PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

BRUNO MUNARI

DESIGN AS ART

Bruno Munari was a well-known. Milanese designer and graphic artist who was twice awarded the Compasso d’Oro for excellence in his field. Known for his researches in visual communication and cinematography, various exhibitions of his work have been held in Europe, the United States and Japan. He died in 1998.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

MAXIM GORKY

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

In art exhibitions we see less and less of oil paintings on canvas and pieces of sculpture in marble or bronze. Instead we see a growing number of objects made in all sorts of ways of all sorts of materials, things that have no connection with the old-fashioned categories of the visual arts. In the old days of painting these materials and techniques were very much looked down on as inhuman and unworthy of being the vehicles of a Work of Art.

But even in the recent past both painting and sculpture began to lose a few of their bits and pieces. The literary element in a visual work of art was the first to be discarded in favour of pure visuality (Seurat), and it was understood that with the means proper to the visual arts one could say many things that could not be put into words. It was therefore left to literature to tell stories. The disappearance of narrative led to the disappearance of the forms that imitated visible nature, and (with Kandinsky) the first abstract forms entered the scene. These still had shades of colouring, but this naturalistic and representative element was discarded (by Mondrian) in favour of a colour and form that was simply itself and nothing else. From this point it is practically inevitable that we should end up with paintings that are all of one colour (Klein). This version of the story is rather compressed, but these at any rate are the essential stages in the disappearance of the old categories in art. Eventually the picture is punctured, slashed or burnt alive (Fontana, Burri), and this is the last farewell to techniques that no longer had anything to say to modern man.

The artists of today are busily looking for something that will once again interest the people of today, distracted as they are by a multitude of visual stimuli all clamouring for their attention. If you go to an art exhibition today you may see very simple objects that are so huge that they fill the whole room, some based on statics and others on kinetics. You will find stainless steel used in conjunction with seagull droppings, laminated plastics of every conceivable kind, rigid or inflatable transparent plastic, bits of scrap metal soldered together, and live animals. The artist wants to make the viewer participate at all costs. He is looking for a point of contact, and he wants to sell his works of art in the chain stores just like any other commercial article, stripped of its mystery and at a reasonable price.

But what is at the bottom of this anxiety that drives artists to abandon safe traditional techniques and certain markets, and to sell mass-produced articles in shops and not in galleries?

It is probably the desire to get back into society, to re-establish contact with their neighbours, to create an art for everyone and not just for the chosen few with bags of money. Artists want to recover the public that has long ago deserted the art galleries, and to break the closed circle of Artist – Dealer – Critic – Gallery – Collector.

They want to destroy the myth of the Great Artist, of the enormously costly Masterpiece, of the one and only unique divine Thing.

They have realized that at the present time subjective values are losing their importance in favour of objective values that can be understood by a greater number of people.

And if the aim is to mass-produce objects for sale to a wide public at low price, then it becomes a problem of method and design. The artist has to regain the modesty he had when art was just a trade, and instead of despising the very public he is trying to interest he must discover its needs and make contact with it again. This is the reason why the traditional artist is being transformed into the designer, and as I myself have undergone this transformation in the course of my working career I can say that this book of mine is also a kind of diary in which I try to see the why and wherefore of this metamorphosis.

1970

BRUNO MUNARI

PREFACE

The Useless Machines

Lots of people know of me as ‘You know, the man who made the useless machines’, and even today I still occasionally get asked for one of these objects, which I designed and made in about 1933. That was the time when the movement called the ‘novecento italiano’ ruled the roost, with its High Court of super-serious masters, and all the art magazines spoke of nothing else but their granitic artistic productions; and everyone laughed at me and my useless machines. They laughed all the harder because my machines were made of cardboard painted in plain colours, and sometimes a glass bubble, while the whole thing was held together with the frailest of wooden rods and bits of thread. They had to be light so as to turn with the slightest movement of the air, and the thread was just the thing to prevent them getting twisted up.

But all my friends rocked with laughter, even those I most admired for the energy they put into their own work. Nearly all of them had one of my useless machines at home, but they kept them in the children’s rooms because they were absurd and practically worthless, while their sitting-rooms were adorned with the sculpture of Marino Marini and paintings by Carrà and Sironi. Certainly, in comparison with a painting by Sironi, scored deeply by the lion’s claw of feeling, I with my thread and cardboard could hardly expect to be taken seriously.

Then these friends of mine discovered Alexander Calder, who was making mobiles; but his things were made of iron and painted black or some stunning colour. Calder triumphed in our circle, and I came to be thought of as his imitator.

What is the difference between my useless machines and Calder’s mobiles? I think it is best to make this clear, for apart from the different materials the methods of construction are also quite distinct. They have only two things in common: both are suspended and both gyrate. But there are thousands of suspended objects and always have been, and I might point out that my friend Calder himself had a precursor in Man Ray, who in 1920 made an object on exactly the same principles later used by Calder.

There is a harmonic relationship between all the parts which go to make up a useless machine. Let us suppose that we start with a glass ball, marked A in the illustration. From this we obtain the disc A+1/3R by simply adding one third to the radius of the ball and marking the dimensions of the ball inside the cardboard disc. The diameter of this disc determines the other two geometric forms B and 2B (the one being just double the other). The backs of these forms are painted as the negatives of the fronts. The wooden rods to which the shapes are attached are also measured in relation to the diameter of the ball: 3A, 5A and 6A. The whole thing is then balanced up and hung on a piece of thread.

Mobiles are by nature different. The inspiration for them seems to be drawn from the vegetable kingdom. One might say that Calder was the first sculptor of trees. There are plenty of sculptors of figures and animals, but trees in the sense of living things that oscillate, with branches of progressive dimensions and with leaves on the branches, these had never been done. Take a branch with its leaves still on and you are looking at a mobile by Calder. They have the same principle, the same movement, the same dynamic behaviour.

But the pieces of a useless machine all turn upon themselves and in respect to each other without touching. Their basis is geometrical, while the two differently coloured faces give a variety of colour-effects as the forms turn. People have often wondered how the idea originated, and here is the answer. In 1933 they were painting the first abstract pictures in Italy, and these were nothing more than coloured geometric shapes or spaces with no reference at all to visible nature. Very often these abstract paintings were still lives of geometric forms done in realistic style. They used to say that Morandi made abstract pictures by using bottles and vases as formal pretexts. The subject of a Morandi canvas is in fact not the bottles, but painting enclosed within those spaces. Bottles or triangles were therefore the same thing, and the painting emerged from the relationships of its forms and colours.

Now I myself thought that instead of painting triangles and other geometrical forms within the atmosphere of an oblong picture (for this — look at Kandinsky — was still essentially realistic) it would perhaps be interesting to free these forms from the static nature of a picture and to hang them up in the air, attached to each other in such a way as to live with us in our own surroundings, sensitive to the atmosphere of real life, to the air we breathe. And so I did. I cut out the shapes, gave them harmonic relationships to one another, calculated the distances between them, and painted their backs (the part one never sees in a picture) in a different way so that as they turned they would form a variety of combinations. I made them very light and used thread so as to keep them moving as much as possible.

Whether or not Calder started from the same idea, the fact is that we were together in affirming that figurative art had passed from two or at the most three dimensions to acquire a fourth: that of time.

Other types of ‘useless machine’ designed in the period 1935-54 and made of balsawood, cardboard and thread. Some were made of flexible wire and wooden rods. The components were always tied together with thread. The wire gave a special springiness to the wooden rods.

A useless machine which was mass-produced in aluminium (1952).

A useless machine which was mass-produced in aluminium (1952).

The name ‘useless machine’ lends itself to many interpretations. I intended these objects to be thought of as machines because they were made of a number of movable parts fixed together. Indeed, the famous lever, which is only a bar of wood or iron or other material, is nevertheless a machine, even if a rudimentary one. They are useless because unlike other machines they do not produce goods for material consumption, they do not eliminate labour, nor do they increase capital. Some people declared that on the contrary they were extremely useful because they produced goods of a spiritual kind (images, aesthetic sense, the cultivation of taste, kinetic information, etc.). Others confused these useless machines, which belong to the world of aesthetics, with the comic machines I invented during my student days with the sole purpose of making my friends laugh. These comic machines were later published by Einaudi in a book (long since out of print) called Le Macchine di Munari. They were projects for strange constructions for wagging the tails of lazy dogs, for predicting the dawn, for making sobs sound musical, and many other facetious things of that kind. They were inspired by the famous American designer Rube Goldberg, but British readers will more easily recall Heath Robinson, who was working in a similar field.

‘Machines would not exist without us, but our existence would no longer be possible without them.’ (Pierre Ducassé)

DESIGN AS ART

Today it has become necessary to demolish the myth of the ‘star’ artist who only produces masterpieces for a small group of ultra-intelligent people. It must be understood that as long as art stands aside from the problems of life it will only interest a very few people. Culture today is becoming a mass affair, and the artist must step down from his pedestal and be prepared to make a sign for a butcher’s shop (if he knows how to do it). The artist must cast off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men, well up in present-day techniques, materials and working methods. Without losing his innate aesthetic sense he must be able to respond with humility and competence to the demands his neighbours may make of him.

The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. Instead of pictures for the drawing-room, electric gadgets for the kitchen. There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.

Anyone working in the field of design has a hard task ahead of him: to clear his neighbour’s mind of all preconceived notions of art and artists, notions picked up at schools where they condition you to think one way for the whole of your life, without stopping to think that life changes – and today more rapidly than ever. It is therefore up to us designers to make known our working methods in clear and simple terms, the methods we think are the truest, the most up-to-date, the most likely to resolve our common aesthetic problems. Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for him, bettering his living conditions and encouraging him to develop his taste and sense of beauty.

When we give a place of honour in the drawing-room to an ancient Etruscan vase which we consider beautiful, well proportioned and made with precision and economy, we must also remember that the vase once had an extremely common use. Most probably it was used for cooking-oil. It was made by a designer of those times, when art and life went hand in hand and there was no such thing as a work of art to look at and just any old thing to use.

I have therefore very gladly accepted the proposal that I should bring together in a volume the articles I originally published in the Milanese paper Il Giorno. To these I have added other texts, as well as a lot of illustrations which it was not possible to publish in the limited space of a daily paper. I have also made a few essential changes for the English edition.

I hope that other designers will make similar efforts to spread knowledge of our work, for our methods are daily asserting themselves as the fittest way of gaining the confidence of men at large, and of giving a meaning to our present way of life.

Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads:

‘We know that only the technical means of artistic achievement can be taught, not art itself. The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has severed it from our daily life; but art is always present when a people lives sincerely and healthily.

‘Our job is therefore to invent a new system of education that may lead – by way of a new kind of specialized teaching of science and technology – to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them.

‘Thus our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need: not because he is a prodigy, but because he knows how to approach human needs according to a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.’

From that time on we have watched an ever more rapid succession of new styles in the world of art: abstract art, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, Neo-Abstract art, Neo-Dada, pop and op. Each one gobbles up its predecessor and we start right back at the beginning again.

What Gropius wrote is still valid. This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one’s material life in and an ideal world to take moral refuge in.

When the objects we use every day and the surroundings we live in have become in themselves a work of art, then we shall be able to say that we have achieved a balanced life.

DESIGNERS AND STYLISTS

What is a Designer?

He is a planner with an aesthetic sense. Certain industrial products depend in large measure on him for their success. Nearly always the shape of a thing, be it a typewriter, a pair of binoculars, an armchair, a ventilator, a saucepan or a refrigerator, will have an important effect on sales: the better designed it is, the more it will sell.

The term ‘designer’ was first used in this sense in America. It does not refer to an industrial designer, who designs machines or mechanical parts, workshops or other specialized buildings. He is in fact a design engineer, and if he has a motor-scooter on the drawing-board he does not give a great deal of importance to the aesthetic side of things, or at the most he applies a personal idea of what a motor-scooter ought to look like. I once asked an engineer who had designed a motor-scooter why he had chosen a particular colour, and he said: because it was the cheapest. The industrial designer therefore thinks of the aesthetic side of the job as simply a matter of providing a finish, and although this may be most scrupulously done he avoids aesthetic problems that are bound up with contemporary culture because such things are not considered useful. An engineer must never be caught writing poetry. The designer works differently. He gives the right weight to each part of the project in hand, and he knows that the ultimate form of the object is psychologically vital when the potential buyer is making up his mind. He therefore tries to give it a form as appropriate as possible to its function, a form that one might say arises spontaneously from the function, from the mechanical part (when there is one), from the most appropriate material, from the most up-to-date production techniques, from a calculation of costs, and from other psychological and aesthetic factors.