Expanding Functionality: Operational Exchanges between Ettore Sottsass and Allen Ginsberg

Exploring Functionality

Ettore Sottsass Jr. is a particularly interesting case for exploring the concept of functionality in the field of design. Though a radical critic of functionalism and its concomitant positivism,¹ he did not reject the idea of “function” per se,² seeking rather to shake it from its rationalist complacency by calling for an “expansion” of approaches to it. This expansion should be understood as a critique of the finality at play in the notion of “function.” Despite the plurality³ of functionalist doctrines, one thing they all have in common is an understanding of the notion of function in terms of “finality,” since a function is always designed for a given end and an identifiable purpose. Vases are used to hold flowers or decorate a patch of domestic space, bowls are used to hold food or other things. Sottsass’ output of ceramics in the 1960s, on the other hand, including the series Ceramiche delle tenebre (Darkness Ceramics, 1963), Offerta a Siva (Offerings to Shiva, 1964), Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants & Gas Pumps (1965–66) and Yantra (1969), deliberately minimises the purposeful­ness and finality of functionality. The narrowing of the functional remit does not, however, equate to a diminution of functionality for Sottsass. Rather it is the principle underlying its expansion: “My intention was to ‘not make trinkets’ but to concentrate the object so much that it escapes its ordinary functions (though these are still maintained), and thereby plunge it into a sphere of superior functionality.”⁴

Sottsass here seeks to redefine the very concept of func­tion, aiming to free it from its purposive chains and unveiling an original philosophical concept: functionality without purposive function. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that in the sense that this “superior func­tionality” operates without a pre-established finality, it overspills the conventional functionalist framework: something functions, an operation takes place, without being determined in terms of a finality that can be iden­tified from the outset. This process of exploration plunges us into the event of the design being produced, at the moment when the thing designed presents a form of potential, fleeting, as yet unstable functionality. This instant of indeterminacy cannot be equated with a random process: rather, Sottsass’ purpose was to imbue the creative event with operational intuitions and func­tions that he saw at work in the poetry of the Beat Generation, particularly that of Allen Ginsberg, combin­ing Buddhist motifs with a critical political gaze brought to bear on the consumer society of the day. The aim of this text, then, is to shed light on the constitutive rela­tionship between Sottsass’ work on ceramics and Gins­berg’s work on poetry at this time and the way both draw on Indian spirituality, seeking to translate it via the mate­riality of objects made of, respectively, terracotta and words. I take this relationship as the backdrop for the emergence of a new mode in understanding the func­tionality of things.

Expanding Functionality

Looking back at his ceramic work of the 1960s, influ­enced by traditional Indian culture, Buddhism, and yoga, Sottsass pointed out that the experimental work is perhaps merely a way of expanding the concept of ‘the functional’ to the subconscious and unconscious psychic spheres, given that those of the Bauhaus and all that generation never gave it any thought.”⁵ Framing his experiments in terms of a broader theorisation of func­tionality remained a feature of Sottsass’ thought over the following decades, as indicated by this quote from 1989:

I think that functionalism has lost the meaning that the Bauhaus had originally given it. [...] Of course, function is important, but it’s not the final word because you can never precisely define the function of an object [...]. Its definition has to be enlarged because objects are functional to life.⁶

Understanding this call for an “expansion” of the notion of function means starting by turning the spotlight on the figure of the Bauhaus that Sottsass here uses as a counter-model.⁷ Sottsass’ essay “Expérience de la céramique” mocks the rationalist vision of functionalism inherited from Hannes Meyer’s Bauhaus:⁸

They had this idea that man could solve everything rationally and therefore the idea of a well-ordered petty bourgeois society with the dining room table, chairs, lamp, serving trolley, rug, frame, stairs, bedroom, the window overlooking the garden, the child playing in the garden, the tree in the garden, the shade beneath the tree, the bench in the shade, the pensioner on the bench, the wife in her apron [...]. They didn’t foresee that they would all get drunk, they would all be cuckolded and young girls who got pregnant without love would end up in clinics where everyone is so kind. Amen.⁹

Above and beyond the ironic image in Sottsass’ text, he sets two concrete limits for the concept of “function” as the active heart of any functionalist doctrine. The first challenges the idea that design starts with functional analysis. In this perspective, functionality is the necessary opening step in any design process. The careful study of the various use functions of an item is what initiates the design event, understood as the process of shaping and organising those functions. The second, which is concom­itant to the first, critiques functionalism for turning design into an activity whereby the designer seeks to control the lifestyle he is shaping. Countering function­ality considered as a condition for design activity and as the designer’s control over the lifestyle he creates, Sottsass opens up a new path in which life events do not let themselves be framed by predetermined functional­ity; rather, he designs alternative, unexpected, prolifer^­ating lines of function.

Learning by living: the Influence of the Beat Generation

Ettore Sottsass spent 1962 convalescing in California following treatment for a serious degenerative kidney condition at a Palo Alto hospital. He spent time with the leading figures of the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg. Sottsass’ first wife, Fernanda Pivano, known as Nanda, an Italian publisher and translator who was one of the first to promote Ginsberg’s poetry,¹⁰ was then working on a translation of Ginsberg’s famous incanta­tory poem of 1955, Howl, and an anthology of Beat poems for Italian readers.¹¹

Sottsass and Ginsberg had one major thing in common: their time in India. Sottsass and his wife had spent three months in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma from October to December 1961, while Ginsberg travelled to India in 1962-1963.¹² The friendship and common interests between Pivano, Sottsass and Ginsberg culminated in the 1967 publication of the first issue of Pianeta Fresco, an underground journal with an experimental layout and design inspired by the San Francisco Oracle, which published new poems by Ginsberg and extracts from the sacred Indian text Prajñāpāramitā. Sottsass’ work was clearly influenced by his encounter with Ginsberg, as he acknowledged: “I was prepared for all this, I was like a layer of wax waiting to receive those signs.”¹³ The years he spent frequenting the Beat poets imbued Sottsass with the unique value of the limits of experience as a catalyst for creativity that is open to the world.¹⁴ He brought the same approach to the field of design, outlining the fundamentals of what might be called a form of learning by living, an existential mode of learning by doing.¹⁵ In 1962, he started planning the series of Darkness ceramics drawing on his experience of ill health and imminent death: “I would think about it at night when the medicine stopped me from sleeping. That’s why they are called Darkness Ceramics.”¹⁶ The vases were not intended for just any user: Sottsass designed them initially for the community of the living and ghosts¹⁷ around him at that critical time, creating a non-monumental design that laid no claim to univer^­sality. He clearly expressed the same idea in a 1968 text on the ability of design to foresee the future:

I don’t understand universal words. That’s why it is very complicated to draw the future of anything involving men, to talk for instance about the future of people’s houses or furniture, people’s children’s toys, or people’s wives’ jewellery. [...] Personally, I imagine a future for myself and my friends.¹⁸

Like the Beat poets, Sottsass drew on an initiatory expe­rience to feed the design process and rethink the horizon of reception of the object designed, thereby breaking with functionalist creed. The creative impulse, which he repeated with the series of dishes Offerings to Shiva in 1964 in ritual recognition of his remission, thus became an early hint of the Beat Generation’s influence on his work.

The Object as Yantra

In December 1969, Ettore Sottsass Jr. exhibited a series of twenty-eight ceramics, the Yantra di Terracotta, at the Design Center Milan. The shiny vases are shaped with sharp angles, creating an unusual landscape of radiant monochrome geometries in shades of black, red, white, blue, yellow, and green. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 The series takes its name, Yantra, from a book that Ginsberg gave Sottsass, Ajit Mookerjee’s Tantra Art, published in 1966.¹⁹ Tantra refers to the full set of key texts in vajrayāna Buddhism.

This Indo-Tibetan form of Buddhism sees the body and materiality of the senses as the conduit for spiritual awakening. Mookerjee’s book presents Tantra both as a life experience and a “scientific method”²⁰ for achieving the transformation; Sottsass sought to convert this into a design methodology in shaping his ceramics, which he thought of as individual “yantras.” Mookerjee’s definition, taken up by Sottsass in his 1970 article “Drawing a yantra,” is as follows:

Yantra is essentially a geometrical composition; but to understand its true nature, one has to go beyond the notions of geometry into those of dynamics. [...] The yantra form is similarly constructed to induce, bear, and convey a particular pattern of thoughts and forces. To get into that form is to get into that thought.²¹

Traditionally, a yantra (a Sanskrit term meaning “instru­ment of control”) is used by believers to guide their meditation–a mandala is the most familiar example in the West. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 Yantras are primarily operational and secondarily symbolic, as simply looking at them transforms the worshipper’s state of conscious- ness. They are more akin to architectonic elements than mere illustrations, diagrammatically building a means of inhabiting perception.²²

The series explores the Western context of a consumer society in which design is increasingly critiqued.²³ Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is significant in this context: above and beyond the book materialising the questions shared by the two men, his work led Sottsass to explore the means of understanding certain frameworks of Indian and Tibetan spiritual practice as a way of making them operational in the arena of contemporary political thought. Understanding what Sottsass intuited in Ginsberg’s poetry and sought to incorporate into his own work as a designer means looking at the key elements of Ginsberg’s poetry. From the 1950s on, in Howl and Kaddish, Ginsberg’s writing was influenced by his meditation and reading of sacred Buddhist texts. Only in the 1960s, however, did the influence come to shape his work definitively, in the collection Planet News.²⁴ What Ginsberg sought in Buddhism was a means of making poetic activity operational. Using mantras gave him a locus to experiment with language, placing breath, phrasing, and sound vibrations at the heart of his writing. In this sense, what Tantra gave him was not so much a symbolic imaginary as a physical, material, almost machinic use of language, making prosody the mainstay of his writing practice. While poetry in English has traditionally been structured by a regular metre imposed on the text,²⁵ Ginsberg’s poetic innovation was to define an internal metre correspond­ing to the physiological movements of the person reading the poem aloud. For Ginsberg, the importance of the body and the quiver of organs in speech and vocal expression open up a form of political challenge to public order, making Buddhism the conduit for a “political urgency for his poetry.”²⁶ Chanting mantras offers both artistic and political innovation, combining the integrity of individual demands–to have your voice heard, particularly as a homosexual pacifist in 1960s America–and the Far Eastern ideal of fluctuating, unsta­ble subjectivity.

In this sense, what Ginsberg does with mantras in poetry, Sottsass does with yantras in ceramics and design more broadly.²⁷ Sottsass does not simply copy Ginsberg’s approach, but transforms the geometric visual language and perception associated with it. While the geometry reflects the dominant form of expression of 1950s rationalist design, from Max Bill’s gut Form to a Gestalt-inspired semiotics of objects, it is also taken further, elsewhere, by Sottsass’ connection between practising yantras and design:

I also sought hard to wrest geometric shapes from mathematics, from intellectual rigour, to return to possible mythical archetypes, to signs in which history can be identified from the thickness of its oldest layers, like earth can be known from its geology.²⁸

Sottsass brings into play an Indian origin for geometry that is ritual rather than rational.²⁹ Geometrical figures are no longer the products of technological rationalisation or the expression of a sign promoting the legibility of a given commodity, but rather a call to concentration. Geometry is no longer the rational translation of a functional form; it becomes the expression of a play of operational forces that functions without being determined by a given finality. Pe perception of the yantra object thus leads not so much to abstract meditation as to a conversion of the gaze brought to bear on the object itself in the context of an industrial, productivist material culture.

Towards Functionality Without Function

This article has focused on exploring the “superior functionality” Ettore Sottsass set against conventional functionalism–shaping a functionality that is not frozen into a predetermined, final, predestined finality.

The strength of Sottsass’ ceramics, most powerfully in the Yantra series of 1969, lies not in the evocation of tantric ritual as mere symbolism or folklore, but rather in giving shape to an operational framework that is equally present in Ginsberg’s poetry. The circulation of operations and frameworks from the field of Buddhist practice to poetic prosody and the design of household objects is an instance of superior functionality: terracotta, tantric yantras, sacred texts, the practice of meditation and Ginsberg’s poetry are a body of materials that Sottsass strives to bring into use in designing his ceramics. Each Yantra vase thus presents a form of functionality without immediate finality, just as meditation is a means and a technique with no preconceived purpose. The aim is not to furnish the user with something utilitarian, but to transform his perception; not to finalise an interaction, but on the contrary to open it up. 

The nested geometric shapes on the Yantra vases create an effect of radiance, triggering less an immediate reading of the object–in line with the principles of the psychology of form–than an invitation to question our visual relationship with the object. Sottsass uses the series to influence our perception: the viewer no longer perceives the objects with an equal and distant eye as inert, interchangeable use functions, but engages in a process of visualisation proper that explores our relationship with the objects that fill our surroundings. The object functions as a question that calls on us and places demands on us before its use, its purpose, is determined: “In a room (as empty as possible) not more than one of these ‘terracotta yantras’ should be used. Otherwise the focus disappears and the Yantra would become just another object in the room.”³⁰

While this mode of functionality gives us a better under- standing of Ettore Sottsass Jr.’s work, it also opens the way to understanding functionality when it is placed at the very heart of the design process: whenever I design something–not yet knowing what, the whole issue being to come to a definition–I am working with unpurposive operational frameworks, in the course of an experiment. What is foregrounded here is the functional mode of existence of a prototype. A prototype, starting with a sketch for a ceramic piece, seeks to draw out the function of various operations, test various means of functioning, without being able to predetermine the ways in which these will be achieved in concrete terms. The sphere of superior functionality that surrounds the very act of design is therefore a functionality without function–i.e. without a predetermined, purposive function– in the same way that Kant used the phrase “finality without end”³¹ to describe the specific ability of a work of art to signify without being reduced to a single identifiable purpose.

Bibliography