A day at the museum - II

Next in line is a 1970 Braun transistor radio. Braun was at the forefront of the German modern industrial design with its minimalist and functional style. The reason why it caught my attention at the museum is that we had one of these pieces at my old house in Thessaloniki. My mother would often cook and listen to the damn thing. When my mother cooks there is always a TV or a radio on, except for when we have guests. Invariably, then, all the conversations around lunch time have to be conducted in a louder than usual voice which of course is very convenient for her because she is a high-school teacher and used to speaking loud. Anyways, I think we might have dumped the transistor somewhere when we moved to a new house, or perhaps it's at my grandmother's place.


As the two arch-rivals plunged into the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, they abandoned the amiability of the early Khrushchev years. Art and design became fascinated with nuclear catastrophe, spies and high-tech military gadgets. Kubrick's black comedy Dr. Strangelove captured the absurdity of the era and the production designer of the movie, Kenneth Adam designed the War Room as a concrete bomb shelter featuring a circular table where diplomacy is played like poker.

It was around that time that the space race captured the imagination of artists, architects and designers. This is - I think - by far the best room in the exhibition perhaps because it demonstrates how much of modern design smacks of the utopian (or dystopian) vision of those years. Below, a house entrance (from Alison and Smithson's House of the Future) and a chair (by Eero Aarnio) inspired by life on a spaceship.




The images of satellites and the possibility of space colonies in remote hostile planets launched the building of strange structures on earth. Some of them like the Jested Tower in Czechoslovakia were built on very unwelcoming terrain. Others, like the BT Tower were raised in the middle of London. Typical of the period, the BT Tower was actually a state secret and did not appear on offical maps until the mid-1990s, when its existence was confirmed by a government MP.





Icould not imagine how the space craze could be translated into everyday clothing, until I saw the Pierre Cardin "Cosmos" design. If you have found yourselves in posh circles of downtown London or university campuses recently, you cannot but agree that the English still love this stuff.

And then, of course, the late sixties came in all their glory and there was talk of revolution and a new society, freed from Communist or Capitalist hierarchies and fueled by new forms of social protest. In a sense, modernity itself, the object of the race (and the exhibition) until then, was disputed. My take on the period is that a lot of the protesting students were spoilt bourgeois brats, as demonstrated so vividly in this clip from Godard's La Chinoise:




One of the posters I couldn't find online to post it was the in-your-face rejection of liberal democracy by the protesting youth (it read "to vote is to die a little"). It was designed by the Atelier Populaire in May 1968. I have replaced it with another famous poster of similar tone from Atelier Populaire. Below and on the right, a part of one of my favorite exhibits, Boris Mikhailov's "Red Series" of photography, which depicted the meaninglessness of the Soviet symbols in all their kitsch glory.


Below, Mikhail Kalatozov's "Soy Cuba" conveys, through the camera-work, the energy that shook the movement of the period. It contrasts the decadence of pre-revolutionary Cuba and the moral fervor of the upcoming revolution:


Last, but not least, the unofficial logo of the exhibition, the stuff of best-selling t-shirts and, perhaps, a comment on who won the Cold War:

A day at the museum - I

A few days ago I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to see a really interesting temporary exhibition on Cold War Design. The website can be found here. It was an entertaining evening, full of insights into, to use a Marxist term, the aesthetic superstructure of the titanic clash between the USA and the USSR. On the downside, the exhibition lost some steam after the space age room and, more generally, portrayed the Soviet experiment with modern design as a priori doomed. In any case, for those in England, a visit is highly recommended, and if not for the exhibition itself, certainly for the excellent gift shop (I found miniature Trabants which made me happy). Here are my favorite posters, buildings, objects and videos in chronological order as they were roughly presented in the V&A.





In these first two posters, designed made after the end of the War, the clash of the two visions of modernity (promised by both superpowers) is evident. Skyskrapers, roads and bridges signify progress in the West, a progress promised by the advent of the Red Army in Prague and celebrated by the neo-avant-garde poster on the right. Click to enlarge, please.


This looks positively awful for a Berlin memorial (something like a cell phone tower with a couple of charred figures underneath). It was supposed to celebrate the human spirit of East Berliners not crushed by the Soviet machine - it would be called The Memorial to the Unknown Political Prisoner. Two things about this monstrosity made it appealing to me: it was supposed to be the Western counterpoint to the Soviet memorial and built on a hill opposite to it, which made the hill as important as the memorial. The second interesting thing is that the project fell through because the West Berliners either realized that minimalist abstractions are no match to Soviet heroic realism or simply found the whole thing extremely ugly.


The tower on the right is the eighth of the Sister towers that Stalin decided to build around the city of Moscow. Bottom-up Gothic structures, hierarchy, concrete Soviet modernity and an Orwellian bleakness define the buildings. The period they were built is marked by zero tolerance on the part of the regime for symbolic avant-garde or other "formalist" influences. Seven of the eight Sisters were actually built and have defined, ever since, the Moscow skyline, but this one never materialized.


Above, a magnificent piece of design produced for the literate masses, the Lexikon-80 Olivetti typewriter; manufactured objects like the Olivetti and the Vespa showed that Western industrial objects could be practical and charming at the same time. The early 50's were still not a time for too much design-related added value, but a few decades later the insights from the designers Italian Reconstruction would prove very useful to IBM.


I spent about a quarter of an hour inside the museum watching and rewatching the dreaming sequence of the adaptation of Shastakovich's musical parody Cheryomushki (Cherry Tree) - it starts at 2:45 on the embedded video. The musical was acted out in 1959, in a strange period for the Soviet Union; Khrushchev promised standards of living on a par with the West, but the Soviet system couldn't help frustrating its citizens with its inefficiency. Masha and Sasha, the newlyweds of the video, express their dim hopes of getting a fully-furnished apartment while dancing classical ballet underneath a block of flats of the Khrushcev era. The whole thing is hilarious and rather crude, but the music is really beautiful. The two superpowers were now competing not over housing, food and health care, but over appliances, kitchens and dancing spaces.


Lastly, on the right is the visual response of a human rights group from France to the peace-loving, anti-imperialist pretensions of the USSR. Of course, the dove had been originally adopted as a symbol of peace by Pablo Picasso, a famous Communist of the era.