- October 27th, 2008
- Filed under Art, Design, Education, Public Programs
Once upon a time, December 1980 to be exact, Italian architect-designer Ettore Sottsass had a little party to celebrate his plan to produce a new line of furniture. He invited several young design collaborators. A record was playing: Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again).” When the vinyl platter kept catching on the word “Memphis,” a new design movement was christened. What punk was to music, Memphis was to design.
Sottsass and the members of the collective, including young architect Michele De Lucchi, broke through the “tyranny” of modernist taste by making furniture made from leopard print plastic laminate, celluloids, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals, jazzed up with spangles, glitter, and crazy color combos. Memphis got its power from the ubiquitous cheese of consumer culture. The old guard modernists turned their noses at the flamboyant movement; the mass media ate it up.
Then, in 1985, at the height of Memphis’ popularity and influence, Sottsass walked away, like a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who turns in his cleets when you’d least expect. Memphis left the design world in an identity crisis. Was modernism dead forever? How long can one subsist on glitter, and can it feed the soul? What to do when the avant-garde is no longer so?
Thursday, October 30, come to the IMA to hear the rest of this story, as told by Penny Sparke, professor of design history at Kingston University in London. Sparke will spin the tale of what happened after Memphis and how European designers, no matter how fragmented, marched onward with the reinvention of industrial and product design.
Sparke’s talk is an appetizer for an exhibition opening next March to the IMA: European Design since 1985: Shaping the New Century. Visit the IMA next spring and you will enter a fun house of chairs, lamps, teakettles and knifeblocks you never thought possible. Stay tuned to the IMA blog over the next few months for more design chatter.
