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Living: Leonardo Had It Wrong

5 minute read
Allan Ripp

A wry revisionist’s view of eating, sitting and other matters

Trendy types who party in their redwood tubs built for two or four or more may be buoyed by some notion that they are making a splash in 1980s fashion. But Architect and Social Critic Bernard Rudofsky pulls the plug on all that. “Why, in the Middle Ages,” says Rudofsky, “people ate their dinner, conducted business, feuded, made love and even held wedding banquets in their tubs with the guests half-submerged in the water.” Rudofsky also frowns on the chlorination, artificial scents and hygienic filters favored by contemporary communal splashers. Says he: “Americans have a long way to go in overcoming the Puritan disgrace over a simple convivial bath combining hot water, naked bodies and good food.”

The Austrian-born Rudofsky, 75, has always been at his acerbic best when challenging modern ideas of what is civilized in fields such as clothing, street design, architecture, even staircases. A former visiting professor of art at Yale who has organized exhibits for the U.S. Government abroad, he is now scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. There his latest “salute to the unknown art of living” is a wryly provocative exhibition designed to prove that bathing, eating, sleeping, sitting and a few other domestic matters were managed better in older cultures, especially in the Orient.

Rudofsky has titled his show, and also his new Anchor Press/Doubleday book, Now I Lay Me Down to Eat, which turns out to be a reference to the Last Supper. Leonardo, it seems, had it wrong. Instead of a symmetrically arranged sitdown affair, the meal was a recumbent Passover Seder. As practicing Jews, Jesus and his disciples would have dined while stretched out on couches, reclining to the left—the Passover expression of freedom. Moreover, says Rudofsky, they would have done so without the noisy clatter of silverware.

Rudofsky, in fact, builds a whole disquisition on forks into his exhibition. Condemned as “devil’s paws” by 15th century European clergymen, forks are such a fixture in 1980 America that there is even a stop-go one on the market, with flashing red and green lights to indicate when it is time to take another bite. Some Fiji Islanders, according to Rudofsky, eat everyday fare with their fingers and reserve forks for formal dishes roast of human flesh.”

Besides vindicating non-table manners, Rudofsky—assisted by Cooper-Hewitt’s Lucy Fellowes—assembles a widely (some would say wildly) eclectic domestic history. In one display he indicts chairs as uncomfortable and unhealthy, particularly the infant high chair (“a vicious, sado-pedagogic trap, as humiliating to a child as a leash is to a dog”). Elsewhere, he charts the sly history of the swing, which he describes in his book as “a pale copy of a onetime bold device for generating violent motion and emotion” of a sexual nature, mostly in women. He suggests that all forms of “bobbing mania,” from lying in a hammock to tipping a rocking chair, may be “aquiver with racial memories of our arboreal ancestors swaying in a breeze.”

As far afield as his judgments swing, Rudofsky brings home the point that one culture’s utility is another’s futility. Westerners may appreciate why the Japanese “loathe sitting on the ground,” but question their choice of sitting instead on raised wooden platforms without backs, arm rests or cushions. Similarly, it is hard to imagine any pillow-loving American laying his head on any of the wood and stone headrests Rudofsky has collected from the Far East.

Westerners, he asserts, have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from their bodily needs, hiding under Latin euphemisms, turning their toilets into chairs, even throwing up an insecure smokescreen of scatological humor. “As a result,” he says, “constipation is as common as the cold.” Among Crimean Tatars and in other parts of the Soviet Union, toilet training presumably started much earlier, with infant cradles equipped on the bottom with elimination tubes. In most of Asia, children are encouraged to squat naturally, rather than sit. In Japan, if they are wealthy enough, they can grow up to enjoy the “Great Convenience Place,” a facsimile of which Rudofsky has constructed at the Cooper-Hewitt. Surrounded by a bed of smooth black stones and a bamboo fence, it is an elegantly spare room furnished with a calligraphic fan, porcelain slippers and a vase sprouting delicate blossom branches, with only a porcelain-lined hole in the floor to give away its true purpose.

Says Rudofsky: “Nowhere on earth does man go about his most humiliating business with so much dignity.”

Clearly, Rudofsky’s pleas for cultural tolerance imply his own favorites and foes; he is the first to admit a raging impatience with the U.S., where he has lived intermittently since 1935. “The dependence on novelty, machines and status will be the end of this country yet,” he complains. Despite his affinity for Japan, Rudofsky feels that he is still in search of his ideal cultural roost. “I live,” he says somewhat resignedly, “in a country that doesn’t exist . ‘ ‘

— By Allan Ripp

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