An Important Failure
Lo zoo di Enzo, an installation designed by Nanda Vigo for Enzo Mari Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli (image by Eva Herzog, courtesy of the Design Museum).
“It seems to me that people have a good understanding only of some things,” intones Enzo Mari, speaking as part of film shot during a panel discussion at the Triennale Milano back in 2009. “For instance, they understand that Parma ham is very good. They totally get Grana cheese, and they understand certain wines very well. […] They understand things they [experience] with their senses, but they do not understand a thing about form.”
Society’s lack of understanding is a recurrent theme when looking at the work of Enzo Mari (1932-2020), the 20th-century Italian designer who became emblematic for his rejection of consumerism and desire to instead position design as a vehicle for sociopolitical transformation. A creator of graphics, furniture, artworks, exhibitions, products and more, Mari’s ideas took form in myriad ways, but were always informed by his left-wing politics and belief in design as a tool for communication rather than consumption. “When I design an object and people say: ‘Oh, well done!’, I unfailingly ask myself, Where did I go wrong?” he told Domus magazine in 1997. “If everybody likes it, it means I have confirmed the existing reality and this is precisely what I don’t want.” To Mari, design had failed to understand its own social potential, and instead settled for a role as the handmaiden of capitalism.
Enzo Mari (portrait by Enzo Mari Ramak Fazel).
This is the subject matter of Enzo Mari, a newly opened retrospective at London’s Design Museum. The show has been adapted by curator Rachel Hajek from a 2020 exhibition at Triennale Milano, which was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in collaboration with Francesca Giacomelli (Mari’s former assistant), both of whom have also worked on the London edition. “Mari was a universe,” said Giacomelli in Disegno #28 in a roundtable exploring the opening of the original show. “His lifelong project was to transform the world through a socialisation of design.” Speaking as part of the same article, Obrist put the same point more explicitly. “It’s almost like superstring theory with Enzo,” he said, “because there was Enzo the polemicist, the writer, the intellectual, the furniture designer, the industrial designer, the DIY designer, the exhibition maker, and Enzo the artist[…].” This is, needless to say, a lot of Enzos to cram into one exhibition.
Fortunately, the Design Museum has afforded the exhibition the space and curatorial attention it needs to start to unpack the complexities of its subject. The exhibition spreads itself across multiple rooms of the museum, multiple Enzos, but successfully marshals the sheer volume of material it contains. Mari’s delicacy with spatial relations and colour becomes apparent in artworks such as Structure 795 (1965), a vertical wave of interlocking black and white PVC tubes; his graphic expertise and illustrative wit emerges in Otto, l’Oca (1967), a remarkably prolific set of studies of a goose’s face, ranging from the sumptuously artistic, to the shonkily Biro-esque; his industrial nous and refined aesthetics appear in Putrella (1958), his subtly bent I-beam fruit bowl for Danese; and his politics and impassioned fury at the design world’s wastefulness and cultural ignorance (an anger that was undeniably self-righteous but also, crucially, correct) in his celebrated Autoprogettazione? (1974) self-assembly furniture and his Ecolo (1992) vases for Alessi, made from the plastic containers that manufacturers pump out through systems of chronic overproduction and environmental indifference. You could tour the exhibition as many times as there were Enzos, and find new objects, resonances and themes with each visit – the Triennale and Design Museum’s curators are to be applauded for having created a show that is rich, complex and beautiful. It is essential viewing for any serious student of the discipline.
Mari’s Formosa perpetual wall calendar (1963) and Timor perpetual table calendar (1966), designed for his longterm collaborator Danese (image courtesy of Danese Milano).
The display has been built up out of Mari’s own archive, which he donated to the city of Milan upon his death in 2020, stipulating that after the closure of the Triennale’s exhibition (and, presumably, its subsequent touring schedule) it not be publicly accessible for 40 years – a decision motivated by the belief he voiced in his 1970 Funzione della ricerca estetica that “[the] meaning of the research will only be understood by the public after a meditation, which will last for at least two generations.” There is no shortage of portentousness in such a statement, although that does seem to be a common feature of Mari’s wider thought. Some of Mari’s more prophet-like qualities are admirable (I can’t help but delight in his view that “design is not one of the many commodities in circulation, but the place to transform and dignify human work”), but in other cases they appear less justified. In his review of the exhibition, for instance, The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright highlighted the fact that a considerable quantity of Mari’s design output seems to fit awkwardly with his own politics and social ambitions for the discipline; his “lasting legacy is not to be found in affordable mass-produced homewares for the common man,” Wainwright notes, “but expensive limited edition objects sold in exclusive boutiques.”
An installation view of the exhibition (image by Eva Herzog, courtesy of the Design Museum).
Exploring the exhibition, which contains a significant number of said editions, Wainwright’s observation seems fair critique and has considerable bite, even if there are things that might be said in Mari’s defence. Mari was not, for instance, to blame for the fact that many of his objects have gone on to become collectibles, and their original pricing was heavily shaped by his desire to “dignify human work”, understood as creating objects whose production would provide workers with a fair wage and interesting labour. Mari’s 1973 Samos series of porcelain bowls and vessels, for instance, made use of basketry techniques that he hoped workers might subsequently vary according to their own tastes – unfortunately, however, the project failed and they simply replicated his initial designs. Nevertheless, Mari was consistent in his belief that “the research is the design, not the product,” and a number of the pieces in the exhibition, even those that are most explicitly decorative, make this explicit – the Ferri Saldati bowl series (1958) for Danese contains any number of beautiful objects, for example, but that beauty should not be cleanly separated from the underlying idea that the machine-cut sheet metal and brass weld-seams of industrial production need not be hidden away, and could instead be aesthetic, dignified and valuable. These provisos aside, however, it is an interesting quirk of Mari’s practice that his sociopolitical ideals still led to the production of quite so many expensive ornamental vessels (although I would not want to suggest that society doesn’t need beautiful vases). “I suggest looking outside the window,” one quote from Mari reads, included right at the end of the exhibition. “If you like what you see, there’s no reason for new projects. If, on the other hand, there are things that fill you with horror to the point of making you want to kill those responsible, then there are good reasons for your project.” Mari, you sense, must have had very strong feelings on vessels.
A chair created as part of Mari’s Autoprogettazione? self-assembly furniture project (image by Eva Herzog, courtesy of the Design Museum).
This intensity likely speaks of Mari’s ambition and complexity as a designer. Not all of his works met the standards that he set for design, but this is likely because he set the bar so high to begin with – opportunities to produce meaningful, socially impactful work in the field are always constrained by reigning economic and political paradigms. One exhibit, for example, shows an advertisement that Mari placed in Domus in 2004, in which the “highly experienced and qualified designer seeks desperately” a “young entrepreneur” who has “THE COURAGE to implement strategic projects as the only salvation from a deep economic crisis affecting all. THE UMILITY not to try to design form too. THE KNOW THE DIFFERENCE: between design and fashion; between design, industrial products, applied art and karaoke; between alienated work and transformation.” It is a laudable call for designers to be granted the opportunities they need to fulfil their social potential – and which seems basically correct on every level (I admit, however, to not really understanding the karaoke thing) – but one tinged with a certain level of sadness.
Preliminary sketches and variations for the goose from Enzo and Elio Mari’s The Nature Series (image courtesy of Studio Enzo Mari).
Looking through the exhibition, you are reminded that all of the things that Mari fought against in design – its excess, vanity, superficiality and devotion to commerce for commerce’s sake – not only dogged him throughout his career, but remain in full effect today. One of the projects on display, Mari’s 1971 Day-Night sofa bed, is labelled in the captions as “An important failure”. The Day-Night was designed to be a flexible, affordable piece of furniture, but was met with resounding silence by the market (prompting Mari to reframe his ideas in his subsequent Autoprogettazione?, which remains to this day a critical darling). “The public to whom this type of project was addressed refused it because they did not recognise it as part of the cultural system,” Mari lamented, an echo of his ongoing belief that his work was misunderstood. Personally, I’m not sure whether Day-Night was misunderstood (there is something rather mechanically mangle-esque about it, which perhaps makes it more compelling as an idea than as physical furniture) as much as it was simply overwhelmed by the forces that its designer raged against: even when we sympathise with Mari’s ethical stance surrounding form and its connections to social need and production methodology, people are still regularly drawn in by the obviously beautiful, the luxuriant and the fashionable over the rigorous and meaningful; Mari was right about many things, but rightness does not always carry the day in terms of commercial success. Indeed, the superficiality of design that often won out over Mari’s more demanding ideology has, if anything, been supercharged by the rise of digital platforms that flatten design to the status of image, stripping away all of the social connections and deeper research that Mari prioritised. “In our time of Instagram,” Martino Gamper, a student and friend of Mari, noted in Disegno #28, “where really superficial imagery is spread all around the world with very few words, I think we like characters who speak their mind and have a clear vision of what their work is intended for.” No doubt Gamper is correct in this regard – even today, Mari feels refreshing and original – but it is difficult not to feel that Mari's principled vision for the field has been lost amongst more mercenary and mercantile interpretations, at least in terms of commercial cut-through. Perhaps many designers of Mari’s stripe have simply migrated to different fields – the worlds of social and system design, for instance – but you suspect that were Mari to look out the window onto design in 2024, he would find no shortage of thing that “fill you with horror to the point of making you want to kill those responsible”.
An installation view of Grazie Enzo: Contemporary Responses to Enzo Mari (image by Eva Herzog, courtesy of the Design Museum).
This sense of frustration is an important part of the Mari story (and one of the reasons why the exhibition is so worthwhile visiting), but the Design Museum has chosen to end proceedings on a hopeful note. One of the new additions for the London edition of the exhibition is a supplementary display called Grazie Enzo: Contemporary Responses to Enzo Mari, in which curator Esme Hawes has installed a series of works from current designers whose practices have been variously informed by or referenced Mari’s practice in the museum’s balcony space, displayed alongside a small selection of Mari’s own pieces. It is a charming and thoughtful idea (and one that the museum should repeat in future historical shows), bringing in designers such as Study O Portable (steered by Mari’s capacity to be “always critical and occasionally humorous”), Michael Marriott (for whom Mari is “a torchbearer for alternative practices”), Special Projects (who carry Mari’s attention to how objects impact us into the realm of digital experience), and Sound Advice (a platform that shares Mari’s conviction as to design’s political impact, focusing on inequality and racial discrimination in architecture). Mari may not have convinced the wider industry of the need to think more carefully about form and its various socio-political impacts, but Grazie Enzo leaves no doubt as to the deep-rootedness of his legacy. Perhaps correct ideas, no matter how embattled, will always find ways to make themselves felt.
Words Oli Stratford