“I Can’t Accept to Act Like a Zombie”:

Enzo Mari and Design’s Utopian Impulse

Italy is not a place short of iconic furniture and industrial designers. Gio Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Ettore Sottsass, Gae Aulenti are just a few names who revolutionized the industry in the 1960s and 1970s. None of them, however, quite compare with Enzo Mari (1932–2020). Not because the latter’s designs are better or more influential (although they are extraordinary, ranging from austere and functional to playful), but because through his practice, Mari embodied better than anyone the utopian impulse that, according to designer and radical socialist William Morris (1834–1896), has always been design’s mission.

This association might strike someone as odd—after all, what do Mari’s sleek, phytomorphic glass flower vases and industrially made modular bookcases have to do with the elaborately woven wallpapers and handmade tapestries for which Morris & Co. is famous? However, if you accept Morris’s view of craftsmanship as “attractive labor”—an antidote to the alienating effects of industrialization and division of labor, the foundation of a truly “popular art” in which beauty and utility, flair and function are one and indivisible—you can’t help but see how Mari was a subscriber to Morris’s humanist philosophy.¹ Through his idea of a “utopian standard” accessible to all, he was trying to adapt Morris’s view of design as the driver of social change for an age of booming consumerism and industrial mass production.²

The son of a Pugliese shoemaker and barber who migrated to the industrialized north by foot, Mari got his start as a conceptual artist in the early 1950s while studying at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. (Previously, he was forced to abandon his studies to support his family when he was barely 14.)

While at Brera, he got interested in seemingly arcane subjects: the psychology of perception, the interplay between volume and color, modular structures and numerical sequencing—all of which culminated in his adhesion to the neo-avant-garde group Arte Programmata (Programmed Art). Around the same time, Mari became a father and, together with his first wife, illustrator Iela Mari (1931–2014), he designed a series of children’s books and toys whose best example might be Il gioco delle favole (The Fable Game) from 1965—a book-cum-game designed, with its absence of explicit rules, to unleash children’s creative potential. This might seem a strange place to start for a designer. But as evinced by the Design Museum’s Enzo Mari, the first major English retrospective of his work, this early example already elucidates the preoccupations that would become the trademark of his mature phase: “form” as a timeless archetype alien to the vagaries and wastefulness imposed by the market; play as the epitome of “attractive labor,” conducive to a less passive, potentially transformative attitude toward the world.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mari made the progressive switch from artist to designer, working mainly for the manufacturer Danese. This production—best exemplified, on the one hand, by the truncated cylindrical marble vases of the “Paros” series (1964) and, on the other, by the modular, generative bookcase system “Glifo” (1966)—follows roughly two axes.

Mari experimented with different materials such as marble, welded brass, and plastic in an effort to tease out and foreground the inherent qualities of each. But he also explored the possibilities afforded by standardized industrial production and its techniques. The results are so perfect in themselves—the vacuum-pressed PVC fruit bowl “Atollo” (1965) might just be the best case in point—that it’s easy to forget that the drive behind this research was always to offset some of the most noxious aspects of industrial capitalism.

By appropriating industrial processes and designing modular structures that could be freely modified and expanded on the cheap, Mari sought to create mass-produced yet “eternal” furniture pieces that would counteract commodity fetishism and planned obsolescence. Similarly, letting materials shine through, often in a semifinished state, was a way to lower manufacturing costs and do away with the assembly-line style of labor, thus sparing the workers the compulsion to repeat “day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change.”³ (The culmination of this second approach might be the “Proposals for the hand craftsmanship of porcelain” or the “Samos” series from 1973: exquisite bowls and vases made of oven-cooked modular parts, which, by eschewing slip casting and a potter’s wheel, could only be produced each by a different skilled artisan.)

It was only a matter of time, though, before the contradictions of this “incremental” approach would come to the surface. Great ideas like the “Glifo” bookcase system failed in practice (too cheap, not aspirational enough). Projects that succeeded commercially sometimes angered him for other reasons. In the case of the “Samos” series, for example, Mari had hoped individual makers would use his examples to kickstart their own practice; he was dismayed to observe that his models were being followed to the letter months after production had started. It was this brewing dissatisfaction that eventually prompted Mari’s most iconoclastic (and, in his view, misunderstood) project, the work he is commonly known for.

Mari tells the story to Hans Ulrich Obrist in one of the extended video interviews on display at the Design Museum. (Obrist is the cocurator of the show with Francesca Giacomelli, Mari’s closest studio collaborator as well as the person in charge of his archive.) In 1971 Mari designed a sofa bed called “Day-Night,” which flopped commercially due to its no-frills approach. A younger Marxist comrade, visiting his studio months later, added insult to injury when he asked why an accomplished designer like Mari would own such an ugly couch. How is it that the public—so discerning when it comes to the qualities of Parma ham and Grana cheese—is absolutely clueless when it comes to “form”? asked Mari. He answered this question by positing that, if they had hands-on experience with how things are made, they would develop a greater appreciation for the structural properties of objects and thus would make more informed choices as consumers.

With this in mind, he conceived “Proposta per un’autoprogettazione” (Proposal for a self-design), nineteen pieces of furniture designed according to the basic principles of balloon-frame carpentry that could be built just by using hammer and nails.

The project, which came in the form of a booklet distributed free of charge to anyone willing to try their hand at building the pieces, was not meant as a refusal of modern society or retreat into some fantasy of autarky. Quite the contrary: The goal of building your own furniture was to foster a critical attitude by making. By Mari’s own admission, very few people understood the project for what it was and fewer still took his designs as cues to experiment and come up with their own bespoke pieces. However, millions of examples were made worldwide (including the version of “Chair 1” that sits proudly in my bedroom).

After this more militant phase that lasted most of the 1970s, Mari returned to a mode of working more akin to a critique from within. The last third of the retrospective at the Design Museum (itself a selection of a larger show that premiered at the Milan Triennale, Mari’s home turf) takes note of a collaboration Mari did to revive German manufacturer KPM Berlin, which culminated in the production of the “Berlin crockery set”(1995) as well as a workshop he conducted with Japanese craftspeople from the town of Hasami. A sizable chunk of the exhibition’s last rooms is dedicated to “retrospective” art installations, shrines that look back at his practice and influences. The absolute highlight, however, is a selection of scythes, both handcrafted and industrially produced, from the 1989 exhibition Perché una mostra di falci? (Why an exhibition of scythes?).

Again, the display of agricultural workers’ tools as sculptures might appear like a radical chic provocation, but—far from that—it encapsulates Mari’s own conception of design. As Morris writes in Useful Work versus Useless Toil, commodities under capitalism tend to fit into categories: ornamental luxury goods for the propertied classes, functional yet shoddy knockoffs for the burgeoning working class. In contrast, as tools perfectly molded to purpose, scythes embody an archetype stripped to its essence such that “it is often difficult to distinguish where the mere utilitarian part . . . ended and the ornamental began.”⁴

Like Morris, who was painfully aware of the contradiction of preaching world revolution while making furnishings for the sophisticated bourgeoisie, Mari never made peace with the sometimes middling practical results of his designs. He grew more gloomy and resigned as design, much like the culture at large, abandoned all pretense of social change and became more commercially driven. Hence, a certain image of him as a gruff stylite shouting damning indictments while perched up on his column. (For a good example, see the interview Mari gave to the journal Design Issues, from which the title of this profile, “I Can’t Accept to Act Like a Zombie,” proceeds.)⁵ Still, in a world pushed to the brink by capitalism, his work, whatever its shortcomings, makes a powerful case for useful objects that don’t come at the expense of the planet and other workers. Hopefully, the retrospective at the Design Museum will be the start of a much-deserved rediscovery, reaffirming the importance of creative, fulfilling labor.