Let’s thank Led Zeppelin, too

The XXI Milan Triennale advertising campaign, thought up by the prestigious KesselsKramer agency), must certainly have been prompted by Bruce Mau, who asked what we could design today when we have already designed everything?

The agency’s reply is a totemic yellow simulacrum, “The Thing”, a vaguely domestic take on the TV tower of Communist Berlin (the ball was originally to be all gold). This is the intriguing symbol for what Design will be after the Design we have known to date. It earned itself a secular baptistery at the entrance to the exhibitions and adorns the uniforms of all the exhibition attendants. This symbol for the future of design invites ordinary people to interact with it, as if it were a super-magical wand, the holiest of relics or the electrical appliance we were all waiting for.

The photographic and video production records figures in what are more than ordinary surroundings but that also have the feel of a fashion shoot. It records them in a suspended atmosphere and this is what generates the communication deviation, attracting the curiosity of passers-by. They visualise – in suspended form – the question what shall we design? For whom? Certainly, as well as being indebted to Bruce Mau for his suggestion, the campaign ought to have remembered Led Zeppelin and Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell of Hipgnosis, which created the images of Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The narrative mechanism reminded me of my youth but I must thank graphic designer Marco Basti for the precise reference.

Anyone holding Led Zeppelin’s seventh studio album, Presence, released in 1976, will see a white cover featuring a photograph of a 1950s’ family seated at a table with a harbour containing lovely neatly berthed boats in the background. The parents and children are smiling as they look at a strange, vaguely phallic object: this is “The Object”, a black presence that creates a void in the scene. The contrast takes you slightly aback. The inside sleeve and back cover confirm this feeling and add other situations to the scene in the restaurant overlooking the harbour: the technicians at work, a lady surrounded by flowers, a couple in a swimming pool, friends listening to music, a bank vault, a doctor with a child, a game of golf and scientists in the mountains. On the inside sleeve is a mature teacher with two children and using “The Object” as a Montessori-style educational tool; indeed, a drawing of it hangs on the wall beside the blackboard.

Hipgnosis drew these pictures from old 1950s’ issues of National Geographic, gave them a somewhat sci-fi film brightness and added the black silhouette, which they wanted to call “The Obelisk”. Given Jimmy Page’s Satanic and occultist fascinations – he was a follower of the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley -the “presence” brings a disturbing atmosphere to the serene mundane pictures. The black object is unidentifiable and inexplicable; a Surrealist object springs to mind, a skeleton at a party. Led Zeppelin’s record company Swan Song Records ordered 1000 numbered plastic copies of the small black obelisk, today reminiscent of a model city skyscraper, to promote the record and they sold like hotcakes. Who knows, maybe the same will happen for this yellow “The Thing” by KesselsKramer and the Triennale, with a little help from the afterworld perhaps.

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