The Daily Telegraph - Features
Superb tribute to a bombastic, Marxist children’s games designer
Exhibition Enzo Mari
Design Museum, London W8 ★★★★★
Enzo Mari could be spectacularly rude. When he wasn’t crafting children’s toys, calendars that would last for ever, and Milan’s beloved yellow traffic bollards, the designer delighted in picking a fight.
Mari described Ikea as “genocide”. He slammed his peers for being “publicity whores”. He called the architect Rem Koolhaas (to his face) “a pornographic window dresser”. Young people were a disappointment too. The only design they worshipped, he said, “is the god of merchandise”.
Culture had become so corrupted by consumerism that, this committed communist once opined, “design is dead”. What did he like? Well, Mari thought terrorism wasn’t “all bad”. “Why not?... It changes things.”
The curious thing about this bombastic, terrorist-sympathising communist – who died of Covid in 2020 at the age of 88, and is now the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at London’s Design Museum – is that he made such quietly elegant objects. Look at his desk tray, composed only of a bent beam of iron; a paper knife that emerges from a slightly twisted sliver of satin steel; or a bulbous lemon squeezer he made for Alessi – you nod approvingly at these things, and whisper, how tasteful.
Mari’s genius was prolific, as this exhibition proves. Children’s games were not for enjoyment, he declared, but for “self-learning”. Take his “16 animali”, produced with the design company Danese. He cleverly carved a puzzle of animals, including an elephant, camel, and snake out of a single block of oak wood. Nothing wasted.
This non-prescriptive approach extended to picture books for children. The Apple and the Butterfly, which he authored with his first wife Iela, contains within it a tale of death, life, and metamorphosis, which becomes a never-ending cycle as a caterpillar hatches within the core of an apple, and later as a butterfly, pollinates a flower.
After his father fell ill, Mari dropped out of school to support him, selling cabbages and soap. Such humble beginnings fuelled his lifelong Marxism. For the 1976 Venice Biennale, he produced a giant marble puzzle that joined to form a hammer and sickle – the symbol of “paradise”, he said.
Mari’s own manifesto lines one pristine wall: his 1974 how-to manual Autoprogettazione, which he distributed for free, comprised instructions for building furniture at home. Readers, he hoped, could make chairs, beds, bookcases out of nothing more than pre-cut planks of pine, a few nails, and a hammer. Finally, he thought, the pleasure of making ordinary furniture would be available to all, and when we all ultimately became craftsmen, there would be “less crisis in the world.”
Mari soon realised that his chairs wouldn’t convert anyone to communism. It continued to be a sore spot that his real appeal lay not among the working class, but with bourgeois design snobs, who thought his furniture had the right “rustic” appeal for their chalets in the Rocky Mountains. Speaking as a design snob to my fellow design snobs, don’t miss this
show.
From tomorrow until Sept 8; designmuseum.org