It turns out that Francis Fukuyama – yes, that Francis Fukuyama – is quite the amateur carpenter who spends his down time making antique furniture.
The American political scientist is best known for his essay The End of History? Published in 1989 while he was working for the State Department, it acted as a de facto philosophy for a post-cold war, neoliberal idea. He wrote:
‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
Fukuyama told us that history as a struggle of ideologies was over. Instead, humanity would find itself in an endless laguna of liberal democracy stretching to the end of time.
But when he wasn’t writing this, he was learning how to build furniture. In an interview in January with AARP magazine, (the bi-monthly publication produced by the American Assoicciation of Retired People), Fukuyama said:
‘Around the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I worked at the State Department. Every time I visited the secretary of state’s office, I looked at the antique Federal-style furniture and thought, this is so beautiful. I knew I could never afford anything like that, but I like doing things with my hands, so I started to teach myself how to build furniture.”
Fukuyama, the author of The End of History, spent his spare time building reproduction Federal-style furniture, using Japanese tools reminiscent of his grandfather’s secret collection of Samurai swords.
In this little tale, we see an idea of furniture that is an intersection of political philosophy, ideology and immigration as well as connoisseurship, history, and craft. And though in some ways exceptional, this is also the story of all design objects. Even the most mundane of the things we surround ourselves with are the product of super-complex abstract forces. Even the things we surround ourselves with at home, the things we hardly even think about, the things in the heart of our domestic circumstance, are precipitations into material form of gigantic and dramatic narratives.
Yet we often think of design as a medium or a form of practice innocent of these kinds of cultural reflections. That’s something we more often expect art to do. Art is the site where we make far more self-conscious work about the world. When we think of where we usually encounter art, it’s in exceptional spaces that exist outside of the ordinary world, places where we behave differently, look differently, even think differently. Things too change their meaning in these strange places of cultural intensity. Simply placing an object in a gallery space alters that object fundamentally. The gallery might appear to act as the proving ground of culture, the place where ideas about society, about culture and about humanity can be explored and tested, an exceptional space separate from the world where a different set of rules apply.
Design though is something we encounter in the midst of life, or rather it is the very midst of life, not only in the things around us but also the entirety of everything around us. Perhaps because of this it makes it far harder to see design’s cultural significance. And even more, makes it far harder for designers to understand their role as producers of cultural artefacts.
‘The fog of war’ is a military term used to describe the sensation where the complexities of conflict obscure the clear objectives of a campaign. This kind of fog descends too on designers, whose job inevitably involves battles over cost, use, permissions, regulations, marketing, a client’s taste, the restraints of manufacture, logistics and so on. In this sense, design as a form of practice emerges into the world in a way that is entirely compromised compared to fine art practice, just as the spaces design occupies are far more compromised than gallery space. But could its very compromise be imagined as its real source of power? Could the fact that it has to negotiate be its real agency? It can if we understand design as the way in which we manifest ideology, not as statement or reflection but as something far more powerful, not as an image of the world but as the world.
The recent Turner Prize win for the architecture collective Assemble might be part of this story. Their award of the prize, for their collaborative project in the Granby Four Streets community of Toxteth, Liverpool, a form of ground-up regeneration of a small community was, it seems, taken up by sections of the artworld (or at least sections of the Turner Prize jury) and imagined as a form of art practice. This came as much as a surprise to Assemble as to anyone else. What seemed to be of value to this section of the artworld was an idea of social practice, about how creative practice could transform the world. Many of the things, that for the design and architecture world are intrinsically part of their role, could be seen, through this lens, as a form of radical art practice. The awarding of the prize to a collective of artists, designers and architects was as much in recognition of the potential of design to reinvigorate and/or challenge contemporary art practice, as it was for the specific work of the group.
Yet what was recognised is only half the story. What it rejected was the significance of art as a material thing but also that of design-as-thing. There is far more potential in the way design and art practice could hybridise to create new kinds of creative practice than using one to cancel out the other. Instead, could we not imagine a way in which art can help lift the ‘fog of war’ that might surround design, allowing us to see with the kind of conceptual clarity a white-cube space provides, the social, political and cultural issues bound up in the act of design – that ‘making of the world’ that is its central act.
Ikea’s head of sustainability Steve Howard recently declared that we have reached ‘peak stuff’, where the accumulation of things in western liberal democracies has reached a point of saturation. Here he declares a sense of crisis for the design world (or at least for the world’s largest home furnishing retailer). If we have provided enough affordable, useful and meaningful objects to furnish our homes then what role might design now have?
Of course, we could recognise the same sense of hubris that characterised Fukuyama’s own vision of the end of history. Perhaps Howard is suggesting that the fundamental struggle of twentieth-century Modernist design, eventually fulfilled through flat-pack affordability is over. Just as post-1989 we have found that other histories have emerged with forms of ideological conflict, we can be sure that there will be more ‘stuff’. How we imagine, make, and use this stuff is as pressing a concern as it was at the origin of Modernism. What form it might take though is something else entirely.
Perhaps this could be a moment of re-drawing boundaries that, though they seem inevitable[1] , are simply cultural constructs that emerged in a very different time. The cultural boundaries between art and design are boundaries that are maintained by institutions (the applied arts museum versus the art gallery), education and media but most of all by ourselves as we self-identify as artists or designers, as we consume ‘art’ or ‘design’.
Instead, what if we used Fukuyama’s furniture-building hobby as a model. That the making of things might be a conscious coming together of form, material and craft yet intimately connected to politics and ideology. That we could think of objects not as products of either art or design, but of culture itself. More, that the construction of these objects is how we might imagine new versions of the world itself – not drifting on an endless laguna of stasis but as things that can help us navigate the tidal forces that surround us, things that might chart our routes into the future.
First published in Art Review