// literary & arts //
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Designing Modern Women 1880-1990 (on display through fall 2014)
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Two of the MoMA’s 2014 exhibits, “Designing Modern Women 1880-1990” (through Fall 2014) and “Walker Evans American Photographs” (through March 2014) depict women in diverse yet ultimately restricted artistic spaces. They both represent the modern woman as un-modern—defined solely by her traditionally domestic responsibilities and sexuality—vis-a-vis the home she furnishes, children she cares for, schools and churches she instructs and attends, and the body she inhabits. Although these characteristics may shape important aspects of the modern woman, they should not confine her to the overdone image of the female situated behind the white-picket fence with a homemade pie in-hand, as the two exhibits indirectly convey. Walker Evans and these “modern” female architects leave the female museum visitor to ponder if she is a modern woman and even if she would ever want to be.
Upon entering the MoMA’s “Designing Modern Women 1880-1990,” I was quickly acquainted with classical artistic limitations of art produced by women. These limitations can be best explained in the words of film feminist theorist Laura Mulvey as constraints created by the “male gaze,” defining women as occupants of the home, caretakers of the children, and inhabitants of highly sexualized bodies. The exhibit’s written and visual content ultimately embodies an acceptance of androcentric conceptions of women—conceptions largely emanating from Western canonical ideologies supporting women as primarily domestic beings. Viewing the exhibition’s displays of white porcelain dishware and kitchen furniture placed atop mini-wooden stages, I was suspended in a world of these classical, domestic expectations for female designers rather than in a nuanced world of artistic exploration. Similarly, the “Walker Evans American Photographs” exhibit exposed me to stereotypically palatable portrayals of the American woman, now framed in white-and-black two-dimensionality. Particularly interesting is the manner in which both exhibits utilize materials such as leather, paint, and ink to craft furniture and images representing female domesticity with making little visual use of the female body.
A quote by Elizabeth Mock on a postwar kitchen in “Designing Modern Women” reads, “perhaps the mistake came when we started thinking of the kitchen as a laboratory and confused the art of cooking with the science of food chemistry.” The French postwar kitchen designed by Charlotte Periand possesses little aesthetic appeal or practicality; the kitchen is spatially too narrow and visually too plain, especially when considering the 21st Century Western appreciation for stainless steel. The meager counter top is coated in a mismatched orange and red tile covering and sits below a small rectangular configuration of white and wooden pantries. Iron rimming connects both the counter top and pantries, curving around the sink and stove. Reflecting the sterility that Mock refers to, Periand’s kitchen is an exceptional example of the exhibit’s remarkably controlled and largely un-embellished tone. There was little about the kitchen which excited me, either on a purely sensual level or, more importantly, as a woman wanting to visit an exhibit about women doing something more with art than constructing a kitchen.
As the first female designer featured in the Museum of Modern Art, Eva Zeisel, whose artwork is now featured in “Designing Modern Women,” produced a collection of dinnerware entitled “Utility Ware” in 1942. Although I am critical of the museum’s decision to fashion an exhibit about women solely in relation to their production of goods for the home, I also believe Zeisel’s pottery to be the one redeeming and perhaps even modern inclusions in the exhibit. The pottery possesses characteristics which both comply with those qualities classically associated with women—as delicate and thin—and with qualities which push such stereotypes, manifest in the pottery’s practical and un-bedazzled exteriors. Stacked in a glass display case, Zeisel’s collection is primarily ivory-white with a large and curvy, yet delicate and unadorned sophistication. Her pieces invoke more of an androgynous rather than classical feminine tone, with a practical simplicity absent of any schmaltzy froufrou that often traditionally stereotypes American female design-wear.
Although Zeisel’s collection was able to work within and perhaps supersede classical limitations on the female artist, featured furniture designed by Ray Eames failed to boast such accomplishments. Organized in a doll-house-resembling, aseptic-feeling display opposite the cut-out kitchen is a sparse arrangement of miniature and delicate chairs. One of these in particular attracts the visitor’s eye, comprised of barely three feet of dark mahogany wood with a cut-out heart in the tip of its frame. The chair has no sharp points and appears to melt on every side, with each of its four corners hanging towards the floor. Aside from these unique and innovative qualities, however, the chair’s miniature frame and soft and youthful accents call into question the museum’s motivations for including such a piece in the “Designing Modern Women” exhibit, as there is little representation of women in the piece at all. Rather, the chair represented more of what might be found in a prepubescent’s dress up room rather than in the home of the “modern woman,” whoever she might be. This inclusion furthermore caused me to question what qualities comprise the modern woman and whether these qualities escape or conform to Mulvey’s male gaze.
An opposing wall hangs pieces under the title of “Punk to Postmodernism,” comprised primarily of feminine design represented in musical punk rock albums during 1970-1990. Buzzcocks, The Ramones, and Patti Smith covers are among the featured albums, providing a diverse and somewhat contradictory representation of what constitutes the woman designer in American punk rock. The Buzzcocks album cover closely complies with a hyper-sexualized representation of the naked female body, displaying an exploitative image of the woman’s head replaced with a tilted silver iron and her nipples with large-toothed, dark-red-lipsticked smiles. Beside the woman’s body reads the title “Orgasm Addict,” unambiguously tying her with the sex act and depicting her with a round-the-clock libido. The album cover’s sexual nature again obfuscates the motivation behind the MoMa’s decision to include such pieces in this exhibit—an exhibit with a title suggesting a focus on feminist and socially progressive artwork. Displaying such an image also works to contradict any feminist progression gained by Eva Zeisel’s pottery which challenged gendered artistic limitations.
The “Evan Walker’s American Photographs” exhibit provides a clear representation of women which works to evade the contradictory commentary of women as both progressive and subordinate throughout “Designing Modern Women.” Rather than exploring the possibility that women both as artistic creators and subjects might be able to transcend largely accepted gendered conventions, Walker’s photography unabashedly presents women as solely domestic beings. Although the walls are decorated with several female portraits, any sense of feminine autonomy that could have been gained from such portraits is diluted by the abundance of rural images of the home, schoolhouse, and church. The majority of the exhibit’s images of women is either accompanied by the presence of children or is adjacent to pictures of locations where women were often employed in Depression-era America.
Unlike “Designing the Modern Women,” however, Walker’s photography creates a documentary-like atmosphere as one enters the petite 20 X 20 ft2 showcase. Before assessing how his photography affects the portrayal of American women in the 1930s, one immediately makes note of his reliance on black-and-white prints. This absence of color strips his subjects down into a less fantastical and more rudimentary world of ruddy rural landscapes. Although its entirely white exterior similarly confined Eva Zeisel’s “Utility Ware” pottery collection, Evans’ photographs don’t possess the same sense of affluence embedded into her pottery’s delicate curves. Rather, his photographs and subjects portray rural America with white-paint-chipped churches, dirt-puddled streets, and barren schoolhouses. Even the women’s faces are grimy with black smears over their interesting and often difficult-to-decipher smirks and sunburned foreheads. One photograph in particular demonstrates Evans’ attention to the monetary deprivation embedded in 1930s American culture, displaying the entrance way of a white schoolhouse upheld by three ill-maintained wooden pillars. Although schoolhouses are not particularly symbols of monetary abundance, Evans’ photos of them represent a stark sense of financial depravity which makes them, the other architectural locations, and the women he captures sadder and more helpless than they might otherwise be perceived. His photos hence provide a clearer representation of woman as domestic beings than does “Designing Modern Women.”
Both exhibits presented women and female artists more as Western canonical caricatures rather than as dynamic individuals. I return to re-experience the MoMa’s un-modern world of potpourri, pink colors, and smiling, teethed nipples. As a female visitor, I am still unsure about how to exactly define the MoMa’s conceptualization of the modern woman, but I know that she is a woman I have never met and will never identify with.
// STEPHANIE GOLDSTEIN is a junior at Barnard College and Creative Editor for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo by Etsy user SayHeyCrystal.
Upon entering the MoMA’s “Designing Modern Women 1880-1990,” I was quickly acquainted with classical artistic limitations of art produced by women. These limitations can be best explained in the words of film feminist theorist Laura Mulvey as constraints created by the “male gaze,” defining women as occupants of the home, caretakers of the children, and inhabitants of highly sexualized bodies. The exhibit’s written and visual content ultimately embodies an acceptance of androcentric conceptions of women—conceptions largely emanating from Western canonical ideologies supporting women as primarily domestic beings. Viewing the exhibition’s displays of white porcelain dishware and kitchen furniture placed atop mini-wooden stages, I was suspended in a world of these classical, domestic expectations for female designers rather than in a nuanced world of artistic exploration. Similarly, the “Walker Evans American Photographs” exhibit exposed me to stereotypically palatable portrayals of the American woman, now framed in white-and-black two-dimensionality. Particularly interesting is the manner in which both exhibits utilize materials such as leather, paint, and ink to craft furniture and images representing female domesticity with making little visual use of the female body.
A quote by Elizabeth Mock on a postwar kitchen in “Designing Modern Women” reads, “perhaps the mistake came when we started thinking of the kitchen as a laboratory and confused the art of cooking with the science of food chemistry.” The French postwar kitchen designed by Charlotte Periand possesses little aesthetic appeal or practicality; the kitchen is spatially too narrow and visually too plain, especially when considering the 21st Century Western appreciation for stainless steel. The meager counter top is coated in a mismatched orange and red tile covering and sits below a small rectangular configuration of white and wooden pantries. Iron rimming connects both the counter top and pantries, curving around the sink and stove. Reflecting the sterility that Mock refers to, Periand’s kitchen is an exceptional example of the exhibit’s remarkably controlled and largely un-embellished tone. There was little about the kitchen which excited me, either on a purely sensual level or, more importantly, as a woman wanting to visit an exhibit about women doing something more with art than constructing a kitchen.
As the first female designer featured in the Museum of Modern Art, Eva Zeisel, whose artwork is now featured in “Designing Modern Women,” produced a collection of dinnerware entitled “Utility Ware” in 1942. Although I am critical of the museum’s decision to fashion an exhibit about women solely in relation to their production of goods for the home, I also believe Zeisel’s pottery to be the one redeeming and perhaps even modern inclusions in the exhibit. The pottery possesses characteristics which both comply with those qualities classically associated with women—as delicate and thin—and with qualities which push such stereotypes, manifest in the pottery’s practical and un-bedazzled exteriors. Stacked in a glass display case, Zeisel’s collection is primarily ivory-white with a large and curvy, yet delicate and unadorned sophistication. Her pieces invoke more of an androgynous rather than classical feminine tone, with a practical simplicity absent of any schmaltzy froufrou that often traditionally stereotypes American female design-wear.
Although Zeisel’s collection was able to work within and perhaps supersede classical limitations on the female artist, featured furniture designed by Ray Eames failed to boast such accomplishments. Organized in a doll-house-resembling, aseptic-feeling display opposite the cut-out kitchen is a sparse arrangement of miniature and delicate chairs. One of these in particular attracts the visitor’s eye, comprised of barely three feet of dark mahogany wood with a cut-out heart in the tip of its frame. The chair has no sharp points and appears to melt on every side, with each of its four corners hanging towards the floor. Aside from these unique and innovative qualities, however, the chair’s miniature frame and soft and youthful accents call into question the museum’s motivations for including such a piece in the “Designing Modern Women” exhibit, as there is little representation of women in the piece at all. Rather, the chair represented more of what might be found in a prepubescent’s dress up room rather than in the home of the “modern woman,” whoever she might be. This inclusion furthermore caused me to question what qualities comprise the modern woman and whether these qualities escape or conform to Mulvey’s male gaze.
An opposing wall hangs pieces under the title of “Punk to Postmodernism,” comprised primarily of feminine design represented in musical punk rock albums during 1970-1990. Buzzcocks, The Ramones, and Patti Smith covers are among the featured albums, providing a diverse and somewhat contradictory representation of what constitutes the woman designer in American punk rock. The Buzzcocks album cover closely complies with a hyper-sexualized representation of the naked female body, displaying an exploitative image of the woman’s head replaced with a tilted silver iron and her nipples with large-toothed, dark-red-lipsticked smiles. Beside the woman’s body reads the title “Orgasm Addict,” unambiguously tying her with the sex act and depicting her with a round-the-clock libido. The album cover’s sexual nature again obfuscates the motivation behind the MoMa’s decision to include such pieces in this exhibit—an exhibit with a title suggesting a focus on feminist and socially progressive artwork. Displaying such an image also works to contradict any feminist progression gained by Eva Zeisel’s pottery which challenged gendered artistic limitations.
The “Evan Walker’s American Photographs” exhibit provides a clear representation of women which works to evade the contradictory commentary of women as both progressive and subordinate throughout “Designing Modern Women.” Rather than exploring the possibility that women both as artistic creators and subjects might be able to transcend largely accepted gendered conventions, Walker’s photography unabashedly presents women as solely domestic beings. Although the walls are decorated with several female portraits, any sense of feminine autonomy that could have been gained from such portraits is diluted by the abundance of rural images of the home, schoolhouse, and church. The majority of the exhibit’s images of women is either accompanied by the presence of children or is adjacent to pictures of locations where women were often employed in Depression-era America.
Unlike “Designing the Modern Women,” however, Walker’s photography creates a documentary-like atmosphere as one enters the petite 20 X 20 ft2 showcase. Before assessing how his photography affects the portrayal of American women in the 1930s, one immediately makes note of his reliance on black-and-white prints. This absence of color strips his subjects down into a less fantastical and more rudimentary world of ruddy rural landscapes. Although its entirely white exterior similarly confined Eva Zeisel’s “Utility Ware” pottery collection, Evans’ photographs don’t possess the same sense of affluence embedded into her pottery’s delicate curves. Rather, his photographs and subjects portray rural America with white-paint-chipped churches, dirt-puddled streets, and barren schoolhouses. Even the women’s faces are grimy with black smears over their interesting and often difficult-to-decipher smirks and sunburned foreheads. One photograph in particular demonstrates Evans’ attention to the monetary deprivation embedded in 1930s American culture, displaying the entrance way of a white schoolhouse upheld by three ill-maintained wooden pillars. Although schoolhouses are not particularly symbols of monetary abundance, Evans’ photos of them represent a stark sense of financial depravity which makes them, the other architectural locations, and the women he captures sadder and more helpless than they might otherwise be perceived. His photos hence provide a clearer representation of woman as domestic beings than does “Designing Modern Women.”
Both exhibits presented women and female artists more as Western canonical caricatures rather than as dynamic individuals. I return to re-experience the MoMa’s un-modern world of potpourri, pink colors, and smiling, teethed nipples. As a female visitor, I am still unsure about how to exactly define the MoMa’s conceptualization of the modern woman, but I know that she is a woman I have never met and will never identify with.
// STEPHANIE GOLDSTEIN is a junior at Barnard College and Creative Editor for The Current. She can be reached at [email protected]. Photo by Etsy user SayHeyCrystal.