Mechanical Brides: The Exhibition

Abstract

Long considered the bastion of the decorative arts, the CooperHewitt Museum has been devoted to the preservation of fine objets d'art since its inception in 1897. Founded by Amy, Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt, granddaughters of industrialist Peter Cooper, its closets brim with furniture, silver, porcelain, wallpaper, textiles, rare books, glass, drawings, prints, tassels, keys, Etruscan pottery, bottles, miniature painted sculptures, bandboxes, and bird cages. Like many late 19th-century collectors, they held European taste and craftsmanship superior to American, and thus assembled exhaustive collections of continental decorative objects produced between the 16th and early 19th centuries as gesture towards elevating the taste of the public. Aesthetic reform was at the heart of the museum's conception as a library of design.' Passing through the drawing rooms of Andrew Carnegie's sober Edwardian mansion which houses the Cooper-Hewitt today, the museum-goer is beckoned by Formica-bright, technological coffee-clatch of sorts to enter new era in collecting. coy Hello, may I help you? announces the entrance of Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, forthrightly feminist history of home and office appliances. back-lit grid of familiar faces-paradigms of womanhood from Clara Bow to Christy Turlington-each with telephone receiver pressed to an ear, stands under the loopy, welcoming script. menu offers list of possible audio selections available from bank of actual telephones below. (Just like an AT&T convention.) I pick up receiver and hold it to my ear as Lily Tomlin, the irreverent operator Emestine, from TV's Laugh In reels off the possible connections: Press '1' and you get, Barbara Bates, an AT&T operator of 32 years.... Cooper-Hewitt's curatorial change was prefigured by the appointment of Dianne H. Pilgrim as director in 1991. Airing out those crowded closets, Pilgrim organized major retrospective called The Cooper-Hewitt Collections: Design Resource, an exhibition organized to display and rotate an eclectic array of more than 1,000 objects-from the museum's inventory of 250,000-over period of six months. This exhibition was intended to encourage the general public and scholars alike to view the collection, once again, as visual library of design. Pilgrim insists, We did not impose an art-historical structure on the exhibit because we are not an museum.2 She suggests that the objects in the collection should not be viewed as art so much as indices of cultural values and social histories, texts, and tools of interpretation. 1 Beth Sherman, A Design Collection on Grand Scale, Newsday(March 28, 1991) 84. 2 Sherman, A Design Collection on Grand Scale, 84.