Gulliver, 2012
Augusta, 2012
The White Line in the Desert: Exodus, Design and Post-Work Imaginaries Nik Papas Perhaps the most striking account of Autonomia is Nanni Balestrini’s The Unseen, an unpunctuated work of fiction that follows the trajectory of Italian extra-parliamentary politics through the eyes of a single, nameless protagonist. Of particular resonance is the social movement it describes: a disparate amalgam of self-organised students, the unemployed, intellectuals, feminists, the autonomous working class and counter-cultural youth that took to the streets, identifying the city as a site of antagonism and direct appropriation. Their actions included the occupation of universities and schools, the setting up of free radio stations and the practicing of diffuse forms of illegality such as the looting of supermarkets, squatting in buildings and the autoriduzione (the self-reduction or non-payment) of public transport fares, concert tickets and power bills. Above all, it is the appropriation of free time as collective practice that best expressed the immediate desire of the movement, a quality that is exemplified by the dialogic relationship the novel frames with the incarceration of the main character as a political prisoner. Balestrini dramatises this relation in the final chapter with an episode depicting a collective protest that has lost all bonds of solidarity: I broke the mirror with the leg of the stool I threw all the pieces down the toilet I flushed it five six seven times I kept on flushing it staring at the black hole of the toilet that black circle where the water rushed down I put my hand inside it then deeper down to feel the bottom I put my head in it I pushed my head down but it wouldn’t fit it wouldn’t go through the hole to come out somewhere else to see out to see where I am where you are when we were a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand it can’t be true that there’s no one outside it can’t be true that I feel nothing any more that I no longer hear any voice any sound any breath it can’t be true that outside there is only a vast cemetery where you are can you hear me I can’t hear I can’t hear you I can’t hear anything any more Balestrini’s novel follows the course of the movement at its height, when street demonstrations
and clashes with the police occurred almost daily in some Italian cities. Plotting their own actions, a small cadre of the hard-line communist terrorist organisation Brigate Rosse (the Red Brigades) led by Mario Moretti abducted Aldo Moro, former prime minister and then president of the Democrazia Christiana (the Christian Democratic Party). Bitterly critical of Autonomia, and loyal to the historical Marxist-Leninist notion of revolution as putsch—as ‘seizure of power’—the terrorist organisation sought to exchange Moro’s life for the release of imprisoned members. On May 9, 1978, after nearly two months of negotiation during which the government refused to cooperate, the Brigate Rosse carried out their threat to execute Aldo Moro. An unprecedented wave of political repression followed—a state of exception inaugurated by both the resurrection of the national criminal code, first drawn up under Fascism, and the Democrazia Christiana’s Legge Reale, which restricted bail rights and increased the powers of the police force, to the extent that police were prevented from being prosecuted for acts committed while on duty. The Partito Communista Italiano (the Italian Communist Party) supported the use of these laws against the social movements, which it referred to as untorelli (plague carriers). Against this turbulent backdrop, which saw mass arrests and the long-term imprisonment of twelve thousand without trial, Balestrini’s narrative recalls Autonomia’s attack on politics and its strategy of social democratic ‘normalisation’. Specifically, the movement of ‘young proletarians’ came together around the theme of work-refusal, rejecting the moralisation according to which work, or waged labor, was cast as an inherently necessary social and political good. This refusal of work—the declared estrangement with regard to their role as workers—marks a dramatic shift in the expectations of extra-parliamentary politics and led to the dissolution of Marxist-Leninist factions that clung to the social movements. In short, women, students and the unemployed took to the stage. The movement that emerged departed from the ideology of self-sacrifice promoted by ‘real socialism’, and with this exodus came to insist on the need for the interper-
sonal and the everyday. What is more, Autonomia’s disavowal of political asceticism saw the promotion of irony, play and theatricality as part of a practice of insubordination. Mockery and wit were employed liberally, providing a means of expression and a source of entertainment against the ideology of crisis and austerity advanced by both governments and political parties. This was particularly the case with the Indiani Metropolitani (the Metropolitan Indians), so dubbed by the media and by far the most visible counter-cultural force of the social movements. Wearing face paint and claiming to revive pagan traditions, the Indiani Metropolitani not only considered unemployment to be an opportunity for self-development (rather than a social problem that needed to be ‘cured’), but also sought to undermine language’s socially controlling norms through the use of nonsense, word play and puns. From lining up at a police helicopter flying overhead to form letters spelling the word SCEMO! (STUPID), or to taking up the eclectic poetics of détournement in its leaflets, slogans and chants, the Indiani Metropolitani emphasised the ridiculous, often inappropriate consequences of protest so as to undermine and contradict the normative order of political discourse. The refusal to speak a conventional political language, to adopt its models and its codes, provides Damiano Bertoli with a platform for the distribution of narratives and affects that can enter into the very composition of the image. The term ‘image’ is constituted not simply as an optical faculty, as something perceived, but as the locus of reception itself. Which means that, for Bertoli, the image does not provide a replica of reality; instead, it takes into account the specific configurations of relations enabled by a continually shifting assemblage of conditions—between past and present, as well as between artist, spectator and history. Hence, when Bertoli takes Italian extra-parliamentary politics as a site of encounter, and as event, it is because it constitutes a kind of laboratory that generates ‘meaning’ not as a fixed quantity, but precisely as an image, as an instant of occurring transformation. It is precisely within this framework that Associates, Bertoli’s suite of pencil drawings, emphasise the aesthetic of poster design. In particular, the drawings address the interrelation between the graphic and the visual—between the potential located in the message that a poster may or may not carry, and the unequivocal challenge issued by the Milan-based design collective Memphis in opposition to the modern fixation on function over decoration. Seeking to simplify or eliminate ornamentation, functionalist principles
dictated that the design of objects should reflect a balanced harmony between form, structure and purpose. In contrast, Memphis’ unorthodox use of colour and ornament was a wilful assault on notions of good taste and an anathema to the functionalist’s mantra of ‘truth to materials’. Yet what mattered to these designers was not the problem of form and function, but of unsettling fixed solutions by suggesting temporary possibilities, contradictory and chance encounters, ‘momentary and provisional figures that can be envisaged during the great, mad, supersenseless journey of History’. Key to this stance was the collective’s adoption of pop culture—an acknowledgement that the frenzy of advertising and uncontrolled consumerism was not the site of mastery, adequation, and intelligibility, but of an enduring opacity in which the hallucination of pleasure reigns. There is of course much more to understanding Memphis’ provenance, especially the group’s emergence from Italy’s politically motivated Disegno Radicale (Radical Design) movement that, among others, included the members of Archizoom, Superstudio and Gruppo 9999. But for the most part, the Memphis design collective saw its unconventional use of colours, shapes and materials leading to new semantic and metaphoric possibilities. This was reflected in the need for design to add meaning to contemporary culture, to unfold other modes of communication that could spread like contagions—a metaphor it linked with cells, singularities and revolt against efforts to produce a sterile world. Bertoli’s drawings are compositions that establish this exchange by eradicating the line of delineation that separates the arrangement of words, torn from headlines and political posters, and the taste for patterned decoration and colour born by Memphis design. By collapsing this arrangement into a synchronous visual field, a common physical surface is established where everything is an immediate inscription. Which is to say, for Bertoli, what is essential is that the exchange between alphabetic signs and the flat patterns restores a point of equivalence between the activist and the artist. And though this relation is disruptive, maybe even irreparable, the drawings seek to activate this creative dissonance by allowing us to see, among all else, the bold intention to fuse certain experiments and make space for new relationships and arguments that not only mock natural necessity, but that serve to symbolise new forms of life.
Mario, 2012
Franz, 2012
Renato, 2013
Claudio, 2013
I THINK I’M TURNING MILANESE MATTHEW BENJAMIN I read in an interview with Ettore Sottsass that he thought more than one or two pieces of Memphis in a room was gauche. I can’t find where the quote is from. But if he never said it, he should have. I remember thinking that it was a radical admission, and then realizing a split second later that any uninitiated person with the benefit of sight was likely to make the same judgement. They are exemplary objects, parties of one. If you have been to art school you know how being in a room full of individuals feels. Sottsass said, ‘generally speaking, I imagine them in an empty room, not with other Baroque or Rococo or Art Deco furniture.’ Memphis is simultaneously more and less than a brand, in the realm of the stateless, the awkward nationality of a borderless territory. Sottsass said in a late interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘I come from the mountains. I was born in Innsbruck, Austria. I spent my childhood surrounded by woods, mountains, high crags... If a thing is heavy, I feel laid back about it. If it’s flying through the air, then I start to worry. So there are these different strands in our visions of the planet, of the cosmos, and the feeling we have, right from the start, about these things.’ The heft of Memphis was perhaps the looming trait that made it instantly recognizable, before the jarring colours and materials; ballast tethered to the earth, holding down everything in it’s orbit. A member of the group and Sottsass’ wife, Barbara Radice, wrote, ‘Generally speaking the Memphis idea descends from Sottsass.’ While Sottsass was a de facto leader, Memphis was more of a beast with no head. Although Sottsass’ style was a catalyst, the designers who constituted the firm were a gestalt. Their products were marked with the same metal plaque, heralding the boxy Memphis insignia, etched with an individual designer or designer’s names, such a sense of occasion! But the works revealed no traces of the hands that made them. Each tight seam, each sharp juncture of blocky materials, each smooth surface was extruded from the same Memphis machine. A schema for an infinitely reproducible vista. This pendulous weight that designs were imbued with remained the constant, every bambino bearing the same husky phenotype.
A product is something you buy, but a Memphis object, an ashtray or a sideboard, has the import of a building. Their presence is a diminution and extension of the city that waits above of the hearth, after all, aren’t living rooms cities too? Propositional structures made of geometric shapes converge in stacks, columns and vertiginous piles into arrangements which project a grid, piercing the walls and shooting across the landscape, like Cartesian beacons on the famous Superstudio plane. They say ‘Don’t buy; Build!’ Laminate, marble, wood veneer, metal, lacquer, glass, repeat printed textiles - luxurious and banal materials side by side - were allegories for the contingent, built world that Memphis’ vision was steeped in, a more-terrestrial-than-not ode to the artificial and its transformative power. For one of the best known design firms of the 20th Century the group’s work is remarkably overlooked. Memphis sits awkwardly in a collection, heavily set down, whether there are a few pieces or it has been hoarded floor to ceiling. It is, after all, a lot of look. A single piece can be a nice curiosity, a couple of pieces have a cordial cartooniness about them, but lots and lots together look like F.A.O Schwarz. They are difficult commodities that parody value and the upsmanship of pecuniary culture, more funny and emotional than slick and prestigious. Many of the pieces are so aggressively ugly and their visual weight so outlandish, they would require some guts to live with. Even with the less ugly ones, not everyone want’s an anthropomorphic lamp that gooily peers at them as they step in the door after work every night. On the other hand in the public sphere, Memphis never looks more dead and buried than in a museum. Like Woody Allen said his ex-wife used to do to him, Memphis is best placed under a pedestal. In Barbara Radice’s essay the Memphis Idea, she states, ‘Memphis is anti-ideological because it seeks possibilities instead of solutions.’ To have created a work outside the determinations of function, that reveled in the formal potentialities of design was a radical shift in the field, which had been stifled by the dogmas of preceding decades. As Andrea Branzi wrote in The Hot House, there was a ‘suspicion that modern architecture, in the form it had gradually assumed since the beginning
of the century, would remain unchanged in its most important aspect for some centuries to come.’ The need to reassert people into the space that ideology had taken for itself was the group’s cri de coeur. Radice writes, ‘Memphis does not propose utopias. It does not set itself up, as the radical avant-gardes did, in a critical position towards design itself; it does not practice design as an idealogical metaphor to say or demonstrate something else.’ When asked in an interview this year why she thought Memphis was “anti-ideological,” Radice responded ‘Practice is thought in action.’ The group’s design was anchored in the experience of life, of everyday affects and the unfettered intensity of materials. Emphasizing the material bent of their work through weight was also the practical visual means for demonstrating that the ‘object [is] a sign through which a message is conveyed.’ This is, in effect, the definitive break with the old guard of 20th century design, which attempted to implement a social posture through its program and the break is contained within every example of Memphis’ output. In Giorgio Agamben’s essay Falling Beauty, on the sculptural work of Cy Twombly, he wonders about the idea of a caesura in the artist’s work, that perhaps illustrates the same point. Agamben describes it as: ‘The caesura that exposes the inactive core of every work, the point at which the will of art supporting it seems almost blinded and suspended. For this reason, it is as though the movement of falling beauty has no weight, it is not the work of gravity but a sort of inverse flight, like the one Simone Weil had to think of when she asked, “Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise. What wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?”’ Introducing a ‘caesura,’ as Agamben put it, into a piece of decorative art served as more than a retaliation against particular doctrines of design. Memphis made works out of a heavy yet weightless pure surface, which eschewed the demagogic ‘wings‘ of a prescriptive design that raised objects up off the ground. Their solid centered work would neither rise nor fall. Memphis is a reminder that an object is arranged by the prevailing wind that blows things around according to their weight.
Mara, 2013
Pippo, 2014
Damiano Bertoli Associates May 7 – June 7, 2014 Neon Parc 1/53 Bourke Street Melbourne 3000 neonparc.com.au All works pencil on paper Texts by Nik Papas, Matthew Benjamin Designed by Warren Taylor Photography by Tony Marin, Memi Bertoli Published by Neon Parc ISBN 978-0-9923491-2-7 Printed by The Printing Hub Melbourne, Australia Edition of 500 Thanks to Geoff Newton, Greg Wood, Nik Papas, Matthew Benjamin, Tony Marin, Angela Bertoli, Memi Bertoli, Warren Taylor, Hayden Daniel and Fiona Abicare.