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Not Just a Gadget
John Haberin New York City
The Value of Good Design and Broken Nature
"Thank you for visiting MoMA. Don't miss our Design Store across 53rd Street!" By all means, don't—and don't be surprised if you have to put up with a loss of privacy and an ugly text message on leaving the museum, at least through the winter chill. Be sure, though, to look past that to design and its value.
A new coat check system at the Museum of Modern Art has you handing over your phone number rather than a ticket. Play your cards right, and you can relish the irony of doing so after a visit to "The Value of Good Design." You can relish, too, a look back at the postwar years and the bad taste of your parents. As a postscript, a show just two years later about how art and design can contribute to science manages only one set of technical drawings. Mustafa Faruki sets to work on an "intake facility for an anonymous client." Just who, though, is the client, and can he fix what has gone wrong with humanity and nature? 
Faruki's plans are as inscrutable as their title, but the client is up to some serious celestial business. The facility, MoMA explains, is for angels ascending to heaven—leaving the earth to climate change and overpopulation. Despite a haunting photo of what might be an underground site or a work in progress, you would be only right to doubt that the facility exists. Can its dream endure? As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary," but here there are only angels. No wonder there is also only "Broken Nature."
Art in your life
A glance at the phone after picking up your coat may capture everything wrong about art today. It makes the entire museum an extension of the gift shop. To make matters worse, "The Value of Good Design" ends just in time for the Modern to shut its doors for the summer, to wrap up yet another museum expansion. You will still, though, be able to shop for tchotchkes right across the street. To confess, I have an Andy Warhol t-shirt from there, and I feel guilty every time I put it on. My best excuse is that I took it in exchange for a gift.
Then again, I have been complimented on it—and the curators, Juliet Kinchin and Andrew Gardner, would surely share my embarrassment. They quote the museum half a century ago, to say that good design is "a statement and not a gadget." They draw on twenty years of design exhibitions and competitions at MoMA, starting in the 1930s, when Modernism refused to set design apart from fine art. The Bauhaus and early Soviet art were both out to change lives. So was the Modern, but with a difference. It disseminated its "good design kit" as a model for others but, years before Warhol, it was willing to meet its audience more than halfway.
It started, in fact, on the cheap. Design exhibitions go back to the museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and a show of machine art in 1934. And a decade of shows of "useful objects" began in December 1938 with objects under $5. Shoppers could pick up a dog bowl or an ashtray, a rake or a broom, a mousetrap or a meat grinder—all just in time for Christmas. They also anticipated the globalism and diversity of art today, with one show devoted to Latin America. Soon enough came design competitions and, from 1950 to 1955, displays of just plain "good design."
A messy time line gets only a rear alcove, but messy it is. The annual Christmas shows did cater to consumers, and by their end the price cap had crept up to $100, not so affordable in today's dollars or even theirs. In asking to place "modern art in your life," the museum was also selling itself. It was selling the world on the West as well. A museum bulletin announced not just useful objects, but ones "useful in wartime," with a Chemex coffee maker on the cover—just in case you were nodding off through the fight against Fascism. With the 1950s, design's mission entered the Cold War, with displays on tour from Stuttgart to New Delhi.
So did they promote affordable design or capitalism, and whatever was their "statement"? It had to have room for low-cost furniture like stacked and folding chairs, but also a museum dinner service in white porcelain. It could denounce old-fashioned armchairs as "overstuffed gorillas," but it still had its all-enveloping Brazilian bowl chairs. It had portable TVs, but also a clunky Olivetti typewriter that had me longing for the sleek red one by Ettore Sottsass. It had gone from machine art to organic design. Above all, it had plastic, from Tupperware to a bright yellow lemon squeezer, in what comes off as an awkward snapshot of the 1950s—and the "house beautiful" that keeps Martha Rosler or Richard Hamilton laughing and angry to this day.
Looking back, though, has its guilty pleasures, too, like a subcompact Fiat or a Slinky. It has the star power of Isamu Noguchi and a Noguchi table lamp, a 1949 house for MoMA's sculpture garden by Marcel Breuer, or Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, who dominated the competitions. Eames conceived of a total modern interior, with a table, chairs, shelves, and a wall hanger, which here nestle beside inexpensive printed textiles. It allows one to put a name on such things as Chemex, a 1941 design by Peter Schlumbohm, and Tupperware, named for Earl S. Tupper—or to appreciate the unnamed for how much they had to contribute. It includes such women as Eva Zeisel, who designed the fine white porcelain, and Lina Bo Bardi, who designed the bowl chair. Maybe modern art was never all that good a value, but it need not always lead to the gift shop.
If artists were angels
"Broken Nature" began as a feature of the Milan Triennale, curated by Paola Antonelli, who with Anna Burckhardt has brought a selection to New York. If the threats to the planet like climate change, toxic waste, and digital waste were not contemporary enough, so are the intersections of art and design, "Emerging Ecologies," and art and science. It packs just one room, across from another cry from the heart, a video by Garrett Bradley about the African American experience. This response, by comparison, feels more muted and makeshift. It has a close parallel, too, in a sprawling show of "Nature" at the Cooper Hewitt design museum just a year before, but more focused and yet also less elegant.
Of course, MoMA also asks what science can contribute to art. And the single most beautiful image is from NASA, in a video of forty-eight years of Images of Change. It might show a dry planet on which water once flowed or a watershed here on earth. Either way, a rift of bright color channels through an equally intense red landscape. Much of the actual artistry seems routine by comparison. This is art with a purpose, and often the purpose seems to have taken over from the art.
With his 3D-printed Modular Artificial Reef Structure, or MARS, Alex Goad is not exactly out of this world. He means its tall white lattice of ceramic, concrete, and steel as a place for dying coral to grow. Julia Lohmann, in turn, may seem his opposite—converting seaweed into sculpture. Still, both amount to routine biomorphic abstraction. An entire series of Designs for an Overpopulated Planet, by Dunne & Raby with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, looks cuter, but you have seen those green blobs before, too.
Others take recycling seriously, if not quite seriously enough. Alexander Grove and Azusa Murakami as Studio Swine (short, believe it or not, for Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers) turn soda cans into stools and Christien Meindertsma used fabric into acoustic tiles, like something a college student would do to furnish a dorm. (I recycle cans just fine as it is.) Atelier Luma converts algae into glassware and Kosuke Araki food waste into tableware, but neither would stand out at Bed Bath & Beyond. Caroline Slotte adds landscape imagery to dishes, as Damaged Goods, but they are unlikely to inspire a deeper reverence for nature or for dinner. David Benjamin does better with bricks out of cornstalks and mushrooms that could pass for stacks by Donald Judd.
Still others use art to investigate nature, in hopes of more sweeping solutions. The one truly interdisciplinary team, of artists and scientists at MIT, considers how sandbars can combat rising seas. Susana Soare asks how bees can be trained to detect disease. If these have their limits, it could be that environmental damage is not first and foremost a technical problem. Government may be necessary after all. Come to think of it, coral reefs remain in place as it is, even as their ecosystems die with them.
A sense of humor when it comes to swine is all well and good, and so is collective action. Kelly Jazvac and her team hope to inspire it with their treatment of plastics and sediment, as "fossils" for the future. Still, art may do best when it remains as uncertain as the ascent to heaven. Mandy Barker simulates microscopic ocean life with toxic waste, while Aki Inomata studies how an octopus borrows a shell in order to grow. Their photographs could be shared images of biology and art. Still, the show's promised "restorative potential" seems a long way off.
"The Value of Good Design" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through June 15, 2019, "Broken Nature" through August 15, 2021.