Life after Martha Stewart
PUSSSYKATT
Martha Stewart has moved her empire online. She updates her recipes and helpful
house tips daily, and keeps things cozy with a butter-colored homepage and
intimate housewife philosophizing: "Dear friend, Spring is a time of
beginnings. Two of the year's most joyful celebrations -- Easter and Passover
-- fall during this season, reminding us to consider the miracles of survival,
renewal, and rebirth. But rebirth isn't just a metaphor, it's a reality.
Everything's growing and flourishing in the garden right now... After months of
winter dormancy, there suddenly is quite a lot to do."
NOT EVEN A GENERATION of nostalgia accumulated before the Go-Gos bounded back
into popular consciousness this winter via The Wedding Singer. This is a
forgiving interval if you consider the rate at which fashion designers
cannibalize their own fads. Thankfully, interior design is kept to a somewhat
slower pace of death and renewal, since the initial investments are larger and
claims of permanence are typically made on behalf of each new iteration of
sofa, rug and wallpaper. But futons don't last forever. And those suffering
silly generational monikers eventually outgrow them, at least chronologically.
And so, joining the hipster home-deco magazine, Wallpaper, there is now Nest,
another interior design magazine geared toward those of us who endured bean-bag
chairs and olive shag at the hands of our parents, only to pay handsomely for
their revival.
It's a useful myth that one's appeal diminishes with age; in fact, the formerly
hopeful and unwrinkled become more attractive as time wears on -- specifically,
more attractive to advertisers who understand that our material needs are
complexifying. Nest and Wallpaper, then, have hit on a sweet secret of those
putative slackers: they move into bigger apartments; they graduate from Ikea;
they get married, too. Some even have children. What's particularly interesting
about Nest and Wallpaper, both clearly indebted to and rebelling against grand
dame Martha Stewart, is how they hope to seduce this younger reader. To seek
this demographic is to tread into a psychographic roiled by both feminism and
watered-down Marxism, by both the diminished expectations of the early '90s and
the manic acquisitiveness and addiction to debt of the fin de siecle.
But it was perhaps Flaubert who made the housewife (and by extension the home)
an object of scorn and envy, mocking her preoccupations and stripping the
purposefulness -- and thus the morality -- from her sensuality, refashioning
her hearth into a boudoir. And then, a hundred years later, in liberating women
from their calicoed ball and chain, somehow, we torched the house. To nest, for
women, then, is to embrace a toxic carnality or their own subjugation, and for
men, their inner queen.
Wallpaper and Nest would do well to turn their attention to the interior design
of virtual space -- and not just to decorate our desktops, but to the
architecture of interface. Check out the excerpts from Steven Johnson's
Interface Culture on FEED: "We should think of the interface, finally, as a
synthetic form, in both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake
landscape that passes for the real thing, and -- perhaps most importantly -- it
is a form that works in the interest of synthesis, bringing disparate elements
together into a cohesive whole."
IN THE LAST DECADE, Martha Stewart supplied yuppie women with a methodology for
becoming a homemaker without being a housewife. She rehabilitated the home by
making it not a place of comfort and warmth, but a place where over-achieving
women could fail. She tapped a new source of guilt and, in reintroducing
struggle, gave women permission to contemplate picture frames, flowers, and the
color of their towels. How she did this was simple. She created the illusion
that you could do it, too, that with the right trowel or paint brush you could
turn your home into a temple of good taste. This possibility alone justified an
entire afternoon spent making moth-repellent, organza sachets. Her empire was
built on what is essentially an ontological shift.
Philosophically, the next wave of homemakers differ dramatically from their
predecessors. They are less encumbered by, if hardly free of, apron strings and
Tupperware. And they fall squarely in the BIY (buy it yourself) camp.
Discussions of the latest release from Semiotexte long ago gave way to ogling
the William-Sonoma catalog. Time may be scarce, but the stock options have to
be spent on something. And this returns us to the question of gender, since
both Nest and Wallpaper seem to target dual-income households comprised of, in
at least some cases, semi-indoctrinated young men.
Wallpaper skirts the issue and plays to women, mostly and gay men. Features are
populated with pretty boys who lounge on the latest in modernist redux. (A far
cry from the vacant, sober spaces of Architectural Digest.) Wallpaper also
panders with a truly hilarious fashion spread accessorized with faux couples,
feather dusters, window cleansers and Dust Busters. If Wallpaper (much like
Details) addresses its gay readership in feints and whispers, Nest shouts: in
the first issue there's a three-page spread of Keith Haring's "Guernica," a
mural covering the walls of the men's bathroom of the Gay and Lesbian Community
Services Center in Manhattan -- a literal orgy of penises and tongues.
Nest also makes a bolder attempt to attract the straight guy who refuses to
delegate his domesticity. Men and sex are the centers of many stories, and not
just designer men. There's a photo essay about Asmat tree dwellings that smacks
of Conrad and hints at all sorts of sexual perversity. Then there's the
portrait of the Lord of Bath's domicile, Longleat, where the Lord's own
paintings of his many (female) lovers hang along the walls. <Picture>(He's
currently at work on one depicting fellatio and sodomy, the former being
performed on a figure that resembles none other than the hyper libidinous Lord
himself.) There is, then, the possibility that hetero guys might aspire to the
lifestyles represented, and meantime drool over the Tony Cordero tables and
lamps without shame, in the privacy of their comparatively impoverished rooms.
Under-represented in the pages of these glossies are the people truly
revolutionizing interior design. These are not artistes laboring in obscurity
but scientists working hard at MIT and similar institutions, to develop the
next wave of appliances. For in some of the most macho (if no longer male)
preserves of academia -- robotics, computer science -- people like Rodney
Brookes have devoted thousands of hours and research dollars to building robots
that would vacuum your living room or that would perch on your set-top and keep
your TV screen clean. But their hard work has started to pay off. In its
March/April issue, Wallpaper blurbs a Robo Maid, a vacuum cleaner that suctions
your rug with no human intervention. And Sony advertises a "TV with IQ picture"
that can "sense what the weather is like outside.. [and] automatically adjust
the colour, brightness, sharpens and contrast."
The new gadgets perfectly compliment those sleek, stripped-down, dining room
sets and credenzas. For, if you believe the people at Wallpaper, Modernism is
unavoidably back, perhaps after never quite dying. <Picture>Where Martha
Stewart relies on the accumulation of well crafted tchotchkes -- organically
dyed Easter eggs, a silver-leafed mirror, monogrammed blankets -- to achieve
her aesthetic goals, Wallpaper prefers a cool minimalism -- Paul Rudolph and
Ufficio di Architettura's light boxes. (Nest doesn't ever decide and presents
instead a happy combination of the tactile and absurd.) There is no shortage of
blank space, cool planes of glass or bare, architectural bookshelves, moments
of self-denial -- the rejection of color, and detail -- in the face of abject
luxury, that nod to our past denunciations of the bourgeoisie. And then beseech
us to buy.
Wallpaper and Nest have promising futures, engaging, as they do, both the
primal fear of aesthetic conformity and our God-given materialism. In offering
an alternative to prefab furnishings, each holds our eye as successfully as any
respectable fashion magazine. Like those magazines, neither Wallpaper nor Nest
reduces our ambivalence towards caring about our interiors at all. And, as with
all advertiser-driven media, aspirations to own the featured objects ultimately
falter, tamed by our pay checks. And so the self-consciousness that distances
us from the mass culture we consume in such great quantities extinguishes
itself, like a double negative. At which point, we head for Ikea.
The aesthetic of Modernism can be found in the poems, essays, novels and visual
art of the Modernist movement. One emblematic Modernist architect and interior
designer, whose sleek minimalist style is supposedly now back in vogue, is
Frank Lloyd Wright, whose structures attempt to conflate form and function.
©1998 FEED Inc.