Itinerari. Opere, progetti, prodotti tra arte e design

Designers and artists, each of them in their specific disciplinary field, are involved in the hard task of capturing issues and reasons of contemporary age, while dealing with artworks, products and environments. Within their works different lines of research can be discovered and analysed. Sometimes they are similar, sometimes connected or overlapped. It is a sort of dialogue, between design and the arts, which goes through the 20th century and finds, notably in recent years, new and significant argumentations. The Itinerari (itineraries), that are traced in this book, cross this common land, this place of intersection where the design activity and the art procedures feed each other, freeing the energies of creativity and producing new opportunities to understand reasons and meanings of design process. The book refers to authors, designers and artists, whose activity and thought has influenced the all century: Behrens and Duchamp, Stam and Klee, Brancusi and Pesce, to mention some of them. Within their production, a few works are selected that can trace a common path through issues that have informed the debate between the disciplines. Words having a high “specific gravity”, such as “form”, “use” or “mass production”, come out of the narrative, not to distinguish the two disciplines – as authors like Dorfles, Munari and Maldonado have stated in the past – but to connect them. In this respect the book recognises and prosecutes a typical feature of Italian design since its origins.