Though he never lived to see the 20th century, Tennyson managed, in one imperishable line of verse, to sum it up: “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”

A new exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, “American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow,” examines that delirious, combustible union of speed and change that seemed to define the modern world from the end of World War I through the 1970s. Focusing on such related movements of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s as Art Deco and Art Moderne, the exhibition is billed as the most extensive ever mounted on the subject. The 180 objects here, comprising everything from staplers and vacuum cleaners to armchairs and soda syphons, come mainly from the Eric Brill Collection. Among the designers are Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy, as well as many others not quite so well known.

In the middle years of the last century, nothing so impressed itself upon the human mind as the frantic acceleration of daily life. Fifty years earlier, the world moved at a speed scarcely greater than under the Romans and the Greeks. By midcentury, however, speed seemed to infiltrate everything, not only things that moved fast, but things that were made fast, namely the household appliances of an incipient consumer society.

The origins of the various streamline styles can be found in things that moved swiftly through fluids: boats, trains, planes, and cars – the emblems of the industrialized world.According to Bel Geddes, “An object is streamlined when its exterior surface is so designed that, upon passing through a fluid such as water or air, the object creates the least disturbance in the fluid.” In the fullness of time, the slippery careening curves of this streamline style would show up throughout the industrialized world, until all the sharp, faceted angles of reality were pared down to the appearance of something very similar to a dirigible or a porpoise.

Yet what possible relevance could streamline design have for all those hairdryers, eggbeaters, and armchairs that now populate the galleries of the Bard Graduate Center? What conceivable practicality could apply to the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright and Erich Mendelsohn, those most stationary of manmade objects?

In fact, the streamline style quickly evolved into a speed fetish, and the utilitarian mandates it had originally served were reduced to a purely ornamental dream of functionalism. By 1944, the catalog of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Design for Use,” went on the attack: “The desire to make objects look ‘up-to-date’ by borrowing from unrelated modern machinery often leads to absurdities such as [a] pencil-sharpener streamlined to resemble an airplane.”

What the author of those words understood was that, despite the fact that streamlining shared many of Modernism’s goals, and despite its partial emergence out of movements like synthetic Cubism and the Bauhaus, it was fundamentally different from, if not opposed to, them. As one of the curators of the Bard show, David A. Hanks, explains, “Perhaps a core difference in how American scholars received Art Deco and Bauhaus functionalism, and how they regarded streamlining, lies in the fact that the former arose from an artistic vanguard while streamlining aimed at the widest possible public and was based on an admiration for industry and speed.”

That may be true, though it is important to add that part of what fueled the anger of the Modernists was a sense of betrayal from within. After all, what greater adulteration could there be than that the anti-ornamental functionalism that had been central to modern design since Adolf Loos at the turn of the century should itself now become an ornamental style?

As a result, the objects on view at Bard are often more charming for their nostalgic value than they are compelling either for their utility or their purity of design. For all its dash, does Raymond Loewy’s vacuum cleaner for the Singer company really need speed grooves, any more than do the persimmon, lemon, and blue leftover dishes attributed to Ralph Kruck?

The curators make a case for extending the streamline style into the present, in the form of, for example, running shoes, with their various grooves and swooshes. But something else is at work in these defining artifacts of the post-industrial world. It is no longer speed that defines us or that we fetishize – we take it for granted now. Rather it is ergonomics that is the name of our longings, the constant reconceiving of objects in the name of evergreater utility.

As with the streamline style of the ’30s, however, this quest for functionalism has itself become capriciously anti-functional. A personal example: I recently purchased a toothbrush whose particolored design and textured surface clearly invoked the aesthetic of Nike running shoes. The handle was warped to look “ergonomic,” as opposed to those older toothbrushes – the kind I sought in vain on the shelves – with straight handles. The perverse result was that, after using the thing for only a few seconds, my entire arm ached.

One other essential element of contemporary design is what I call the “bubble aesthetic” often seen in SUVs, the sense of hollow, empty, airy surplus swelling around an appliance’s far smaller mechanical guts.The unspoken premise of these designs is that, in the age of the microchip, the heaviness of the industrial age has given way to a hollow shell that houses the object’s far smaller functional heart.

Form no longer follows function, because function no longer needs form, as it did half a century ago. In any event, the forms that have resulted from the aesthetic marriage of the running shoe and the microchip are far less lovely than those that, whatever their real or imagined utility, are now on view at Bard.

jgardner@nysun.com

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