Peak Everything (14 page)

Another American proponent of the Arts and Crafts sensibility was Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora, New York, who headed a community of artisans known as the Roycrofters. Hubbard was a homespun Yankee craftsman-philosopher, the kind of self-taught natural leader who, if he had lived in the 1970s, would probably have been the guru of a hippie cult. A congenital aphorist with vaguely right-wing political views (his most famous writing was the astonishingly popular pamphlet, “A Message to Garcia,” which extolled the diligence of a soldier in the Spanish American war who helped turn Cuba into a
de facto
US colony), Hubbard preached independence and hard work but seldom criticized the expanding corporate structures of the American economy that were systematically undermining the livelihoods of small farmers and artisans. When Hubbard perished on the Lusitania in 1914, the Roycrofters lost their spokesman and guiding light. They soldiered on for a few years, but by the end of the '20s were merely reproducing a few popular designs from their heyday of making original lamps, bookends, vases, chairs, and tables. Today in East Aurora one can still visit some of the Roycrofters' old workshops and savor the afterglow of their happy experiment.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House. Wright sought to make his buildings a part of the landscape; this, one of his houses now open to the public, particularly exemplifies his concept of an organic architecture that promotes harmony between humans and nature through design. As was his typical practice, Wright designed all of the furnishings as well.

The Arts and Crafts movement also spread to continental Europe and Japan, in each instance acquiring the local flavors not only of traditional design elements but of indigenous social philosophies.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1920s, the movement had mostly disappeared. Sadly but predictably, Morris and his followers
had failed to create an enduring artisanal paradise. Industrialism and capitalism swallowed and digested their efforts, which in the end merely yielded buildings and ornaments for middle- and upper-class consumption.

By the late 1920s the industrial megamachine was extruding heaps of new objects with no Gothic predecessors. The most obvious and commercially significant was the personal automobile (what would a Gothic motorcar look like? — surely nothing like the faux-Gothic hotrod on the old
Munsters
TV show). Here was the Machine Triumphant, the symbol and substance of personal attainment and ease of movement. Another significant invention was the airplane, with its capability of transcending limits of space and time through vertical ascent and sheer speed. As aircraft designers gradually began to appreciate the functional benefits of aerodynamics, the
look
of the airplane (and, for a while, that of the dirigible) began to be appropriated for use on objects whose function had little or nothing to do with flight or rapid motion — from staplers and blenders to lamps and toasters.

This transition from over-wrought Victorianism to streamlined modernism came about during a period when, with so many new inventions needing a marketable “look,” industrial design emerged as a burgeoning new field of specialization within the arts. Car designers competed to make fenders more voluptuous, dashboards more commanding — and to make cars look more like airplanes. Designers consciously incorporated modern style elements to stimulate sales; as advertising executive Earnest Elmo Calkins put it in a magazine article in 1927, “this new influence on articles of barter and sale is largely used to make people dissatisfied with what they have of the old order, still good and useful and efficient, but lacking in the newest touch. In the expressive slang of the day...[these goods] ‘date.'”
²

Streamlining led to an emphasis on smooth curving surfaces, long lines, and the illusion of speed. It hid the angular electrical
motors or combustion engines of machines beneath flowing metallic skins, just as rumbling machines themselves cloaked the real source of their power — fossil fuels dug from mines or drawn from deep wells.

Streamlining was the “Look of the Future.“ But in retrospect, once it had itself become “dated” by the endless imperative to rein-vent style for the sake of sales, it became known as Art Deco.

In contrast to the Arts and Crafts style-philosophy, Art Deco took for granted — even glorified — the machine and machine-based production. Nevertheless, its best practitioners sought to develop a design vocabulary (using geometry and the primitive elements commandeered by modern artists like Picasso) that fed the human hunger for beauty while meeting the needs of the factory and ad agency.

Many of the early pioneers of industrial design described their efforts in idealistic terms. Architect Peter Behrens, hired in 1907 by the German industrial firm AEG to create a unified look for the company's products and advertising, sought to infuse his work with a “spiritual” content as he replaced useless and tasteless ornamentation with clean, geometric lines. Here was a design philosophy for a new age of universal freedom and convenience!

However, modern industrial design grew up alongside advertising and the increasing need for advertising. As Morris had seen and predicted, fuel-fed machines could not help but overwhelm the human community and the skill and pride of craftsmanship. They likewise overwhelmed the capacity of ordinary humans to buy and use material goods. So many goods could be produced, and so quickly, that markets were easily saturated; hence the need on the part of manufacturers for new, quickly expanding credit and advertising industries. More invention required more investment, which required more capital accumulation, which in turn required more sales — more consumption. Therefore consumption
had
to be stimulated, and advertisers, using the scientific discoveries of the new science of psychology, were eager to oblige.

Meanwhile the corporation provided the legal, economic, and social nexus for organizing all of these efforts at finance, production,
and advertising. Itself a kind of machine, with capital its fuel, the corporation has an inbuilt imperative for growth and the accumulation of power, one that transcends the personality or ethical views of any particular manager or executive.

Industrial design provided the soul and self-image for otherwise faceless corporate power, as each corporation sought its own identifiable “personality” expressed in the color, shape, tone, and texture of its products. The result: during the 20
^th
century, even the no-blest efforts of industrial designers yielded products that were expressions of a system whose overall characteristics were dictated by scale, speed, accumulation, and efficiency — dictates that made both the shapers and ultimate users of products mere instruments for the attainment of a purpose ultimately at odds with cultural integrity, human sanity, and species survival. As Stuart Ewen put it in his brilliant book,
All Consuming Images: On the Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture:

As industrial design progressed after World War II and into the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, style continued to evolve, as it had to in order to serve the purposes of fashion and planned obsolescence. Images and objects became more frankly seductive and more directly suggestive of the very qualities of which the lives of human beings were in fact being systematically drained — autonomy and creativity.

In hindsight, it appears that Deco was the last hiccup of design originality for the hydrocarbon age. Everything after it has been essentially imitative recycling. Today, the unified vision of Deco is attractively “retro,” and in its place contemporary designers have managed to achieve a kind of new Victorianism consisting of a mangled, chaotically tumbled style hurled together from the detritus of the past, a style they proudly term “post-modern.”

I often feel a jarring visceral response upon leaving the best museum exhibits and returning to contemporary urban existence: everything outside looks ugly and pitiful by comparison. I get the same feeling when leaving a city like Venice or Kyoto and flying back to California. It's a response I can only call aesthetic shock.

If William Morris and his followers were alive today, they might regard a stroll through a Wal-Mart as a veritable descent into hell. Yet many Americans evidently think of it as a visit to consumer paradise. Perhaps this is some gauge of the degree of our collective aesthetic degeneration.

Now, San Francisco is not the most beautiful of the world's cities, but neither is it the ugliest by a long shot (I'll spare you my nominations for that prize). Nevertheless, the endless concrete pavement, the buildings, and, more than anything else, the automobiles that surround us in most modern cities (certainly including San Francisco) are beyond dreary. The cars are so much a part of our lives that we are inured to their dominating, ubiquitous physical presence. Only when one has lived for at least a few days in an environment free from them is one likely to notice how deeply the industrial aesthetic environment is entwined with cars.

Our constant, habitual, unconscious psychic adaptation to the soullessness of the manufactured environment is part of our personal price of admission to the industrial fiesta. Who can be aesthetically proud of a car, a computer, or a refrigerator? One might be proud of
having
one, if that is in question (I am certain there are millions of new car owners in China and Russia who do feel considerable pride in this regard). But what of the object itself
as a product of human artistry? Inherent in our appreciation of its design is our knowledge that the appliance in question will be used up in a decade and obsolete in half that time. Consequently, it must exhibit only as much beauty or craftsmanship as is necessary to get it off the showroom floor and into our home or garage. We are satisfied for now — but not for long.

This state of affairs might be barely acceptable if such objects were the exceptions, if we were surrounded by others that were more durable and that showed more signs of care and that nourished us in deeper ways. But in most modern industrial countries that is not the case. Our houses, our packaging, our furnishings, our electronic gadgets — all share the same disposable ephemerality-by-design. This is truly a throwaway culture. Yes, it is possible to obtain antiques (for example, I like to use old fountain pens instead of disposable plastic ballpoints), or unique art pieces, or handmade shoes, but these are anomalies and affectations. Only the wealthy can afford to surround themselves with such things. The masses instead make do with stamped-out plastic or metal objects that evince no sign whatever that any living, breathing human ever worked them or thought much about them.

As a way of concealing or compensating for this we seek out “designer” lines of merchandise with names like Calvin Klein or Martha Stewart on their labels. But these are goods whose
actual
designers are people we've never heard of, let alone ever see. One can even find faux remakes of Arts and Crafts (“Mission-style”) pieces in the furniture section of Wal-Mart. What's the problem? They look just like the real thing.

As for the working conditions of the people who actually produce these objects — well, you don't know and you don't
want
to know. It doesn't take much imagining to divine what Morris would think of the situation.

The Arts and Crafts movement inhabited the lower upside of history's energy bell-curve; now, after a century of cheap petroleum, we are just over the crest, contemplating our way back down. What
happened in between was a brief, probably inevitable, but nonetheless tragic eruption of production and consumption on a scale never seen before, and never to be seen again. It is tempting to look back now, as we contemplate the downside of the curve, and view with nostalgia the ideas and productions of Morris, Wright, etc., just as they looked back to the crafts guilds of the Middle Ages.

But what will the human-made world look like a few decades beyond Peak Oil? Will we see a fulfillment of the Arts and Crafts ideal? It would be nice to think so. However, the world in which Morris and his colleagues lived and worked — including the cultural symbols, the skills, even in some cases the raw materials then readily available — has evaporated, replaced by one in which most people are loyal not to land and place, but to product and image.