Sunday, 29 May 2011

On Eames

“Eames Chair Sculpture” by Olga Koumoundouros Image via Christos Katsiaouni of The Moment
I found this photo, strangely enough, while avoiding far more pressing concerns; say, for example, actually writing something constructive and relevant in this space, or addressing the 10, 000 words I have due sooner that I would care to think about. On the other hand, at least a handful of those words are required here (unless I have miscalculated, in which case that first figure should read something closer to 11, 000) so I guess, by virtue of my garrulous reasoning, I was in fact researching when I encountered this photograph – not procrastinating – and was on the right track all along toward an uninterrupted and seamlessly executed transition into a discussion of the short films of Ray & Charles Eames, propelled at first by an entirely appropriate and not-at-all contrived segue from the sculpture above to what is written below. Phew.

First, the photo was taken from The New York Times style supplement, T Magazine, and it’s blog, The Moment. The article to which the photograph belongs concerns a group exhibition being staged in New York – in a second-story loft in SoHo in June, if you’re wondering – by a curatorial team of three who sought to represent the ‘atomized scenes’ of Los Angeles; but as the curator Benjamin Godsill professes, ‘There’s no such thing as L.A. There’s multiple, sometimes overlapping bits of community, ideologies and neighborhoods’ and instead it exists as a ‘non-place’. So this group show of forty-seven L.A. based artists, ‘Greater LA’, has been based around ‘the theme of a major metropolis’ with a common thread being that ‘many of the artists have an obsession with material;’ one installation in particular ‘inspiring both movement and claustrophobia.’ Why it’s almost an ode to the City Symphony genre of yore!

[Insert tenuous link]

Which is exactly how I found the three short films of Charles & Ray Eames put forward for discussion – that is, inspiring both movement and claustrophobia. Before watching these films, what little I knew of the family Eames centred on and around The Chairs, their contemporary worth (both monetary and in terms of the pop-cultural capital they generate, see Eames Lounge Chair) and the proliferation of knock-offs resulting from their iconic designs, as well as a modicum of idea about The House, so suffice to say I was unaware of their ventures in film and curious to see more.

However – and you’ll have to excuse my third dubious link – I found the experience of watching the films akin to what I would imagine the experience of sitting in Olga Koumoundouros’ ‘Eames Chair Sculpture’ is like: at first, intriguing, amusing – a comfortable novelty. But there is only so long you can endure sitting up there, perched precariously above the distressed, industrial-chic floorboards of that SoHo Gallery Space, before the novelty of looking down at that Eames Ottoman wears thin and all you want to do is put your feet up and take a nap. So at first, the distortion of scale and thus perceptions encountered in all but one of the films is an endearing and an interesting example of the power of the photographic apparatus in its most potent form, using scale to divorce us from our ordinary level of perception and forcing us to reexamine what it is exactly that we see. It was undoubtedly interesting how the ‘Doll’s-Eye-View’ (akin to the Eames-Eye-View of sitting on the sculpture and looking down) gave life and emotion to inanimate objects in Toccata, aided by the editing and music, as witnessed also in Blacktop and House; it was intriguing how objects become invested with a sense of agency, and narrative gave birth to narrative through metonymic associations between juxtaposed images, made all the more potent by my own projections.

I enjoyed how these domestic vignettes made me aware of both the process of watching and creating these films at once – I just found them a tad claustrophobic and became uncomfortable. Watching them twice allowed me to certainly appreciate the films as an exercise in manual dexterity and as brilliant works of art in their own right, but after what seemed like hours of sitting there fidgeting in the molded plastic of my chair in the seminar and the cold, hard, angular, wooden pew of the Woolley lecture theatre – something I’m sure Charles and Bernice would have a decoratively minimalist solution to – there was nothing I wanted more than to hop down from that Eames Lounge Chair and take that nap (and a desire to nap does not a philistine make).


2 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed this blog post - I love a good tenuous link! I thought the connections you made between Olga Koumoundouros’ ‘Eames Chair Sculpture’ and the distorted scale in 'Toccata' was really interesting - good stuff

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  2. This was a great blog, it's nice reading things related rather than the same information re-spealed. It's interesting to see how their chairs could be thought of as artwork on so many levels - the original designs themself, it's ability to move and gain life in 'Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair' and here, where someone has taken one of their designs and enhanced it further in the direction of an art installation.

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