Sameness be Damned

Even in a chock-a-block 20th century calendar, the year 1980 seems particularly busy and significant. It marked the fall of disco and the early stirrings of New Wave, the assassination of John Lennon and the launch of the Rubix Cube. In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, Reagan beat the political snot out of Jimmy Carter, and the world got its first 24-hour news channel, CNN. That year, the World Health Organisation announced arguably the single greatest humanitarian achievement of the century – the eradication of smallpox. 

And on December 11, 1980, in the living room of his home in Milan, painter, designer and moustachioed ex-soldier Ettore Sottsass gathered a bunch of colleagues to discuss (what he saw as) the problem with ‘modern’ design. 

In the room were some of the most talented creatives in Europe: radical French architect Martine Bedin, visionary Italian designer Aldo Cibic, award-winning industrial designer Michele De Lucchi – who these days spends his seventies carving wooden houses, armed with nothing but a chainsaw – plus Nathalie Du Pasquier, Matteo Thun and George J. Sowden. It was one of those rooms, and those moments, in which you would have paid good liras to be a fly on the wall. 

While the designers tossed ideas around, and the sun sank behind the Alps, Bob Dylan’s 1966 track Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again played over and over in the background. 

This little gathering marked the spiritual beginning of one of the most controversial artistic collectives of the last 50 years: Memphis Milano, also known as the Memphis Group. 

There’s always been some debate over the origins of the name. Some say ‘Memphis’ was lifted from the Dylan track, stuck on a loop during that first meeting. Others say it was chosen because it’s the city where Elvis Presley lived (not to be confused with the capital of Ancient Egypt). Whatever the case, pretty soon some other big names had joined the fray, including Andrea Branzi, Shiro Kuramata, Marco Zanini, Peter Shire, Gerard Taylor, Masanori Umeda, Arquitectonica, Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki and Javier Mariscal. 

About nine months later, on 19 September 1981, at the gallery Arc '74, during Milan’s Salone del Mobile, Memphis came out to the world. It was their first exhibition: 55 pieces of furniture and industrial design that smashed everyone’s pre-conceived notions of good design, or even good taste. A few months after that, over 400 journals were practically buzzing with Memphis articles, dissections, critiques and martini-fuelled diatribes. 

Modernism was officially dead in the water. Postmodernism, whatever that was, had arrived. 

Throw a blanket over some of the most recognisable style cues of the 1980s – loud, obnoxious colour blocking, Pop Art, the liberal use of hot pink and electric blue, a weird fascination with techno-futurism, abstract geometric forms, maximalism in all things, especially perms – and you can trace them all back to Memphis Milano. Well, except the hair thing. The collective was a very deliberate attack on the form-follows-function austerity of mid-century modernism, where a thing’s inherent goodness correlated directly to stuff like ease-of-use, convenience and straight-lined simplicity. Yawn.  

"When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism,”

Sottsass said. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting." 

Sottsass and his crew wanted to get away from the rationalism and monotony of the 1970s. Rationalism might make a decent chair, but it didn’t stir the blood or charge the soul. Life had to be about something more than just ‘functioning’, right, otherwise why get out of bed in the morning? We may as well live in sterile white cubes, sucking down flavourless nutrient smoothies. "Design is a way of discussing life,” Sottsass would say. “It’s a way of discussing society, politics, eroticism, food, and even design itself."

That last bit is important, because if nothing else, Memphis Milano generated a lot of chatter in the art world about what design meant, what its limits were, and who got to make those sorts of calls. Memphis didn’t exist in a cultural vacuum, of course. Sottsass himself had been pushing boundaries since the 1950s, and 1980s postmodernism has the fingerprints of Art Deco and 1960s Radical Design all over it. But still, there was a difference. 

Radical Design was (largely) a conceptual and countercultural movement, often focussing on utopian ideals rather than functional or commercial objects, i.e. stuff you could run out and buy. Its heroes were experimental groups like Archigram, Superstudio and Gruppo Strum. 

Memphis Postmodernism had some of that same fuck-you spirit, sure, but it also added to the mix: playfulness, whimsy, irony and the exuberance of everyday things. It was antagonistic, but also straight-up fun. There was a kind of childlike glee with which Memphis designers tore up the rulebook (then turned the scraps into colourful, avant-garde lampshades). 

Most importantly, the collective somehow balanced all that high-brow, art-wank theory with commercial success. The Memphis crew weren’t just artists, they were designers. They made things you could use. And pretty soon their furniture, textiles, chairs and bookshelves started appearing in affluent houses all over the world. David Bowie became an avid collector. So did Karl Lagerfeld and Mick Jagger. The style tended to jive with anarchists and revolutionaries, and confuse – or mightily piss off – everyone else. 

Although it only existed for seven years – Sottsass left in 1985 to try his hand at architecture, and the group technically disbanded in 1987 – Memphis would come to define the postmodern design movement. And maybe the next 40 years beyond that. A weird technicolour star that burned brightly, then flamed out. But that didn’t really bother Sottsass. “Strong ideas are short-lived,” he said once, “and it is not possible to develop them further.”  

It's kind of funny that one of the 20th century’s most surreal, playful and individualist design movements was started by Sottsass, who fought for Mussolini as a militant member of the Italian Republican Fascist Party. But maybe that wasn’t a coincidence. Sottsass didn’t fight with the fascists by choice, after all; he was conscripted. 

“After a happy youth in the mountains and a much less happy youth in various schools I got an architectural degree at the Turin Politecnico in 1939,” he said. “I was then forced to waste seven years of my life in the army.”

In a way, Sottsass’ entire artistic philosophy can be read as a hardcore rejection of everything fascism stands for: Sottsass was global, not nationalist, curious, not threatened by curiosity, diverse and welcoming, rather than rigidly uniform. In fact, he hated uniformity. And that’s another thing about ‘Memphis style’; while the collective definitely had a look – think geometric shapes, bold, clashing colours, squiggles, checkerboards and other eye-watering patterns, plus the use of unconventional materials like laminate and plastic – every member of the group was encouraged to do their own thing. 

That’s why Sottsass’ famous Carlton Room Divider, which turned the traditional bookshelf into some sort of many-armed Art Deco fertility idol, can sit comfortably alongside Peter Shire's Bel Air armchair, or a chaise longue upholstered by George Sowden, or the iconic Memphis Tahiti lamp (another Sottsass de-construction, which looks like a duck that got lost and stumbled into a Picasso painting). Even when stuff gets surreal and weird, it’s held together by a common thread. 

“Memphis is not a style,” said Italian design critic and Sottsass’ wife, Barbara Radice, “Memphis is a way of being. A philosophy that plays with the possible and the impossible, the rational and the absurd."

Of course, not everyone saw it that way, and over the years Memphis has been labelled everything from a hot, kitschy mess to “a shotgun wedding between Bauhaus and Fischer-Price.” As Pat Finn noted in Architizer, “These were designers who knew that to create a new visual language, one must be willing to create objects that are ugly. And to be sure, much of what this group created was brilliantly ugly.” Emphasis on brilliantly there. 

Memphis was a response to the perceived stasis of modernism, that feeling of everything staying the same, forever, like the make-believe world in Dylan’s song; a nightmare of “going through all these things twice”, where nothing grows or changes, and human beings are left to stagnate. That’s the crisis that Memphis was trying to solve. 

Of course, by the late 1990s, everyone was pretty sick of postmodernism (especially arts students who had to write dense, thesaurus-heavy essays on the topic) and the Memphis style had been relentlessly aped and smoothed-out and re-hashed, almost to death. It even inspired the visual language of 1990s Nickelodeon sets – all those ‘brilliantly ugly’ colours and food-splatter squiggle shapes. Postmodernism was old news. Bring on post-postmodernism. 

Great art has this ability to be simultaneously timeless and of-its-time, and for a while there, people thought Memphis might fall only into the latter category. It’s funny how quickly something radical can feel dated, even dorky.

But the spirit of Memphis didn’t die under the weight of 90s cynicism, and the 2010s saw a Memphis Renaissance, of sorts. In 2011, Christian Dior drew heavily from the Memphis school for the brand’s Fall collection. In 2014, Nathalie Du Pasquier, one of the Memphis founding members, designed a collection of retro-graphic prints for American Apparel. 

By the late 2010s, even mainstream commercial furniture brands like West Elm were dropping Memphis-inspired collections, and you can still see Sottsass’ influence all over the place, from the pop-art designs of British artist, Camille Walala, to the more refined furniture of Milan’s Studiopepe. 

Memphis Milano is even indirectly responsible for ‘Corporate Memphis’, that classically blah and ubiquitous digital art style, in which colourful, faceless, wobbly-armed cartoon figures sell you everything from life insurance to apple juice. The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute – an online Tower of Babel for everything design – describes Corporate Memphis as “The Generic 10s ‘Friendly’ Corporate Aesthetic, neo-Memphis, pastel colours, Mondrian influence, corporate appropriation of Vaporwave motifs, geometric sans typefaces, Monstera plants, exposed plywood, white walls, Matisse-influenced graphics.” Trust us, you’ll know it when you see it. Because you see it fucking everywhere.

But we do have to draw a line in the sand here. Corporate Memphis shares the name “Memphis”, but that’s about all it shares. Memphis Milano dabbled with the same saturated palette, but the bland commercialism and lazy sameness of Corporate Memphis would have annoyed Sottsass no end (if he hadn’t died in 2007, aged 90). 

There was nothing ‘corporate’ about Memphis Milano. In fact they were very famously and deliberately anti-corporate, along with anti-conservative, anti-mainstream, anti-boring, and anti-commercial for commercial’s sake. Memphis became a consumer aesthetic, but right down at the core it was always more about the things money can’t buy: creative freedom, radical individualism, joy, hope and the wonderful messiness of being human. 

As Sottsass once said, “I am not interested in making a better thing. I am interested in making a different thing.”

-

As featured in Issue 4 of our magazine!

Purchase a copy of Issue 4 https://www.nts-store.com

Subscribe to our NTS Sub Club https://www.nevertoosmall.com/magazine