The orange robot in the lobby of the High Museum’s Anne Cox Chambers Wing is making furniture.
Cued by its computer brain, it is arranging LEGO-like little metal cubes, with precision and stamina that humans can’t match. The result will be similar to those displayed nearby: a three-dimensional Etch A Sketch version of an ornate Louis-something-style table, which can be disassembled and reconfigured at will.
Commissioned by the High for “Modern by Design,” Dutch designer Joris Laarman’s robotic performance “Digital Matter” epitomizes early 21st-century design in its use of new developments in digital manufacturing and reflection of the needs and realities of global and virtual worlds. The table can be manufactured anywhere, altered to adapt to different circumstances, and its reusable materials make it a model of sustainability.
This intertwining of art, function, technology and zeitgeist motors the evolution of modern design. Evidence is embedded in the display on the second floor, one in the series created in partnership with New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Its main objective, however, is to chronicle the museum’s pivotal role in bringing modern 20th-century design to mainstream America.
All museums have a general mission; few besides MoMA saw themselves as missionaries. Steeped in the form-follows-function philosophy of the German Bauhaus, founder Alfred Barr put functional design on a par with fine art, and the museum used its bully pulpit to promote modernist aesthetic through design competitions, exhibitions and cross-marketing with manufacturers.
The exhibition focuses on three seminal exhibitions. The 1934 “Machine Art” trained viewers to notice the efficient beauty of well-made everyday industrial objects -- a propeller, a saw, a railroad spring -- which were presented like sculpture to accentuate their formal properties.
The “Good Design” series between 1950 and 1955 touted work by innovative young designers such as Charles Eames. Many, from the Butterfly chair to Tupperware, remain in use. Their clean lines and association with science (note the beakerlike coffee maker) appealed to postwar families wanting to break with their parents’ past, participate in the optimism of the Atomic Age and glide into an Epcot future.
The 1972 “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” expressed the hedonistic ’60s generation’s rejection of authority and middle-class values. Bright color and dramatic shapes replaced sober directness. You can just imagine bell-bottomed swingers hanging out in the conversation pit of the modular purple domicile, perhaps in a purple haze of their own. Designs such as a traditional desk lamp blown up like a Claes Oldenburg sculpture or the inflatable red chair reflect Pop Art’s playful sensibility.
The gears shift on the Skyway. In fact, the display of works dating from the ’80s to the present from the High’s growing design collection is like an entirely different show, a mini-version of last year’s “European Design Since 1985.” Weird though that is, the display is a pleasurable effusion of creativity. In contrast to Laarman, the Japanese group Nendo goes low-tech in a series of chairs and tables made of polystyrene foam and cardboard girded by extra-strength carbon tape. Nendo also contributed the eco-conscious “cabbage chairs,” made out of pleated paper used during the manufacture of pleated fabric and usually discarded. The resin-treated paper strips playfully make a pouf like a Shih Tzu’s topknot.
Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of http://www.ArtsCriticATL.com.
Review
“Modern by Design”
Through Aug. 21. $18; $15, students and seniors; $11, children 6-17; free for children 5 and under and members. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
The bottom line: "Modern by Design" recounts the democratization of high design and offers other insights into modern and contemporary functional art and tastemaking.
