The power of the material object jonathan ventura
the political potential of everyday objects
the semiotics of a politicised space The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was a huge success, proclaiming the power of the British Empire through a plethora of designed objects that seemed, to some, to herald an age of machines and the negation of nature and beauty .1 In many ways the Great Exhibition revealed a schism between two factions of design: one that favoured narrative decorative design and one that proposed functional design. This deep and meaningful schism echoed throughout the next 160 years, resurfacing again and again. The transition from Art Nouveau to mass-produced products can be traced through the works of the English textile designer William Morris (1834– 1896), the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser (1834–1904), the Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray (1878–1976), and the American industrial designer Raymond Loewy (1893–1986). By the mid-1960s, the Ulm school of design, based on Bauhaus principles and typical of this schismatic ideological dilemma within design discourse, was split between Max Bill who favoured a functionalist market approach and Tomas Maldonado who argued for ethics as a basis for design. This is a moment worth further examination as it is still the current reality designers find themselves in. The political potential of objects and the danger in their use relies on the innate nature of politics, the various norms inherent in everyday objects, not the one-off or design art pieces. 2 In an unapologetic example, being offered a pink laptop because you are a woman is ten times more dangerous than viewing a table designed to represent the latest episode in a current war zone. As design professionals of all disciplines deal with daily life in all its complexities, they cannot afford to deal solely with either aesthetics or function but must take into consideration sociocultural context as well. I wish to present here three adjunct and congruent themes that address the political power of objects as used in a particular political context: the commodity situation, the hermeneutic situation, and the design situation. The common denominator is the ability and the need of designers to assume the role of cultural interpreters.
Sharon Danzig
Muslim prayer in an unrecognised Bedouin settlement
1 commodity situations The dialogue between objects and the spaces in which they are situated is enticing for semioticians and political researchers alike. Boundaries erected to mark and create material delimitations can be found all around us. It is not only the walls, barriers, and fences of policy makers and urban planners that create this seemingly endless array of spatial partitioning however, the actions of individuals within those spaces can also manifest innate, personalised rebellions against official boundaries. Situating an ordinary and nonpolitical object within a specific spatial context can become a political statement, imbuing the users of that object with symbolic power. For instance, above, when Bedouins hold prayer in areas where Israeli authorities have removed ‘illegal’ settlements, this can constitute an act of a spontaneous and rebellious nature. Their devotions and the placement of their prayer carpets in this specific context shift the balance of power, even minutely, by reframing the boundaries of the space. The Cave of the Patriarchs, right, is a place in which a continuous dialogue regarding the process of designing spaces through a complex choreography of objects occurs. The placement and reorganisation of objects in these spaces create a situation in which the actual users (Muslim and Jewish believers) manifest their needs vis-à-vis the constraints presented by Israeli authorities. The unique attributes of this place therefore lie not only in its geopolitical reality but also in the possibilities and situations created and maintained by the believers’ ever- shifting status quo. An almost freestyle arrangement of plastic monobloc chairs outlines and maintains the temporal territory of the women’s section during a Jewish exception in an area of the Cave of the
Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque that is used daily as a mosque. 3 The banality of the chairs renders those women’s actions more powerful, almost negating the chairs’ design in favour of their occupation of space. While most of the chairs are vacant, their multitude in such a small place emphasises their existence as objects that take up space. In other words, the design of the situation, not the object itself, imbues the users’ action with meaning and a new ideology.
Oren Sagiv
3 The Status Quo of 1994 addressed the arrangements for sharing the site between Jews and Muslims. To prevent friction between the two religions, the cave is split into two hermetic sections: Jewish and Muslim. For twenty days a year, however, on special religious holidays and for twenty-four hours each time, one of the faiths takes control of the whole compound. These days are called Jewish or Muslim exceptions.
1 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999 2 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
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