Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Italian Radicals and Dutch conceptuals: the sensation of affect in two
movements
KEULEMANS, Guy / The College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales / Australia.
Experimental / Conceptual / Radical / Design / Affect
The Italian Radical movement of the 60s and 70s and Dutch
conceptual design from the 90s and 2000s share in common
the concern for experimental practices. However, their differences
in organization and ethics are notable and inform the
conceptualisation of their aesthetic experiments. This paper
uses Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of affect to investigate this
process.
1. Introduction
Concern for various forms of experimental and conceptual thinking
has long been important to product designers (Antonelli,
2011). In the second half of the 20th century, two of the more
important movements engaged with such methodologies are the
Italian Radicals from the 1960s and 70s, and Dutch conceptual
designers from the 90s and 2000s. Despite being sometimes
marginal in regards to actual penetration of the product landscape,
both continue to have sustained influence on the field and
in the design discourse. The vast majority of the critical writing
on these movements is, perhaps quite rightly, concerned with
topics such as social agenda and historical influence. Aesthetics
are of course considered, however conventionally aesthetics
are critiqued as resulting from stated or perceived conceptual,
ethical or idealogical positions. It is proposed that the relationship
between concepts and aesthetics is actually inversted, and
instead designers (and critics and market forces) develop a conceptualisation
of the work subsequent to aesthetic experimentation.
This paper explores how an understanding of Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of the affect and concept can interrogate this
proposition. In turn, these can notions can be used by designers
wishing to work affectively to build stronger, robust or more
flexible concepts.
2. Ratio and Mood
Italian Radicalism can be introduced through the work and experience
of one its most notable practitioners Ettore Sottsass.
Educated prior to WW2, Sottsass took advantage of the postwar
boom and built up his practice with a number of important
commissions from companies such as Olivetti, from whom
he designed the famous Valentine typewriter (1969) (Fig. 1).
However as early as the late 50s he became suspicious of the
consumer society and began to work in a counter-propositional
style that sought to invest meaning back into objects, whilst
simultaneously working as a serious Modernist industrial designer.
So Sottsass is both one of the earliest Radical designers
and part of the Modernist movement against which the Radicals
were reacting. However, his Modernist work was not orthodox.
His Valentine typewriter is clearly influenced from the Bauhaus,
yet biographer Barbara Radice says that he never full accepted
Bauhaus ideals just as they were. Instead he sought to produce
a “transplant operation” which re-arranged the ratios, distances
and weights that he saw in the Bauhaus style into an “irony of
dis-proportion” (Radice 1993: 142). Sottsass remarked upon his
early career:
“When I began designing machines I also began to think that
these objects…. …can touch the nerves, the blood, the muscles, the
eyes and the moods of people. Since then I have never designed
a product in the same way as I would design a sculpture, and I
have been utterly obsessed with the idea that… …I was setting off
a chain reaction of which I understood very little.” (Radice 1993:
109)
Figure 1. Valentine Typewriter by Ettore Sottsass (1969)
His work as a Radical did not replace this playful form of Modernism,
but instead sough to create social and conceptual meanings
through aesthetic experimentation. His quote above calls to
mind the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion
of affect; a non-reducible mediator that uses force and energy to
transmit intensities of sensation. For Deleuze and Guattari, art is
the composition of materials into tools for the experience of sensation.
Affect is transmitted in waves, producing “compounds of
sensation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 187). It is through affect
that Sottsass is able to “touch the nerves” and “moods” of
people. By re-arranging the visual qualities established by the
Bauhaus, Sottsass alters the transmission of affect and creates
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7