In perfection, there lies a flaw

Published 5:00 am Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Island author Natalia Ilyin writes, reflects on the folly of modernist design.

When the messiness and chaos of the world get to be too much, people retreat into religion, jazz or… modernism.

The early modernists typified by the Bauhaus movement in the early 1900s did so, by Winslow author and designer Natalia Ilyin’s interpretation, as a reaction to the horrors of World War I they experienced on the battlefield.

The design school “fought against the dull, futile ignorance they had seen all around them at the front,” Ilyin writes in her new book, “Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time.”

“But instead of turning to human connection, to love, as a path out of the darkness,” she writes, “they chose to build a new world out of the mud, to build a utopia that did not admit the primal, brutal, unkempt side of people.”

“Chasing the Perfect” is a philosophical look at society’s values molded by the modernist movement and examined in humorous autobiographical vignettes.

Ilyin teaches at the University of Washington and the Rhode Island School of Design, while also maintaining a design consultant company. She urges her graphic arts students to think outside the perfect computer palette and templates and create from their own vision.

At the “peak” of a successful design career in Manhattan, a moment of crushing epiphany sparked the idea for her book.

“I thought that if I could get myself to act a certain way, have the right house, the right shoes, the right boyfriend, that life would cease to be terrifying,” Ilyin said in an interview at her Winslow home. “But I was miserable. All these things I had worked so hard for were ‘shells’ I wasn’t getting support for the inside things – community, family”

The crisis helped Ilyin learn to appreciate imperfection.

“I still nag friends about their hair, clothes, but my life is so much better now,” she said. “Fewer rules for others mean fewer rules for myself, less structure. Structure comes from fear.

“I’m a recovering perfectionist.”

In “Chasing the Perfect,” Illyin pulls the reader into her take on how modernism – known it for its sleek, simple lines that abstract the essence of the object – has resulted in a culture pursuing exterior beauty that neglects the displeasing “messiness” of life – the very thing that makes life worth living.

Her encounter with a terrifyingly perfectly sleek modern home, which she calls “the lantern” – with sealed windows and a Sub-Zero fridge that holds just a Brita water pitcher and six-pack of Coca-Cola – starts the question of why people crave simplification that is intimidating at the extreme.

“How about staying in a germ-proof lantern with no fresh air for a few days?” Illyin writes. “How about camping out in a place that is so clean, so beautiful, so thought out, so complete, so filled with impossibly valuable simple objects that you will lie in the guest bed and feel the weight of all that design pulling you down like the stones Virginia Woolf put into her pockets as she waded into the river?”

Before modernism developed in the early 1900s, “the only perfection people were looking to fill was spiritual (in religion),” Ilyin said. “It didn’t matter what you looked like. Modernists didn’t invent perfectionism, they applied the concept to the exterior.”

Ilyin reasons that the modernists sought to abstract objects from their context out of a fear of life and its messiness.

“For people who want their straight lines to be straight, life itself is the problem,” Ilyin writes. “The modern urge is the urge to get away from organic existence in general. It’s a negation of life. It’s a fear of life.”

The Industrial Revolution made it possible to stamp out 100 “perfect” objects. Consumerism has its birth in the same roots as modernism, Ilyin says, where rather than make imperfect dresses from curtains like Scarlett O’Hara, one would go buy a “perfect” one from Target.

But that lacks the “human hooks.” Scarlett’s dress forever conjures up how and why she made a dress from curtains.

“We have been taught to expect perfection,” Ilyin says. “We have learned to turn our backs on people and things that do not achieve our impossible standards for beauty.”

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Modernist times

Islander Natalia Ilyin presents her book, “Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Design in Our Time,” with humorous observations on design and the world it’s molded on, at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at Eagle Harbor Books. For more information, call 842-5332.