Wild Beat of Memphis

By J.D. Reed

Bizarre new furniture sets trends, but makes the critics carp

Whether turning out sleek cameras or sophisticated cars, Italy has been the acknowledged capital of industrial design for a decade. Products penciled on Milan drawing boards seem to appear in museum collections even before they reach the assembly line. Now, thanks to a furniture group called Memphis, Milan is also the focus of the design world's hot new controversy.

The informal consortium of some 30 designers from eight countries has provoked some of the fiercest skirmishes since 1926, when U.S. Customs agents pondered whether Brancusi's Bird in Space was a work of art or a mere metal implement. Some are hailing Memphis as a quantum leap. Says Bill Lacy, president of New York's Cooper Union: "It's bold and shocking, a new way of thinking about furnishings." Its products grace several museum collections and have been featured in more than 200 magazine articles. But the group's self-conscious combination of campy references to the '50s and contemporary glitz has not impressed everyone. While he admires the bravado, U.S. Designer George Nelson notes that Memphis seems unconcerned with such staples as utility and affordability. Says he: "There's a bottomless appetite for novelty in the age of hype. The interesting thing is why they chose to call it furniture." And the Museum of Modern Art's director of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler, refuses to mount a Memphis show at MOMA. Says he: "Announcing that it's all deeply philosophical gives the media a peg to hang it on. But it's only a mix of California funk, 1920s Kurt Schwitters [the German Dadaist], and a few things that have been lying around unclaimed." Still, Ben Lloyd, an editor at Metropolitan Home magazine, speaks for many in the design world when he states that "Memphis has made furniture much more politically interesting than before."

If it has, the politics are those of anarchy. The group's 185 pieces of seating, storage, fabrics, rugs and accessories, produced over the past three years, loudly refute the tubular chrome-and-black-leather commandments of accepted modern style. Their form follows fantasy, and they owe more to the media messages of Marshall McLuhan than to the Bauhaus minimalism of Architect Mies van der Rohe. Memphis' latest whimsical collection of 66 pieces went partially on view earlier this month at the trendy Grace Designs showroom in Dallas, the Janus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Limn in San Francisco, and will soon open in New York City. The furniture draws smiles from viewers with its unlikely shapes, Pop art palette and a look of imminent collapse. Table legs lean toward disaster and supports bend as if fatigued. Spanish Designer Javier Mariscal's glass-and-red-metal trolley, called Hilton (all Memphis furniture is named for hotels), has a drunken, unsteady look due to its listing frame, although it is actually serviceable and solid. Italian Designer Michele De Lucchi's marble table, Sebastopole, seems to balance precariously on two brown bowling balls.

In every piece, Memphis impudently employs the twin taboos of modernism: pattern and ornament. Many are covered with vividly hued plastic laminate or sport metallic-threaded fabrics, and some are decorated with colored light bulbs. Los Angeles Designer Peter Shire's ironing-board-shaped table, Brazil, is finished in sea green, pink and yellow lacquer. It could serve as an animated cartoon prop, the perfect background for Tom and Jerry. Memphis Founder Ettore Sottsass Jr. has gone further. His Park Lane'coffee table is strictly from Oz: a giant black marble aspirin resting on delicate emerald green feet.

For Sottsass, 66, such contradictions are nothing new. Following his Turin university days, the Austrian-born designer witnessed the transition of Italian architecture from fascist monument to utilitarian modern. He became an acclaimed leader of the spare and sensuous new style in the 1960s, creating innovative and clean-lined office furniture and machinery for Olivetti, a task he still performs. But influenced by the Pop painting of Roy Lichtenstein, rock music and Indian mysticism, he surprised colleagues with Olivetti's plastic Valentine portable typewriter. He later did a table and stools called Mickey Mouse, and designed a disco outside Beirut. The restless maestro explains his professional schizophrenia in typically surreal terms: "If you see a girl in a bathing suit in the morning and an evening dress at night, you don't have to ask if she's the same girl."

Sottsass created Memphis in late 1980, he says, to "get rid of institutional rhetoric." The replacement? What he calls "suburban slang." The name appropriately comes from rock: Bob Dylan's Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again happened to be playing the night Sottsass crystalized the project with half a dozen young followers. His oddly hued, plastic-laminate-covered Carlton room divider, whose bookshelves extend at eccentric angles, is intentionally haphazard-looking. Since books tend to settle on an incline anyway, reasoned Sottsass, why force them to stand at attention? With a core committee in Milan, Sottsass informally reviews proposals and commissions plans from like-minded designers. "We are explorers out in unmapped places," he says. "We are not trying to define truth. We just want to keep exploring."

The Memphis quest, claims Sottsass, "implies an optimism that the body is always winning. The puritanical, Catholic approach of 'less is more' is wrong because we know that all Catholics are sinners." Yet Sottsass's domestic decor is far more spartan than hedonistic. His Milan apartment and office are simply furnished, with plain tables and black plastic chairs. Says he: "I have to be free of any outside information to concentrate. I would like to live in a monastery."

Memphis clients prefer more luxurious locales. Trend-and jet-setters always crowd Memphis openings in Europe and the U.S.; Couturier Karl Lagerfeld has completely done his Riviera apartment with Memphis, including a silk-cushioned, wooden-roped conversation pit by Japanese Masanori Umeda, in the shape of a boxing ring. The style is catching on with professional decorators as well. In Houston, a beauty salon and a cocktail lounge are currently being furnished exclusively with Memphis. The largest single professional group who buy the disturbing style, reports Lorry Parks, a partner in Dallas and Houston's Grace Designs, are affluent psychiatrists.

The prices are enough to send anyone to the couch. Some chairs go for $5,500, sofas for $6,200 and Architect Michael Graves' maple, brass and lacquered wood single-bed unit fetches a breathtaking $19,500. But Memphis' business-minded president Ernesto Gismondi, who also owns the highly successful Artemide line, is pushing for more marketable designs and prices. Memphis' latest edition sports straighter legs, more illuminating lamps and affordable price tags. "Fust," a metal-and-wood side chair by De Lucchi, for instance, sells for $275.

Will Memphis' innovation trickle down from the trendy heights? The one who seems least curious is Sottsass. "We are not designing for eternity. For me obsolescence is just the sugar of life." With the orders picking up in Milan, the immediate future of Memphis looks sweet indeed. --By J.D. Reed. Reported by Roberto Suro/Milan

With reporting by Roberto Suro/Milan