Embraced by Aesthetics of Pop

Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.
Andy Warhol, POPism

Andy Warhol defined pop as liking things . He must have liked the Finnish Futuro house, which he visited in the 1970s. The Futuro looked as if it came directly from a sci-fi comic book or a James Bond film. Smooth and sleek on the outside, yet mysteriously introverted, it alluded to masculine adventure and was as seductive as Pandora’s box. Matti Kuusla one of the first owners of a Futuro, remembers: "[Futuro] was like a womb, it was a fantastic feeling, it took you in its arms..." Kuusla’s description tells of a sensual experience of space: a space of desire. But it also betrays a persistent tendency to appropriate the female body as a material-spatial metaphor.

Like the Futuro house, the bright colours and unconventional forms of Eero Aarnio’s plastic furniture bespeak leisure and ease; they, too, provoked erotic fantasies. "I wonder why it is, but in the photographs, women are always undressing in my chairs," Aarnio himself has said.

Increasingly free associations are characteristic of post-modernism: post-modern form comments on its function instead of humbly submitting to it. It flirts, in deed "almost forces one to become infatuated", as the magazine Kaunis Koti (‘beautiful home’) wrote about the Ball chair in 1966. Aarnio’s furniture highlights interior design in an inviting and light-hearted way, serving as signs or marks, even, as it were, exclamation marks. The etymology of the Finnish word for furniture “huonekalu” – a “tool” to be placed in a room – evokes a mechanical nature and "masculine" heaviness. Aarnio’s seats argue against the traditional angular protocol of the chair; after all, sitting on a chair requires, in principle, a kind of decorum or etiquette.

Similarly, the interior of the Futoro defies decorum: it does not have "tools" (unless one takes the steel fireplace with its phallic stovepipe as one), instead, the sensuous shapes of the seats melt into the framework of the space. Thanks to these seats that transform into beds, the living room is the bedroom. The eye, accustomed to pictorial representations of Futuro, sees it as "female territory", or rather male territory marked with a woman. Jean Baudrillard discussed the gender divide of consumer culture at the end of the 1960s: "If the man is a man, he will choose his wife among other objects/signs (his car, his wife, his eau de toilette)..." Woman’s fate was linked to objects fulfilling a prestige function.

Woman’s fate in a masculine culture of (conspicuous) consumption is most poignantly realised in the artificial reality of marketing imagery: women are represented as decorative attributes of a house or chair. Although contemporary photographs tell otherwise, women probably were not overcome by a compulsive desire to undress when they sat down in an Aarnio chair. But the round form and intimate introversion of the chairs, as well as those of the Futuro house, "thirsted" after a woman to embrace, to proclaim sweet idleness and soft responsiveness. A woman’s function in these photographs was multi-faceted: not only to arrest the eye and, through it, the desire (to buy), but also to modify the modernity of the design, to render decorative its futurism. At the same time, the female body functioned as a metaphor of the organic, an eroticising analogy of curvaceous form.

The female body as spectacle

The mythology of the female body was commented on in feminist visual art around the same time as the Futuro house, and Pastil and Bubble chairs were created. In the work La Maison est le Corps by Lygia Clark, displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1968, the viewer stepped into a (female) space, which was organised according to the phases of intercourse and conception. Hon (‘she’), more familiar to the Finnish art audience, was an architectural sculpture project, carnevalising of the myths of the female body. It was created by Niki de Saint-Phalle in collaboration with Jean Tinguely and Per-Olof Ultvedt in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1967. The feminine space of Hon was entered through the spread legs of a female and inside visitors could find, among other things, a gallery of forged paintings, a goldfish pond and a planetarium in the spirit the of the space age. Hon presented the female body as an open spectacle, at the same time commenting on the topical dialectics between the internal and the external, surface and depth, art and entertainment.

In the cultural consciousness, masculine, sublime space is infinite espace, as distinct from the closed (internal) space of feminity. This ideological dynamic seems to resonate with Finnish pop-futurism. Just think of the idea of a "homey spaceship": the faith in progress and mastery of technology embodied in the sleek exterior, the "masculine" themes of mobility, infinity and conquering the universe are in fertile discord with the sensalised and closed "feminine" interior. Aarnio’s chairs also connect intimate femininity with (world) embracing spatiality. Behind such futuristic designs looms an early classic in the field, a chair by Eero (son of Eliel) Saarinen from 1948, called, what else, The Womb.

Plastic dream of woman

In 1936, Salvador Dali embodied the enticing lips of Mae West in his sensuous sofa. It is easy to imagine those resting on West’s lips to have had sweet, surreal dreams – or to have recounted them to their psychotherapist in New York, where Dali’s works attracted scandalous attention. But what kind of dreams did Finns, sprawled out and relaxing in Pastil chairs and Futuro houses, have thirty years on? Sweet, no doubt, but also restless ones. It is somehow symptomatic that the forms of these Finnish classics of pop-futurism resemble their most famous contemporary: the Pill. The swinging sexual climate of the late 1960s set the perfect stage for pop-futurism, or vice versa. The cultural impact of the Pill was, however, far from simple: it liberated (women’s) sexuality, but, at the same time, it shook the (masculine) hierarchies of the gender system. If there was a threat of women becoming more "masculine" as the Pill drove the "feminine mystique" out of bedrooms – as male concerns were described in the Finnish women’s magazine Eeva – the contemporary women posing in the Futuro house and the Pastil and Ball chairs seem to conform prettily to traditional ideas of femininity.

Finnish pop-futurism was a short-lived phenomenon. The final deathblow was delivered by the recession caused by the energy crisis in the mid-1970s, when the jolly plastic products revealed their less-than-jolly manufacturing costs and unecological nature. At the same time, an atmosphere of insecurity led to the surfacing of a nostalgic desire for more secure values. As the pseudonym Porina wrote in the magazine Kaunis Koti back in 1966: "The space age is here, but, nevertheless, ordinary people most of all feel the need to make themselves comfortable and human.... In this atomic age, it still seems that the home is subject to the slowest change. It is the haven for ordinary people..."

Harri Kalha
Ph. D.

Bibliography:
The article is part of the author’s study to be published by Desura Books in 2002 in a book about the Futuro house.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society. Myths and Structures [original: La Société de consommation, 1970], Sage Publications, London 1998.
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference [original: Ethique de la différence sexuelle, 1984], transl. C. Burke and G. C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York 1993.
Futuro – tulevaisuuden olotila, a documentary film, 1999, script: Mika Taanila & Marko Home, directed by Mika Taamila.
Andy Warhol (& Pat Hackett), POPism: The Warhol ´60s, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego & New York 1980.