I’m making a kind of nebulous time capsule, a compendium of things in my friends’ homes that mean something to them—items that fulfill the dual purpose of art & function. I don’t think function and recreation are mutually exclusive, as evidenced by my last letter, on board games.
My friend Abby sent me photos of two absolutely glorious light fixtures in her apartment. Looking at them, I knew I had to run to my humongous book of multiple Sears Roebuck catalogues, which has pages upon pages of lovely illustrations showing light fixtures for sale.
What connects all these images is something kind of amorphous & hard to articulate, but maybe you understand just by looking at them all. How these pieces look & how they function are, in some ways, running parallel to one another. That their owners want more than just light, want to make these objects into delicate little treasures, links us through different eras.
Often, our technology gets more utilitarian over time, turning chrome and becoming sturdy. Abby’s two fixtures prove that fragility (butterflies and flower petals are the textbook definitions of delicate) & functionality are not antithetical to one another.
It’s easy to imagine people in the past as just Past People, and I love the catalogue as a little window into a choice they were making. They needed light, and so do we. More importantly, they wanted something above and beyond function. That’s a choice we make. It’s a silly point, maybe, but I think at a certain point we forget that those Past People had things like this to decide on and consider, that they had personal tastes.
Often we visualize an era as one big blob with uniform visuals and forget the most fascinating part: each person’s choices within their own little world. In our collective imagination, we leave little room for personal things like this—things that are simultaneously insignificant and deeply important.
I love you I love you, bye!