authentic imposters
design | consumption by melissa jacques
accessibility exclusion ubiquity rarity style
moulding the mini-me
the Eames plywood chair takes centre stage as the designer-object of choice. Herman Miller’s current marketing strategy for this icon provides an almost textbook illustration of the subjectification of the object that, according to Foster, facilitates the self-interpellation of the consumer. If Foster is right, and the ‘designed subject’ strolling the virtual aisles of the cultural Megastore is the monster child of the ‘constructed subject’ of postmodernism, then the animated Eames chair of the Herman Miller ad campaign signals an even more perverse twist in the consumerist loop. In two advertisements for this campaign, the Eames plywood chairs function like Foster’s mini-subjects. In the first advertisement, we see a coffee table accompanied by four of the iconic chairs. The caption is a play on words: Herman Miller with four-of-a-kind. Eames Molded Plywood Chairs & Table. They do everything but fold. Here the chairs have morphed into post-millennial designed subjects endowed with a kind of obstinate agency. They may not be the ideal poker buddies, but they have staying power. The scene of the second advertisement is less homely, a little more ominous. The setting is an office you’d find in a hardboiled detective novel. There are two chairs. One is positioned as if engaged in surveillance; the other is perched on a pile of books with its back panel wedged under the handle of the door. The door has a sign barely visible in its partially covered window. The caption to the ad reads: Herman Miller fights Crime. Eames Molded Plywood Chair. A small price for design security . The sign in the window reads: KEEP OUT . The exclusivity of the gathering is reinforced by the caption Authenticity Rules printed in red on the facing page of the magazine. At the bottom of this second image, there is exhibition information for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair that took place during May of 2003. Above this information is the following sentence: From Alvar Aalto to Charles and Ray Eames, Herman Miller celebrates original design and original designers. Needless to say, knockoffs aren’t invited to the party. The emphasis on authenticity can be understood simply as a recognition of the designers themselves. However, the way this purity narrative plays out says less about intellectual property and more about profit. It also extends beyond plywood into the realm of moulded fiberglass and plastic. Herman Miller no longer makes the fiberglass shells that, together with the plywood models, made Eames a household name in mid-century America. Having moved from fiberglass to plastic, they’ve also changed the measurements of the legs available for each model. What this means for people who want to buy legs for their ‘authentic’ shells is that they have to buy them from Modernica, a company that produces fiberglass shells on the original presses. Representatives of both Herman Miller and the Eames Office have openly criticised Modernica for their appropriation of the original designs. 6 As someone with four shells and no legs to go with, I have to ask: What’s a girl to do? v
To understand our current fascination with mid-century design, we need look no further than one of the twentieth century’s most ubiquitous design-objects: the Eames moulded plywood chair. The tension between the ethics of what interior design magazines call the modern aesthetic and the cultural capital attached to the Eames chair as a signifier of that aesthetic generates some interesting questions: How do the original wartime applications of moulded plywood developed by Charles and Ray Eames continue to inform a domestic object designed for the average, albeit culturally savvy, post-war American? Does owning an Eames plywood chair in the first decade of the twenty-first century mean the same thing as it meant in the 1940s and 1950s? Does it signify the owner’s commitment to social change, or does it stand in for that commitment? Who is the ‘real’ audience for the marketing campaigns advanced by companies such as Herman Miller, the only licenced North American producer and distributor of the Eames plywood chair? How do factors like poverty (the inability to purchase) limit one’s ability to participate in this exchange of cultural values? In other words, when – if ever – is the moulded plywood chair just a chair? In Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) 1 , Hal Foster surveys our current obsessions. According to Foster we live within a self-perpetuating system of total design, where ‘the aesthetic and the utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed within the commercial, and everything—not only architectural projects and art exhibitions but everything from jeans to genes—seems to be regarded as so much design ’. 2 Rather than staging a minor revolution, the real people in Foster’s text are caught within a ‘seamless circuit of production and consumption’. 3 One of Foster’s primary concerns is the status of the contemporary subject caught within this circuit: For today you don’t have to be filthy rich to be projected not only as designer but as designed—whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery), your historical memory (designer museums) or your DNA future (designer children). Might this “designed subject” be the unintended offspring of the “constructed subject” so vaunted in postmodern culture? One thing seems clear: just when you thought the consumerist loop could get no tighter in its narcissistic logic, it did: design abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption, without much “running room” for anything else. 4 In a market where products are mass-produced, the packaging of commodities has become an end in itself. The most effective marketing strategies succeed through a process of consumerist interpellation. According to Foster, in the world of total design, a product can be mass in quantity yet appear up-to-date, personal, and precise in address. Desire is not only registered in products today, it is specified there: a self-interpellation of ‘hey, that’s me’ greets the consumer in catalogues and on-line. This perpetual profiling of the commodity, of the mini-me, is one factor that drives the inflation of design. 5 The subject recognises her or himself in the commodity. The advertisement functions as a mirror, pulling the consumer into a narcissistic relationship with the product. To be complete, to be oneself, it is necessary to buy. The marketing potential of this specular relationship is certainly not news. In a series of ads for Herman Miller published in Dwell ,
1 Foster, Hal. Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) . London and New York: Verso, 2002. 2 Ibid. p17 3 p xiv 4 p 18, 5 pp 19-20 6 Demetrios, Eames. Letter to the Editor. Dwell 8.7 (2008): 42.
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On Site review 23 Small Things
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