Memphis Design Group 1981-1987
Related: 1980s - Ettore Sottsass - postmodernism - Italian design
"The purpose of Memphis is to exist". -- Ettore Sottsass, 1982
"[Memphis is] the new International Style". -- Ettore Sottsass
Carlton Cabinet (1981) - Ettore Sottsass
Invitation, first memphis presentation, Sept 18 1981, graphics by Luciano Paccagnella.
image sourced via http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/memphis.html [Feb 2005]
Introduction
Ettore Sottsass conceived Memphis, one of the most fascinating recent phenomena in the field of furniture and object design. Memphis explored a visual language outside of the limiting canons of "good taste," blurring the boundaries between "high" or popular culture and mass-produced "ordinary" consumer goods.The Memphis Group
The Memphis Group was an influential Italian design and architecture movement of the 1980s.
The group was founded by Ettore Sottsass on 11 December 1980, and resolved to meet again with their designs in February 1981. The result was a highly-acclaimed debut at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair. The group disbanded in 1988.
Named after the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the movement was a reaction against the post-Bauhaus "black box" designs of the 1970s and had a sense of humour that was lacking at the time in design. Prepared to mix 20th century styles, colours and materials, it positioned itself as a fashion rather than an academic movement, and hoped to erase the International Style where post-modernism had failed.
While designers such as Philippe Starck were influenced by Memphis, the continuing rise of minimalism in the 1990s saw a return to seriousness. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group [Jun 2005]
Ettore Sottsass [...]
"What, after all this, is the purpose of Memphis?"."The purpose of Memphis is to exist".
Ettore Sottsass, 1982
Inspirations
[The Memphis Group] drew inspiration from such movements as Art Deco and Pop Art, styles such as 1950's kitsch and futuristic themes. Their concepts were in stark contrast to so called 'good design'.Postmodernism
[The late Seventies] was the era of the shiny, black glass office block - which, in the hands of most architects, was ineffably banal. In the US, it was also the heyday of postmodern architecture and design. Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown were strutting the architectural catwalk with slapstick-style buildings that were a big and blowsy two-fingers up to the stern values of the Bauhaus and what Johnson had labelled the International Style when he was modernism's most ardent American advocate in the early 1930s. -- Jonathan Glancey
Sottsass called Memphis design the New International Style and plunged the sophisticated and influential Milan design world into a labyrinth of visual irony, puns and provocations. In effect, he was injecting a dose of postmodernism into mainstream European design. This was design as cultural criticism, rather than as a functional tool or statement of modernist intent. -- Jonathan Glancey
[...] Memphis, though, is also a reminder that all design movements need to be questioned to keep them at the edge. The great design project of the 20th century, modernism, was clearly in need of a kick by the 1980s. This is what American postmodernism also tried to do, but it had all the cultural sophistication of Beavis and Butthead. Memphis was at least a clever clown. -- Jonathan Glancey [...]
A Profile
[...]In 1981 at the Milan Furniture Fair, the world of design was shattered, visitors discovered after years of rationalism a collection of strange furniture with flashily coloured plastic laminates emblazoned with kitsch geometric and leopard-skin patterns usually found in 1950s comic books or cheap cafés.
Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson and others who were students at that time, were deeply influenced by these new visions on design. Jasper Morrison remembers breaking into "a kind of cold sweat" and a "feeling of shock and panic" when he stumbled into the opening of a design exhibition at the Arc ’74 showroom in Milan on 18 September 1981. "It was the weirdest feeling," he recalled years later, "you were in one sense repulsed by the objects, or I was, but also immediately freed by the sort of total rule-breaking."
The Memphis collection (named after a Bob Dylan song) was the product of the work of a score of designers, manufactured by a host of suppliers with a group of supporters that included two craft makers – Renzo Brugola and Fausto Celati, Ernesto Gismondi, Artemide’s owner as well as Mario and Brunella Godani proprietors of the Arc ‘74 show-room, the venue chosen for the Memphis event, and of course, Ettore Sottsass and some of his friends : Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi, Matteo Thun , Marco Zanini, Andrea Branzi, George Sowden, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Peter Shire, Hans Hollein, Masanori Umeda. The US architect, Michael Graves, also joined the collective: as did Javier Mariscal from Spain, Arata Isozaki and Shiro Kurumata from Japan.
Sottsass and his collaborators were thinking about the creation of a New International Style. A style that would poke fun at the defensive stockades, the barriers and enclosures that littered the landscape of design in Italy that confined the universe of objects to the geometry of good design. This sort of ‘prohibition’ was to be replaced by a sensibility that was half Art Déco half Pop, appealing part to an élite taste, and part populist, half serious half tongue in cheek. It was based on an acceptance that the imagery of even the highest culture is sooner or later consumed by the everyday world.
At the same time Sottsass, like Mendini with his work at Alchimia, also grasped that if high culture could become populist, then the opposite was also true. What has come down can also go up again, in design too. Hence, the Memphis objects clearly manifest the concept of retrieving the most ordinary everyday images, forms and colours and transforming their meaning by raising them to the status of élite objects.
Little about Memphis was truly innovative. Most of its concepts had been trail-blazed by Alchimia , the radical late 1970s Italian design group to which Sottsass and De Lucchi had belonged. Perfectly in tune with an era when pop culture was dominated by the post-punk flamboyance of early 1980s new romanticism, Memphis was also a colourful, clearly defined manifestation of the often obscure post-modernist theories then so influential in art and architecture.
Memphis was splashed across magazines worldwide. There were exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and back in Milan. But Sottsass became increasingly disillusioned with Memphis and the media circus around it, in 1985 he announced that he was leaving the collective.
The talents that formed the group or rather collaborated with it, even if only once, were exceptional. They have continued to produce objects and architecture, that is usually of consistently high and sometimes extremely innovatory, quality.
Memphis represented a point of no return for Italian design, a declaration of war on the past – and, equally, of surrender to the future – by a generation of designers that is today having difficulty rediscovering the anti-classical sparkle. In fact we have started the 21th century without many new ideas having emerged in the field of design to match the impact of that first Memphis collection unveiled 20 years ago.
from http://www.dside.yucom.be/pag50_1030.htm
Links
Books
- Memphis - Barbara Radice [Amazon US]
Ettore Sottsass conceived Memphis, one of the most fascinating recent phenomena in the field of furniture and object design.
In 1981 at the Milan Furniture Fair, the world of design was shattered, visitors discovered after years of rationalism a collection of strange furniture with flashily coloured plastic laminates emblazoned with kitsch geometric and leopard-skin patterns usually found in 1950s comic books or cheap cafés. - Memphis: Objects, Furniture and Patterns () - Richard Horn [Amazon.com]
Movies
[the kidnapped wife has a Memphis Design Group interior. This is the most Memphis furniture you are going to see on a strip of celluloid.]
Design [...]