Vanni Pasca

The Otto Luogo dell’Arte project which Olivia Toscani Rucellai is developing in Florence, with Mauro Lovi as art director, is very interesting. It began with the show Radura (The Clearing), dedicated to Lovi’s work, and continued with Megalopoli, dedicated to the atelier/gallery Agneta Holst curated in Milan until the late 1970s (Olivia is Agneta’s daughter). Otto now proposes a new initiative, Oh! Nirica (a title which speaks for itself: the Dada-esque break refers to Surrealist tradition), in which forty artists and designers have been asked to present “objects” made in collaboration with artisans. Among them, Lovi presents his own Letto Abbarca (Boat-Shaped Bed). All aboard?
I first met Lovi in the mid-1980s. For a show called “La Mossa del Cavallo” (The Horse’s Move), which Isa Vercelloni and I curated, we chose a chair of his, a small architectural piece whose legs rhyme with the arched seat and whose back ends in a scrolled ornament; a cross between architecture and decoration, one might say, but on the seat, a small wooden pyramid asserts itself, “defunctionalizing” the chair, making its use unwise, displacing it as “something different from itself”, or at least from its otherwise immediate recognizability as a chair. I recount this here because it was a significant object from that phase. I’d like to underline that the progression of Otto’s three shows (and this latest, which will travel to Berlin) outlines a route towards a redefinition of the research which exploded in Italy during the 60s and 70s (reprising Futurism and Pop Art), with experiences like those of Archizoom and Superstudio in Florence, and with Alchimia and Memphis in Milan. But not only in Italy. Suffice it to remember Hans Hollein’s first phase, or Walter Pichler; or the English firms Smithson, Independent Group and Archigram; and, starting in the 80s, the spread through Europe of groups such as Ron Arad’s One-Off in London and Antologie Quartett with Borek Sipek in Germany.
There developed then, in different ways, a research on objects: in terms of environment, relationships and psychology, with a progressive formulation of a theory of romantic design based on the new relationship between design, art and self-production, in a playful and eclectic style, the pleasure of color-play and the magical-ritual presence of objects towards a “total work of art” in which life and art interweave. But these themes have already been dealt with in the previous catalogues for Otto shows, in essays written by Isa Vercelloni, Philippe Daverio, Beppe Finessi and others. Essays which, with those to come, may constitute a collection of texts which could be used to open a debate prompted by an inititiative which, Olivia Toscani Rucellai writes, “was first inspired by Megalopoli, and would like to prove the validity of that method of working by adapting it to our times.”
As Arthur C. Danto showed ( in After the end of art, 1997), in the second half of the 20th century, the predominance of abstract art, which seemed to have obscured other directions of research, was lessened; other artistic trends, including Surrealism, and figurative work in general, came to the fore. This happened with design as well. In a showon Italian design which I curated in Brasilia in 2009, in the new museum designed by Niemeyer, I began the exhibition with two objects, which appeared between 1977 and 1979: Atollo, (Atoll) a lamp by Vico Magistretti, of rigorous rationalist geometry; La poltrona di Proust (Proust’s Armchair), by Alessandro Mendini, whose exuberant forms were sprayed with color à la Seurat.  Strongly dissonant pieces: one belongs to the Rationalist School; the other develops with Radical Design and opens the way to Post-Modernism. A clarification is needed: when one speaks of Radical Design, and then Post-Modernism, one tends to define these trends as design that re-opened relationships with art, but this isn’t exactly true. Design has always had a relationship with art; even when, as with the Russian Productivist designers of the 1920s, the relationship was denied.
In the last century, in design on the whole, two tendencies became apparent: one which based its linguistic research on De Stijl’s geometric abstraction, later changed by the Bauhuas; on the other side, starting mostly in the second half of the 1950s the resumption of relationships with figurative art in all its expressions, from Futurism to Surrealism to Pop Art. Perhaps this is where the situation characterized by the third phase of the Industrial Revolution opens: the phase of globalization and the acceleration of the Technological Revolution. With the re-emergence of all the trends which characterized the 20th century, the age of trends extinguishes itself, especially the avant-gardes. Artistic research becomes complex, barely decipherable. “Where do we have to go to comprehend the direction in which we’re orienting ourselves, to understand the trajectories of contemporary poetics, to outline the aesthetic landscapes of the future?”
Vincenzo Trione asks this question in an article he wrote for the Corriere della Sera, 29/10/2010. He also answers it: one has to go to Documenta Kassel. What would a design critic say? That one has to attend the Salone del mobile in Milan, or go to Miami, Basel, Berlin, Shangai and who knows where else? In truth, as far as design’s concerned, we’re faced with a new reality, based on the fact that a new research on objects is emerging today, rich with artistic intentions, but unburdened by obligatory references to the poetics of past avant-gardes, be they abstract or figurative, which characterized most of the 20th century. These researches are free of precise prototypes, as if the age of languages were over, those languages which identified themselves with so many “ism’s” of 20th century avant-gardes. In the period of increasingly pervasive generalized media information, the problem of art and the relationship between art and design is posed afresh.
But let’s continue on the basis of the direction Toscani Rucellai poses with the problem of “our times”. In our phase, which is still to be defined, a series of processes reaveal an ample modification of design’s role, and its importance. First of all, its geographical extension. Until a few years ago, one considered design to be the property of a few industrialized countries: Italy, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, USA, Japan and not many others. Today, one invests in design in most of the world’s countries. Thus, the number of designers grows; also the number of students and docents of design; in Italy as well, where, since the first half of the 1990s, many University design schools were founded, in addition to those public and private schools not attached to Universities. The profession, once considered élite, became widespread on all territories. Certainly this happened because design is considered a plus not only for corporations, but for country-systems; in the sharpening of international competition induced by globalization; but the sharp rise in the number of young designers and design students indicates an increased interest in design as a new mode of contemporary creative expression.
In this difficult present, it’s not easy to focus on today’s design panorama (still more difficult to decipher, in that it’s affected by the current crisis). Trione’s words offer some consolation, evoked as they are by the art panorama’s complexity; but, following his advice and going to Documenta Kassel several years ago, we would have found a Marc Newson armchair, which first appeared in Larry Gagosian’s gallery in New York, representative of one of those phenomena being heavily developed today, known as Design art. Interest in antique dealers and auction houses has increased, in recent years, from Christie’s to Sotheby’s, for design objects from the first half of the 20th century. Consequently, antique dealers and art dealers saw the chance to create a new market for objects from the 80s, spawning a trend for designing single pieces and limited designer editions. Even more recently, decorative objects are commissioned ad hoc, not only by galleries and not only from designers. For example, at the 2006 Salone del Mobile in Milan, Dolce & Gabbana presented sculpture-armchairs they commissioned from Ron Arad.
But, conversely, the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, in London, commissioned benches and marble tables to be made not by some designer, but by Marc Quinn, one of the more interesting exponents of Young British Art. In the meantime, new galleries and salons have been born (in Berlin, for example), dedicated to the sale of designer limited editions. And Gagosian opened a show in his New York gallery of unique pieces directly commissioned from Marc Newson. His aluminum dormeuse, Lockheed  Lounge, has become an icon; also because it was featured in a Madonna video (Rain, 1998): in this case, it’s obvious, mediatic circularity becomes exemplary. The argument on the artist/designer/decorative object/art market relationship is complicated and its real meaning still needs to be analyzed.
But there’s a second aspect that needs to be brought into focus. The idea which characterized the ideologies of the first half of the 20th century, which posits that the new radically replaced the old, has disappeared. It’s clear that contemporary complexity is certainly made up of the emergence of the new, but also by the permanence, in new forms, of that which seemed doomed to disappearance, such as artisanry. In 2010, even such an institution as the International Committee of Design History and Design Studies (ICDHS) organized a conference on the theme: “Design and Craft: A History of Convergences and Divergences”. And it’s obvious that theis renewed attention influences the development of New World History, which, looking around the world, re-reads history by avoiding eurocentrism.
As we can see, the theme, or at least one of the main themes, is the new opening of relationships between art, design, artisanry. An opening favored not only by new artistic researches but also by the vast presence of young designers who, acting upon the territories, often find in artisans, with their high-quality productive capacity, an adequate reference with which to develop their own research. But we mustn’t forget another theme, often underlined by Ugo La Pietra, who’s always worked with artisans: since the ‘700s-‘800s, what’s changed is the artisan’s condition. He’s retained his productive know-how, but has seen his design tradition extinguished; that which was traditionally passed down in the workshop. A new relationship between artist-designers and artisans is probably capable of giving meaning to the “new design”, rooting it in the territories and reconferring perspective. In a pluralism of researches, it is indeed pluralism not relativism, as Richard Shusterman writes, in Estetica Pragmatista, Palermo 2010 .
In this scenario, it might be useful to read the reflections of Martin Kemp, the great Oxford art historian, who, in his beautiful book, “Image and Truth” (Immagine e verità, Milano 1999), wrote, “I believe that art, in its usual manifestations, will become part of a much wider context, in which it will be almost a subcategory belonging to a an enormous variety of products created to supply visual stimuli”. It will be interesting to follow the progression of the investigation of new design phenomena, the evolution of this process, which is of great interest and asks many questions. It is in this sense that I referred above to the task which OTTO Gallery is taking on: to become a pole for the research of new processes, with exhibitions, texts, debates; and the relationship which might eventually be established between designers, students, schools and local artisanry. An extremely important relationship that may well prevent the extinction (through banal repetitiveness) of the great Italian and Tuscan Artisanal tradition.

Vanni Pasca