Adams, Annmarie

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

« 20 $ millions au Musée McCord, une chance formidable », Muséogramme (février 1988); Ian McCulloch, « The McCord Renewed »,The Bea-ver (June/July 1992), p. 62; Paul Carie et Alain Mongeau, « La difficile naissance d'une mu-séologie scientifique moderne : le cas de l'Uni-versité McGill et du Musée Redpath pendant la première moitié du XXe siècle », Musée (vol. 11, n°l et 2,1988), p. 6-10; le catalogue du Musée, La famille McCord, une vision passionnée (Mont-réal, Musée McCord d'histoire canadienne, 1992) (texte bilingue, anglais, français); le dépliant actuel du Musée. 2. Luke Rombout, op. cit. 3. Édités par le Musée (Montréal, 1992) et distribués par McGill Queen's University Press : The Mc-Cord Family: A Passionate Vision/La famille McCord, une vision passionnée. 4. Wright, Donald, dans La famille McCord, op. cit., p. 88. 5. Miller, Pamela, dans La famille McCord, op. cit., p. 140. 6. Papiers de la famille McCord, dossier 5046. 7. Communication orale de Stanley Triggs, le 11 no-vembre 1993. 8. Je remercie Wanda Palma et Pamela Miller qui ont identifié pour moi les différentes compo-santes de l'élément d'exposition. A N N M A R I E A D A M S Cooper-Hewitt Nat ional Museum of Design, New York, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office Curator: Ellen Lupton Designers: Ellen Lupton (graphie design); Con-stantine Boyn, Laurene Leon (installation design) Itinerary: Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, New York, 17 August 1993 to 2 Jan-uary 1994; Pacific Design Center, Los Ange-les, 23 March 1994 to 27 May 1994 Publicat ion: Catalogue, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, 65 pp., illus., Pr inceton Architec-tural Press, 1993. Paper U.S. $19.95, ISBN 1-878271-97-0 9. Communications orales de Pamela Miller, 11 et 13 novembre 1993. 10. Voir à ce sujet, entre autres, Susan M. Pearce, « Objects as Signs and Symbols », Museums /bur-ner/(vol 86, n° 3, December 1986), p. 131-135. 11 La famille McCord, op. cit. (M.M.), p. 102. 12. Moira McCaffrey, dans La famille McCord, op. cit., p. 106. Voir aussi et surtout le catalogue du McCord sur ses collections ethnographiques : Aux couleurs de la terre : héritage culturel des premières nations. 13. Tous deux en grès rouge, sculptés par Henry Beaumont (1853-1900) en 1888, ils décoraient les frises de la maison Drummond, situées au 488, rue Sherbrooke ouest (architecte : Andrew Taylor). 14. Dans un article sur les objets haidas du McCord, George MacDonald se souvient : « One of the most striking and monumental oftheseisa house frontal pole from Masset, which is one of the few to have been taken out of that village on the northern Queen Charlotte Island. It now greets the visitor to the McCord Museum from its promi-nent place in the foyer ». « Masterworks of Haida Art, George Merver Dawson and the McCord Museum Collection », Apollo (May 1976), p. 434-437. When Louise and Andrew Carnegie construct-ed their 64-room mansion on upper Fifth Ave-nue in New York in 1898, household technology was a nearly invisible, yet essential, aspect of domestic architecture. Their six-storey villa's sophisticated system of boilers, pipes, pumps, and machinery was relegated to the basement; k i tchen and l aundry were clearly separa ted from the main living quarters; and the team of 19 servants employed to manage the Carnegies' state-of-the-art e q u i p m e n t ga ined access to the family's lavish rooms only through a laby-rinthine system of service stairs and corridors, designed especially to maintain the servants ' invisibility. Itis somewhat ironic, therefore, thatamajor exhibition on household and office technology Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, New York, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office Material History Review 40 (Fall 1994) /Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 40 (automne 1994) 71 currently occupies five rooms of the former Carnegie mansion. Remodelled in the 1970s to accommodate the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Design), the sombre interiors of the former home seem a curious backdrop for the 100 brightly coloured plastic and metal objects contained within Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office. The show's focus on women, too, is starkly juxtaposed against the quintessentially masculine, oak-panelled rooms, in which Carnegie no doubt hosted many of America's most powerful men earlier this century. Mechanical Brides confronts head-on this male-centred, conservative world in which it is set. It also uses contemporary exhibition tech-niques in a subde way to make instructive com-parisons between the technology of Carnegie's era and that of the twentieth-century, middle-class home and office, the real subject of the exhibition. Perhaps the clearest example of this mechanical counterpoint is a large television and VCR, set boldly in a now-obsolete Carnegie fireplace. The hearth-cum-video is framed on each side by two shiny washing machines sit-ting on concrete bases (intended to suggest base-ment floors); the wall text accompanying the laundry equipment is printed on starched bed linen, suspended overhead from wooden dow-els as if hung out to dry. Against the dark, deeply-sculpted panelling of the formerly aristocratic room, this scene is, to say the least, startling. Mechanical Brides begins with an equally bold statement. A thick partition wall adorned with four wall-mounted, push-button telephones and 24 images of people on the telephone faces the entry to the exhibition sequence (Fig. 1). Intended to remind visitors of contemporary telephone booths and/or bus shelters by its bold graphics and use of back-lit images, this inter-active wall invites visitors to use actual tele-phones to reconsiderthe place of telephones in modern culture. Surrounding images of historic telephones and media images of telephones suggest how this technology has acted as a link between the gendered spheres of home and work. Numerous jobs associated with women and centred on the use of the telephone in the twentieth century - secretary, receptionist, tele-phone operator - limited women's roles to pas-sive receptors and communicators of informa-tion, rather than producers of information. Both the exhibition and the catalogue explain how women in these positions became human exten-sions of the technological systems they were expected to mediate. The issue of gender and technology is brought into even sharper relief in the second room. In addition to the video in the fireplace (with an ordinary, three-seater couch in front), in which a variety of people discuss their per-sonal views of laundry, and the display of eight vintage washing machines, this room also boasts three vitrines of historic irons. The walls are covered, like the first room, with advertise-ments and images from pop culture explaining the gender division of housework; race, class, and ethnicity in housekeeping as a business; and the concept of modernism in the home. Typ-ical of the way the subject matter informs every level of the exhibition design, these images are matted in sheets of vinyl flooring and framed by sections of aluminum, typically used to finisl i the edge of kitchen counters. This political approach to the subject of domestic technology is consistent with other projects by Ellen Lupton, the Cooper-Hewitt's first Curator of Contemporary Design, who de-vised Mechanical Brides. Lupton co-curated the controversial exhibition, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste, at the List Visual Arts Center, MIT, during the sum-mer of 1992. Rather than focus on issues of gen-der, however, the MIT exhibition of mostly sinks, toilets, and toasters drew perceptive anal-ogies between our cycles of economics, diges-tion, and plumbing.1 Fig. 1 The exhibition Mechanical Brides opens with an interactive tele phone wall. More than 50 telephones provide information to visitors about how the phone developed from a rela-tively neutral device to a seductively designed consumer object. (Photo: Bill facobson) Material History Review 40 (Fall 199411 Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 40 (automne 1994} 72 Fig. 2 The dosing display of Mechanical Bridesisa workspace of the future. especially commissioned for the exhibition. It shows the anticipated blurring of home and work resulting from new technologies. (Photo: Bill facobson) The playfulness of domestic technology is celebrated in the third room of the exhibition, which features a collection of contemporary household machines inspired by the characters from The Wizard ofOz on a bright yellow dis-play stand. Images on these walls also explore the romantic partnerships suggested by domes-tic technology; m a n y of the adver t i sements aimed toward brides show explicit promises of marital happiness and even sexual satisfaction: a wedding ring is reflected in die shiny surface of a 1946 toaster; a woman paints a heart and a r row on her new dryer, su r rounded by her smiling husband and children; another happy woman dances with her silicone-covered iron-ing board in an advertisement of 1956. The weakest section of Mechanical Brides is the fourth space in the sequence, occupying the former conservatory of the Carnegie man-sion and functioning as a hinge in the exhibi-tion to turn visitors into the final room. Filled with plants and suggestive of an outdoor space, this greenhouse hosts a lawn mower and chain saw for die exhibition, suggestive of men's do-mestic technology. Lupton says the conserva-tory was intended as a very solemn place, where visitors could contemplate the laundry line bear-ing quotes about housework from a diversity of women. The display of objects, however, seems inconsistent with the other strongly thematic arrangements of material culture; given the gen-eral theme of the exhibition is the relationship of women and machines in the home and office, it seems incongruous (and smacks of tokenism) to include men and machines used outside the home. This section of the show is, in addition, a blatant reminder of the difficulties of designing exhibitions in a building conceived for a com-pletely different purpose. "Office Politics" is the focus of the final room in Mechanical Brides. The centrepiece here is a display of three secretarial work stations, each paired with an executive chair intended to sim-ulate actual office environments. The furniture from the influential 1906 Larkin Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, illustrates to visitors how the female clerks employed by this soap company occupied fixed chairs, while the male executives had chairs on wheels. Consid-ered at the time as a modern , efficient office building, fixed seat ing was i n t ended to inc-rease the efficiency of clerks by limiting their mobility. A built-in display case in this final room de-picts the parallel re la t ionship of typewri te r design to women's subordinate positions in the world of work. Typing, like working on the tele-phone, was constructed as a kind of neutral com-munication of ideas generated by men. Two examples of contemporary design also underl ine the complexity of gender in today's "Office Politics." Next to the typewri ters is a wearable computer, designed by a woman. This tiny machine, with both an eyepiece and an ear-piece, hangs like a necklace on the weare r ' s chest, delivering information direcUy to the ret-ina. Next to the exit door of Mechanical Brides is a desk of die future (Fig. 2), commissioned by the museum for the exhibition. This conscien-tiously domestic prototype - it was intended to address the "live/work" space of the future -draws on the worlds of boui home and work for ideas. The work station comprises a playpen and a combination of rotating filing cabinet and lazy susan, in addition to a horizontal work sur-face. Lupton says the piece was inspired by the powerful photo shown above the desk in the exhibi t ion wh ich appea red in the New York Times. It shows a frantic bank executive work-ing at home in a chaotic setting widi her infant, who is demanding attention and keeping her from her work. Mechanical Brides is a powerful exhibition about women and machines, a much neglected subject in academic scholarship. Its real con-tribution in terms of an approach to the field is that the show considers technology in a setting far wider than the home. Mechanical Brides, by illustrating with real objects the close rela-tions between home and work, has added to our increasing suspicion of the so-called "separate spheres" theory, which defines the home as a relatively isolated institution in urban life. This notion, which formed the basis for pioneering work in women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, Material History Review 40 (Fall 1994) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 40 (automne 1994) 73 presumed the house as a place both antitheti-cal to, and spatially separated from, the world of science, politics, and men.2 Mechanical Brides challenges this theory by drawing links between women/technology and office employment, architecture, and adver-tising, among other male-gendered domains. Lupton is interested, at every level of the exhi-bition, in how the public informs the private and vice versa. Drawing on the revolutionary work of Marshall McLuhan, she, too, appreci-ates industrial design as an aspect of mass media, rather than for its formal values, as is often the case in museums of design. The title of the exhibition is drawn from McLuhan's book of 1951, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Indus-trial Man, in which he compared advertisements showing parts of women's bodies to the inter-changeable parts of machines. Presumably this title pays homage to McLuhan's brilliant anal-ysis of the social and political values of mass media, as well as his early interest in the rela-tionship of sex and machinery. In an exhibition so broadly based, it is no sur-prise that every type of technology displayed is not as deeply researched as in a smaller show. By including so many different types of technol-ogy spanning the entire century - telephones, laundry, cooking, typewriters, office furniture - the exhibition addresses the real impact of technology on women's lives at a relatively su-perficial level. At the same time, however, the great range of objects displayed - 95 per cent are loan objects - no doubt made the subject much more appealing to the non-specialist. In this respect, the 65-page catalogue will be more useful than the exhibition itself for purposes of further scholarship and teaching. In the final analysis, it would be difficult to find a more appropriate place than the former Carnegie mansion for Mechanical Brides. The Carnegies were, after all, obsessed with tech-nology. Theirs was the first private home in the United States to have a structural steel frame, was one of the first to boast a passenger eleva-tor, and was extremely progressive in its use of central heating and air conditioning. The Carnegie mansion even included duplicates of every maj or piece of equipment, in case of fail-ure. Although its systems were hidden in the walls, the house was, in every sense, a show-case for turn-of-the-century technology. Its rein-carnation as the museum setting for Mechanical Brides has "exposed" once-invisible systems of technology, as well as the systems of power whichhave dictated the relationship of women and machines for most of this century. The ser-vants' ghosts, at least, must be smiling. N O T E S For more information on the MIT exhibition, see my "Waste Not, Want Not: An Exhibition Re-view," The Winterthur Portfolio, 27, no. l(Spring 1992): 75-82. For a review of the literature on separate spheres, see Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," The Journal of American His-tory75, no. 1 (June 1988): 9-39. Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, Chinatown JOAN SEIDL Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, Chinatown Curator: Virginia Careless, Bob Griffin (RBCM); David Chuenyan Lai (Guest Curator) Designer: Alan Graves Opening Date: November 1992 In November, 1992, the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM) in Victoria, British Colum-bia, opened Chinatown, a new addition to the sprawling re-creation of Old Town built in the Museum in the early 1970s. The original Old Town was designed to showcase the facades Material History Review 40 (Fall 1994) / Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 40 (automne 1994) 74 

Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, New York, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/download/17623/18898

Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, New York, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals