You are in Oslo, Norway
Bibliographical note: The text was published in Scandinavian Journal of Design History 2, 1992, 119-22; the following version is slightly expanded.
By Jan Michl
This paper pursues a simple idea. It asks whether the modernist design pedagogy really worked as it claimed it did, i.e. whether it had worked without teaching aesthetic norms. Arguing that it had not, the paper propounds at least a partial rehabilitation of the old, model-based kind of design education.
It is a well known fact that in the first decades of their existence, museums of applied art lived with schools of design in a common world: the museums were used by the schools as they were intended to when the two were placed close together - as a collection of exemplary artefacts. It is quite a while since museums and schools enjoyed such a working relationship. For a couple of generations the break between these two institutions gave the impression of being permanent. This had to do with the then current perception of modernist design philosophy which was instrumental in leading to the break. Modernism considered itself to be a final solution: asking a modernist about what would come after Modernism was just as impudent in those years as asking a communist what would come after communism. But the demise of Modernism, which came for most of us just as unexpectedly as the collapse of communism, has put both schools of design and museums of applied art in a new situation. It seems as if the demise of Modernism, and the ensuing crisis of modernist pedagogy, have opened up the way to make the original role of museums as an educational collection of exemplary objects topical again. At least it is logically possible now.
Let me explain this more carefully. When museums of applied art were founded in the second half of the 19th century, following the example of the South Kensington Museum in London, their role as collection of exemplary artefacts from the past and present was of key importance. For schools of design, which were often also physically connected to these museums, the pedagogical concept of exemplary or model artefacts was completely natural and unproblematic. It was a continuation of traditional training in crafts and in art. Students were to learn to become designers by studying and copying, for practice, the excellent products from the past and present. But the 19th century also produced the germs of Modernism, and the modernist pedagogical principles later on brought about a complete estrangement between museums of applied art and schools of design. This process had already started before the First World War. But even though Modernism was in the period between the world wars becoming the day's dominating philosophy of design, it took time before the new pedagogical principles got a foothold in the schools of design and before the earlier example-based pedagogy was replaced by the modernist, 'exampleless' one. The schools did, it is true, continue to use museums for quite some time, but this was more and more from habit; it was as if they had forgotten in the meantime what they were actually coming there for. In the end the museums' collections were largely used for practising the students' drawing skills. It seems that the left-wing radicalism which culminated in 1968 swept away the little that remained of the old deliberate ties between the institutions.
The new 'exampleless' design pedagogy grew out of the modernists' belief, and hope, that there were aesthetic principles that existed independently of the market's preferences regarding taste. Were it so, it would make designers the rulers of taste, just as Marxists when they acquired power claimed that they ruled in agreement with the time-table of History, and that this rule was per definition beyond the criticism of normal people (working class as an avantgarde, etc.). This belief was formulated perhaps most succinctly by the American architect and designer Louis Sullivan, when he wrote, in 1896: "It is my belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution." Now, to those who came to fancy that each problem contains its proper solution - including, that is, its proper form - the whole idea of studying exemplary artefacts must have seemed scandalously wrong. From the modernist point of view, it was on the contrary necessary to go ad fontes, to analyze problems, and study functions, constructions, the nature of materials, production processes, etc., in order to find in them proper solutions, including proper forms.
Modernism's main thesis, in other words, implied an unequivocal rejection of the example-based pedagogy. When Modernism became the
| "It is my belief that it is of the very essence of every problem that it contains and suggests its own solution." |
Museums of applied art began now to live apart from schools of design, which carried on with their anti-normative, 'exampleless' design education, isolated from the museums. There were all the same two areas where links between schools and museums remained alive: exhibitions of current design and joint design libraries. Both continued to function in harmony with the museums' original intentions, as suppliers of model artefacts - though without either the schools or the museums now having this as a goal. This supplier-function has been more obvious in the case of exhibitions than in that of libraries. Nonetheless, the way in which design students have used the libraries of schools/museums can be seen as empiric proof that the 'exampleless' pedagogy actually never worked. Probably only a relatively small proportion of students at design schools come to libraries in order to study design history or theoretical texts. There is reason to believe that most come to study periodicals with examples of trend-setting solutions and books with pictures of works from the history of their craft. In other words, they are in search of the exemplary. It is hardly surprising that libraries and exhibitions have been used in this way. The point of studying design is after all to be a skilled practitioner, and one cannot become one without having a clear idea of what is considered exemplary, i.e. worth of imitation.
Modernist 'exampleless' pedagogy indirectly received its death warrant in the 1970s with the wide recognition that Modernism's design theory, as reflected in in its architectural practice, had been a fiasco. Still, the 'exampleless' pedagogy proved rather tenacious. The surreptitious supply of model solutions through exhibitions and libraries was not the only reason why this pedagogy appeared to work. As important was the fact that the 'exampleless' pedagogy was normative all the same. This is, after all, not surprising, since anti-normative pedagogy is a contradiction in terms: every kind of pedagogy is normative by definition. Modernist teachers, like all teachers in all ages, had taught the right way of doing things. But in contrast to their predecessors, modernists claimed that they were not teaching aesthetic norms or any particular stylistic idiom at all, but only methods for attaining the proper solutions.
Modernist design education led to most students being locked in a single stylistic convention without being aware that this was the
| "the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age" |
The modernists' linking of a specific style to the notion of truth, was very flattering to designers since it gave a profession with craft status an intellectual aura. With this linkage, the profession's old priorities were turned upside down: Designers who had previously been the servants of the market now perceived themselves as members of an avant garde in the moral struggle for the new epoch's genuine idiom - one that necessarily collided with the market's aesthetic preferences. This linkage between style, truth and morals may shed some light on why the modernist design philosophy had become a credo for so many designers, and why they held on to it for almost two generations.
We can glimpse how normative this professedly anti-normative education actually was already in the Bauhaus of the 1920s - the school which was the principal model for all later modernist design pedagogy. The Bauhaus students received in the Basic Design Course, and later in Kandinsky's and Klee's classes instructions in elementary principles of form and composition, and they used the basic vocabulary the way their teachers' inadvertently had taught them - as a style in its own right. The basic language of forms never became a base for a non-basic language of forms. This basic language became the final language. Elementary training led to a kind of elementarist style, even though the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, like all modernist teachers after him, resentfully rejected all hints that students were taught stylistic norms.
Now I have finally come to my main thesis, which I already indicated: If design schools succeed in coming to terms with the fact that design education unavoidably deals with the exemplary, then this might open up a new chapter in the relations between design schools and museums of applied art.
| model solutions play a key role in design education |
The road to this kind of collaboration is opening up but there are still roadblocks on both sides. The largest barrier for schools are probably the ingrown but not quite explicit notions about the artistic, i.e. aesthetically independent status of the design profession. These notions are based on the mentioned idea that problems contain and suggest their own aesthetic solutions, i.e. on the suggestion that there is a link between aesthetic and truth. The idea that a designer is 'actually' a truth-seeker invested with the right to ignore the market tastes has proved wishful thinking - but designers still find it difficult to give up the idea of aesthetic autonomy. They seem to have a suspicion that acknowledging the fact that normative examples play a central role in both the process of teaching and the process of designing would lead to an implicit demotion of the profession to its previous craft status. And it is difficult to see, outside the confines of Modernism, an alternative which would preserve the coveted artistic autonomy that the modernist design theory conferred on designers. This is apparently why many designers still cling to the mental world of Modernism - regardless of whether they are adherents of the modernist aesthetic or not. The sensitive question of the designer's artistic status will thus tend to curb the pedagogical rapprochement between schools and museums.
A number of hinders stands in the way of museums, too. To what extent, for example, are museums of applied art willing to let themselves be disturbed by the prospect of closer collaboration with budding designers? And if they are willing, how far should they go in buying the contemporary products of industrial design? Should capital goods also be included? What about the conflict between the museum's function of preserving objects and the students' need to touch and manipulate them? I do believe that most of these problems could be solved in cooperation with the schools, since where there's a will, there's usually a way. To aim at meeting the students' need for knowledge about exemplary products would give the historical research of artefacts which museums have traditionally been so good at, a new practical function. Co-operation with schools of design could actually prove attractive for museums, among other things because the educational links would give museums of applied art a strongly pragmatic aspect which they otherwise have a difficult time demonstrating to the authorities that fund them. And last but not least, perhaps concrete contributions of this kind to the education of industrial designers could justify funding for the museums' operations from industry.
By way of conclusion we can say that although the schools have the ball (it was the schools' new design philosophy, not that of the museums, which led to the divorce) we can hardly expect a sudden re-marriage between the two institutions. The future rapprochement will depend on how much individual teachers are willing to rethink the inherited and ingrained modernist attitudes to notions such as imitation, originality, truth, honesty, zeitgeist, and others. No doubt museums can contribute to, and support, this rethinking. When the new, more realistic and matter-of-factly attitudes to these notions have establish themselves within the walls of design schools, the logical possibility of a renewed working relationship between schools and museums, opened by the demise of Modernism, may become a mutually gratifying enterprise.
�
Notes:
�
�