The Banal Object

L’Oggetto Banale. Image from Alchimia: Never-Ending Italian Design by Kazuko Sato

Founded in 1976 (’75 to ’77, depending on who’s telling the story), by Alessandro and Adriana Guerriero or/and Bruno and Giorgio Gregori, and following a wavering line of radical Italian movements, absorbing the Operaism of the ’60s, the Post-Operaism and the Autonomia of the ’70s and early ’80s (I’ll leave the differentiation and fine detailing of the respective movements to Pier Vittorio Aureli and others), and remotely connecting to some aspects of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism, studio Alchimia emerged in the break of the ’80s as a bridge between modernity and post-modernity, and between earlier stages of anti-design and a more Jencksian conceptualisation of postmodernist design and architectural principles – with Ettore Sottsass Jr as the ever present personalisation of that sliding position.

There is a mistake that the designer, especially the avant-garde one, inevitably risks making: that of taking his own desire for a fact. The Modern Movement believed in perfect coincidence between quality and quantity, and radical architecture counted on the creative autonomy of the proletariat. Both, for opposite reasons, had to pay for their illusory premises and impossible expectations. It might be helpful now to accept the world as it is, or at least observe its regulating mechanisms with no judgement, and go on from there with more humility. With a strain of cynicism and no regret for the lost utopia. Alchimia chooses to examine the spaces of everyday and to all appearances adapt itself to these. It rummages through the trunk of the man without qualities, through the housewife’s cupboard and the store-room of the suburban bar, re-emerging with a collection of absolutely banal objects.

On these it intervenes, making changes that are sometimes minimal, bare indicators of luminous vectors, but more often violent, with decorative superpositions which do not modify the function but cancel the aesthetic anonymity of the piece. The result is disconcerting and outrageous, challenging every rule of good design and every theory of good taste.

Alchimia 1977-1987, “Banale”, Guia Sambonet, 1986

Interior from the 1980 international Venice Biennale of Architecture. Image from Alchimia 1977-1987, Guia Sambonet, 1986

Painting by Arduino Cantafora for the exhibition entrance at the 1980 international Venice Biennale of Architecture. Image from Elogio del Banale – a cura di Barbara Radice, 1980

In 1980, as part of the first international Venice Biennale of Architecture, titled The Presence of the Past and directed/curated by Paolo Portoghesi, Studio Alchimia presented the exhibition l’Oggetto Banale (The Banal Object). L’Oggetto Banale comprised a series of manipulated, de-functionalised or dramatised, by the addition of decorative elements, everyday objects, for example irons, carpets, lights, and shoes. Alessandro Mendini (maybe the most pregnant of the members associated with Studio Alchimia, which, other than the already mentioned, included Andrea Branzi, Michele De Lucchi, and Matteo Thun) later writes of the Object as at the same time “normal” and “abnormal”, where the “ordinary” made it part of reality and succumbed it to necessary anonymity, and the extraordinary ascribed it with the unexpected, accidental, differential and transgressional (The Alchimia Manifesto, 1985).

But beyond the aesthetic impact, what is disconcerting about this risky undertaking is its initial statement: that contemporary man, inexorably surrounded by artificial objects, is himself artificial – artificial in the way his existence is organized, in his clothes, his living spaces, his relation to nature, hopelessly alientated with no chance of return.

So the designer, however he tries, can do only a more or less sophisticated cosmetic job. Trying to use the stylistic forms of the historic avant-garde he realizes that along underground paths, these became the mass décors of the ’50s; and in the same way, exploring his creative urge, in front of the evidence of his own lack of originality he can only give up and admit that he himself is banal. And architects and designers should not illude themselves – there will be no new label, no new “ism” to restore uniqueness, because all the possible definitions have also been used up.

Alchimia 1977-1987, “Banale”, Guia Sambonet, 1986

The priority of the “drawing” as a continuum, of decoration, of de-specialisation and “confused” methods of creation and production, of “ordered disorder valid only within itself” (The Alchimia Manifesto), of a “new morality” beyond the reach of (aesthetic) judgement, of weakness, emptiness, absence, of the space in between, and of the poetic vocation in an unbalanced and transitory contemporary present, manifest itself in the l’Oggetto Banale as an almost iconographic, and strangely contradictious, grammar. As so many of the exploratory strategies deployed by the studio the effect is one of continuous transition and reflective positioning, infusing and diffusing supposedly different traits of the object within each other, kitch translated as high culture, history as future, and rational as emotion and sentimentality. It is a practice of form that is constantly burning with at least two separate flames. In a personal, problematic, searching, and comprehensible light.

Paesaggio banale, Alessandro Mendini, 1979. Image from Collezione permanente Francesco Moschini e Gabriel Vaduva A.A.M architettura arte moderna

L’Oggetto Banale. Image from Alchimia: Never-Ending Italian Design by Kazuko Sato