Feminine devices - various artists, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, New York

Art in America, Dec, 1993 by Richard Vine

The Cooper-Hewitt's "Mechanical Brides" exhibition examines the subliminally erotic - and often repressive - link between women and "labor-saving" machines.

Am I alone in my perversity, or does the show currently on view at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, "Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office," have one of the most suggestive titles in recent memory? Women and machines. To judge by the early notices in airline magazines and general-interest women's publications like Lear's, something sociologically intriguing (and subliminally racy) seems to have registered in the popular mind, as it did among members of the New York art press, who emerged in large number for the pre-opening at the unthinkable hour of 10 a.m. on a sweltering Monday in mid-August. Clearly, in her first effort as the museum's curator of contemporary design, Ellen Lupton has hit upon a theme - the peculiarly erotic link between the gender prejudicially associated with mystery and illogic, and the mechanical embodiments of rationalism at its most severely pragmatic - that can start the critical juices flowing long before the first GE top-loader has loomed into sight.

In her catalogue, which is substantially echoed in the show's extensive didactic labels, Lupton provides a succinct profile of the kind of matrimony she has in mind: feminine rapport with telephones, laundry equipment and typewriters as it reflects societal "assumptions about the aspirations and responsibilities of women." Like any functioning marriage, this one is innately, if unevenly, reciprocal - to the point where the partners begin to resemble each other.

Design and advertising often compare people to inanimate objects and endow objects with human qualities. Mechanical devices have posed as magical instruments for procuring romantic love and economic opportunity, while human bodies have emulated the repetitive service of machines. As consumers and employees, women have been wed to technology; meanwhile, machines have borrowed physical and emotional attributes from women, becoming glamorous but hard-working brides themselves.

A weird doubling (or perhaps just a lack of conceptual clarity) is at work in this scheme. Women wed themselves to their machines (which, oddly, become "brides" rather than grooms) in order to solidify a literal or figurative marriage to men (husbands and bosses). Behind such malleability lies Lupton's own fashionable assumption that "the self is, to some degree, a manufactured object, a social product."

This emphasis upon deconstructionist notions is a much-needed lifeline throughout the exhibition, for upon entering the first gallery, one is immediately struck by its paucity of objects. (Roughly 100 are said to be salted within the show's five display areas.) Countless photo-panels and magazine ads cover the walls; a bank of telephones confronts us, ready to offer up the voices and work histories of five veteran switchboard operators, along with comments from Lily Tomlin's irascible Ernestine. Everywhere, the sense of condescending, ethnically diverse irony toward a now-defunct middle-class ideal is palpable. (The ads selected are the most blatantly, suburbanly prescriptive. Of the five witnessing women, identified by name and photograph, one is Hispanic and two are black.) But to find the physical items ostensibly under examination - telephones in their evolving forms and configurations, as manifestations of design - one has to slip around behind the central partition to display cases slung low on its backside or exiled into corners.

Some of the examples - a 1956 Ericofon that resembles a pink space-age dildo, a surrealistic high-heeled-shoe phone and a Rietveld-like Enorme model that is all rectangles and planes of solid color, both from 1987 - are visually and conceptually arresting. Most of the pieces, however, are merely run-of-the-mill production units from the long decades when telephone service was a monopoly and the phone company, because it merely leased the equipment to consumers, gave little thought to making its instruments the highly marketable commodities they are today. Now the old standard models sit forlornly on their shelves like plain-faced orphans - neglected, shoved aside, unequal to the media blitz that surrounds them.

Apparently, what matters most to Lupton is not that we should grasp the integrity of design in these objects, the beauty and efficiency with which they once solved functional problems, but that each sample should be implicated in the long-standing gender conspiracy by which a patronizing telephone industry, with the aid of these ubiquitous implements, cast female employees and customers in subtly demeaning roles. From the beginning, women were seen as naturally qualified to provide the soothing "voice with a smile" and to tolerate the stressful monotony of switchboard work. As consumers, they were initially encouraged to think of the phone solely as means for rational home management - a modern way of directing the household help or conveniently ordering from tradesmen - thus leaving the lines uncongested for more "serious" male business use. With the onset of the Depression, a desperate industry urged women to make more recreational use of the telephone, under the guise of holding together their ever more dispersed families and friends. The postwar consumer boom brought on the advocacy of multiple personalized extensions - the utilitarian kitchen-wall unit, the simultaneously sensual and reassuring bedside phone, the patience-saving teenager's private line. Through it all, there is one prurient constant: from turn-of-the-century postcards to stills of Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8 to ads for today's 1-900 phone-sex, no single idea has been more persistent than that of female sexual availability abetted, both vicariously and materially, by the aural and tactile intimacies of the lip-to-ear phone.