Is Martha Stewart Editing Your Life?

by

Nina Damavandi

 

In June 2003, Beatriz Colomina and Rem Koolhaas interviewed lifestyle diva, Martha Stewart in Wired. Their first question to Stewart was the most insightful: “Do you think your audience views you, to some extent, as a virtual antidote to their isolation?” In other words, are Martha Stewart’s domestic interventions staged to combat disassociated, isolated and disconnected experiences of space?     

          It’s a thought-provoking question and one that resonates with our immediate environment. The distance between things, the spaced-out aspects of suburban experience affects more than just the outskirts of the city. I am thinking specifically about downtown Los Angeles and it’s seemingly eternal status as “up and coming.” I am also thinking about my house and the white kitchen floor tiles that are currently covered in dirt trails left by my shoes. What creates distance between ourselves and the spaces we occupy?

          Gestures restore what otherwise has fallen into extreme disuse, utter alienation. They traverse physical space and overcome this divide to make occupation possible. The questions then are not why should my house look like one of Stewart’s, nor what kind of dominant model of interior design does she provide? As Koolhaas and Colomina have demonstrated, Stewart locates the space, the place where a kind of escapist “virtual antidote” to isolation can occur. She isn’t an antidote. Stewart is another shade of wall paint. Her shade is pastel to Koolhaas’ orange. Is either offering anything different? Isn’t her manipulation of a site like any other self-designed intervention?

          The full title of the interview is “Martha Stewart is Editing Your Life (That Includes You, Bill Gates).” But aren’t I editing my own life? The activity of editing is one I want to embrace: “…in that edited space can be life.” I want to live in one of Stewart’s home sets and make it my own through editing as an active process of inhabiting. Painting, finishing, arranging flowers or furniture; selecting, drawing, embellishing, decorating, and cleaning are all productive edits that I use to infiltrate my environment. Stewart edits. The magazines, books, TV shows, products, websites, and newspapers she produces are as much a form of edited interventions as are her home sets. She pulls all these disparate elements into a kind of unison, selecting and arranging her own image -- a Martha Stewart collage. Only the seams are more discrete, more invisible. Digital or wireless collage makes the seams or spaces between things even harder to locate.

          Stewart describes how Bill Gates’ home is full of hidden tubing, extra hidden space for electrical wiring that wireless technology has rendered obsolete. Are these tubes that invisibly crisscross Gates’ home the same under-utilized space that ‘spaces out’ our suburbs? Is it also the same space that is narrowed to the point of invisibility in digital collage? Are they spaces whose invisibility denies habitation?

          I cannot figure out what unedited spaces Colomina and Koolhaas are arguing for. The only unedited spaces are those that are overlooked or under-utilized; spaces that have become routine and, in their invisibility, alienate and disassociate us from the world. Under-utilization is under-occupation. Stewart has thoroughly saturated her home. She leaves no space (in her homes, magazines or television shows) under-utilized. Every inch, every square foot is marked and implicated in some way, making the magazine as well as the home a project in interior design. Home is made coextensive with life and living. Conflating life and style, permeating life with style is exactly the kind of personalization that puts individuals in their own spaces. It makes such a relationship intimate and it is through intimacy of occupation that individuals practice the most involved and significant kind of intervention.