Design History Beyond the Canon

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass, Christopher Wilson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350353473
• eBook ISBN: 9781350051591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional narratives of design history. The book explores a diverse selection of objects, spaces and media, ranging from high design to mass-produced and mass-marketed objects, as well as counter-cultural and sub-cultural material. The authors' research highlights the often marginalised role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice. The book is organised in three thematic sections: Consumers, Intermediaries and Designers. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy. The essays in all three sections utilise different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. Design History Beyond the Canon brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.

Section 1

Users/Consumers

Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home

Yelena McLane

The Russian term kul’ttovary translates roughly as “cultural goods.” The concept of cultural goods was well known in the Soviet Union, and, for decades, each city, town, or village had at least one store called “Kul’ttovary.” The premise behind the concept, and associated consumer goods, was that specified items, broadly available for purchase at affordable prices, would bring culture into workers’ and collective farmers’ homes. The range of “cultural goods” visible in Figure 3.1—musical instruments, radios, televisions, record players, decorative clocks, drawing and photography supplies, and reproductions of works of art—was typical for these state-owned retailers. The kul’ttovary phenomenon was widespread in Russia from the late 1920s into the 1960s, at which point the previously ubiquitous Kul’ttovary stores yielded to shops with narrower specializations, consistent with broader changes in the Soviet retail industry.

Soviet product design, along with accompanying commercial propaganda specifically in the context of kul’ttovary, is a topic that is virtually unexplored outside of Russia. The marketing and retail strategies for these products were component to a much broader undercurrent of state-sanctioned “consumerism” as a means of implementing the government’s political, social, and cultural policies.¹ This story runs counter to the prevailing narrative of the Soviet Union as a country at odds with the more materialist impulses of the capitalist West.² Recent scholarship reiterates the true, but incomplete notion that consumer-oriented manufacture addressed material necessities and, to a lesser extent, individual tastes and habits for personal effects like clothing and accessories.³ Kul’ttovary objects are, of course, only a small part of Soviet design history, but the details of how and why and for whom these products were made, how they were used, and how these uses contributed to the formation of a common Soviet national identity illustrate a range of socialist ideologies aimed at promoting culture—literary, musical, and physical—planning for a cultured citizenry, and effectively distributing material goods within the USSR.

Aside from the now canonical experiments of revolution-era avant-gardists, Moscow Metro decoration, and the apotheosis of Art Deco under Stalin (the latter termed “Soviet Classicism”), Soviet design has, by and large, been supposed in contemporary scholarship as of little import—inferior replicas and pallid adaptations of Western styles.⁴ Soviet-era “two-balls” sneakers mimicked the more fashionable brand with the “three stripes,” and “Tonika” electric guitars (Russia’s answer to the Fender Stratocaster) were notoriously un-tuneable. It is, nonetheless, worth observing (albeit briefly) the origins of Soviet consumer product design, the political and socioeconomic contexts that shaped its development, and the stories of a few representative examples of kul’ttovary, if only to test that supposition. What emerges is a teleological counterpoint to the established, style-driven account of twentieth-century design history, worthy of inclusion in the canon as an alternative milieu for exploring the purpose (rather than the function or the aesthetic) of designed goods.

Figure 3.1 An attendant assists customers shopping for accordions in a Kul’ttovary store in the town of Balakovo, Saratov Region, circa 1960.

Creating the “cultured man”

From the early 1920s, the Bolshevik government recognized the importance of literacy and culture in building the new Soviet state. Vladimir Lenin emphasized that an increased “cultural level of the masses” was integral to the task of reorganizing society. Involving the population in artistic and cultural activities would inspire volunteerism, swell the ranks of local government offices and agencies that managed the new Soviet economy, and teach accountability among the legions of state workers needed to manage the wholesale transformation of society.⁵ The range of individual pursuits provided for through kul’ttovary would offer each citizen a means by which to embrace and enjoy the fruits of the October Revolution.

The realities of life—“byt”—were changing rapidly. The concept of a private, domestic life spent amongst family and friends, surrounded by an assortment of personal possessions signifying one’s status in society, was at first dismissed by revolutionaries as archaic, dying echoes of the petty bourgeois lifestyle. The new socialist “byt” would be marked by communal living, egalitarian workplaces where men and women labored side by side, and group recreation (gymnasiums), sanitation (bathhouses), education (reading rooms), and consumption (cafeterias). Comradery, not family in the traditional sense, was the socialist future, culminating on that eventual bright day in the harmonious reconciliation of the public–private dichotomy. In the words of the revolutionary-era writer, journalist, and period historian Marietta Shaginyan: “This does not mean to ‘get rid of the individual,’ but to develop a new, restless, richness of individuality (yet undiscovered by art) in the sphere of public service.”⁶ In short, for a person to be enculturated into a life of collaboration, the person must, through education, overcome the impulse to self-centeredness through engagement with outward-looking arts, sports, and recreation. Party leaders, artists, writers, architects, and musicians strove through their speeches, essays, paintings, and compositions to exemplify this ideal. The reality of implementing this vision for the future was, of course, quite different from the soaring ideals described by leaders, far less pretty than imagined by artists and writers, and far more complicated to enact.

Through the 1920s, tens of millions of peasants moved from rural villages into cities to be conscripted into vast crews at the sites of new urban and industrial building projects. These were “peasants by origin and workers by occupation.”⁷ Much of this workforce lived in barracks and dormitories. As traditional mechanisms for social control, such as the church and patriarchal family and village structures, fell away under the new socialist regime, epidemics of violence, vandalism, rape, alcoholism, and hooliganism spread.⁸ Corporal punishment or imprisonment against numberless restless youths could not be implemented on a mass scale, and such measures were unlikely to be effective as long-term solutions. Instead, the Soviet government opted to adopt (at least officially) an array of positive, non-violent methods to restore discipline and order. The people were to be “civilized” and “cultured.”⁹

In 1927, the Communist Party’s first five-year plan set forth the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword: A pre- and post-history of “Teaching the History of Modern Design: The Canon and Beyond” Carma Gorman and David Raizman
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Rose Pass, and Christopher S. Wilson
• Section 1 Users/Consumers
• Kul’ttovary: Bringing culture into the Soviet home Yelena McLane
• Diversionary tactics at work: Making meaning through misuse Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler
• Everything old is new again: Modernization, historic preservation, and the American home, 1920–1966 Emily Wolf
• Section 2 Intermediaries
• Representing modern architecture in The Rockford Files, 1974–1980 Christopher S. Wilson
• CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES PUNK PUNK PUNK WOMEN WOMEN WOMEN Maria Elena Buszek
• Using digital tools to work around the canon Matthew Bird
• Section 3 Designers
• Confronting racial stereotypes in graphic design history Karen L. Carter
• The Mangbetu coiffure: A story of cars, hats, branding, and appropriation Victoria Rose Pass
• Adventure play in physical and virtual spaces Gayle L. Goudy
• The case of William Pahlmann: Challenging the canon of modern design Marianne Eggler, Erica Morawski, and Sara Desvernine Reed
• “I was not a woman designer … I was a designer who happened to be a woman” Russell Flinchum
• Epilogue: Beyond the canon—building the case for and cases for interdisciplinary design history Stephanie E. Vasko
• Notes on the contributors
• Index
• Copyright