Friday, September 24, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Yelling/Memphis: Urban 4 9" Vinylmations
Memphis: "was a Milan-based collective of young furniture and product designers led by the veteran Ettore Sottsass.
Originally dubbed The New Design, the project was rechristened Memphis after the Bob Dylan lyric "Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)" stuck repeatedly at "Memphis Blues Again" on Sottsass' record player.
Their solution was to continue the experiments with uncoventional materials, historic forms, kitsch motifs and gaudy colours begun by Studio Alchymia, the radical late 1970s Italian design group to which Sottsass and De Lucchi had belonged. When the young Jasper Morrison and a couple of thousand others crowded into Arc '74 on 18 September 1981 they discovered furniture made from the flashily coloured plastic laminates emblazoned with kitsch geometric and leopard-skin patterns usually found in 1950s comic books or cheap cafés.
Other pieces of furniture and lights were made from industrial materials - printed glass, celluloids, fireflake finishes, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals - jazzed up with flamboyant colours and patterns, spangles and glitter. By glorying in the cheesiness of consumer culture, Memphis was "quoting from suburbia," as Sottsass put it. "Memphis is not new, Memphis is everywhere." Matteo Thun described Memphis as "a mental gymnasium".
It was an exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which colour and decoration had been taboo. Memphis also scoffed at the notion that 'good' design had to last. "It is no coincidence that the people who work for Memphis don't pursue a metaphysic aesthetic idea or an absolute of any kind, much less eternity," observed Sottsass. "Today everything one does is consumed. It is dedicated to life, not to eternity."
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 colorful, clearly defined manifestation of the often obscure post-modernist theories then so influential in art and architecture."
Originally dubbed The New Design, the project was rechristened Memphis after the Bob Dylan lyric "Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)" stuck repeatedly at "Memphis Blues Again" on Sottsass' record player.
Their solution was to continue the experiments with uncoventional materials, historic forms, kitsch motifs and gaudy colours begun by Studio Alchymia, the radical late 1970s Italian design group to which Sottsass and De Lucchi had belonged. When the young Jasper Morrison and a couple of thousand others crowded into Arc '74 on 18 September 1981 they discovered furniture made from the flashily coloured plastic laminates emblazoned with kitsch geometric and leopard-skin patterns usually found in 1950s comic books or cheap cafés.
Other pieces of furniture and lights were made from industrial materials - printed glass, celluloids, fireflake finishes, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals - jazzed up with flamboyant colours and patterns, spangles and glitter. By glorying in the cheesiness of consumer culture, Memphis was "quoting from suburbia," as Sottsass put it. "Memphis is not new, Memphis is everywhere." Matteo Thun described Memphis as "a mental gymnasium".
It was an exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which colour and decoration had been taboo. Memphis also scoffed at the notion that 'good' design had to last. "It is no coincidence that the people who work for Memphis don't pursue a metaphysic aesthetic idea or an absolute of any kind, much less eternity," observed Sottsass. "Today everything one does is consumed. It is dedicated to life, not to eternity."
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 colorful, clearly defined manifestation of the often obscure post-modernist theories then so influential in art and architecture."