The Films of Charles and Ray Eames

The films and designs of Charles and Ray Eames resonate with many people in today’s design world on so many different levels that had I never encountered these films, I would never have noticed their significance. Last week I picked up a copy of Oyster Magazine (an Australian art/fashion/design magazine for a youth audience) which published an article on an anniversary exhibition of Charles and Ray Eames works in America which had occurred earlier this year, suggesting that the ideas of this design duo are resonant within contemporary design today.

Personally I have always considered furniture and their design to be products of mass consumption, and as commodity items since my family work within the furniture design industry. Only in last century with the advent of modernism in art history - I'm thinking of Le Corbusier's modern architectural designs and the German Bauhaus school - has architecture and furniture been conceived as a way of bringing avant garde art into everyday life condensed in the mantra of Louis Sullivan, an American architect who stated “form follows function”. Modern artists were recognising the potential for objects since Marcel Duchamp challenged the artistic canon with his introduction of the Readymade, transforming the domestic coat hook or urinal into an object by simply proclaiming an item to be a work of art. Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box installation deconstructs the nature of everyday commercial item, expressing his idea about simulacra in so far as he believed the mass reproduction of an item or image inevitably results in their death of meaning. Alan Kaprow, a 1970s New York installation artists would create dialogue about the object through his replications of living spaces within art galleries. As these artists demand contemplation on the aesthetics of everyday objects as art, so too do the films of Charles and Ray Eames films. Kaleidescope and House After Five Years of Living urge us to consider these “anonymously designed” objects imbuing them almost with a personality of their own, as they impact on the individual living, working and engaging in that space. Charles and Ray Eames house also epitomises influence of modern design, the colour scheme evoking Piet Mondrian straight line and colour aesthetic.

Within contemporary postmodern society our identification of these objects as mainstream products of mass production for instance the chair, or a house as evocative of a display home within the pages of catalogues, industry magazines or advertising, is far removed from the early experimentation with furniture. There exists a heightened awareness of these objects as commodities and hence they become valued in terms of their commerciability. Yet Karl Lagerfield's fashion designs for Chanel illuminate the blurring of the boundaries between high art and a commodity "low art" object. Consider the following Chanel Be@rbrick released last year.

A bear reminiscent of a larger version of a child's lego figure, turns into a modern day sculptural piece, erring on the status of Adorno's kitsch object and collectable predominantly by adult. The Be@rbrick is a result between collaborations between design houses and MediCom Toy Incorporated, the company behind these savvy Japanese toys. Suprisingly an Eames Be@rbrick exists as well http://bearbricklove.blogspot.com/2007/02/eames-by-design_929.html . Watching the Eames films reminded me of the difficulties in finding the boundary of art, design and the commodity object within the paradigm of 21st century Western culture.

In the Eames' Powers of Ten film they blend science and art, the camera zooming outwards. In this film, the scale of human to the cosmos is questioned alongside science’s concern with observation, data, statistics. Although I have never seen this film as some people in the seminar may have, the exactitude, the documentarian aspect, and the objective monotone voice of the narrator, are reminiscient of films I watched during high school on mysteries of the Universe. Charles and Ray Eames propose in this film the pedagogical function of film to illuminate the multifaceted scale of the human to the Universe, here one no longer needs to abstractly learn about concepts but can visually be shown images of the milky way, our galaxy. This ties in with the ontology of film and photography, as a way of capturing time and aspects of nature hidden to human vision. Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction makes an analogy between the role of the director as analgous to a surgeon, in so much as modern technology has unconcealed what was once hidden to the eye, the surgeon operating can get a glimpse in the intricacies of the human body, in the same way a director can capture everyday life on a microscopic level.

The films of Charles and Ray Eames approach modern film from a sociological phenomenon, and places film as a space in which to explore developments within design and science. Although the breadth of films viewed in Cinematic Modernism have explored films which contribute to the linear development of modern cinema through experimentation with the medium, reaction to Modern urban life and its impact on the human individual, the Eames' film innovatively chart the history of design, art and science through a cinematic medium.