal came into service, and railways arrived at the Port of Le Havre in 1847. In 174, the port entry was again widened to 100 meters with the demolition of the Francois I tower.
New modern facilities appeared in the Port of Le Havre. No. 4 dry dock was completed in 1864.
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This is almost something of a cliche, out of the movies.
The article goes on to note that it’s the second accident for the fellow; a few weeks earlier he’d been helping a neighbor remove a tree, slipped, and fell down a hill.
Gravity was not his friend that year. |
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High school.
They suggested you should dress like this in High School, because it’s what a man did.
That'll do. See you tomorrow.
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