On a recent trip to London, we finally made it to the Design Museum so we could catch the exhibition of work by the Italian design legend Enzo Mari (which runs until 8th September 2024, in case you have the opportunity to go.)
I first got to know about Mari’s work by stumbling across his iconic play puzzle 16 Animali, which, as the name suggests, is a set of 16 animals produced with one single continuous cut line through a 27cm x 38cm x 5.5cm block of wood. There’s also a 16 Pesci set, which does the exact same thing but with sea creatures instead.
They are both amazing. If I could remotely justify the expense, I’d buy one of each set for myself. (I don’t actually think 16 Pesci is available to buy anymore, except as a super-expensive second-hand purchase.) The Design Museum shop has got 16 Animali sets for sale, though — but seriously, in this economy, it’s not right for me to spend the equivalent of two months’ Council Tax on something like that.
The exhibition, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli, is an incredible insight into Mari’s career, showcasing the breadth of his work from his early formative years in training through to the impish utterances of his grand old age. This is design as art, sure, but design which never loses sight of its human point and purpose, be it function, education or entertainment, be it a picture book about butterfly life cycles or instructions for building your own furniture or (to my great delight) an experimental novel (more of that in a future post.)
SPOILER ALERT:
I am going to talk about the very last thing you see before you leave the exhibition space. If you don’t want to have that surprise spoiled, stop reading now, and come back after you’ve been to the museum.
IF YOU’RE STILL WITH ME:
Discreetly printed up on the wall by the exit door is this quote from Mari:
…and I think I’ve just found a mantra for my the rest of my working life.
It also made me remember a Ray Bradbury quote from The Paris Review #192 (Spring 2010, interviewed by Sam Weller — but there’s a paywall if you want to read the whole thing!):
BRADBURY: I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”
I often feel like the line is thin, between the horror and the hate on one hand, and the things to love and celebrate on the other. Especially now that I’m moving more into prose than drama, I’m finding that my subjects and my characters have more direct relationships with my own values, feelings, experiences and perspectives than perhaps they used to, and that I’m engaging my brain with more complex moral battlegrounds than I did before. It sometimes means having to get to grips with ideas and people that I’d ordinarily rather avoid. But the end result of a career pursued along that path of avoidance would be a body of work that focuses on nothing but kittens and tea parties, and frankly, I have a responsibility to do better than that.
Have a look out of the next window you pass. What’s out there? Do you like what you see? Or is there something that fills you with horror? If it’s the second option, what are you going to do with that feeling?
