Verbs of design

At the exhibitions at the XXI Triennale in Milan, which ends today after five months, what seemed to emerge was an encyclopaedic tendency for highlighting a number of key issues. 

At the XXI Triennale in Milan, the theme “Design after Design” has paved the way to numerous interpretations and conjectures. Despite the variety of material exhibited, disciplines involved and authors present, there is a clear thread that runs throughout. It is a curatorial thesis that appears in more than an exhibition: the infinite conjugation of verbs. Asked if this was a decision made by the academic committee, the curator’s responded that is was merely a coincidence.

So what if this revealed however a demand, an instance of the contemporary that is indicative of a common feeling? Also because, even when it is not about verbs in the infinitive, what emerges from the exhibitions is an encyclopaedic tendency that could be the other side of the coin. Remembering also that the compendium of knowledge is a curatorial trend that art has often used recently, extensively expressed in the “Palazzo Enciclopedico” by Massimiliano Gioni at the 2013 Venice Art Biennale.

Top and above: views of the exhibition “Neo-preistoria. 100 verbi”, curated by Andrea Branzi and Kenya Hara at the Triennale di Milano

Rereading some of the prefaces by the curators of the exhibitions at the Triennale, a number of points emerge that provide a foundation for this choice. Luisa Collina and Cino Zucchi explain in the introduction to the exhibition “Sempering” at Mudec: “Actions like stacking heavy materials, connecting lightweight structures, shaping soft materials, engraving thin wrappings, folding sheets, weaving threads, assembling pieces or blowing air can be seen as primary acts able to invent unexpected forms in the light of new technologies but also as a verification of sedimented ‘habits’ or formal customs in the face of new conditions.” So it is an attempt to relate basic functions that have always existed with contemporary responses, as if to draw a common thread between past and present in which the invariant remains the necessity of function, the only thing that does not change despite the development of techniques, materials and skills.

View of the exhibition “Sempering”, curated by Luisa Collina and Cino Zucchi at Mudec

The other effect of such an approach is that of not imposing an univocal interpretation but leaving the exhibition as an “open work” according to Eco’s noted semiotic thesis. “The Atlas” underlines Pierluigi Nicolin in the introduction of “Architecture as Art”, a draft of an archive and outline of a map, “presents an arrangement of things in the unified space of a parterre that alludes to the beginning of new actions and ways of being. The mapping, that excludes in principle a hierarchy, a centre and an order of meaning, responds to the desire to offer an open encyclopaedia”. Even the new version of the Design Museum, dedicated by Silvana Annicchiarico to women in design, does not fail to free-up the flow of the project, articulated in two “verbal” macro-sections, Weaving and Procreating, via the works of the designers in chronological order. Alongside this are investigations into Protecting with a gallery of patron saints with their objects-attributes, and Representing, that highlights the exhibition design by Margherita Palli.

View of the exhibition “Sempering”, curated by Luisa Collina and Cino Zucchi at Mudec

However the exhibition where this hypothesis is most evident is “Neo-Prehistory. 100 verbs”, where the issue is also included in the title. The 100 verbs are intended here as “human activities aimed at specifically resolving single social and individual necessities,” describes Andrea Branzi, curator of the exhibition along with Kenya Hara. The urgency of function thus becomes a degree zero for highlighting a number of key issues. First and foremost the substantial indifference of the specialised history of design to the atrocity of a number of facts and changes in real history, as Branzi goes on to explain. As a result, there can be hope either for a reconciliation between design and life, such as was aspired to by the radical avant-garde, or for accepting, “chaos not as a mere lack of order but as participation in the laws that govern the universe of men and things (…) Perhaps this is one of the fundamental achievements of the XXI century: accepting the existence of problems that cannot be solved”. The only way to regenerate the design landscape perhaps then moves on to become an actual renewed understanding of function. If the 1950s were about Form and the 1990s/2000s about Process, with their tables of elements and negation of actual form, the present may be the years of Functions and the basic needs that they give rise to.

View of the Triennale Design Museum, dedicated by Silvana Annicchiarico to women in design

“Combining 100 tools and 100 verbs – says Hara – we have tried to describe like a poem in a fixed form, the history of humanity’s desires”. But let’s not forget that also in the 1960s and 70s, Functions lay at the basis of design. Articulating verbs in the infinitive or talking about “sitting” as opposed to “chairs” arose precisely from a need to start again that much resembles the present one. “He doesn’t design for a function but he designs a function” said Ettore Sottsass about Charles Eames and his Lounge Chair. And later an Atlas of Design, written by Alfonso Grassi and Anty Pansera in 1980, utilises verbs in the infinitive in place of traditional typological subdivisions (Pansera who launched a few years ago a crusade on feminine design that heralded the current). On the other hand, the battle of the typological model in those years reentered fully in the post-modern debate: the refoundation of design passed via the breaking down of those traditional typologies and the rethinking of function even before the form.

Entrance to the Triennale Design Museum, dedicated by Silvana Annicchiarico to women in design

In conclusion, this return to Functions via the artifice of verbs in the infinite could actually correspond to a renewed questioning of our basic needs, made even more evident by the redundancy that the formalistic and typological thesis has led to. Provided however that it does not hide the desire to elude the responsibility of a thesis, leaving the all-encompassing encyclopaedia in place of selective hierarchy, the dictionary in place of critical history. Because as George Perec said in Think/Classify, a collection of writings that was based on the question posed by the two verbs and concluded with a literary form that prefigures order without ever achieving it: “It may also be that it is both a use and abuse of that old rhetorical figure called excuse, thanks to which instead of addressing the problem to solve, one is content to respond to the question with other questions”.

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