Ettore Sottsass’ psychedelic (and televised) epiphanies in New York

By 1969 Ettore Sottsass had been sharing for quite a long time his Memories of whipped cream with Domus, later to become Memoires, to emphasize their character as essays between critical and oneiric, between retro evocation and radical provocation. He had narrated Swinging London by photographing its boutiques and time-warped life, he had narrated Japan and then it was New York’s turn. It was one of his various journeys – a short time later came the one for the MoMA exhibition Italy: the new domestic landscape, evoked for Domus by Andrea Branzi in a small pop narrative firework all to be read – and all it took was a TV set with an anarchic functioning, to transform it into a psychedelic epiphany, in which the future founder of Memphis was revealed new keys to interpreting the visual and cultural panorama of Italy and the Western world. Here, you can share with us the first passage of that journey, published in March 1969 on issue 472, and you can find the full version by exploring the Domus Digital Archive. 

The real ““journey” began at six o’clock in the evening when, after a nine-hour flight (given the departure from Milan on Sunday), the suspicious four-engined Douglas 403 Rolls Royce happened to land on the JFK tarmac, and the last four hours were spent swaying in the fog, seatbelts fastened and nosmokingplease signal on; or rather, the “journey” began after the one to Manhattan, the city of New York, had ended, with the opulent yellow taxi buzzing through Queens, channelled in a crawling throng of opulent, ghostly cars along the track called Van Wyck Expressway and then along the Grand Central Parkway over the Triborough suspension bridge, leaving to the left, to the south-west, the hills covered with crosses, the constellation of cemeteries called Calvary and New Calvary, Mount Zion and Mount Olivet, Mount Carmel and Mount Judas, Cypress Hill and Lutheran Cemetery and St John's, Union Field Cemetery and Trinity Cemetery, then ending in the vast island of the Cemetery of the Evergreen, amidst misty moors of charred workshops seen from above and tundra of shacks of rotting planks, rusting iron and broken glass from the slingshots of boys who fled like shadows; amidst parks drenched in swampy fog; amidst cars crushed, off the road and overturned, abandoned with their cushions on the ground like tins of syrupy pineapples; The “journey” began when we arrived in the overheated room of the Stanhope Hotel, a luxurious hotel owned by French former feudal lords of William the Bastard (perhaps), given the presence of the family tree hanging in the lobby near the monitor (to see who comes in and who goes out when the whistle-geared doorman is off “to wash his hands”); the real “journey” began immediately, when I turned on the colour TV with the wrong buttons, because I don't know how to make it work, and Sophia Loren appeared, frowning, dressed as a princess, I think, she looked like a kind of nun, but with her face all pretty in cyclamen purple stripes, those wild ones that used to be in the shade of the woods and no longer exist, and behind Sophia the sky was a little green like good jade, the colour of apples, they say, and a little pink, the colour of mountain carnations, the perfumed ones that only grow in the sun on dry earth where (like ectoplasms) iridescent beetles run, and the fields were orange like the socks Nanda bought me in Florence for my fiftieth birthday.

There were also the medieval jousting tournaments, all wrong, with domineering warriors armed with spears but green as lizards and the old king's beard yellow as Oransoda, and the Spanish maidens lined up in conical hats and veils like the fairies of the Viareggio floats, all bluish with shades of green, looking like pipes to water the gardens of American suburbs; and the immaculate hero Cid, a mama’s boy, a mercenary sold to the highest bidder, came in all purple-red and stayed there, waiting for the ever-anxious Sofia to go to bed on her wedding night, etc. , and all the rhetoric of the knights, etc.; these lies that had been told to us for centuries before they had gone round the moon were finally painted in their proper colours, colours like those of Mickey Mouse and Snow White, but drugged with L.S.D. It was a happy journey at last.