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

Art in America, Dec, 1993 by Richard Vine

A brief ahistorical interlude is provided by the visionary creations of designer-in-residence Laurene Leon. Throughout the exhibition, one is often tempted to ask if any of these objects were designed by women, or just how they would differ if they were. In a small transitional room, we find one partial answer, in the form of the household phantasmagoria of this recent Pratt graduate invited by the museum to create mock-ups for "alternative" appliances. Integrating Wizard of Oz figures into her prototypes, Leon has produced a family of whimsical kitchen aids - e.g., the Wicked Witch blender, the Tin Man coffee maker-marked by a postmodern insouciance. Her printed rationale is that it is now time "to give emotional significance to household appliances by linking objects to a familiar narrative." Yet the effect aimed at by the young free-lance designer is presumably more subversive than a simple personalizing of user-object relations. After all, the central thesis of the exhibition is that domestic gadgets have been conditioned by an implicit narrative all along, one that prepares women from childhood for little more than a well-kept but servile destiny.

Appropriately, then, the walls of this passageway are devoted to bridal ads and toy-sized models of kitchens, irons and washer-dryer sets, completing the appliance manufacturers' seemingly deliberate trivialization of female work. Is this cradle-to-altar bourgeois indoctrination juxtaposed with Leon's playfully impertinent response as a subtle rhetorical strategy? Does it intentionally reduce grueling domestic labor to such diminished terms that the mind, by way of protest, begins to supply a larger significance? (Viewers might remember, for example, that for all its shortcomings there was once a compelling legitimacy to the American domestic-bliss dream, given that the women who assimilated pop-up toasters and spin-cycle washers into their marital fantasies were often only one generation removed from the cholera ships and immigrant sweatshops.) With her character-machines, Leon attempts to infuse a measure of quiet rebelliousness into the most traditional female domain, opening up imaginative new options for work-related pleasure - polymorphous pleasures not easily confined to the reigning homemaker paradigm. But it is difficult to see how thinking about Dorothy and Toto every time one purees a stalk of broccoli will set many feminine spirits free from drudgery and neglect.

By contrast, the next gallery area, the old green-houselike conservatory of the Carnegie Mansion, is sober in the extreme, bedecked as it now is by banners emblazoned with statements from individuals critical of domestic labor, whether in the home or elsewhere. Tellingly, the space contains no appeasing "brides" at all. Here words physically dominate; one scarcely notices the absence of feminine machines, so incidental have they become to the pedagogical experience. At one end of the clothes-line that bears the message-sheets, an excerpt from the autobiography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh concisely summarizes the housewife's predicament. "How can one point to this constant tangle of household chores, errands, and fragments of human relationships, as a creation? It is hard to even think of it as purposeful activity, so much of it is automatic. Woman herself begins to feel like a telephone exchange or a laundromat." At the other end, in a passage from Studs Terkel's Working, a cleaning woman named Maggie Holmes articulates the domestic worker's dual plight with a plainspoken poeticism. "If you work in one of them houses eight hours, you gotta come home and do the same thing over. You gotta come home, take care of your kids, you gotta cook, you gotta wash. You gotta wash and iron and whatever you do, nights. You be so tired, until you don't feel like doin' nothin'."