Issue No. 592
Culture
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27 June - 3 July 2002 Issue No. 592 Culture |
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Filling spaces
William Morris -- poet, designer, architect, typographer, publisher, painter and, most famously, at least these days, the wallpaper man -- is one of those characters only the 19th century could have thrown up. A utopian socialist to boot, he found himself, at the fag end of England's industrial revolution, fighting a rear-guard action in defence of craftsmanship, and this at a time when the positivist 19th century was entering its most gaga phase. Everyone, absolutely everyone it must sometimes have felt, was rushing off to the Crystal Palace, or attending some other great exhibition to extol the virtues of mechanised production and the beauty of the machine-pressed tin tray. And there was poor old William, with his band of like-minded protégés, cutting hand-blocks for impossibly swirly wallpaper, composing parables of an improbably idyllic rural past, designing the 19th century's most beautiful typeface, and setting up small workshops to produce his own reworkings of pre- Georgian furniture designs. If it was all a bit madcap, this messianic zeal for the pre-industrial, and the pulpit moralising tone of some of his design statements is a little off-putting, it remains perfectly understandable, not least as a necessary fillip to the increasingly cack-handed direction of mass -- for which, I'm afraid, one can substitute bourgeois -- taste. Think of the Victorian equivalent of a Mike Leigh film set and try and persuade yourself that you would be happy to call it home.
Unfortunately, like all attempts to buck mass-production -- from Morris's Arts and Crafts movement to Memphis, via the Wiener Werkstat and Bauhaus, what Morris ultimately became engaged in was niche, luxury good marketing, producing beautifully made objects at fabulously high prices for a clientele happy to pin, if not its aesthetic on its sleeve, then at least in the drawing room.
Many years ago, sitting in on a seminar on the Arts and Crafts movement given by a far from sympathetic modernist, an expert on the Russian avant-garde who had unhappily been roped in to some 19th century overview course to fulfil teaching commitments, I was surprised when she snapped at some poor undergraduate who had failed to understand a point being made about hygiene. Morris's furniture, simple turned wood with rush seats, was far more hygienic than its mid-Victorian counterparts. The hapless student (the only person of my acquaintance, incidentally, to have been recruited by MI5, which in the circumstances might have been a wiser career choice than furniture design) innocently asked why. Upholstery, she said. And then horse hair. Dust, she snarled, mites, and other parasites. She made her point, and she made it sufficiently forcefully to have engendered a lifelong suspicion of upholstery and other soft furnishings. Which leaves the dilemma of just what to sit on.
One close friend, who has long advocated the uselessness of much modern furniture, took to living in a box, a raised platform in the middle of a room surrounded by wood-framed linen sliding screens. And it was, admittedly, a perfectly pleasant place to sit cross-legged and drink green tea. His arguments were perfectly logical: the human body, he said, reasonably enough, had not evolved over eons to sit in chairs. The ergonomic chair is an oxymoron. The human frame is made to squat, or sit on the ground, and for tens of thousands of years this is what it did, and continues to do in societies that have yet to fetishise the sitting room and the dining room, in societies that are nomadic, or that are sufficiently secure not to feel bound to ape the accessories of the Second Empire. But however convincing his arguments the practice has always appeared too extreme to embrace: a box with sliding screens is fine as a novelty but as a life- style choice it would, in my house at least, remain confined to the corner of one room. Such is the price of timidity. The faint-hearted seldom break the habits of their parents, let alone their own.
Take an expanse of floor, any expanse of floor. It can be modest or it can stretch as far as a football pitch, and then think about making it inhabitable, and the chances are you are in the process of filling it. With furniture. But what furniture?
Cairo is full of furniture shops. They seem to occupy every corner. There is one on every block. Yet apart from a tiny handful of retailers intent on stressing design, and then only in the most declamatory of ways, the stock seems much of a muchness. There are, though, changes that occur from season to season.
The big story, this summer at least, and based on a spot check of several retailers together with careful observation of the back of trucks, is pale walnut veneer. Where gilding once reigned marquetry is now the great pretender. Now the thing about walnut, if you slice it thin enough, is that you can construct perfectly symmetrical patterns, the knots in the wood forming mirror images of each other along a vertical or horizontal axis. So now your wardrobe doors can resemble an enlarged version of those folded ink blot images that psychiatrists used to show patients in 1950s melodramas before peering over their spectacles and, in oleaginous, coaxing voice, asking, "Now tell me what you can see".
And the veneer, with sufficient patience and the right kind of adhesives, can be affixed to almost anything. The frames of armchairs, rough hewn untreated blond wood, heaped on the back of a van encountered on the way to the office this morning -- as yet only ghosts of their future selves -- were obvious candidates for the walnut treatment.
At the beginning of last year, when the newspapers were full of stories attempting explanations for the shortage of hard currency, references were endlessly made to stockpiled itineraries, bought in the wake of East Asian currency collapses. Now we all know, and knew then, despite the column inches, that there were somewhat more structural reasons for the on-going currency crisis than the mysterious stockpiling of unnamed items from South-East Asia. But now at least we know at least one of the things filling the warehouses. Mountains of walnut, thinly sliced into biscuit coloured veneer.
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