Further confusion is created by the mysterious
"1930�1997" in the subtitle, which appears to suggest that for some reason
the book covers only the last 70 years or so of the 20th century, from the 1930s to the
present. But almost all of the book�s articles discuss developments starting at the
turn of the century, and often much earlier, while only two of them bring the story up to
the 1990s. No rationale for this discrepancy is given in the introduction.
A probable
explanation of the incongruity is that as it was decided that the book was to double as an
exhibition catalogue, it simply "inherited" the title of the BGC exhibition,
where the oldest object on show was a 1929 Aalto side chair, and the most recent a 1997
brooch. The conflict between the title of the exhibition and the contents of the book was
apparently ignored. (This unresolved exhibition fixation probably explains why we do not
find any entry on the Nokia company, the present
flagship of Finnish industry, in the section on company histories referred to above: the
reason, it seems, is simply that there were no Nokia objects exhibited.)
The absence of a proper focus also shows in the passive, somewhat
mechanical arrangement of the contents structure. The first four contributions are grouped
sequentially together, because, in the words of Stritzler-Levine, they address "the
issue of modernism and cultural identity", while the next five articles deal with
"different areas of the applied arts in Finland"; the last article is described
as discussing "the reception of Finnish design in the United States" and figures
obviously in a category of its own, concluding the book. This introductory explanation
does help to give the reader at least some sense of a meaningful structure (first
reflections, then histories), but as there is no further discussion of either this
arrangement or of the articles themselves, it fails to impart any persuasive sense of
unity to the book as a whole, and the reader will probably suspect that the structure is
rather arbitrary. One can certainly wonder about how reasonable it is to offer the reader
reflections about Finnish culture and design before the articles presenting the more
factual developments in furniture, glass, metal, textile and ceramics.
On the whole one feels that the editors did meet a minimal demand
for bringing order into the collected contributions, though without providing any palpable
focus for the volume. This is a pity, not least because several articles (most of all the
concluding text by Hildi Hawkins, called "Finding a Place in a New
World Order") in fact suggest a possible unifying theme. Here I think of the intense
determination of Finland in the years after the Second World War and throughout the
fifties, to use and sustain the country�s achievements in design as a way of
redefining the political and cultural identity of the nation. The success of this
pragmatic approach of Finnish decision-makers to the potential in their design culture is
certainly a striking, perhaps unique, feature of the history of design in the 20th
century. If we agree that design history should be a study of problems rather than a study
of a subject matter, one way of imparting a focus to the whole book could have been to start
with Hawkins� article, which discusses this theme most explicitly, and via editorial
comments to draw lines backwards and forwards in time - and to conclude with the
reflective articles.
Admittedly, the problems such as lack of focus, sequence of
articles and alternative focusing, are moot points. We encounter, however, at least three
more tangible problems. The first is the editors� failure to provide a list of
contributors to the book. When the exhibition itself is commented upon by the BGC Director
Susan Weber Soros in her Foreword, a large number of staff members,
including the security and maintenance personnel, are mentioned by name and function and
thanked for their contribution to the exhibition . This is both fitting and humane
� but it is the present book, not the exhibition that was meant to last.
Although the authors of the book are duly thanked, too, the reader is left completely in
the dark about their background, the institutions to which they belong, as well as their
research record, not to speak of their age (and their gender, since far from all Finnish
first names give outsiders a clue in that respect).
The second problem has to do with the book�s bibliography
which, though fairly extensive, seems to have been done in haste, and as far as
completeness is concerned, must be considered unreliable. No editorial information is
provided about the choice criteria of the 390 plus titles. It appears that they were all
extracted, somewhat mechanically, from end-notes in the ten articles. This probably
explains why the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky�s book Watermark,
which is about Venice and was mentioned in an end-note to the first article of the book,
came to be included in the bibliography too. At the same time, important titles are
missing, in spite of having been mentioned in the end-notes. For example four
English-language articles by Pekka Korvenmaa referred to in his text on
furniture design are lacking. It would have been a good idea to divide the bibliography
into at least two categories: one for titles published either in English, or with English
summaries, and the other for those in Finnish only. Also the English equivalents of the
Finnish titles should have been provided in a more consistent manner than is the case. At
any rate, in a volume of this size and length it is reasonable to expect that all
important books on Finnish design published in English to date, and preferably also
articles, should be included. One is grateful for what is there, but there is no doubt
that a unique opportunity for providing the English-speaking public with a dependable
bibliography on modern Finnish design has been, sadly, lost.
The third major shortcoming, and the concluding sign of the
half-baked editorial quality of the volume, is that it was left without an index. This
absence, of course, makes an operative retrieval of facts, issues, terms and names
contained in the articles incomparably more cumbersome and reduces the usefulness of the
book. This is, again, a great pity considering the amount of work invested into the
volume.
*
All these shortcomings of course, do not by themselves reduce
the value of the individual contributions. Let me now comment shortly on these in the
order in which they are presented in the book.
The first essay by Jari Ehrnrooth on the
"Ambivalence of Finnish Culture", and to some extent also Harri Kalha�s
following text on "The Other Modernism: Finnish Design and National
Identity", discuss an intriguing, complex and elusive problem. If I understand it
correctly, the problem can be said to arise whenever we intend to produce more of
something we have come to value for its not having been intentionally produced; i.e. when
we want to institute something that is essentially a by-product. Naturalness, spontaneity,
authenticity, primitiveness, modernity � or Finnishness � can be mentioned as
examples of such by-products. The problem could, somewhat facetiously, be called a problem
of pretending not to pretend, and it has been a recurring dilemma for us modern people
probably since the advent of Romanticism. There are apparently scores of daunting issues
related to this dilemma, such as for example: Is Finnishness, the quality of being
Finnish, a kind of quality which all Finns impart to everything they do? Or is it rather
that not everything Finns do is of necessity marked by Finnishness? And, are some Finns
perhaps more Finnish than other Finns? Or can the true Finnishness be produced only by
those who are not really aware of being Finns? And why is the kind of Finnishness
generated by those who are unaware of their Finnishness deemed better than that produced
by those whose who are keenly aware of being Finns? And so on and so forth. Both authors
address similar questions, Ehrnrooth reflecting in a more freewheeling fashion, while
Kalha talking more on the particulars of the Finnish design discourse of this century.
Both Ehrnrooth and Kalha have succeeded each in their own way in
producing some interesting ideas on the problem, but both of them also make the
reader�s life miserable by their kaleidoscopic way of presenting their findings. In
the end one is very much at a loss as to the concrete results of their deliberations. Jari
EHRNROOTH in his ruminative essay manages to mortify the reader already
in the first paragraph when expatiating about "objects [which] neutralize the
semiotic ambivalence between emptiness and density." (17) Although not typical as
such, the sentence is still indicative of the author�s preference for ambushing
readers instead of preparing them for the many intriguing themes and perspectives that he
produces in the course of the article, but also of his propensity rarely to dwell on a
theme long enough to unearth more than a promise of a new insight. Out of the blue, for
example, he introduces the notion of "first degree" and "second
degree" cultures (19) which seem to be central to his topic. However, he drops it as
quickly as he brought it up, only to return extensively to it several pages later as if it
were a well-explained and well-understood concept. The religious perspective which he
brings in towards the end remains essentially ambiguous, as it is difficult to understand
whether he is entirely serious or whether he is perhaps only speaking in a figurative, or
possibly tongue-in-cheek, manner. Other concepts, like "communications
purgatory" (21) "dialectics of the unattainable" (22-23) are also presented
like attractive dishes with compelling smells with which the waiter passes by and which we
are allowed to glance at, but which never land on our table so that we can relish them.
Although sometimes witty, this highly spirited, somewhat late-nightish reflection is at
any rate not suitable as an opening essay.
The main problem in Harri KALHA�s long
article (17 pages of text plus 6 pages of notes) is his apparent inability to reduce to a
manageable number the issues he is eager to discuss. The result is that the reader is left
in considerable confusion, often being uncertain about what is actually being discussed at
any particular moment, and what are really the author�s conclusions. One of the few
unequivocal statements in the article is the author�s claim that what is called the
Finnish feeling for nature "is perhaps a myth, but like most myths, it is
simultaneously true and untrue." (39) Perhaps the article illustrates the perils of
attempting to produce a shorter autonomous article out of a much larger earlier text. I
would like to comment briefly on Kalha�s contention there was a special, or
"other", kind of modernism in Finland, one represented above all by the
Arts and Crafts traditionalist and educator Arttu Brummer, a kind of modernism that was
nationalistic, striving to express the essence of the Finnish nation, or its
"Finnishness". This modernism professedly contrasts with the kind of modernism
that became synonymous with Finnish design and was characterised in Kalha�s words, by
"purity and function ... internationalism .. reduced functional forms ...
�universal� appeal" (29) and an aesthetic culture in common with the rest
of the Nordic countries. But one wonders whether it is really necessary to postulate a
distinct Brummerian kind of modernism simply because, as Kalha puts it,
"Brummer�s [traditionalist] ideas also contained �functionalist�
elements, such as the principle of truth to materials, and the idea of
�organicism�" (42). Maybe it is the Romantic ideal of authenticity,
apparently as common to Arts and Crafts ideology as to Modernism proper, which makes it
possible to (mis)take Brummer for a modernist sui generis.
There is no editorial explanation for the reason why Taisto M�KEL��s
article on "Architecture and Modern Identity in Finland", in itself an informed
and informative piece of writing, was included in this volume. True, besides giving a
historical outline of the development of Finnish architecture in this century it also
discusses, in an able manner, the question of modern national identity related to
national-romantic, rationalist, classicist and functionalist positions in architecture.
But as the author keeps fairly strictly to architecture proper, and since architectural
design was not a part of the exhibition, its presence in the present volume is
questionable, especially when the volume does not offer a proper historical presentation
of the Finnish industrial design.
Susann VIHMA�s article "Objects of
Everyday Life: Aspects of Finnish Design Since the 1980s", touches in its opening
chapter on what the author calls "the nature myth" in Finnish design - similar
problems to those in Ehrnrooth, though her treatment of the theme brings little in the way
of enlightenment. Although less dense that Kalha�s text, Vihma�s article suffers
just like his from addressing far too many issues, in addition to a somewhat shaky
structure and a meandering kind of writing. Paragraphs often open with one theme, only to
end up with another, or if they don�t they fail to offer any conclusion. Nominally
the article, "examines contemporary Finnish design and design culture since 1980s,
focussing on design literature and criticism, as well as specific objects." (83) But
it turns out that its theme is mainly the so-called product semantics, that refreshing
design theory that emerged on the international scene in the late 1980s. The theory drew
attention to the fact, ignored by Modernists, that products are perceived not only as
aesthetic objects but also as carriers of various meanings - no matter whether the
designers are aware if it or not. The product semantics theory was launched by several
German-American, Ulm-educated industrial designers and came to be widely known within
design-education circles thanks largely to the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki (UIAH), which in the late 1980s and early 1990s
arranged a series of major international conferences around the theme. Strangely, the
author says nothing about the American background to the product semantics wave of the
1980s. Stranger still, the Finnish conferences and the important volumes of the
proceedings published in their wake are not mentioned at all, either in the text or in the
notes (and as a consequence they are not included in the final bibliography either).
Instead, the author delves into finer points of the product semantic theory itself, and
although the discussion is interesting, it is certainly misplaced in the present volume.
The concluding discussion of three product areas from the product semantics perspective is
disappointingly tame. Again, one has a feeling that the text is a cut-and-paste adaptation
from some earlier materials, with seams clearly showing.
*
The historical presentation of Finnish design begins really only
with page 102, and it is here the reader will find articles of substance, in terms of both
historical facts, observations, and insights.
This historical section opens with Pekka KORVENMAA�s
article on the "Opportunities and Ideals in Modern Furniture Design in Finland".
This is a firmly structured, controlled, informative and well-written text. Korvenmaa
discusses in turn the emergence of the furniture design profession, the furniture industry
and its market, wood, metal and plastic as furniture materials, the designer-client
relationship and the changing ideals of the profession. The article includes a
consideration of several individual designers that is very well integrated into the
discussion of larger issues. The carefulness of some of the author�s stylistic
characterizations should be also stressed. He is obviously not entirely happy with the
blandness of aesthetic categories such as "modern" or "modernist" and
often develops formulations of a finer discerning power, as when he describes a furniture
line as "conceptually modern, though not necessarily modernist in its outer
appearance" (122) or when he speaks of "the overall domestication of
modernism" in the 1930s (121), or when he writes that "[t]he lamination
technique which Aalto developed ... enabled the production of ... bentwood chairs that
conformed to the aesthetics of international modernism." (109) On the other hand, he
also employs, as do several other authors in the volume, somewhat problematic terms such
as "progressive design" or "progressive furniture". These are
necessarily ambiguous expressions, as "progressive" is a term tainted by its
partisan, originally pro-modernist connotations, antonymous to the term
"regressive". Even if many of the authors, including Korvenmaa, seem to use it
as a stylistic rather than ideological term (meaning "opposite to the
traditional") I suspect that, unless an author happens to be an unreconstructed
modernist, "progressive" remains a misleading label. Part of the merit of the
present article is that it is written explicitly with an eye on an international public
(Korvenmaa points out, for example, that "Lahti became the center of furniture
industry similar to Grand Rapids in the United States"). Also in the bibliographical
references in his end-notes section he explicitly aims at listing the key English-language
texts on the subject. As already mentioned, too many of them, for some unknown reason,
never made it into the final bibliography at the end of the book. The text is in addition
blemished by several uncorrected misprints and, embarrassingly, what look like leftovers
from deserted editorial interventions. (120-121)
Kaisa KOIVISTO�s article on the
"National and International Aspects of Finnish Glass" singles out and discusses,
in a manner similar to Korvenmaa, problem clusters which give the article a palpable
structure, and which she manages to combine admirably with a chronological presentation.
This article, too, is a very well written, matter-of-fact, forthright assessment of the
Finnish course of development, refreshingly free of promotional formulations. It contains
a wealth of information on the political, economic and technological aspects of the glass
history, as well as on the key personalities and ideological and aesthetic discussions of
the time.
In her article "Simplicity and Materialism in the Design of
Finnish Jewelry and Metalwork" Marianne AAV, the Finnish co-editor
of the present volume, takes a broad look at the history of the trade. Starting with the
discussion of the role of the Russian capital St Petersburg in the 18th and 19th centuries
in the development of Finnish goldsmith trade, she proceeds to present a many-sided,
informative overview of the development of the goldsmith and jewellery trade in the 20th
century up to the eighties. In the last chapter she discusses, though only briefly, the
design of metal household utensils and touches upon the emergence of Finnish industrial
design, making partly up for the missing chapter on that area. The theme of industrial
design is not arbitrarily introduced here, since, as she points out, in Finland after the
Second World War education in industrial design developed from within the metalworking
department at the Helsinki Institute of Industrial Art (the present UIAH).
One of the sorely missing elements in the book is an overview of
the more than 100 years long history of the above-mentioned UIAH, nowadays called the
University of Art and Design, which, as all writers agree, has been the most
important Finnish educational institution for applied arts and design. Mercifully, Leena SVINHUFVUD
in her article on the development of "Finnish Textiles en Route to
Modernity", provides some relief in this respect. When stressing the key role of the
UIAH and its Textile Art Department in the development of Finnish textile art, she
provides a brief overview in one of her early notes of the changes in the school�s
official name over the years, and adds a number bibliographical references to the
literature discussing the history of the school. (A brief informative piece on the
orientation of the school in its various periods can be found also in the very first note
in the following article on ceramics by Aav and Kalha.) Svinhufvud�s article
concentrates in general more on the institutional framework than the individual
personalities, giving a very useful review of Finnish professional institutions of applied
art, all of which, according to the author, were closely associated with the UIAH. She
provides a good discussion of themes such as textile design for serial production, the
status of the artists, markets for textile art, the relationship to folk traditions and
later developments towards autonomous textile art, although the structure of the article
is less than lucid, and the level of the accompanying contextual information is uneven.
While some parts are written with a foreign readership in mind, others appear to address
insiders only. An example of this is the fairly long section devoted to what the author
subtitles as "The Finnish Ryijy". While the term ryijy comes to be
employed some 70 times in the fairly detailed discussion which follows, its niceties tend
to be lost on the reader as the meaning of the term is never explained, and no background
information on its apparent folk art origins is provided � although one manages to
gather that a special kind of rug is being discussed. If the ryijy is considered a
phenomenon that warrants an exclusive use of the original Finnish term then a good
explanation is certainly imperative (including perhaps a hint about the pronunciation of
the word).
The penultimate article is devoted to a discussion of the
historical development of modern Finnish ceramics. Marianne AAV and Harri
KALHA, both of them earlier contributors to the present volume, open
their joint article "Finnish Ceramics: From Everyday objects to Art" with this
characteristics of the trade status: "Twentieth-century Finnish ceramics has been
dominated by two major institutions: the Arabia factory,
and the University of Art and Design, [both in] Helsinki." The authors start with a
historical overview of the UIAH-based training of Finnish ceramists over the years, but it
is the activity of the Arabia factory and the work of Arabia designers which dominates
their concerns. The article is well structured, and just as all preceding articles dealing
with design history proper, richly informative and equipped with an extensive end-note
apparatus. The only two minor blemishes are that the article does not provide even a brief
overview of the Arabia factory history, nor does it refer to the excellent Arabia entry in
the section on the company history at the end of the book. In addition, while only few of
the discussed ceramic objects are illustrated in the article, there are no references to
the colour illustrations in the catalogue section where many of them are in fact depicted.
As mentioned earlier, the theme of Hildi HAWKINS�
article ("Finding a Place in a New World Order: Finland, America, and the
�Design in Scandinavia� Exhibition of 1954-57") could have been made into a
focal point of the book, and I regret its appendix-like placing, for the reason suggested
above. It is an admirably lucid and brilliantly informative piece of writing, clearly
conceived with a non-Finnish public in mind. Hawkins gives both the world political and
"design political" background to the Finnish design success of the 1950s, being
forthright about the things Finnish in a manner similar to Korvenmaa and Koivisto. She
shows persuasively the choices opened to Finland after its tragic participation in the
events of the Second World in the light of its enforced cession of Eastern Karelia to the
Soviet Union, war reparations paid to Moscow and the subsequent precarious political
existence on the borders of a totalitarian superpower. She discusses briefly the
fascinating Finnish figure of the multilingual Olof Gummerus, the expert promoter of
Finnish design, whose prime quest according to the author was to mould the international
perception of Finland as a part of Scandinavia, unequivocally on the Western side of the
Iron Curtain. The author�s examination of the background to the idea for the 1950s
"Design in Scandinavia" exhibition, which had toured twenty four United States
museums, and of two ideologically competing American design magazines which both happened
to support Finnish design, is enlightening. She concludes with a short reflection on
"Political Success through Design" where she argues that although the success of
the "Design in Scandinavia" exhibition was a result of a public relations
exercise, it was based on the genuine appeal of Finnish design itself, an appeal which
"lay in its blend of the modernist avant-garde and traditional qualities. [It was]
through its closeness to nature as inspiration, as much as through its pure, abstract
forms, [that] Finnish design endeared itself to a wide range of critics and consumers,
from the most provincial to the most cosmopolitan, from the political left to the
political right (...). "
*
In conclusion we can say that despite all the
deficiencies mentioned earlier, there is no doubt that the present book will substantially
contribute to dissemination of a better knowledge as well as a better understanding
of Finnish modern design.