Do nothing machine

No doubt the Eameses' work did, as the catalog puts it, give "shape to the twentieth
century," as it also followed three axes of that century's movement central to
understanding the Eameses' influence: "the West Coast's coming-of-age, the economy's
shift from making goods to producing information and the global expansion of American
culture." What is at stake, however, in investigating their work now (both in the museum
and elsewhere) has precisely to do with how we take the measure of those shifts. In their
embrace of corporate projects and underwriters (such as IBM, Polaroid, Boeing and
Westinghouse), in their polemical anti-Cold War democratizing worldview (best seen in
their 1959 slide show, "Glimpses of the USA," but also in Charles's appointment to the
Nixon administration's National Council on the Arts [NCA]) and in their dedication to
producing affordable, yet high-quality, furniture, the Eameses' work contains the kernel
of modernity's own contradictions. In such optimistically American projects we see that
innovation invariably contains dystopian seeds, that the rational calculation of value and
progress can spill over in into quasi-imperial conquests and exoticism, modernism-forprofit or anti-democratic idolatry.
Giovanni suggests that Ray was "a victim of common contemporary prejudices, which
wer e perpetuated even through her obituaries in 1988." Such a view is echoed by a
female Eames Office coworker interviewed in the oral histories who describes the sexist
pressures of traditional domesticity that forced Ray into Charles's shadow.
But it is not sexism alone that is responsible for burying the traces of their collaboration.
Several other Eames Office coworkers faced battles for credit for their work and ideas;
some (including the prominent designer Harry Bertoia) quit over the issue of attribution.
A third perspective from another female coworker confirms Charles's lust for the
limelight:
I saw this in action when he designed the house for John Entenza (Case Study House #9).
He and Ray came here for dinner one night, and he was thinking about the design and
asked what I would do if I were designing a house. I said I'd have a room, a studio
without any windows, just a skylight because I would want it to be a room that would be
completely private in, turned inward, so I wouldn't be distracted by looking at anything
outside. And literally, three weeks later, he came over with a model of the house and said,
"Here is a room without any windows, it's a study, completely private, turned inward." He
used my words, and innocently--he didn't even remember. I was staggered. What Charles
did was to organize the whole thing.
Since many of their joint projects (as well as, curiously, those of their heirs) have borne
Charles's signature alone, one of the daunting tasks of "A Legacy of Invention" is to
restore a sense of parallel inspiration and joint work, yet the tug of accumulated histories
of imbalance and misattribution often renders such parallelism strained and artificial.
Another catalog entry, from the section entitled "Beauty," remarks: "Charles heard the
music of Bach in the splash of soapy water on an asphalt school-yard--and made the film
Blacktop [1952]. Ray saw beauty in the shape of a utilitarian leg splint--and made elegant
sculptures." In each beauty was revealed, despite the inherent differences. Giovanni's
essay seeks to revise the history of the couple, suggesting convincingly that it is not a
simple matter of fairness that is at stake. Instead he argues that the eclipse of Ray
"obscures an entire body of thought deeply indebted to a major artistic tradition [the

American Abstract Artists movement] that otherwi se remains unacknowledged." The

occlusion of Ray thus stems from an emphasis on structure rather than on richly
dimensionalized space (the preoccupation not only of the Abstract Artists but of European
abstractionists as well); their ideas were products of distinct genealogies, and, in
Giovanni's words, the "complexity and ambiguity of the work lies partially in its hybrid
character."
The exhibit's parallelism and the catalog's correctives remain, however, formal answers to
a denser social problematic: the undertow of social transformations challenging the
ideology of inspiration and self-invention that subtends the Eameses' distinctly American
practice and pedagogy. The Eameses, in other words, worked at the juncture of corporate
and national interests that cannot be subsumed by the rhetoric of individual or joint
inspiration, precisely because such rhetoric elides the "unity of disunity" on the underside
of the modern: the forces of transnationalism, feminism and other social struggles and the
limits of representation itself as a rationalist enterprise. Such pressures are especially
evident in the multi-media slide shows, many of which Charles and Ray produced for
corporate events, museums or educational institutions. Their slide show produced under
the aegis of the USIA for the 1959 American National Exhibition, "Glimpses of the
USA," stitches the rhetoric of the later Powers of Ten to the Cold War: Americans and
Russians wake up under the same stars, travel through their days under the same physical
organizations of time and space and feed themselves from the same earth. This literal
American grain is assured in its social progressive vision, much as the British
documentarian John Grierson group's investment in social reform was in the 1930s'
EMB/General Post Office films; the narration (male "voice of God," as with much of
their other work) confidently bolsters the power of its multiple projection, which, said
Charles, "was simply a method to employ all the viewer's senses ... [to make] the
American way seem credible." The scientism of "Glimpses of the USA" now seems
astonishing if not naive, its faith in rational explication to bridge antagonistic political
structures either melancholic or quaint. Through such retrospective projections, though,
we are challenged to ask ourselves, "What succeeded in this modernist project?" What
has changed? And, incidentally, is the language of postmode rnism adequate to
characterize the shift?
The films provide a partial answer, for it is in the latent photographic image that the
Eameses' scientific approach to vision found its objective correlative. The couple made
roughly 110 films over more than 30 years, and they produced a slide library of over
350,000 entries for reference and use in their various projects. Again, one of the
interviewees in the Eames Office Video Oral History Project provides context: Richard
Donges suggests literally that "Charles saw through the camera." Elsewhere in the
catalog, the citation reads "Charles and Ray saw through the camera," again
foregrounding the politics of attribution. Images of the two of them at work on the films
confirm that Ray's artistic vision was crucial to their production. The films' obsession
with vision, as evidenced particularly by their dependence on macro lenses, strategies of
magnification, the manipulation of motion (stop motion and changes in speed) and
animation declare a practice based less on formal experimentation and structural inte
rvention than on the documentary capacities of the image to reveal the hidden physical
and mathematical structures (and beauty) of everyday life.

The method of exhibiting the films in "A Legacy of Invention" is two-fold: video
monitors throughout the exhibit display those films that are ostensibly relevant to the
exhibition's sections: "Space" (which encompasses their house and the film about it,
House: After Five Years of Living [1955]), "Culture" (which includes the current Eames
Office recreation of "Glimpses of the USA"), "Beauty" (which includes Tanks [1970-1] a
film on the Eameses' aquariums produced for the Charles Norton Lectures at Harvard),
"Science" (which includes the Eameses' 1976 version of Powers of Ten (made with IBM
funding) and the second version of their study of motion Tops [1969]) and "Furniture"
(which includes the Herman Miller production videos).
In order to give due attention to the films, the curators have strung together nine in a
video loop in a separate auditorium, and they have reserved entire rooms for a ceiling-tofloor projection of Blacktop (1952) and for a video presentation (on a horizontal monitor)
of Powers of Ten. (It is worth mentioning that the titles and dates provided for the videos
are often at odds with information provided elsewhere in the exhibit and in the catalog.)
However, the auditorium sound was poor and overwhelmed by the crowds outside the
open room testing the few pieces of furniture on which visitors could actually sit. While
the furniture may be the most widely acknowledged element of the Eameses' output, the
films are the most telling reminders of their visionary concept of modern design as an
element for social change. The nine films on display (a portion of what is now available
on videotape in a five-volume set from 'the Eames Office) bear witness to the Eameses'
preoccupation with the capacity of cinema to produc e and anatomize motion toward
beauty and "the good." Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), an examination of old toys in
macro proximity, puts the agenda baldly in its narration: the film pays homage to the lost
knack of making toys that were "direct and unembarrassed," wherein there was "nothing
self-conscious about [their] use of materials" ("what is wood is wood"), and that may
provide for us a "clue about what is the best of its time, including our own."
Forthright, mass-produced, unselfconscious, rational, close-up and well-constructed, the
toy trains are as much a model for the Eameses' own film practice as they are for massproduced design. To see the genius of objects regarded as quotidian and outmoded is the
task, for example, of Babbage (1968), a film on the mechanical antecedent of the
computer called the "Difference Engine," invented by the Englishman Charles Babbage.
To see in the variable motion of people a form of mass calculation rationalized by
mathematics is the focus of IBM At the Fair (1965), produced as a souvenir of the IBM
pavilion at the New York World's Fair. And a vision of the renewal of science in
architecture as belonging to photographic and cinematic time is the result of the stillphotography meditation on the baroque in Two Baroque Churches in Germany (1956).
That such an investment in unmediated perception, scientific rationality and the beauty of
the everyday could glide from the camera to the chair to the arrangement of objects on a
floor is the achievement of the Eameses' project. Its investments and its mobility do rest
on the light (aesthetic and political) of a fleeting moment in Los Angeles, on the promises
of plenitude of postwar production and on the vigorous stakes in the arts of the NCA and
schemes of international exportation of American culture. The current interest in this
moment of the middle of the century, however, is not so much millennial hoopla as it is a
mode of processing its passing and seizing upon the fluidity, piracy, sampling and
hypertextuality in a new world brought to us by digital technology. To see the Eames
retrospective can trigger nostalgia with its attendant pain or can challenge us to produce

and embrace the struggles for new designs for living in the face of decreasing arts
funding, corporate control over public space, anti- democratic household labors and rigid
separations of art and life. For those of us living with Eames artifacts, we might sit on
them anew as residual traces of modernity in the mirage of the postmodern. They remain
comfortable, beautiful and honest in their plasticity, but there are new chairs, new
imprints, new visions and new names to discover.
AMY VILLAREJO is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Film at Cornell
university. She is author of Queen Christina (1995) and Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism
and the Value of Desire, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
When Charles met Ray
by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
The Eames story could so easily have been different. Charles Eames, an architect trained
in the Beaux-Arts tradition, married Ray Kaiser, an abstract artist, in 1941. Together, they
became, to take the subtitle of a recent biography, "designers of the 20th century".
They built their "dream home" in Pacific Palisades, helped by the magazine Arts &
Architecture, which sponsored a series of "case-study houses" in the Los Angeles area in
the years immediately after the war. With its Zen proportions and Mondrian colours, the
steel-and-glass box became a place of pilgrimage for modernists everywhere.
But the Eameses had considered several styles. Their international-style home was nearly
a Spanish-style hacienda. They were no ordinary ideologues.
Any movement co-opts those whom it likes. The Eameses are acclaimed as heroes of
modernism even though some of their designs teeter on the brink of kitsch. Take the
ingeniously simple children's chair, made out of two pieces of moulded plywood, with a
heart-shaped cut-out in the seat back. The designers mollified die-hard functionalists by
explaining that the cut-out makes the chair easier to pick up (functionalists are sometimes
rather easily mollified). Of course it was decoration.
The Eameses were modernists and more. Their house and much of their furniture has a
strong Japanese influence Pacific Rim fusion long before every two-bit chef was doing it.
They were pioneers of"organic" and also of "hi-tech". Unlike some who bear the latter
label, they were genuinely interested in science and technology.
The Eameses inhabited the Venn diagram overlap of the Hollywood circle and the Dutch
Protestantism that infused the Michigan furniture-making industry, where the Herman
Miller Company became their major client, putting into production first their novel
moulded plywood chairs, which adopted techniques the designers had learnt making
splints and stretchers for the American army, and then their ubiquitous fibreglass-bucket
chairs. They designed a house and furniture for Billy Wilder. The "Aluminium Group"
chairs appear in 2001, the quintessence of futurism, already ten years old by the time of
Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film.
One of their most popular pieces was the lounge chair and ottoman of 1956. It strikes the
balance between trendy modernism and kitschy tradition. Although its model is the
English club chair, and the design is intended to have "the warm, receptive look of a wellused first baseman's mitt", the chair is in effect an upmarket version of the Barcalounger,
the all-adjustable armchair that is the throne of middle America's breadwinners (Frasier's
father has one, to Frasier's chagrin).

The inevitable question asked of any creative partnership is who did what. In the
biography, Pat Kirkham, a professor of design history at De Montfort University, tries to
retrieve Ray Eames "from the margins of history". She produces evidence that reveals the
foolishness of terming Charles and Ray's creative partnership anything but equal. It helps
that we are, these days, more willing to acknowledge aspects of design beyond the strictly
functional - the painterly and the whimsical, girlish qualities one might suppose, but the
very qualities which distinguished the Eameses' work from the prevailing purism.
Compare the Eameses' house, honest and humane, where even the trees were decorated,
with the cold and deceitful lines of Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in New Canaan,
its exact contemporary.
Across the board, the Eameses still seem ahead of their time. It was they who, in their
designs for exhibitions for IBM, the Smithsonian Institution and other august bodies,
introduced time-lines (modernist, didactic) but also a rich texture of information (protopostmodernist hypermedia). They showed what film might become as a medium for
education rather than mere entertainment. As the director Paul Schrader wrote: "The
classic movie staple is the chase, and Eames's [sic] films present a new kind of chase, a
chase through a set of information in search of an idea." Powers often ("a film dealing
with the relative size of things in the universe, and the effect of adding another zero")
remains the outstanding example: a continuous shot that at first recedes by a factor of ten
every ten seconds from an aerial view of a pair of picnickers, revealing the earth, the
solar system and our galaxy to the limits of the universe, and then zooms in again through
the skin of one of the picnickers' hands to show cells, molecules and subatomic particles.
(The film is available on video from Vitra, the European company that now makes some
Eames furniture, at a price that itself seems inflated by the appropriate power.)
For all their varied achievement, the Eameses were no saints. Their employees frequently
found both Charles and Ray hard to understand and to work with. Charles in particular
never gave praise. Important clients fell out with them. The only management task they
delegated was the unpleasant one of sacking people. It is hard to escape the conclusion
that the Eameses made a living out of not growing up, maintaining not just the innocence
but also the petulance of spoilt children.
And yet, and yet . . . the designs: so advanced, so exemplary, and yet so delightful. In
1957, an aluminium company asked the Eameses to design a toy that would show the
metal to advantage. The designers took a mile; they created not just any toy but a solarpowered toy. In 1957! Like all their best work, it made its point, but did not labour it; it
was called the Alcoa Solar Do-Nothing Machine.
-1-