A sentence that we have often quoted, and which for a long time has had the value of a substantial biography of Enzo Mari, comes right from the pages of Domus, and more than a biography it is a definitive critical profile: “Mari is not a designer; if his objects did not exist I wouldn't particularly mind. Mari, instead, is the conscience of us all”.
Alessandro Mendini wrote this in a letter to Mari with which he opened issue 607 of July 1980: the director of the new Domus, setting a new intersection between design and the arts, in Sottsass's graphics destined to become as iconic as the portraits on the covers (and the covers by Alchimia and Occhiomagico in the following years), wears the garb of the advancing postmodern, and addresses the great Modern maestro as “design inquisitor”, "moralist", to underline their differences, but also to recognize how Mari would embody a need that the design of the years to come would feel more and more: the need of a conscience.
Dear Enzo Mari,
I have read the book that has just been written on your work as a designer. On my travels round the world as a reporter on design and sleuth of architecture and art, everybody asks me with curiosity for news of the famous Italian design, of its past fortunes and future hopes. And so I talk about the heyday of Bel Design and its decline, about the period of radical design and its bitter end.
Then I talk about the fact that young designers with golden pens just aren’t growing any more, and that this phenomenon has a very definite social sense, etcetera. Then I talk about the myths of Aulenti, Castiglioni, Magistretti, Munari, Sambonet, Sottsass, Zanuso and Maldonado the immigrant. Then I recall the industrial myths of Alessi, Artemide, Brion, Cassina, Flos, Gavina, Kartell and Olivetti. Then I introduce my hypothesis for a possible future eclectic road of Italian design, based on the diffusion of petty bourgeois “normality”, of a broader and more fanciful, less exclusive and schematic kind than that of the past thirty years.
What you are interested in is the design for the design, or rather, the design for the design for the design. In other words, you seek, propose and meditate only on the ‘project of man’.
At some point or other on these travels people ask me: “And what about this man Enzo Mari, who, besides his infinite objects for Danese, delivers irritating messages like his “Atlas according to Lenin”; who exactly is this Enzo Mari and what does he represent?” Then I have no doubts and I reply: “Mari is not a designer; if his objects did not exist I wouldn’t particularly mind. Mari, instead, is the conscience of us all”.
Now I am not a moralist and a demagogue like you. I cannot and I don’t want to distinguish the good from the bad, as you do. And I don’t believe that those I have listed hitherto can or want to either, because all of us take the part for the whole; we deliberately chew rubber bones. Whereas you bite only the real bone, though you know there’s no meat left on it by now. You’re not interested in the drawn project, except as an arrow to be shot at the illogical logic of the productive mechanism, as a theorem to demonstrate the incongruities of the system.
What you are interested in is the design for the design, or rather, the design for the design for the design. In other words, you seek, propose and meditate only on the “project of man”. And this means occupying yourself with morality, maybe even through the objects you do for Danese.
While we, hunched over our desks, keep drawing our hopeful lines, you at regular intervals have us jumping out of our chairs with some tragic new “final» message: mad, holy, severe, candid, alienated and at the same time concrete, as in your decomposition of the hammer and sickle into forty-four informal components, the graphically impeccable poster on “Shit”, the idea of letting everyone make furniture with rough boards and nails, the apocalyptic hypothesis for the total refoundation of design, the polemical failure of your exhibition on the Compasso d’Oro and, finally, this new book in which the author. Renato Pedio, flings in our faces your exhausting vocation as a constructor who destroys himself.
So I tell people who ask me about you that you don’t seem to be the usual designer, that you are like a “design inquisitor” who launches ecumenical and laconic appeals to us architects, us prodigal sons: “Empty everything, change everything, reinvent everything!”. Although I am not sensitive to the rhetoric of calls to order and to seriousness of the man who never contradicts himself, I want you to know that your periodic messages reach the depths of my conscience.