EAST/WEST in the 50's

Kitchen-sink diplomacy

By Peter Aspden



“Vicious,” said Lou Reed laconically in his cherished 1970s hit of that name. “You hit me with a flower.” Something of that bathetic air of high camp came across this week when the Victoria and Albert museum announced its big autumn show, Cold War Modern. The exhibition, which opens in September, aims to remind us that design and aesthetics, just as surely as nuclear missiles, were essential elements in the battle between the postwar superpowers.

It was a strange time: military paranoia and mass consumerism swept through their respective lands, creating a new aesthetic that was both brashly confident and deeply insecure (brilliantly captured in the early Bond films and the dark satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove). While the US and the Soviet Union threatened each other with grim scenarios of mutually assured destruction, they were also taking part in surreal games of domestic oneupmanship.

The fight between communism and capitalism to prove their respective superiority, while full of dangerous bombast, also took place on a more subtle level. Subtle, and thrilling too. For the fight was no less than for modernity itself. Cold War Modern will show how radical art and design were commandeered in bold, original ways in order to make thumping political points, and emerged as exciting new forms of expression in themselves.

It is not the popular image we have of the cold war. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s video of their 1984 hit “Two Tribes” has Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko pummelling each other to (nuclear) oblivion in a sandpit. That is how we thought of the deathly impasse of the cold war age, as two mastodon political systems that cared not a jot about the finer points of lounge-chair design.

But this was the beginning of the media age, and the propaganda war. Here were the beginnings of “soft” power: in the abstract expressionist painters championed by the CIA, and the awesomely drilled dance troupes exported by the Soviet Union. Different modes of artistic expression were harnessed to describe the societies from which they originated.

Domestic design, a seemingly innocuous form of artistic expression, was caught in the storm. This was illustrated in the famous “kitchen debate” between vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American Expo show held in Moscow in 1959. The show was conceived as an educational bridge-builder, in which Soviet citizens would see how American people lived. In return, the Soviets would display the best of their science, technology and culture at the New York Coliseum.

All proceeded well in Moscow as Nixon and Khrushchev wandered amiably around the household items on show (watch television’s excellent Mad Men to get the mise-en-scène). But the Soviet premier, a rambunctious figure, could not restrain himself. “You think the Russians will be dumbfounded by this exhibition,” he ribbed Nixon. “But nearly all newly built Russian houses have this equipment.”

It was rubbish, of course, but Nixon rose to the bait and the two men proceeded to hold a spontaneous debate on the merits of their respective systems. It was caught on film (most of it lost today) and makes riveting viewing: Khrushchev getting more and more clownish, finally taunting Nixon with a childish wave as he explained how the Soviets would soon overtake the Americans; Nixon, calm and dignified, noting pointedly that the debate was being captured on camera and would be shown to the US public – could Khrushchev promise the same? (Khrushchev’s answer was an obfuscatory, bear-like handshake.)

What gave the kitchen debate its spicy context was the success, a couple of years earlier, of the Soviets’ first Sputnik flight, which had for the first time punctured the US’s sense of cultural and political superiority. Such was the publicity afforded to the space race that the views of ordinary people became important and needed to be controlled.

To look at the headlines during Nixon’s Moscow visit tells the story: “Moscow Women Line Up for US Hairdo at Fair,” observed the New York Times drily, while Izvestiya responded days later with a report of Khrushchev’s visit to a machine-tool factory, under the heading “Our Strength is Colossal”.

The mad men of both countries, what we would later call the spin masters, had got hold of culture and would not willingly let it go again. As the turbulent decade progressed, the war to be modern intensified and took strange directions. Science-fiction images of destruction abounded: Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic “Dome over Manhattan” was a classic study in anxiety; Utopian fantasies such as Haus-Rucker-Co’s “Oasis No 7”, a beach placed inside an inflatable bubble, could not be read without irony.

It all sounds so very quaint to our own globalised era, which has anxieties of its own, but which no longer feels confident to express them in cars and kitchens. The west has lost a little of its faith in progress; the countries that today threaten the west wallow in belief systems that are close to medieval. It’s the postmodern versus the anti-modern and no one is hitting anyone with flowers any more.