Monday, February 25, 2008

Do Sugar Gliders Ovulate




HISTORY, PERIODS & STYLES -20th CENTURY
Victoria and Albert Museum
London


In quello che si dice essere il più grande museo al mondo di arte, artigianato e design, la galleria dedicata al Novecento del V&A ripercorre una storia del design attraverso quegli oggetti che più sono entrati e hanno lasciato un segno nelle case e nella vita degli inglesi. Questi articoli hanno aperto dialogo ancora vivace sui rapporti tra uomo e industrializzazione e su quello scambio reciproco di influenze tra la modernità che avanzando cambia la vita dell’uomo e le influenze che di rimando l’uomo esercita sul design. Il Novecento è il secolo in cui questo dibattito prende vita attraverso la voce, in Gran Bretagna e in America, del movimento Arts and Crafts, nato in reazione sia all’eclettismo stilistico dell’età vittoriana che alla spersonalizzazione indotta dalla produzione industriale. William Morris e i Preraffaelliti si ribellarono quindi all’impoverimento in fatto di qualità e di gusto nei prodotti industriali, che secondo loro dovevano avere anche un’altra feature: a low price. The question they raised and attempting to reconcile this conflict led to the birth of the design.

The twentieth century opened then the thrust of these profound cultural innovations which adds an even more important: the radio, a revolutionary tool for communication but also an object that has no antecedents and for which it is necessary to invent a form from scratch. Accomplice to the radio change the style of life, especially in cities, where people no longer recognize in ages past try a new style, which takes in fitting out the ways of multi-functionality and open-space and life becomes relaxed tone.


The design of the forties and fifties bears the signs of war and rationing of raw materials. The test to be overcome is not losing ground in front of the depletion of potential buyers and at the same time respect the strong limitations imposed by the Department of Commerce to the production of fabrics. The fabric could be printed only small reasons, so do not waste fabric in the seams, with only four colors were available and both types the amount of cotton which was to be used were subject to strict controls.


The Sixties sweep away all restrictions and indeed represent a time of great flowering of advertising design. Here comes the Mini, the first car that every Englishman can afford and takes off the design for the home, in everyday objects, from the plates, the first deltaphones, to the stylish lamps. Nothing can be subtracted in this process, nor is a typical British mug. The design takes weight and ends up into that great game that is politics, becoming an extremely effective communication tool that is used for various reasons, from posters against the isolation caused by fear of HIV in the eighties, up to a mug of that period ever made by the small Kent Miners' Union that was not to be swept away by the strikes of 1984 Tatcherism.

The volume of the fields in which artistic design is applied is left increasingly. However, in parallel, has also developed an awareness of design that, under pressure from consumers, the spokesman of environmental targeting in the mid-sixties sull'ecosotenibile with paper clothes, funny dresses in bright floral patterns , and even more in the nineties siding under the ideological banner of recycling.

Not to miss: the desk of the British Mauf made by Edward W. Rowcliffe, whose shapes recall traditional desks clean, but if combined with a processing and manufacturing of high quality materials are transformed into something never seen it before and I dedicate the gold medal winner at the Paris Expo of 1925.



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