The delay that experienced
Italy in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution has left its impact
especially in relation to modernity. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
the process of revival that was struggling to start off, was helped by the
artists who prophesized this.
The first design, which was
manufactured during the period in the interwar, provided a unique idea for
modernity of the surface. It was a decorative, scenographic type, which did not
deal with reform relating to the structure of the domestic life and brought a transformation in its ‘skin’.
Giacomo Balla and Fortunato
Depero interpreted a better future which was unrestrained from humanistic
obligations, in a comedy. It was exactly from this type of approach that
Alessandro Mendini created his projects; from a modernity of the surfaces. This
is a type of modernity that was non-progressive, but neither a conventional one
that changed the meaning of reality without touching its structures.
When Mendini worked as a
consultant for Alessi and Swatch, his work clearly emphasized this concept of
objects that, with the means of colour, together with decoration and new
languages, become a collectors item. Without changing the objects function,
Mendini endorsed a transfiguration in their individuality. The Proust armchair,
thanks to its nineteenth-century upholstery featuring a unique décor, has
become the declaration of a conceivable alternative to structural modernity,
faced with the diffusive usefulness of its media icon. Mendini’s way of working, is situated somewhere in
between where objects are in part real and in part virtual.
In 1970, Milan was still
recovering from the protests of 1968, Mendini decided to take over the
responsibility to run the magazine Casabella which he quickly transformed it
into the core of the certification, development and broadcasting of the
neo-avant-garde of Italian Design.
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| Casabella cover no 367 |
Mendini made his first
demonstrative act with the creation of the cover of the issue no 367 of
Casabella. He managed to do by publishing a picture illustrating a gorilla that
was taken from a postcard from the Museum of Natural History in New York. Mendini
altered the image by adding the words ‘radical design’ to the animal’s chest
and, and depicted the new Italian avant-garde ‘radical’ by Germano Celant, with
the aggressive look of a gorilla. The Gorilla denotes the primitive man who is
in search for new roads and opportunities, opposing the technologically
advanced man who is calmed by development.
Mendini matured his own
vision of the world with a project where he called his objects partaking in
this scheme ‘objects for spiritual use’. His objects were all self-built. These
were intended to oppose the most attractive successive objects. In respect to
Functionalism, these objects, which Mendini created, gambled a claim of sanctity
that surpassed any realistic reference to production and consumption.
In 1977, Casabella was
removed and another magazine was created by Mendini himself and was directed
towards anti-design. The phase of anti-design conflicted with ‘intellectous project’.
The idea behind this era
was that the acceptance of what was real, now hinged towards the renovation of
the object, and this initiated from the observation of everyday reality and its
complication.
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| Proust Chair |
This idea meant to give a
meaning to things already in existence. The Proust armchair, is the result of
the designer’s way of redesigning a chair in Baroque style and transferred it
with a citation from a pointillist painting by Signac. The dotted pattern, that
was done by hand with a small brush, awarded lightness and gave atmosphere to
the object, while obtained a new meaning that was indirect to the reality of
the object.
In 1980, at the First
Architecture Biennial, Mendini together with Alchimia promoted the exhibition
on L’oggetto banale (The banal object). The term ‘banal’ implies a knowledge of
the everyday as a new field of education by testing the rules that governed good
taste and Beautiful Design, capable of emancipating new creative energies and presenting
new meanings to objects that had been stripped of their actual meaning.
After the phase of the
anti-design ceased, the year 1978 marked a new beginning where the object was
now reconstructed through, this time; redesign. This mode of operation involved
in creating new forms, colours and styles, on objects that were already created
beforehand. By doing so, their meaning was reinterpreted in an ironic way.
Hence, an Bruer’s Wassily for
instance was made less dramatic with the addition of free and colourful forms, obviously
in contrast with the author’s intentions. Furthermore, regarding Mendini’s
redesign of 1940s sideboards, the goal was the liberation of anonymous objects,
e made more beautiful by an widespread decoration in Futurist style on the
surface, heeding back to the patterns in Kandinsky’s painting and using collage
to add new formal elements in continuity with the surface.
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| Kandissa sofa |
The idea behind the particular redesign of the Kandissa family means producing a family of objects-, including a sofa, a
mirror and a wall hanging, all entailing the same decorative pattern in common.
These were created out of Kandinsky’s painting, to whom the whole series is
dedicated.
Mendini’s skill lies in his
capability to interpret some of the most important twentieth century avant-garde
movements such as Cubism, Futurism and Abstractionism. These are used as a collection
of signs that can be combined and rewritten. In the case of the Kandissi sofa
and the Kandissa mirror, the décor is independent and vital, so that it changes
the very shape of the objects, projecting them into different directions in
space.
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