I am spending a few days this week in my old, beloved stomping grounds: New York City. While here, there are a few exhibits and events I am super excited to check out and thought I’d share them here.
First on the list was the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum where the Design for a Living World Exhibit is soon to close. A few months ago, I learned about this exhibit and read up on the designers and projects involved. Basically, the Nature Conservancy wanted to “raise awareness about the impact and promise of sustainable sourcing.” To do this, they found ten high-profile designers and sent them off to “harvest materials from the world’s most beautiful and fragile places.” This concept raised some questions for me (ok, a lot) so I thought I’d check the exhibit out for myself.
The first thing one might notice about the museum, housed in a beautiful mansion formerly belonging to the Carnegie family, is how hands-off it is. Even in the showcase for the Design USA gallery, in which award-winning/field-changing design books are shown, one can’t touch the books. Really? They’re just books, C-H.
Moving along, to the second floor of the museum, I found the show I was looking for.
The design of the actual exhibition is superb. The entire second floor is broken into several rooms, cleverly designed and easily navigable, each of which housed one or two of the projects. Explanations, maps and photographs documenting the designer’s experience are all printed on aluminum (from 94% recycled content, we’re repeatedly told) and hung cleanly around the walls. (The origin of the lovely-looking wood holding the aluminum is Bolivia, an FSC-certified Spanish Cedar. The show is made to travel. I learned this on the Cooper-Hewitt Blog.) The typography is clean (I’m guessing Scala but I’m no expert); the palette is limited, earthy and charming. The content is easily accessible.
What concerns me, though, are the subtleties of the exhibition; of the inherent concept of the exhibition, in fact. While I’m entirely onboard with the goal of raising awareness of the issues facing our environment and us, and even utilizing celebrity to achieve this, it seems to me that only a few of the designers actually demonstrated passion for preserving the environment, for creating practical solutions. For instance, Isaac Mizrahi, who designed an incredibly beautiful and elegant salmon-skin dress, says in an interview that glamour cannot be sacrificed for eco-friendly products.
This comment, and maybe this entire show, indicates a certain distance from the actual root of the issue of consumption. In other words, rather than focus on this culture we’ve created of products and desire, we are still looking at the products here.
Next, the photographs hanging on the walls often show indigenous-seeming people. I can only imagine they are indigenous because many or all are not named. Also, they rarely speak in the videos. This creates a distance between the viewer/audience/participant (today, me) and the actual community the materials came from; it indicates a certain other-ness and voicelessness of the people inhabiting the land from which the designers took materials.
Speaking of the communities, why would we be exploring the most “fragile” environments for materials and then utilizing said materials back in the United States? Why not think locally? Why not think in terms of accessible and prevalent materials? Perhaps part of the point of the show is to demonstrate how a community might grow economically, but the projects themselves seem to contradict that. (I’m exaggerating a little. Two of the projects harvested materials from the U.S. Maya Lin found sustainably harvested trees in Maine and Christien Meinderstma used sheep’s wool in Idaho to make rugs, as seen above. Both of these designers seemed genuinely invested in their missions here.)
Surprisingly few people have examined this show critically, as far as I can tell. Even NPR gave more of a promotional advertisement than an investigation of the meaning behind this show’s existence. In an interview for ID Magazine, R.I.P, Abbott Miller, a designer in the show, and Ellen Lupton, a curator for the museum and designer herself, noted that the show was meant to be open-ended, to be inconclusive. So, my question to the you is: do you accept the ideology of this show? Is this good enough? Is inconclusiveness regarding the environment an acceptable response to the knowledge of today’s world? And, am I missing something?
