Addressing the risky business of life

“SAFE: Design Takes On Risk,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art last week as the first major design exhibition in MoMA’s expanded building, is an ambitious attempt to explore the ways that products of nearly every size and shape make us safer -- or maybe just simply feel safer. Indeed, it is the no-man’s-land between those two areas, between the specifics and the psychology of safety, that the show sets out to map.

“Safe” includes objects as small as earplugs and pill bottles and as large as a temporary shelter, with walls made of cardboard tubes, by Shigeru Ban. That it begins to resemble a catalog of items for sale after a while, with its baby strollers and surprisingly elegant razor wire and Swedish safety boots, seems entirely intentional. In America, as one snippet of wall text points out, “safety is an industry in constant expansion: because there is no end to what could go wrong, there is also no end to the creative and commercial possibilities that design can offer.”

Consider the spare tire designed by Carlson Technology and manufactured by McLaren. Packed tightly inside its rim in wedge-shaped containers, to save space in the rest of your trunk, are the following items: “jumper cables, a one-gallon fuel can (with disposable bladders), an air compressor, a siphon pump (hand operated), a reflective warning triangle, a towing strap, a flashlight, three flares, a first-aid kit, fuses, a lock thaw, a Leatherman multipurpose tool, latex gloves, protective coveralls, a police aid sign, handwipes, and a rag.”

It is a product perfectly designed for the American consumer -- a tidy marriage of the practical and the apocalyptic.

In the era of Hurricane Katrina and the avian flu, in a culture that has survived Sept. 11, coined the phrase “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” and produced a half-dozen bestselling volumes of “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” to go with four seasons of “Fear Factor,” these themes could hardly be more timely. Indeed, if “Safe” lurches among the somber, the pragmatic and the pointedly absurd, it is only because our attitudes in the West about danger do the same.

The tonal dissonance struck by curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini is, in other words, jarring but appropriate. After all, never before in human history have we been so well protected -- from disease, from accidental death, from boiling oil dropped from turrets above -- and also so absolutely paranoid about the dangers we face.

If you were to track life expectancy in America on a graph, for example, alongside a measure of anxiety about possible threats to our health and safety, you would see two lines rising in unison. Every day of the new millennium seems to bring a new technology to make our lives safer or healthier along with some new threat, sometimes real but more often imagined or exaggerated, to keep us up at night or jittery during our subway rides. This is the chief paradox of the Information Age. When Woody Allen turns 120, his body and hypochondria having been maintained by the wonders of Western medicine, maybe he’ll make a movie about it.

Indeed, Antonelli and Vecchierini have included a number of objects that seem to make a point of encapsulating clashing or contradictory attitudes about risk. A design called Suited for Subversion, by 31-year-old Ralph Borland, is a case in point. It is an outfit for activists to wear during protests; it includes a wireless video camera to record police brutality and beam the footage digitally to a remote location where it can be stored. But since the suit is also inflatable and bright red, anybody using it resembles a giant overripe tomato -- an absurdity that is not just acknowledged by Borland in his photographs of the suit in action but exploited to full comic effect.

The design addresses a safety need -- protection against a wildly swinging police baton -- but seems more interested in suggesting the impotence, and thus the ridiculousness, of on-the-ground protest in an age when politics is contested almost entirely in the media. The friction between these ideas -- particularly at a time when a police beating in New Orleans has been on the news every night -- is what gives the design its bite.

There is also an “earthquake safety table” by a group of Swiss designers that includes bottles of water, a shovel and other practical items -- as well as a complete fondue set.

Not thinking big enough

IF the show has a blind spot, it is infrastructure. After Hurricane Katrina, American designers have begun refocusing their efforts on the largest scale: reinventing flood control and the levee system for New Orleans and more broadly addressing the crumbling state of many American cities, New York prominently among them. The consumer-oriented items on view in “Safe,” particularly shimmering examples of high-end product design, such as Karim Rashid’s packaging for Prada, look like so many trinkets in comparison with the big-ticket challenges that architects and designers have been debating in recent weeks.

But curators are hardly in a position to predict natural disasters or change a museum exhibition on the fly. This particular show was already delayed and rejiggered once, after Sept. 11.

Precisely because “Safe” has such outsized psychological and sociological ambitions, though, it winds up seeming limited by the confidence of its own artistic judgments -- limited by the notion that exhibitions should be in the business showing us the best rather than the most revealing objects in a given field.

This notion of linking taste and advocacy (or the slightly less aggressive enlightenment) is one that Western museums were essentially built upon, and that the Museum of Modern Art -- in particular its design department over the decades -- has explored more doggedly than any other.

When you are celebrating the work of a single artist or group of artists, that curatorial idea makes enough sense to be entirely transparent. (Nobody wants to see the great paintings from a particular era next to mediocre but somehow representative examples by lesser talents.) And in an age of museum shows that embrace multimedia-heavy context with abandon -- putting up a video loop of a painter at work next to the painting itself, for example, and piping in contemporary music for good measure -- there is something refreshing about the Modern’s refusal to abandon the hermeticism of high standards.

But when you are trying to take on a big, messy societal theme such as this one, restricting yourself in that manner can seem to vacuum-seal the galleries against the intrusion of the real world.

And no two words sum up the show’s limitations like these: Freedom Tower.

As first sketched out by Daniel Libeskind as the architectural heart of his master plan for the World Trade Center site, that skyscraper was meant as a crystalline, transparent symbol of American democracy. Since then it has been taken over by another architect, David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who smoothed out its eccentricities and gave it a corporate sheen. Over the summer, just before its design was going to be finalized, the New York Police Department stepped in, insisting that the building’s lower floors be fortified against possible car and truck bombs.

The result is an office tower disguised as a bunker. As a symbol of America’s tortured ambivalence about safety, risk and openness after Sept. 11, none of the hundreds of objects in “Safe” comes close to matching it.