Going down to Memphis

Relax. It?s useless to resist. The Eighties are coming back.

As the march of history stomps round in everdecreasing circles, so design and architecture follow fashion. And Memphis, the movement that launched a thousand shards of leopard-skin Formica, is being celebrated at the Design Museum.

Memphis was one of those incandescent events that light up a moment: its candy-coloured cartoon look, angular as Space Invaders and as natural as Blondie?s hair colour, furnished the fantasies of the time, in pop videos and bachelor pads and bars and advertising offices.

It is 20 years since the legendary party held to launch Memphis in a Milan showroom, with 2,500 of its closest friends. Memphis was an association of young designers godfathered by the sexagenarian guru of Italian design, Ettore Sottsass. Its name comes from the Bob Dylan song Memphis Blues Again, which was playing incessantly ? because no one could be bothered to change the record ? at the boozy meeting where Memphis was conceived.

Sottsass says it was ?cultural terrorism. We thought we would do something that obliged people to be more aware of their own life? ? as did Dylan and Sottsass?s friend Allen Ginsberg in the 1960s, only remoulded for the shopaholic Eighties, and therefore expressed in chairs and table lamps. This was tableware as revolution.

Sottsass is now 84. With a thin cable of iron-grey plait, he sits in his serene Milan office, just down the road from the Brera picture gallery. In his ironic-portentous way, he wants to talk about ?cocks?.

?I designed a ceramic vase in the form of a cock. I made photomontages of it where it was standing on a table where politicians were having lunch. If this really happened they could call in the carabinieri, or they could smile. Memphis was like putting the cock on the table.?

He is anxious to distinguish his vase from a plastic phallic lighter made by Alessi. ?My cock is abstract and made of ceramic,? he says indignantly. ?It was to negate people who were trying to forget life. The lighter says your life is a comic strip.?

You don?t usually get this sort of talk when buying crockery at the Conran Shop or Ikea, but then Sottsass is not your usual designer of domestic objects. His influences encompass Roy Lichtenstein, Aztec art, Japanese prints and Indian temple-sculpture. He explains how the Carlton bookshelf, his most famous Memphis piece, is like the Doge?s Palace in Venice, and the way he tells it makes sense. Memphis objects were meant to have the same effect as the Red Flag, or ?the cup of Christ?s blood that a priest holds up? ? to be ?an instrument of awareness?.

This means it is best if you only have one or two of them in your house, ?because otherwise you just become a collector. You can only have so many centres of ritual.? Today, ?the attitude is that you use something and throw it away. I say use it and fall in love with it.? I am not sure that the creative directors and proto-yuppies who bought Memphis quite got all this. Or even Karl Lagerfeld, when he Memphised his Monte Carlo home, and installed a conversation pit that looked like a boxing ring, by the Memphis designer Masanori Umeda.

Memphis was an onslaught on the idea of good taste. It was meant to delight the senses and charge the brain, but it rapidly descended into stylistic clich?, and its tics turned up in McDonald?s in Nevada, or in the trendifications of banks.

Sottsass?s sayings would verge on rank pretension, if all he did was talk. But since 1945 he has spent most of his time making things, and they justify the words. At the Design Museum?s small but perfectly formed display you will see some feeble and dated stuff by other designers, but also things by Sottsass bursting with the feeling that it is good to be alive. The fact that they are as 1980s as Margaret Thatcher?s handbag, is neither here nor there.