Through certain eyes, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s newly published book, “1968: Radical Italian Design” (Deste Foundation/Toilet Paper), with text contributions from venerated designer Alessandro Mendini, is full of nothing but vulgarities. Its 60 or so pages feature Playboy-style photographs that oscillate between being playfully suggestive and explicitly sexual. Naked masked women, phallic objects, leather bondage, urination, less-than-conventional uses of food — “eggs, asses, panties, and spaghetti,” design critic and Bisazza Foundation director Mario Cristina Didero writes in the preface, which “compose an intriguing pop collage as if the objects had decided to move with their own feet, gone wild and started to express their own subversive stories, each one with its own temperament, its own needs, its own daily life” — all intermingle here.
In addition to this list of vulgarities, the images also feature important design objects from 1968, a time right in the midst of a groundbreaking era in the field — and the world at large. And so to some, these lurid moments, set against candy-colored backdrops, are an expression of a certain spirit of irreverence and protest that came bubbling to the surface at the time. The titular year saw riots, assassinations, and wars that continue to reverberate through history, as well as a backlash to the staid functionality of modernism led by the likes of Archizoom, Superstudio, Global Tools, and 9999. What they produced was furniture that flew in the face of conventional ideas of “taste” and assailed any notions of comfort, a new style that Mendini describes as “an elaboration of the methods of kitsch, on the paradox connected to bad taste, on self-directed irony, on plastic and other inappropriate materials,” in his “Rules of the Radical Designer, 1968-1978,” featured in the beginning of the book. Kaleidoscopic furniture in the shape of cacti, elephant tusks, human hands, and nameless objects are just a few examples.
It was also in 1968 that that Dakis Joannou, the Greek power-collector and founder of the Athens-based Deste Foundation for the Contemporary Arts (which supplied the design icons for these photos), fist became fascinated with Italian Radical Design.
Click on the slideshow to see images from “1968: Radical Italian Design.”
