THE WAY WE WERE : ‘The Art That Is Life’ and ‘Machine Age’ at LACMA

They say that when couples remodel or redecorate, the strain is often enough to cause them to break up. Sure, living with daily invasions of workmen and chaotic surroundings drives anybody crazy, but the real tensions may come from psycho-artistic problems caused by differences in taste. Fred wants to go High Tech. Ginger loves French Provincial. He thinks that if she adores that corny stuff she must not be the person he fell in love with. She thinks that if he likes all that cold gadgetry he must really be the heartless monster she had always suspected. Trouble.

Anybody inclined to this love-me-love-my-style kind of thinking is advised to exercise great caution in schlepping one’s intimates to two new exhibitions at the County Museum of Art, “The Art That Is Life” and “The Machine Age.” Each surveys a crucial period in the state of the American spirit expressed through its taste in everything from pencil sharpeners to world’s fairs, from bookmarks to architecture. They are significant to Los Angeles because the two styles represented--the craftsy and the slick--form the backbone of the local aesthetic.

They are significant to the museum because they are marvelously installed blockbusters that reflect both LACMA’s coming of age as a popular institution and the state of the current artistic Zeitgeist . Design and architecture are so hot today that we find them dominating the whole special exhibitions area of the museum for the first time in living memory. Viewers who also visit an important survey of contemporary American crafts currently at the Laguna Art Museum will get a good sense of the present state of Post-Modernism’s entertaining, consumer-oriented blurring of the lines between fine and applied art.

The LACMA exhibitions bristle with such ramification that it is hard to know where to begin. Both are intensely personal in their appeal. Visitors of a certain age may well find a bike they rode as a kid or the corner of an L.A. bungalow that looks suspiciously like Grandma’s house. People are going to kick themselves for not hanging on to their old Electrolux vacuum cleaners or the boxy old fridge that are now museum pieces.

But these are also exhibitions about such a very big question as, “How do people cope with the present when it is more than usually uncomfortable?” “The Art That Is Life” deals with one American reaction to the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, namely the Arts and Crafts Movement as it flourished here from 1875 to 1920.

The movement had its roots in England in the thinking of the reformer A. W. N. Pugin, critic John Ruskin and the writer/craftsman William Morris. Their program was complex, but it boiled down to a reaction against both excessive industrialization and the excessive ornament of the time. The idea was to get back to the simple life, based on a medieval model where hard and careful work fed the soul of the artisan and joined him in brotherhood with the community. It was not just an aesthetic program but a program of political and social reform. It had a moral dimension. It believed that art could make people better through spiritual elevation.

It was, from present perspective, a rather quaint notion that resulted in a quaint product. A turn through the 200-odd objects on view in the Hammer Wing through Nov. 1 makes its own point. We are surrounded with warm, dark wood carefully fashioned into simple objects delicately elaborated, sometimes to the point of something severely ornate. Round about are ceramics that hint at folk art, slot-joined wood that recalls the Japanese, whiffs of Viennese Art Nouveau, bits of American Indian crafts.

Sensibilities range from the starkly understated soulfulness of Gustave Stickley to the delicate virility of Greene & Greene. Large doses of domesticated Romanticism appear in stained glass by John La Farge, Tiffany lamps and a carved desk by Charles and Lucinda Mathews. Mainly, however, we are in a dark pine forest cave sometime during the Middle Ages of the imagination. The Arts and Crafts Movement dealt with an awkward present by fleeing into the past.

Across the court in the new Anderson Building, “The Machine Age in America 1918-1941” remains on view to Oct. 18. We were between World Wars but the Great Depression made it a grueling time to survive. You would never know that, however, from looking at the show. If the crafts movement appeared to reject the machine (it didn’t in practice), Jazz Age America positively embraced its cogs and wheels giggling.

The 300-odd works of “Machine Age” add up to a more complex business than the crafts show, plunging through everything from fine arts to cigarette lighters and a drop-dead, one-of-a-kind Packard shown at the 1933-34 Chicago Century of Progress exhibition. (Its windshield wipers are missing, but it doesn’t rain much in the Anderson Building.) For all this complexity, a clear sensibility emerges: The dominant materials are chrome and plastic and everything seems to be trying to become a rocketship.

The homey image of crafts became specialized into Industrial Design. In some ways, Norman Bel Geddes is the typical spirit here, designing pencil sharpeners, autos and steamships alike to look like bullet-shaped space vessels. Funny how our concept has changed. Today, the “Star Trek” vision of the future looks rather primitive.

Then, airy, witty stylishness was king. A round cobalt mirror mounted on the front of Walter Teague’s “Bluebird Radio” has no functional purpose, but it looks great. Optimism burbles in everything from California pottery to an early TV that uses a mirror to reverse the backward image on the screen. Fine artists such as Man Ray and Isamu Noguchi kept their tongues in their cheeks, but much of the work expresses real hope and urbanity. Clearly, the Machine Age tactic was escape to the future.

It is hard to imagine more clearly distinguished polarities that the past and the future. The only thing they have in common is that neither exists except in fantasy. It is easy to imagine what might happen to a couple of couples lounging in the court after visiting the shows.

Ginger and Fred are in their early 50s and can no more remember the last time they went to an art show together than they can recall exactly how long they have been married. Ted and Alice are ambiguously 30-ish and have been going out off and on for six months. Everybody makes jolly noises about how interesting the shows are until Ted, a clinical psychologist and part-time art history teacher (who looks like Allan Alda), asks the hard question, “Yes, but which one did you really like in your guts?”

Silence. Fred, portly and bearded, puffs his pipe.

“Arts and Crafts. I respect hand work and serious intentions.”

Ginger, a snappy, red-haired former dancer, looks at her spouse in mock horror.

“How can you say that? That smug, sentimental stuff may be well-made, but it is the gateway to self-righteous amateurism. It is responsible for every dingbat Hansel and Gretel house in this town. Every time I look at it, I can hear the Seven Dwarfs singing ‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.’ The only thing it left us was the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and a lot of third-rate hippies blowing wine chalices that look like turnips. The best thing it is is quaint self-indulgent escapism. Give me the Machine Age. All that Deco and Cocktail Modern and streamlining is smart and stylish and young. It is pure entertainment which is all an object can be. Artsy-craftsy biblical posturing gives me a pain.”

By now, Fred’s pipe looks like a steam engine climbing the Andes.

“Dear Ginger, the Machine Age-style worshiped all the mechanical trappings that would kill millions of people in the Second World War and result in an alienated, neurotic consumer society with values as ephemeral as cellophane. If all those plastic radios and chrome chairs are amusing, it is because they were made by featherheads who ignored the ethical implications of what they were doing. I would hate to come home to a houseful of that cold, ironic stuff on the night my best friend died. Its sophistication would be arch and heartless if it had any brains. But you are right as usual, dear, it is so adolescent it never gets past a campy giggle.”

Alice, a dark, lean social worker, breaks her intense silence.

“Frankly, as far as I am concerned, it is all just a collection of over-designed objects. The only meaning any of it has for me is economics and coercion. I hate being in a house designed by some architect who is going to tell me how to live, where the furniture has to go, that I have to sit in an uncomfortable chair or use a built-in ashtray that’s across the room. I like tract houses and anonymous furniture because I can be myself in them. Everything in here is about self-consciousness. The designers are trying to immortalize themselves in museums. The people who buy the stuff are trying to call attention to their wealth or social status or fancy taste.”

By now, Ted is beginning to regret that he brought it up.

“Maybe there is a way to resolve all these, um, differences. You are all talking about what are essentially side-effects, cheap corruptions of the aesthetic or intellectual implications that lie outside the work. What both shows have in common is excellence. Actually, there is a historical link too, because the relative simplicity and idealism of Arts and Crafts inspired the German Bauhaus, which in turn fed into the Machine Age styles. But what really holds them together is the search for an ideal. Did you notice, for example, that Frank Lloyd Wright is in both shows?

“If there is anything that bothers me about shows like this, it is that they blur the distinction between fine arts and design which have different sorts of excellences. . . .”

“And that,” said Fred, “seems like a good place to pause in this stimulating discussion.”

That night, Fred and Ginger ate in their favorite Italian restaurant and forgot their argument. Alice worked on some case files. None of them ever spoke to Ted again. His explanations tended to confuse them.