It is the mismatch between theory and practice which brings such fundamental questions into the real world of lived experience, the only place where change can actually be effected1. Judy Attfield
It is worth stating that this commentary is an essay, in the original sense of the word, that is to say an attempt, an experiment. Attfield’s article “FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male” comes right at the end of art historian John Albert Walker’s 1989 volume, Design History and the History of Design,2 a work intended to expand the scope of design history study. In it, Attfield’s text is inserted after the author’s conclusion, making it, in the fairly justified view of Elise Goutagny (and of Bruno Giberti before her), a mere postscript.3 Being given a very particular place in the book, it is part of it, but how is it really part of what the book is about? Whilst Attfield’s darkly ironic title clearly refers to Sullivan’s maxim about the natural order of things,4 the title of the book itself is hard to translate into French. The French Histoire du design et l’histoire du design is not specific enough, while making it into a plural (HistoireS du design et histoire du design) risks diminishing it to a series of little stories or inconsequential anecdotes, not least because in French histoire carries the meaning of ‘story’ as well as ‘history’.5 The clearer and more sensible Études historiques en design et histoire du design...well, let’s come back to that one. In any case, this comment helps to establish the intention of this piece: to take our lead from Attfield. Little-known to French readers, this historian and practitioner’s text entered the canon of design history, concerning feminism and women’s studies, precursors to gender studies.
Its impeccable academic construction and direct tone make it easy and accessible to read. The author’s explanatory and schematic approach is consequently illuminating. It is an agenda. Such texts are few and far between in a history characterised by the curation of great objects, territorial or national identities and great men (both theorists and practicians) who supposedly made this history. Sigfried Giedion6 is one such author who shapes the debate on how to make this history “anonymous” (i.e. with anonymous objects and creations, a notion we will revisit) and his patriarchal ambiguities are likely to be of interest7 to those who work on the issue of feminism and gender. There is no denying that the Swiss historian’s observations have a certain power.8 Nikolaus Pevsner, whose frame of reference ranged from Morris to Gropius, and from England to Germany, for personal and political reasons, does so too, but what should really be questioned here is the origin of the History of Design—at the roots of which he might be.
The introduction to “FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male” postulates a clear framework: the necessary and healthy critical confrontation with an established narrative, a problematic orthodoxy, the exposition of new perspectives without dismissing their inherent ambivalences and divergences, and the setting out of her agenda in seven sub-sections.9 Finally, the paragraphs of the different sections switch arguments in a balanced way. The text gives examples and counter-examples without necessarily explaining them, whilst giving a thoughtful elucidation of the concepts. Attfield’s text sets out an agenda in a number of ways: firstly the text itself embodies all those historians who have previously taken any number of feminist or female perspectives on the history of design, the decorative arts and the arts in general, whilst also focusing on three key areas: design-related issues, female and/or feminist approaches to design, and the issue of ‘historical’ methods under the auspices of ‘a feminist history of design’, language and concepts, disciplines and study typologies.
This commentary uses the original text as its point of departure, but is not an explanation of it, rather it is a reflection of the current situation. It does not elaborate on the examples Attfield cites, except in the case of Linda Nochlin, Roszita Parker and Cheryl Buckley, who are simply mentioned, and it occasionally strays from the specific issue of women.10 On the other hand, it embraces a geographical and cultural relationship to writing, to the academic genre of studies, and to the scope of historical studies for picking up on important counter-intuitive aspects, which obviously run through Attfield’s text.
Francophone anomalies...
Judy
An emeritus professor by the end of her career, Attfield, born in 1937, helped shake up the academic course of design history and it was prior to her PhD that she wrote “FORM/female FOLLOWS FUNCTION/male”. Her agenda was therefore also personal and she was to apply it in her subsequent academic work.11 She was a designer who brought to history her own personal observations of gaps and omissions, which informed her work in her Masters at Middlesex Polytechnic. Her first work was on tufted wool carpets.12 Using material culture studies methods, she went on to examine everyday life and the ordinary objects in which canonical history takes no interest. She wrote her thesis on the history of British furniture, including post-war ‘Good Design’ furniture, which supposedly flew the flag for the British furniture industry. In it, she shows that far from there being a logical and established chain of design and production, handmade items were marketed as exemplary industrial forms, whilst industrially manufactured furniture could be advertised as rare and original pieces made by skilled craftsmen. She thus engaged in a process of demystification and erudition, which led to her being included in women’s studies curricula. Her design background is clear from her patient observation which anchors neglected and disparaged popular items in both gender and social history. Such is the case in her book Wild Things,13 where her humanities and linguistics background clearly informs her unpacking of facts and observations. Through her work in the UK she therefore demonstrates the possibility of a subtle history that constitutes a field of study in its own right, and not just a sub-category of art history. Has her work been forgotten or was it indeed never known in places such as France?
These biographical and contextual elements are situated in a very identifiable period, which calls into question the Modern and modernism as well as the largely male-dominated narratives which have been built up around it. For our purposes, this text bridges the gap between that which precedes the postmodern era to which it belongs, and the present day, where on the one hand these issues are applied to a broader definition of society, and on the other they assert a new element of originality or new origins with developments in gender issues.
A series of shifts has occurred in the design field. It has been an academic discipline and is constituted as such (i.e., as a set of studies) for some forty years in the UK and US, but has only been considered as such in Europe and in France in particular over the last few years.
The ‘Studies’ issue
The somewhat Anglo-American issue of ‘studies’ barely gets a mention in the articles in this issue of RADDAR, yet they almost all fall within this field, given that we endeavour to create and collect narratives, reflections and studies to constitute a corpus for the discipline or perhaps proto-discipline. One then of course notes the various different subdivisions of study; essentially: feminist, postcolonial, gender, digital and African. These represent areas of enquiry and theorisation which were, between the 1980s and 1990s, to foment change not only in scholarly studies but also in this era’s approach to memory and activism. This is perhaps a turning point, such that disciplinary fields are no longer simply ‘bubbles of knowledge’; and are reopening to sometimes militant approaches. These gaps create conflicts, power games and entrenched positions as much as perspectives. From this point of view, the UK and US are perhaps more experimental in the ways they engage a dialogue. However, this ‘studies’ trend and its modalities have been part of the culture in countries such as France for over twenty years, particularly in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Today they sit alongside already important and established areas, made fashionable by the addition of the word studies. This includes gender, science, postcolonial, digital, environmental, animal, subaltern, disability, etc., and not forgetting the seminal models of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The term ‘studies’ signals a shift and process of cross-fertilisation among fields previously constituted as distinct university disciplines,14 i.e. what seems “consubstantial to the advent of the modern University”15 and above all to its stability.
New practices in design history, which sprang in the 1980s from the ‘studies’ approach, thus attacked modern perceptions by bringing consumerism and popular culture into the mix; it was then quite logical that the issue of gender and the female gender in particular would also enter the frame, being closely related to the other two issues. Attfield’s own work and articles are a testament to this. In this sense, today’s young historians can only usefully link dominant male thinking to points of entry that, oddly enough, are peace-related! Indeed, it is possible to say that it is also war that separates their ways of seeing. The entire modern tradition is connected to the machine only inasmuch as it leads to war, which is presented as a man’s game. This is a route to trauma and not just to the modern as a male chauvinist theory of beauty. This rediscovered peace conjures up another reality that could, like the gentle feminine, protect us from it: abundance and employment in the production of consumer goods—but at the staccato pace of the machine.
These points of view (studies and disciplines, study subjects) also give greater ways of explaining, writing, linking and articulating ideas, justifying, naming and creating ellipses. They constitute a varied range of cultural modalities in which we now notice radical differences in the references and authors summoned between geographical areas whilst they pass between from one field and another: patriarchy, gender, particular intersectionality, separatism, gender-specific issues, objectification and language, etc.
Linguistic turn
Judith, Éric, Roland
A specialist in 20th century French literature and author of Le sexe des Modernes. Pensée du Neutre et théorie du genre,16 Éric Marty is also the editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, whom he met in 1976.17 He is an analyst of literary and critical modernity and of those areas that ‘weave’ theory and writing. Along with Barthes, he regularly scrutinises Lacanian, Foucauldian and Derridean thought and discourse, i.e. those thinkers of the French structural and post-structural period, from 1950 to the 1980s. All of whom, having received an enthusiastic reception on US campuses during the 1970s and 1980s, came to be known (rightly or wrongly) under the banner of French Theory. Ostensibly nothing in Marty’s work specifically relates to design, its ontology or its politics. However, he scrupulously reconstructs those twists and turns which led to the emergence of a new vocabulary in the 1990s and thus to the concepts of agency, performativity, etc. Taking texts by writers such as Judith Butler, he examines notions which are of interest in design (aside from specifically gender-related issues).
It is paradoxical that the simplest word to translate into (and from) French, gender/genre, is specifically untranslatable. Indeed, we know that the word ‘gender’ itself—like the word ‘gay’—comes from the Old French *gendre (meaning sort, type or sex), which in modern French becomes genre, itself derived from the Latin genus meaning race, stock or species.18
Le sexe des Modernes thus gives us a language between the French and English-speaking cultural domains by studying and naming, from a French perspective, the movements then active. Public debate was sparked in France by the theoretical machinations of Judith Butler’s 1990 work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which was belatedly translated into French and published in 2005 by Cynthia Kraus, Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Lausanne.19 The fact that this was just over 15 years ago is no coincidence.
Exactly what story is Le sexe des Modernes trying to tell? The author describes it as “the history of a gesture...which leads the great deconstructive enterprises of Modernity [...] to the contemporary triumph of gender theory”.20 Marty asks vital questions about what constitutes thought in two respective cultures where writing holds a very different status.21 This is why the book also gives such a powerful account of the two dimensions. One which, in the recesses of language and its theories, in the twists and turns of translations, tells of the birth, the abduction, the transposition and the transformation of concepts, that is to say of intellectual fecundity. And one which, in the transatlantic crossings, perhaps reveals the equivocations, the diversions, the rifts, that is to say the divisions of cultural spaces that thought, no doubt somewhat hypocritically, they had something in common and—let’s be clear about this—find themselves uniting around the question of cultural leadership, around an ideological issue, whether we like it or not.
Diverse focuses
By assiduously decoding the major issue of gender, both as a concept and epistemological and campaigning tool, Marty introduces the idea that “gender is the West’s last great ideological message to the rest of the world”.22
Whilst gender and race issues are part and parcel of design, and whilst the third edition of RADDAR23 is devoted to reporting on specific studies, the pleasing digressions imposed by the choice of articles on a theme as complex as Design Politics24 are quite fascinating. It is notable that those articles by English-speaking authors all deal with relationships of domination, e.g. colonialism, imperialism and anti-Black racism, or more specifically, within these relationships of domination, a set of racial problems inherent in the West-centric discipline of design. The French-speaking or Latinate authors, on the other hand, focus more on the relationships with others shaped by the political structures which the current state of a discipline can impose, implicitly or explicitly, e.g. co-construction, “de-norming”, gendering, dissymmetry, de-disciplinarisation, anarchism. There are, of course, crossovers, but the English-speaking foothold has strongly and historically taken an irrevocable form whose roots date back as far as the triangular black slave trade of the 15th and 16th centuries, continuing in the 19th century with the taking over of colonial economies, in the 20th century with the hypocrisy of relations with the former colonies on the African continent and into the 21st century with the global-scale theorisation and complexity of black/white race relations based on theories and issues which are largely North American in origin. From the Latin point of view, however, the fact of colonialism is a contextualised and historical one. The relationship with formerly colonialised peoples is seen more as a source of a new way of looking at the world and as an opportunity to reconsider disciplinary transformation through other prisms than those of extractivism, the imposition of Western institutions, the annulling of rights and colonial violence. Ultimately ‘learning from...’ rather than ‘imposing upon...’ Might one say that historicisation exposes, on the one hand, a wound, an alienating rift, and on the other hand, clear duties and opportunities? What connections can be made between design and the motives examined in this perspective?
Creative structures and disciplines: history and activism?
Between the 1970s and 1980s, design and architecture historians, influenced by “second-wave feminism and a handful of pioneering texts began to approach these questions armed with feminist theories,” Cheryl Buckley tells us.25 Within this context, notions of value and taste were questioned “as the new discipline’s [academic] failure to account for women as producers, designers, consumers, and users of design became clear”.26
Retrospective evidence of activism
Art historian Charlotte Gould,27 along with Linda Nochlin, quoted by Attfield, offers us the welcome work ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’,28 where Nochlin gives an inventory of the social and economic factors that have prevented the recognition of female artists since the Renaissance, and the expansion of women artists. She points out that as they were excluded from studios and forbidden from attending 19th century life drawing classes featuring nude models, women had little opportunity to set any precedents which might have served as models for the next generations of artists. This is why it is possible to state that sexual difference is significant in art (The sex of the artist matters), such that no writer even questions it any more. Gould also notes that such practices were addressed in The Subversive Stitch, the title of two separate exhibitions held, appropriately enough, in Manchester in 1988: Embroidery in Women’s Lives 1300-1900 and Women and Textiles Today.29 Attfield also cited Rozsika Parker’s ground-breaking companion work which was also published alongside it.30 The art critic Charlotte Gould, perhaps had in mind the second of these exhibitions, which dismantles gender and social issues in an “interlocking” way, emphasising the relevance of Dadaist, Surrealist and Russian Constructivist craft-type practices, which included many women artists. The first part of the exhibition is also interesting from a design point of view, as it demonstrates the decline of these practices (the same goes for other applied arts), embroidery in particular. Works such as this exhibition thirty years ago, or films like Céline Sciamma’s 2019 work La Jeune fille en feu, are all vital in bringing to public awareness such phenomena as the power of marginalised practices or what it was like to be a woman practising as an 18th century portrait artist, for example. The historian Séverine Sofio, who wrote Artistes femmes. La parenthèse enchantée, xvıııe–xıxe siècles,31 meticulously unpacks those mechanisms which might connect the fine arts, applied arts, status and money (professions), and what the Industrial Revolution was to bring.
The author investigates a particular history of the feminisation of a
specific field and it would be inspiring to
pick up where she leaves off, extending this into applied arts and
design, students of which are these days mostly female.32
This lesson complements what remains of Nochlin’s observations.
The fecund counter-intuitiveness of the historical study
Art sociologists have studied the turbulent years of 1750 to 1850 in the fine arts in France, and how the fortunes of women artists saw a positive shift, followed by a downturn. Increased female involvement and professionalisation initially came through the practices of professional painters in the last few decades of the Ancien Régime, only for this trend to gradually get shut down again in the early half of the next century. What might seem counterintuitive to us is that the creation of the Académie quashed corporatism and permitted female attendance.33 Many women were emancipated by the opening up of private studios to young women, as initiated by Greuze and David, as they were banned from the fine arts schools of the time. It then became possible to be a female artist and earn money and enjoy working conditions roughly equal to those of male artists. Artistic skills constituted a “new distinctive capital” and made it possible for women to exercise a “useful profession”,34 and even to be recognised and be “artist like the others” in the various salons.35 So this was progress, albeit in a somewhat restrictive environment, but no more so than that of design. For women, becoming an artist was considered “the most enviable destiny and the most prestigious work available to them, at a time when higher education was closed to them”.36 However within three generations and just over fifty years, another much-studied shift begins, whereby painting gradually becomes seen as a female activity. The male career path of such academic training disappeared, and the generation educated under the Empire became more specialised and artistic practices started to become more widely socially distributed. The last generation studied (1825-1840) then started to encounter new obstacles, along with the lowering of the average social level. With what might be interpreted as a broader establishment of the status of female artist, came an increased selection, a specialisation in minor genres and entry into the less demanding decorative arts to be able to earn a living. Women were often copyists in the galleries of the Louvre, alongside men:37
It seems that perhaps the status of professional artist conferred upon women some measure of protection from the opprobrium that such freedom of movement and autonomy in work outside the home would ordinarily have incurred.38
Interestingly for us, Séverine Sofio demonstrates that what excluded women from the profession was the way the avant-garde operated and the greater independence of the artistic profession alongside the inception of galleries (in the early 1850s), far more effectively than regressive discourses, that is to say the public space governed by its own male gatekeepers and the mechanisms of a certain (liberal) economy sequestered from women by social convention. What we often consider to be very 19th century themes such as flânerie, the bohemian lifestyle, cafés, ‘selling oneself’ to curators and patrons of the arts, for instance, had a very real impact. Within the mechanisms described, there is a counter-intuitive analysis of the role of public regulation in France, even under more conservative regimes. What becomes abundantly clear are the actions and the repossession of the field of fine arts painting by an essentially masculine economic world that makes the rules of play as it goes along, proposing new female professions in the industry, as if to ‘empty’ the field. Éric Marty makes some very useful observations on the adeptness and ease with which multinationals and the capitalist world cheerfully welcome and integrate gender issues into their systems (e.g. human resources, trading, marketing, etc.). Finally, how capitalism and the ‘battle with the patriarchy’ employ a certain vocabulary. Hence the use of terms that are both liberating but also dreadfully managerial, ‘empowerment’ being a prime example thereof.39
“Structures do not take to the streets”40 or the return to objects
Analysing these common factors, Marty notes that they are also:
[...] the historic symptom of a profound disruption to the relationships between power and the challenging of power, between classes and minorities, between norms and changes to norms, [it is] a significant historical symptom, as it is, in effect, an initially American process that has gone global. Put very simply, one might say that it is replacing the European political Manicheanism which arises from a theological and political reading of history, in which power ceases to be mythologised as a transcendental power but is rather an element of a relationship or interaction. The most relevant analysis of this process is found in Foucault’s talk [...] on “The Analytic Philosophy of Politics”.41 42
So here we see positions and ways of doing things beginning to take shape. Attfield’s text seems to signal a vast programme of historical revision, but let us not be mistaken. Her work also shows that we must, with the meticulousness of readers, practitioners and historians, engage in vast studies whose cases open up the possibility of looking at and sometimes fully embodying, systemic movements. These can teach us that the game has not yet been won or at least alert us to the constant regulatory shifts that are happening. Legislation is not there to ensure greater equality but rather to perform a permanent rebalancing act in the maintaining of power. This rebalancing act does not shift humans but the values of activities. Humans then align themselves in accordance with these symbolic, moral, financial, educational or statutory values. This observation touches on the way the work itself gets tirelessly put above the profession. Textile, then. This is also why we need to continue the historical work, with and beyond words and concepts, on the history of ideas and norms, and the attention paid to objects and the relationships we have with them:
[...] a two-way process of research which includes a study of external forces beyond the physical object itself and the more self-referential analyses of a product of modern mass production as a material manifestation of those cultural forces.43
Attfield has been instrumental in making design history a study of specific and special relationships in which banal forms, connections and consumption are evidence of evolution. We therefore need to move away from mythologising to focus more on historical accuracy and demystification. Her thesis supervisor, anthropologist Daniel Miller, author of Material Culture and Mass Consumption44 and Stuff45, described Attfield’s approach as a historian as follows:
The fact that unlike any other work on this topic this starts from a respect for otherwise denigrated materials, not from some postmodern or ironic or clever conceit but from a modest humanism, a desire not to judge or patronise but simply pay attention to and create an understanding of all our material culture however it is otherwise labelled and dismissed. This politics of respect is something that was a leitmotif of all her work and is her legacy for the future.46
“Yesterday’s Future”47 is Judy Attfield’s passing of the baton to Europe.
Bibliography
Books
ATTFIELD, Judith. Wild Things. The Material Culture of Everyday
Life [2000]. Londres : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
— . Bringing Modernity Home: Writings on Popular Design and Material
Culture. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2007. GEISER,
Reto. Giedion and America. Zurich : gtaVerlag, 2018.
MARTY, Éric. Le sexe des Modernes. Pensée du Neutre et théorie du
genre. Paris : Seuil, « Fiction & Cie », 2021.
MILLER, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge : Polity, 2010.
PARKER, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of
Cloth. Londres : The Women’s Press, 1984.
SOFIO, Séverine. Artistes femmes. La parenthèse enchantée, xvıııe-xıxe siècles. Paris : CNRS,
2016.
WALKER, John A. et Judy ATTFIELD. Design History and the History of
Design. Londres : Pluto, 1989.
Chapters or articles in a book or a journal
ATTFIELD, Judith. The Tufted Carpet in Britain: Its Rise from the
Bottom of the Pile, 1952-1970. Journal of Design History 7,
1994, p. 205-216.
BUCKLEY, Cheryl. Made in Patriarchy II: Researching (or Re-Searching)
Women and Design. Design Issue, vol. 36, n° 1, hiver 2020,
p. 19-29.
DURO, Paul. Copyists in the Louvre during the Middle Decades of the
Nineteenth Century. Gazette des beaux-arts, avril 1988,
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GOULD, Charlotte. Histoire de l’art et féminisme : la fin d’un oxymore ?
Les pratiques et théories féministes des années soixante-dix comme
héritage. In MARRET, Sophie et Claude LE FUSTEC (dir.). La fabrique
du genre : (dé)constructions du féminin et du masculin dans les arts et
la littérature anglophones. Rennes : Presses universitaires de
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MONTEIL, Lucas et Alice ROMERIO. Des disciplines aux « studies ».
Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, 2017/3, vol. 11,
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NOCHLIN, Linda. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
ARTnews, janvier 1971, p. 22 et sq.
<https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201>.
En français : « Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas eu de grands artistes femmes ?
», in NOCHLIN, Linda. Femmes, art et pouvoir. Traduit de
l’américain par Oristelle Boni. Arles : Jacqueline Chambon, 1993,
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SCOTFORD, Martha. Messy History vs Neat History, from Visible Language
[1994]. In SMET, Catherine (de) et Sara DE BONDT. Graphic Design:
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SOFIO, Séverine. Socio-histoire des formations artistiques du xvıııe au xxe siècle. Agone, n° 65,
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