The Brooklyn Rail

The Museum of Modern Art’s Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design exhibition is the latest in a series that champions technological and conceptual innovations in twenty-first-century interior, product, and fashion design, particularly those at the forefront of education and scientific discovery. Previous entries have included Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design (2011–12), which envisioned advanced, atypical designs for domestic objects; This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good (2015–16), which examined accessibility in contemporary design; and Items: Is Fashion Modern? (2017–18), an exploration of modern fashion designs that remain commercial staples.

Life Cycles distinguishes itself, albeit indirectly, from its predecessors by reflecting current audiences’ heightened expectations of public, actionable accountability from their exhibition spaces—accountability that frequently manifests as diplomatic PR statements, the removal of problematic donors, and symposia. Museums’ application of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to their own collections is another example of such institutions recognizing and countering their contributions to climate change, and can range from examining the carbon footprint of transporting object loans to evaluating the cost efficiency of reducing temperature-regulating HVAC devices in gallery spaces.¹ While museums typically administer LCAs internally, applying the framework of LCAs to the content of Life Cycles hints at a new frontier of museum transparency, one in which art institutions engage with the art world’s environmental impact.

Invoking the first of an LCA’s four components, “goal and scope,” Life Cycles’ introductory text establishes its criteria for analysis by presenting its intention to examine different ways in which object and product design adapts to climate change. The exhibition’s many works (by at least forty artists) encompass the “inventory” element of LCAs, while viewers conduct the LCA’s “impact assessment” component, or an evaluation of how the stages of each work’s existence—from its materials, formation, display, and storage—affects its environment.

Haute-couture designer Issey Miyake’s A-POC [A Piece of Cloth] Queen Textile (1997), for example, challenges the single-use constructs of fast fashion, the practice of cheaply—and exploitatively—mass-producing quickly-damaged, quickly-dated clothing. The installation, a lengthy, narrow swath of red fabric, pre-woven with seams, allows the wearer to fabricate their own clothing from it. The seams provide structure through standardization, but the wearer can tailor these preset designs to their own size, comfort, and style, providing an infinite array of possibilities ranging from dresses to shirts to socks to pants. Though A-POC Queen’s fabric is an amalgam of nylon, cotton, and polyurethane (all of which are products of copious resource consumption), Miyake’s design reduces fabric scraps while also regimenting color and material, championing versatility as sustainability and effectively eliminating the microtrends that underpin fast fashion.

Another characteristic work is found in Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny The Honeycomb Vase “Made by Bees” (2006), which introduces interspecies collaboration to object design’s lifecycle as a reaction to climate change. Created in a manner reminiscent of ancient Greek lost wax casts—Libertíny formed a vase-like mold while a mass of forty-thousand bees layered it with honeycombed wax—the vase bears the color, texture and oblong contours of a beehive. Libertíny’s intervention in the bees’ natural processes draws cyclical connections between insects and humans, as vases contain the very same flowers bees pollinate, underscoring the responsibility we have to protect and strengthen the species our actions endanger.

Kosuke Araki’s Anima dinnerware set (2018–19) focuses on human activity, hybridizing the life cycles of food and dinnerware. Araki formed the set’s cups, saucers and bowls out of a charcoal composed of both food waste, ostensibly the nadir of food’s life cycle before decomposition, and urushi, a glossy black lacquer pigment used to adorn Japanese printmaking and ceramics, a process that represents the apex of an art object’s lifecycle before distribution. Araki’s transformation of food waste to food vessel compellingly repurposes food waste while making the viewer cognizant of the resources they consume (and leave behind).

The onus is now on audiences to complete the fourth component of its LCA—drawing eco-conscious conclusions from the “impact assessment” that can be applied to future accessions (“improvement assessment”). Though the exhibition’s exhaustive range poses challenges in reducing it to a summary, Life Cycles is the rare instance of an exhibition’s premise demonstrating responses to the contentious issue of museums’ contributions to climate change. Life Cycles uniquely reframes works from MoMA’s collection as solutions to contemporary environmental problems caused by object design and mass production alongside artists’ material sourcing and museums’ collections practices.

1. Sarah Nunberg, Matthew J. Eckelman & Pamela Hatchfield (2016) “Life Cycle Assessments of Loans and Exhibitions: Three Case Studies at the Museum Fine Arts, Boston,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, 55:1, 2-11.