Who Designed the 1980s Aesthetic?: Meet the Memphis Group, the Designers Who Created the 80s Iconic Look
For those who remember the 1980s, it can feel like they never left, so deeply ingrained have their designs become in the 21st century. But where did those designs themselves originate? Vibrant, clashing colors and patterns, bubbly shapes; “the geometric figures of Art Deco,” writes Sara Barnes at My Modern Met, “the color palette of Pop Art, and the 1950s kitsch” that inspired designers of all kinds came from a movement of artists who called themselves the Memphis Group, after Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” a song “played on repeat during their first meeting” in a tiny Milan apartment. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to think of any other design phenomenon that can be located as specifically to a group of people,” says Yale Center of British Art’s Glenn Adamson in the Vox explainer above,
Founded in December 1980 by designer Ettore Sottsass — known for his red Olivetti Valentine typewriter — and several like-minded colleagues, the movement made a deliberate attempt to disrupt the austere, clean lines of the 70s with work they described as “radical, funny, and outrageous.” They flaunted what had been considered “good taste” with abandon. Memphis design shows Bauhaus influences — though it rejected the “strict, straight lines of modernism,” notes Curbed. It taps the anarchic spirit of Dada, without the edgy, anarchist politics that drove that movement. It is mainly characterized by its use of laminate flooring materials on tables and lamps and the “Bacterio print,” the squiggle design which Sottsass created in 1978 and which became “Memphis’s trademark pattern.”
Memphis design shared with modernism another quality early modernists themselves fully embraced: “Nothing was commercially successful at the time,” says Barbara Radice, Sottsass’s widow and Memphis group historian. But David Bowie and Karl Lagerfield were early adopters, and the group’s 80s work eventually made them stars. “We came from being nobodies,” says designer Martine Bedin. By 1984, they were celebrated by the city of Memphis, Tennessee and given the key to the city. “They were waiting for us at the airport with a band,” Bedin remembers. “It was completely crazy.” The Memphis Group had officially changed the world of art, architecture, and design. The following year, Sottsass left the group, and it formally disbanded in 1987, having left its mark for decades to come.
By the end of the 80s, Memphis’ look had become pop culture wallpaper, informing the sets, titles, and fashions of TV staples like Saved by the Bell, which debuted in 1989. “Although their designs didn’t end up in people’s homes,” notes Vox — or at least not right away — “they inspired many designers working in different mediums.” Find out above how “everything from fashion to music videos became influenced” by the loud, playful visual vocabulary of the Memphis Group artists, and learn more about the designers of “David Bowie’s favorite furniture” here.
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Watch Brian Eno’s “Video Paintings,” Where 1980s TV Technology Meets Visual Art
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When Salvador Dalí Created a Surrealist Funhouse at New York World’s Fair (1939)
Only the violence and duration of your hardened dream can resist the hideous mechanical civilization that is your enemy, that is also the enemy of the ‘..pleasure-..principle’ of all men. It is man’s right to love women with the ecstatic heads of fish. — Salvador Dalí, “Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness”
Whatever organizers of the 1939 New York World’s Fair thought they might get when Salvador Dalí was chosen to design a pavilion, they got a Coney Island of the Surrealist mind. The vision was so initially upsetting, the committee felt compelled to censor Dalí’s plans. They nixed the idea, for example, of reproducing a gigantic reproduction of Boticelli’s Venus with a fish head — as well as fish heads for the many partially nude models in Dalí’s exhibit. These and other changes enraged the artist, and he hired a pilot to drop a manifesto over the city in which he declared “the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness.”
It was all part of the theater of the “Dream of Venus,” Dalí’s so-called “funhouse” and public experiment playing with “the old polarity between the elite and popular cultures,” says Montse Aguer, Director of the Dalí Museums.
This conflict had “changed into a tense confrontation between true art and mass culture, with all that the second ambiguous concept brought with it consumed by the masses, but not produced by them.” While Dalí rained down a “screw you” letter to the establishment, he also seduced the public away from “the streamline style that dominated the Expo in 1939” — the “modern architecture, which with time had turned against modern life.”
Rather than a sleek “World of Tomorrow,” visitors to Dalí’s pavilion encountered “a kind of shapeless mountain from which sprouts out, like the body of a sticky hedgehog, a series of soft appendages, some in the shape of arms and hand; others of cactus or tips and others of crutches…. The world of machines, cars and robots had been replaced — or should one say challenged — by a universe of dreams.” Inside the weird structure, a goddess stretched out on bed, dreaming two dreams, “wet,” and “dry.” As Dangerous Minds describes it, once visitors entered the exhibit, through a giant pair of legs, they encountered:
Two huge swimming pools featured partially nude models floating around in the water. In one of the pools, a woman dressed in a head-to-toe rubber suit that had been painted with piano keys cavorted around with other “mermaids” who “played” her imaginary piano. In fact, the place was filled with scantly-clad women lying in beds or perched on top of a taxi being driven by a female looking S&M batwoman. There were functional telephones made of rubber as well as an offputting life-size version of a cow’s udder that you could touch—if you wanted to, that is.
The exhibition had been coordinated by architect, artist, and collector Ian Woodner and New York art dealer Julien Levy. It was so popular “it reopened for a second season,” notes Messy Nessy, “but once torn down it faded from memory and its outlandishness became the stuff of urban myth.” In 2002, the photographs here by German-born photographer Eric Schaal were rediscovered and collected in a book titled Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 World’s Fair. See rare footage from the pavilion in the short documentary at the top and read Dalí’s manifesto here.
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Salvador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Contributed “Nothing” to Art (1986)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Martin Scorsese Introduces Classic Movies: From Citizen Kane and Vertigo to Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind
In today’s cinema culture, there’s only one thing as reliably entertaining as watching a Martin Scorsese movie: watching Martin Scorsese talk about the movies of his predecessors. Before becoming a director, one must understand what a director does, an education delivered to the young Scorsese practically at a stroke by Citizen Kane. Watching Orson Welles’ masterpiece (in the original sense), Scorsese also “began to become aware of editing and camera positions,” as he recalls in the clip above.
It comes from an interview conducted by the American Film Institute, which also collected the ultra-cinephile New Hollywood icon’s takes on a series of other classic pictures including John Ford’s The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
In discussing Citizen Kane these days, of course, a different Hitchcock film tends to rush into the discussion: Vertigo, which displaced Citizen Kane on the top spot of the latest Sight & Sound Critics Poll in 2012. Whatever his feelings about the comparative merits of Welles and Hitchcock, Scorsese would surely be unlikely to balk at this changing of the guard.
When he first saw Vertigo with his friends, as he puts it in the clip just above, “we thought it was good; we didn’t know why.” Re-watching it in the intervening decades, he found its beating heart in “the obsession of the character,” James Stewart’s traumatized ex-cop bent on re-creating the object of his infatuation. “The story doesn’t matter. You watch that film repeatedly and repeatedly because of the way he takes you through his obsession.”
The late 1950s and early 60s must have been a fine time for a budding cinephile. Not only could you enter and leave the theater at any time, staying as long as you liked — a custom whose pleasures he emphasizes more than once — you could walk in on these works of surprising cinematic art. But stepping into David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the twenty-year-old Scorsese had to have an inkling of what he was in for. “There it is, up on the screen in 70 millimeter,” he remembers. “The main character is not Ben-Hur, it’s not a saint, it’s not a man struggling to come to terms with God and his soul and his heart; it’s a character that really, in a way, comes out of a B movie.” No doubt this portrayal of Lawrence as a “self-destructive” and “self-loathing” protagonist at an epic scale did its part to influence what would become Scorsese’s own cinema.
Scorsese also finds much to admire, and even use, in films from before his time. “It’s melodramatic, it’s stereotypes — racial stereotypes — and yet, you know, those characters,” he says of Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind. “There’s complexity to them.” Though its production “smacks of the nineteenth century” (with which Scorsese himself has exhibited his own fascination in The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York), it stands alongside Casablanca as one of “the two high points of the studio system.” Few experiences so forthrightly deliver “that magic of old Hollywood,” one variety of the power of cinema that Scorsese knows well. But as his remarks on everything from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to Thorald Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades to Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar show us, he’s more than acquainted with many other varieties besides.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Design Thinking for the Greater Good: A Free Online Course from the University of Virginia
Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector shows how and why human-centered design is a powerful tool. Offered by the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, the course lets students “view design thinking success stories from around the world, in areas as diverse as government, health care, and education.” Throughout the course, students will “learn the tools, techniques and mindset needed to use design thinking to uncover new and creative solutions in the social sector.”
You can take Design Thinking for the Greater Good for free by selecting the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee.
Design Thinking for the Greater Good has been added to our list of Free Business Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Read More...Meet the Inventor of Karaoke, Daisuke Inoue, Who Wanted to “Teach the World to Sing”
Daisuke Inoue has been honored with a rare, indeed almost certainly unique combination of laurels. In 1999, Time magazine named him among the “Most Influential Asians of the Century.” Five years later he won an Ig Nobel Prize, which honors particularly strange and risible developments in science, technology, and culture. Inoue had come up with the device that made his name decades earlier, in the early 1970s, but its influence has proven enduring still today. It is he whom history now credits with the invention of the karaoke machine, the assisted-singing device that the Ig Nobel committee, awarding its Peace Prize, described as “an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.”
The achievement of an Ig Nobel recipient should be one that “makes people laugh, then think.” Over its half-century of existence, many have laughed at karaoke, especially as ostensibly practiced by the drunken salarymen of its homeland. But upon further consideration, few Japanese inventions have been as important.
Hence its prominent inclusion in Japanologist Matt Alt’s recent book Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. As Alt tells its story, the karaoke machine emerged out of Sannomiya, Kobe’s red-light district, which might seem an unlikely birthplace — until you consider its “some four thousand drinking establishments crammed into a cluster of streets and alleys just a kilometer in radius.”
In these bars Inoue worked as a hiki-katari, a kind of freelance musician who specialized in “sing-alongs, retuning their performances on the fly to match the singing abilities and sobriety levels of paying customers.” This was karaoke (the Japanese term means, literally, “empty orchestra”) before karaoke as we know it. Inoue had mastered its rigors to such an extent that he became known as “Dr. Sing-along,” and the sheer demand for his services inspired him to create a kind of automatic replacement he could send to extra gigs. The 8 Juke, as he called it, amounted to an 8‑track car stereo connected to a microphone, reverb box, and coin slot. Pre-loaded with instrumental covers of bar-goers’ favorite songs, the 8 Jukes Inoue made soon started taking in more coins than they could handle.
“When I made the first Juke 8s, a brother-in-law suggested I take out a patent,” Inoue said in a 2013 interview. “But at the time, I didn’t think anything would come of it.” Having assembled his invention from off-the-shelf components, he didn’t think there was anything patentable about it, and unknown to him, at least one similar device had already been built elsewhere in Japan. But what Inoue invented, as Alt puts it, was “the total package of hardware and custom software that allowed karaoke to grow from a local fad into an enormous global business.” Had it been patented, says Inoue himself, “I don’t think karaoke would have grown like it did.” Would it have grown to have, as Alt puts it, “profound effects on the fantasy lives of Japanese and Westerners both”? And would Inoue have found himself onstage more than 30 years later at the Ig Nobels, leading a crowd of Americans in a round of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Design Thinking for the Greater Good: A Free Online Course from the University of Virginia
Design Thinking for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector shows how and why human-centered design is a powerful tool. Offered by the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, the course lets students “view design thinking success stories from around the world, in areas as diverse as government, health care, and education.” Throughout the course, students will “learn the tools, techniques and mindset needed to use design thinking to uncover new and creative solutions in the social sector.”
You can take Design Thinking for the Greater Good for free by selecting the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee.
Design Thinking for the Greater Good has been added to our list of Business Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Free: A Crash Course in Design Thinking from Stanford’s Design School
Download 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media
Read More...Digital Transformation: A Free Online Course from the University of Virginia & Boston Consulting Group
Digital Transformation is a hot topic. But what exactly is digital transformation, and what does it mean for companies? This course developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and led by Darden faculty and Boston Consulting Group experts, will examine the pace of digital change and the imperative it creates for businesses. Students will then examine “what it takes to win in the digital age and how to identify key areas to digitize, including strategy, core processes, and technology.”
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- describe the underlying economics of innovation, technology, and market disruptions.
- weigh the pros and cons of current digital technologies driving advancement.
- utilize BCG’s digital transformation framework as a “how-to” for digitizing your organization.
You can take Digital Transformation for free by selecting the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee.
Digital Transformation has been added to our list of Business Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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For a complete list of online courses, please visit our complete collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
For a list of online certificate programs, visit 200 Online Certificate & Microcredential Programs from Leading Universities & Companies, which features programs from our partners Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn and edX.
And if you’re interested in Online Mini-Masters and Master’s Degrees programs from universities, see our collection: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Masters, Mini Masters, Bachelors & Mini Bachelors from Top Universities.
Read More...Keith Richards Shows Us How to Play the Blues, Inspired by Robert Johnson, on the Acoustic Guitar
To me Robert Johnson’s influence — he was like a comet or a meteor that came along and, BOOM, suddenly he raised the ante, suddenly you just had to aim that much higher.
As Keith Richards tells it, the first time he met Brian Jones, the two “went around to his apartment crash-pad,” where all Jones had was “a chair, a record player, and a few records, one of which was Robert Johnson.” Jones put on the record, and the moment changed Richards’ life. He wasn’t so much interested in the devil at the crossroads. The first question he asked — “Who’s that?” — was followed by, “Yeah, but who’s the other guy playing with him? That, too, was Robert Johnson, playing rhythm with his thumb while bending and sliding with his fingers, the fancy guitar work that earned him the envy of fellow bluesmen, and led to the rumor his skills came from hell.
“One of the staples of Johnson’s style is his ability to sound at times like two guitar players,” writes Andy Aledort at Guitar World, “combining driving rhythms on the lower strings with melodic figures with the higher strings.” Like every other British guitarist of his generation, Richards was enchanted. “I’ve never heard anybody before or since use the form and bend it quite so much to make it work for himself…. The guitar playing — it was almost like listening to Bach. You know, you think you’re getting a handle on playing the blues, and then you hear Robert Johnson….”
The legendary bluesman became not only Richards’ hero, but also his teacher. “We all felt there was a certain gap in our education,” he tells The Guardian, “so we all scrambled back to the 20s and 30s to figure out how Charlie Patton did this, or Robert Johnson, who, after all, was and still probably is the supremo.”
Figuring out what Johnson did still consumes his biggest fans. Since his recordings were intentionally sped up, interpreters of his music must make their best guesses about his tunings, which “can be broken down into four categories: standard tuning, open G, open D and drop D,” Aledort notes. (There are other arguments for alternate tunings.) Richards frequently used open tunings like Johnson’s before he learned 5‑string open G from Ry Cooder, on songs, for example, like “Street Fighting Man.” At the top, he gives us his interpretation of Johnson’s “32–20 Blues,” in standard tuning.
And just above, Keef offers a brief lesson on how to play the blues, mumbling and growling over a 12-bar vamp. The music took him over, he says, “it’s just something you’ve got to do. You have no choice. I mean, we had other things to do and everything, but once you got bitten by the bug, you had to find out how it’s done, and every three minutes of soundbite would be like an education.”
What did their blues heroes think of the Stones? The band never got to meet Robert Johnson, of course, but he might have been appreciative. “I got the chance to sit around with Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack,” says Keith, “and they just wanted to share ideas.” Johnson didn’t leave much behind to learn from, but his keenest students found exactly what they needed in his few haunting recordings.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The World’s First Bass Guitar (1936)
Image via Ebay
The big, stand-up double bass or “bull fiddle,” as it’s been called, dates to the 15th century. The design has evolved, but its four strings and EADG tuning have remained standard features of basses for several hundred years of classical and, later, jazz, country, and early rock and roll. Its booming tone and unwieldy size notwithstanding, the venerable instrument is a member of the violin family. So, when did the four-string bass become a bass guitar?
Leo Fender’s 1951 Precision Bass is frequently cited as the first — “such a special instrument,” writes the Fender company, that “if Clarence Leo Fender were to be remembered for nothing else, surely it would be the Precision — an instrument — indeed a whole new kind of instrument — that simply didn’t exist before he invented it.”
Prior to Fender’s innovation, it was thought that the earliest examples of electric basses were stand-up models like Regal’s Electrified Double Bass and Rickenbacker’s Electro-Bass-Viol, both dating from 1936.
Image via Ebay
But as historian and writer Peter Blecha found out, the first electric bass guitar actually appeared that same year, invented in ‘36 by “musician/instructor/basement tinkerer” Paul H. Tutmarc, “a pioneer in electric pickup design who marketed a line of electric lapsteel guitars under the Audiovox brand out of the unlikely town of Seattle.” Throughout the thirties and forties, notes Guitar World, Tutmarc “made a number of guitars and amplifiers under the Audiovox brand.” In 1935, he invented a “New Type Bull Fiddle,” an electric stand-up bass. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced it at the time as good news for the “poor bass-fiddler… who has to lug his big bull-fiddle home” at the end of the night.
The following year, Tutmarc combined his instrument-making skills into the world’s first bass guitar, the Audiovox 736 Electric Bass Fiddle, a true original and a “radical design breakthrough,” Blecha writes. Tutmarc’s instrument solved the bassist’s problems of being inaudible in a big band setting and being barely able to carry one’s instrument to and from a gig. The 736 did not catch on outside Seattle, but it did get out a lot around the city.
Tutmarc “gave the bass to his wife Lorraine, who used it while performing with the Tutmarc family band. [He] also sold copies to various gospel, Hawaiian, and country players.” (The bass cost around $65, or $1,150 today, with a separate amp that sold for $95.) Now, there are only three known Audiovox 736s in existence: one held by a private collector, another at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and a third auctioned a few years ago on Ebay for $23,000.
Did Leo Fender see one of Tutmarc’s creations when he invented the first truly mass-market electric bass guitar? Perhaps, but it hardly matters. It was Fender’s instrument that would catch on — for good — fifteen years after the Audiovox 736, and it was Tutmarc’s fate to be largely forgotten by musical history, “destined to remain obscure,” Blecha writes, “to the extent that, in the wake of Leo Fender’s Precision Bass… the very existence of a previous electric fretted bass (played horizontally) was effectively forgotten.” See an introduction and demonstration of the first bass guitar just above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles–A Free Online Documentary
From KCET (the public broadcaster serving SoCal) comes the documentary, That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles. “During his time spent in Southern California in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright accelerated the search for L.A.‘s authentic architecture that was suitable to the city’s culture and landscape. Writer/Director Chris Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, explores the houses the legendary architect built in Los Angeles. The documentary also delves into the critic’s provocative theory that these homes were also a means of artistic catharsis for Wright, who was recovering from a violent tragic episode in his life.” You can watch That Far Corner online. It will also be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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