Catherine Ince

0:26Thank you. And I don't have any props I don't know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna fire some poor quality archival images at you that was magical thank you and to everybody else so how am I just doing this and doing this yes as I said I organized the exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames at the Barbican which is in essence I suppose about lots of the things that they collected their collective images and ideas and artifacts and they lived with lots of material but they didn't consider themselves to be collectors which is a kind of interesting conundrum when you are a curator dealing with a million artifacts in just one archive so what I'm going to do tonight is just quickly talk you through some of the characters of there the character of their office the character of the archive the character of the collections that they amassed how they live with them and how they use them I'm not going to introduce Charles and ratings because I'm assuming most of you know who they are and if you don't you should you should go and see the show.

1:52And so it's not an art history lecture in that way what you're looking at here is a photograph of the studio that themes is kept in Vaness California 901 Washington Boulevard it was their office for over four decades this is one image of many which document the spaces in which they worked they worked very intensely within the context of their home. But also at 901 six and a half days a week was quite usual as were 18-hour days the life of a designer and a curator is often very preoccupied and as you all know.

2:33But this these types of documentary images of the of the office give you give you a sense of the of the character of the things that they kept around them sections of you know flags and signage from the circus they were huge fans of the circus. And so this sort of apocryphal story goes that if they didn't make it as designers they would run away enjoying the circus.

3:04But they they were fascinated by the discipline that underpinned the the seeming sort of spontaneity and and kind of fun performative nature of the circus. And I think that sort of characterized their their life and approach to to making work but you also have things just kind of passing through the office to advertise shows and and and products and happenings and events that they were interested in our Chi ville material this I don't have a pointer but so you're gonna have to kind of guess where I'm pointing but the timeline that you can see here on the right is is a timeline they made about the history of mathematics stuff just assembled everywhere they they were considerable collectors really and hoarders packrats as the archivist at the Library of Congress where there the papers of Charles and Ray Eames are now kept as the way in which they affectionately refer to them and particularly refer to ray who was known to have increased the size of the pockets in her skirts over time to accommodate the stuff that she stuffed into them. So in encountering the archive in in at the Library of Congress one was looking at complete and finished project drawings related to the themes as work.

4:31But also notes that Rae had written on the back of silver foil papers from Benson & Hedges cigarette boxes that you know because she smoked them and you know you could extract a little piece of paper and over something to write a note on. And so you've got this incredible sort of wealth of material and things that were just kept in drawers in spaces in the office that were piled up and stuffed between the kind of you know seating at their home in in Santa Monica and it's a kind of an impossible task to be able to deal with this what you also have are the sort of rich seams of Correspondence and letters and things that they kept and I was just talking to daniel has been working with alan on the preparation of allen's show. That's coming up at somerset house in the spring which I urge you all to go and see when it happens in April about you know this the the period the period is one pre-internet of course where you either had conversations on the telephone or you wrote letters to people or you sent a telegram and so this incredible kind of you know wealth of correspondence that exists in the archive and if you haven't been to see the show. There are some kind of fabulous examples of the the collections of letters that Rey particularly was responsible for and these magical collages that she would she would make in wanting to speak to people I'm aware that I've been speaking for five minutes and I'm only on slide one this is dreadful okay.

6:03So the archive and the office was this incredible sort of panoply of things things that they were obsessed with and interested in and stored and used in their work and lived with everyday and they're kind of underpinned by this in credible insatiable curiosity about the world and how the material world comes into being and I think that. That's you know what is so compelling about their work.

6:30And so interesting to people still this is the ins house very iconic piece of architecture the interior of the house changed over many years from the moment they moved in in December 1949 it was a sort of blank canvas with a distinctly Japanese character to it to become this kind of interior distinctly sort of humanized version of a very modernist way of looking at the world that was built through steel and architecture softened by the artifacts of objects with which they suit you know they used and surrounded themselves with every every day from textiles to cultural artifacts to you know humble you know anonymous pieces of design and this way of living with objects was was critical to their to the philosophy and critical to their sort of position on design they collected toys they collected folk arts children's art they made objects this kind of totemic looking structure here is a prototype study for a modular toy that they eventually put into production but not quite in this form what you can see kind of poking out the edge of the left of the image here as a wooden hollowed out wooden sculpture of a whale that's about 2 meters long that is typical of the type of artifact you'd find in the Pacific Northwest in in the US. And is in the show he's a character and a kind of growing an interesting cast of characters that appear in the Eames is photography in their films in the interiors that and design designed and they were interested in the material nature of these things the craftsmanship of of the objects that they collected the notion of similarity and difference between topologies of objects and the idea of anonymous design and how something just becomes the way it is because of the you know the kind of knowledge and unspoken sort of attitude and feeling towards material and towards making of a specific object that has passed through generations and so this.

9:09This is a shot from the studio in their house and these assemblages changes changed very much over the years and and so they were constantly kind of recasting their interiors and you know moving things around and enjoying and living with objects in a way that we all do but they have become sort of particularly noted for and this is an image of exactly the type of play that occurred ray on the left of course and here she is masked with a very serious emigres architect based in in America called Conrad Waxman who if you kind of saw his work he wouldn't necessarily kind of you know think of him as this kind of playful creature here donning his fan and mast and and getting up to who knows what's in the air in the Eames house he was a kind of pioneer of intensely interesting space frame sort of architecture but what you start to see is the way in which these this cast of character of you know collections of things that the Eames is acquired and they weren't really collectors and I'd the sort of position of themselves as collectors in that they weren't completists they weren't necessarily interested in you know there's sort of origin that we're interested in the origin of something but not the sort of you know provenance they were interested in the groups of material and what that's signified about the culture and the kind of you know the the place from where these objects came and the ability of children to make things that or equally as valuable and interesting as those products of adult context it's not quite clear sometimes where these artifacts came from so you've got collections of masks in the show for example which may or may not have come from Indonesia they may have been bought at some shop that sold Indonesian goods in Los Angeles who knows but it.

11:19And it doesn't really matter in a way I think what was interesting to them was that they they found the sort of richness of the everyday and the ordinary in in the things that you know society makes and puts into the world and these objects are used and explored in all sorts of different contexts so you get the interiors of Herman Miller Sharon's in Los Angeles from 1949 when the showroom was designed by Charles and Ray Eames and the Eames office two decades later when they're working for Herman Miller across the United States the sort of rich array of objects are brought in to decorate this canvas of this quite archetypal modernist interior so you find kites which you've seen here appearing here.

12:13And then appearing in in other other instances as well.

12:18So these props are kind of moving in and out of spaces and across time.

12:23And then as the images begin to use film and the medium of film and photography particularly to communicate their ideas and almost replace the work that they're doing in production of consumer goods this cast of characters becomes integral to their practice you can see them here May King took captive for toy trains a fabulous film which is kind of ode to the to the beauty of the the mechanical toy train in 1957 or this is apologies incredibly bad quality of this film still but this is traveling boy this is the first film that they made in 1950 it's unfinished it's a beautiful kind of animation of a toy boy who travels around and encounters this kind of incredible world from the seal who can balance a ball on his nose to these incredibly beautiful Japanese women and the things that whimsical kind of you know almost narrative --less scenarios that they were that they were developing in their film work through two films like tops which another kind of very everyday playful object that's familiar and universal in many different countries and cultures to what you have here is a is a contact sheet from the archive of their sort of inventory of different tops from different places around the world so English tops and tops from Japan and tops from India and so there's a sort of there's an inherent quality in the nature of a spinning top and and it's sort of you know what they were interested in is this sort of idea of the the universal object but also in making a film about it the beauty of those objects in motion.

14:31So this is a film still from the 1966 version of tops that they made where you see an Indian top mostly kind of understood through the garment of the person who's playing with the top a ballerina spinning top and you know the sort of thing you'd get free and in a cracker with some or with some popcorn or something and and these this sort of world of collections was also something that was fed very directly into products that they made but a kind of recurrent motif in the visual language that they use to explore material culture and the idea of the everyday and the idea that you might find beauty and youthfulness in every day artifact everybody well most people probably probably know this as a series of apologies images of the uncropped cards they were being prepared for print in my publication to go with the show but you can see here this kind of incredible affection that they had for for the everyday object you've got a walnuts you've got matches you've got miniature tiny you know Chinese firecrackers and the Ames families still have a lot of this stuff in their collection.

16:01And it's interesting when you kind of think about these things in relation to scale I always thought that the firecrackers were quite big they're actually as Tiny as Ellen's they've all kind of little letter a but you just pulled out this pocket anyway you know the interesting thing about what these collections of artifacts offer you is is a way in into their kind of philosophy and the centrality of the idea that with these pictures of things or with these collections of things you can make new connections and new relationships between visual and material information and goods and that those assemblages and those connections might alter your view of the world. And I think that's for me what is most kind of exciting about themes is and why they persist as being important I guess that's it thank you