Contextual and Cultural Referencing in Art and Design: Context that Changed Design

“Anti-Design ……”

Anti-Design rejected the rational guidelines of the Modern Movement and sought to make an individual’s visionary communication within design acceptable.

Surrealism was one of the first examples of Anti-Design and in the 1940s it influenced the Turinese Baroque Style – a style of Italian designers, including Carlo Mollino, who were against rationalism.

Anti-Design influenced the progressive artists, commonly known as the avant-garde, in the late 1960s. At that time, several design groups that were forming in Italy no longer believed in Modernism. They protested against Modernism. According to them, Modernism was no longer a cultural compelling influence because it had been damaged by industrial interests, when industrialists turned it into a consumerist marketing venture.

The Anti-Design Movement highly criticized the advanced technology and consumerism. In 1974 a school called “Global Tools” was founded, in order to discover simple non-industrial techniques to encourage individual creativity. However, “Global Tools” lasted only a year and that marked the end of the first period of the Anti-Design of the 1970s. At that point, certain designers who were associated with the Anti-Design Movement, including Alessandro Mendini and Ugo La Pietra, thought that there was no future for the design that they believed in. However, within three years, those designers who were involved with Studio Alchimia took up the Anti-Design Movement once again. They wanted to bring back design that was spontaneous, creative and with a meaning. Studio Alchimia was an Italian design studio (not in favour of Modernism) founded in 1976, initially as a gallery to exhibit works which were not created under any industrial production pressure.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Charles Jencks, amongst other American critics of Modernism, called for “elements which are hybrid rather than pure …… messy vitality over obvious unity”. Jencks was very much against Modernism and he referred to the rectilinear high-rise buildings constructed in the 1960s as “dumb boxes”! Those buildings were inspired by the architecture of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe whom I mentioned when I wrote about the International Style and Bauhaus.

In the 1980s, when the American critics of Modernism emerged, along with Memphis (founded in Milan, Italy in 1981), Anti-Design, with its liberation from formality and simplicity evolved into a well-known international style – Post-Modernism.