The Name of the Game

It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it. In an age when we are conscious that everything is designed, we can’t turn our backs on the industrial reality that produces computer viruses, lethal drones, and plastic machine guns as readily as it does clever kitchenware and Womb chairs. Surely this is not what Johannes Itten and Walter Gropius had in mind in the Bauhaus days, when they imagined design as a unifying social force capable of harnessing technology to ennoble life. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has driven what may be the last nail in the coffin of the utopian idea of design as a positive, independent agent of change. The hammer is the sprawling, web-based exhibition Design and Violence, launched at the end of 2013, which recently concluded with the physical publication of a catalogue of the same name.

Installed by a team headed by curator Paola Antonelli, critic Jamer Hunt, and Michelle Millar Fisher, the project marked an important departure for MoMA. As Antonelli points out, “It was not meant to be canonical, to be the first word or the last, but to be a platform for bringing disparate – and disputable – ideas together, and getting people to jump in.” The curators chose a series of recent objects and design phenomena, and selected writers, artists, and philosophers to respond to them. The objects ranged from engineered rice (which had unforeseen social consequences in the Philippines in the 1960s) to Choy Ka Fei’s Prospectus for a Future Body, a deeply unsettling attempt to ‘choreograph’ the body via wired electrical impulses. The respondents included science-fiction writer William Gibson, cognitive theorist Steven Pinker, and former child soldier China Keitetsi (writing about the AK-47 assault rifle) These posts were open to online responses, and the discussion is still continuing on the website. The catalogue gives only the briefest hint of the vehemence and extent of the reactions coming in from cyberspace.

The relationship between design and violence is the modern world’s dirty secret, of course. Far from simply providing ‘better things for better living’, as the slogan went, Futurist designers embraced Fascism and its culture of speed and violence; Constructivists wanted nothing more than to wipe out every vestige of past social and aesthetic practices under a Communist banner; and the Third Reich designers shrewdly exploited Bauhaus aesthetics to provide a patina of sophistication to a culturally nihilistic regime. More broadly, the very idea of a ‘modern’ design was born in violence, in the notion of overthrowing outdated aesthetic values and practices – and by extension, the social relations that supported them. In their common celebration of the machine age of mass production, filled with clean, clear, interchangeable parts, designers from Mies van der Rohe to Marcel Breuer often sounded like Henry Ford.

All this is ancient history, and Antonelli avoided it (except for an irresistible glance at the stiletto heel of the 1930s). Her immediate provocation was the thesis of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker that violence is decreasing in contemporary society. Says Antonelli, “We may have curbed some of our tendencies towards brutality, but what if violence is merely mutating?” Depriving people of access to basic human rights is clearly a form of violence, but rampant consumption leading to environmental degradation is equally so, if less directly. These are issues that Pinker’s definition of violence excludes.

The examples chosen in the MoMA project reached back only as far as 11 September 2001. “For Americans, it was a watershed in the perception of violence”, adds Antonelli, and a design cataclysm – the repurposed jet airliners: all plastic, metal, and electronics, crashing into what had originally been a contested (and criticised) work of architecture but, by then, also an urban icon worthy of King Kong. “In the wake of that event,” she says, “warfare was redefined, not as a collision of nation-states but rather as a continuous struggle to root out an enemy that could be anywhere and nowhere.” If the range of potential targets widened, the means of warfare became more abstract and less material – “from clubs, guns, and bombs to propaganda and cyberwarfare.”

[caption id="attachment_9450" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Technical on the coast road B13 West of Marsa al burayqah, Libya; April 7, 2011; photo courtesy of Andrew Chittock.[/caption]

So the project addressed any planned strategy or design object that promoted, portrayed, or resisted violence. A doorway open this wide invited an unruly and confusing group of visitors. Few of them were as obvious as the destructive stux virus or as blunt as designer George Nelson’s 1960 short film for television, How to Kill People: A Problem for Design. His scathing, deadpan recital indicted industrial design as amoral and instrumental – the dirty job that somebody has to do and has done for centuries. Artist Trevor Paglen presented a series of embroidered patches representing the insignias of various secret branches of the U.S. military. They looked as if they were designed by teenagers who had spent too much time gaming. In his response, William Gibson called them “covert in-house advertising”. From a completely different realm came the Menstruation Machine designed by Sputniko!, a metal apparatus equipped with a blood-dispensing system and electrodes to stimulate the lower abdomen. Men wearing the device are supposed to experience something like the sensations of menstruation. Among the heated Internet comments, one Steve Bobel remarked, “I think there are limits [to empathy]”, a sentiment that would surely be echoed by Donald Trump and most of the Republican presidential candidates.

Among such works, it was not surprising that the MoMA team gave conventional weapons an unconventional spin. Guns have long been one of Antonelli’s design preoccupations. “The first object I suggested the museum acquire when I arrived here was a Beretta. They turned it down, in effect saying that we don’t collect weapons. What they meant was that it had only one purpose and no other relevant aesthetic dimension.” But was this object not the perfect harmony of form and function? Its updated counterpart in the project was The Liberator, a polymer handgun 3D-printed in sixteen pieces from software distributed through the Texas non-profit group Defense Distributed. (Since the MoMA project was launched, it has also become possible to print a working assault rifle). “For me, this gun was a wake-up call”, adds Antonelli. “In spite of everything, I had been somewhat Pollyanna-ish about design, in the belief that good design, intelligent design, somehow leads to a better life for all. This design, on the other hand, potentially leads to anarchy.”

The State Department shut down the Defense Distributed portal, but not before 100,000 people purchased the plans. The dream of the Bauhaus, that everyone deserves a good chair, has been rewritten to include a handgun for better living. The technology writer Rob Walker succinctly stated the stark challenge posed by The Liberator – and by Design and Violence – that of a naïve utopia, a techno-utopia gone inevitably wrong: “He [Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed] didn’t subvert the dream of a future where we can all manufacture whatever we want, whenever we like – he hijacked it. And in doing so, he made plain the full stakes of that dream, something that should probably happen more often in the global discourse about how to reckon with technology’s power.”

Design and Violence, edited by Paola Antonelli, Jamer Hunt, and Michelle Fisher; texts by by Anne-Marie Slaughter, William Gibson, Ingrid Newkirk, et al.; published by MoMA, New York

 designandviolence.moma.org

 

[caption id="attachment_9451" align="alignnone" width="819"] Menstruation Machine, 2010, by Sputniko!; Design Interactions Department, Royal College of Art, London; device: aluminium, electronics, and acrylic; 34cm
x 35cm x 34cm; video: 3'24"; product design assistance: Naoki Kawamoto; Innovation Design Engineering Department, Royal College of Art, London; photo: Rai Royal; image and video: courtesy of the artist[/caption]