Ettore Sottsass: Minimum Design

monograph on an outstanding artist working in the vein of the contemporary crossover of art and design

Some of Sottsass's works such as the one on the cover and others pictured in the inside at quick look resemble constructivist works for their angularity and polyglot elements. On closer, meditative-like look however, one senses the works do have an order, in some cases a consummate orderliness. Viewers will pick this up on their own; while the biographical material on the artist sheds light on how this is.

Having the modernist nomadic urge, the Austrian-born, European-educated Sottsass (b. 1917) traveled in Asian countries in the post-WWII years; and later in the U.S. for medical care of a serious kidney ailment, he developed an involvement with the Beat Generation of writers and artists including its most prominent and influential figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. The influence of Asian spirituality on the Beats is well-known. And in relation to this interest in the meditation, concentration, and yoga of such spirituality, the concept and practice of "centering" appeared in Western culture. Sottsass's art works can be seen as artistic, imaginative instances, or formations, of centering.

The names or descriptions of some of Sottsass's creations explicitly remark on the archetypal ideas and related forms which are their origins. Among these are ziggurats, stupas, and shiva. The first two are linked with the descriptive terms fire hydrants and gas pumps, evidencing the free- and broad-ranging, yet ultimately always centered consciousness of Asian spirituality and the Beats. And according to the field of design the artist also moves in, marketplace goods such as a typewriter and computer for Olivetti and furniture and kitchenware for other companies have no particular names or descriptive terms, though evidence the artist's distinctive stylization of an order for multiple parts often varying widely in shape and color.

The book's author Patrizia Ranzo sees Sottsass's diverse travels, interests, acquaintances, varied types of works, and use of different materials in them as a "stratigraphy". This inference of the varied levels and layers of earth known as "strata" which are different from one another yet which bind the Earth over eons captures both the artist's conceptualization and work of composition and also the viewer's comprehension of the works. Sottsass's art and design works reflect fundamentals of the natural and the spiritual world in use of all kinds of materials of the modern industrialized culture.

The book is another in the publisher's Minimum Design series.