Forthcoming this fall with Inventory Books is the first English translation of Bruno Munari’s 1967 volume Fantasy – Invention, Creativity, and Imagination in Visual Communication. Designed by IN-FO.CO, the edition meticulously mirrors the layout and typography of the Italian original –its graphic flavor and texture– and is accompanied by a critical apparatus as well as by an introductory essay. I am responsible for the translation, the notes, and accompanying essay.
Fantasy is perhaps the richest of the great Milanese designer’s elaborations on his art and design practices as well as abiding commitment to democratize art and design. In the opening chapter, Munari states his objectives as follows:
In the present book, I have sought to catalogue and analyze what I view as the fundamental constants, the baseline cases, of this phenomenon. In so doing, I am well aware that I haven’t exhausted the question of how fantasy, invention, and creativity operate. My aim is more modest: to clear the path for a more comprehensive, exhaustive study that will explain how one becomes a creative person. The world of art, the worlds of creativity and fantasy, have always been maintained as a kind of secret preserve. Banish the thought of revealing how an idea is born or how an artwork germinates (presuming one knew the answers)! The public sees only finished works before which it stands dumbfounded. The Romantic artists in the midst of our avant-gardes insist that audiences must always be kept at arm’s length, that artistic creation remains an ineffable mystery, that art collapses in the face of explanation. I believe, on the contrary, that people genuinely wish to understand. As such, I have set about the work of explanation with the hope that others more competent than I will build upon these modest efforts to make sense of phenomena that interest everyone, with the hope of promoting the growth of creativity and personal development.
However modest its pretenses, the book puts forward both a theory and practice of imaginative labor. I cite from the essay, entitled “The Method,” which serves as the book’s postface:
How does fantasy function according to Munari’s account? Through the making of connections. Connections have their rules or, rather, they have a standard set of protocols that govern which combinations are most likely to be valid, significant, provocative, effective, or productive—a “grammar” so to speak. The grammar in question is eminently teachable, “otherwise, all this would be a purely subjective exercise, self-referential in nature, useful perhaps only for purposes of experimentation or research.” Much of Fantasy is dedicated to exploring these combinatory principles. They include reversals of the expected order of things like the literary topos of the “world upside down”: the dunce crowned as king, the cart that leads the horse, Antipodeans who walk on their heads, landscapes that hover above the clouds. Other connections are built around principles of functional affinity (the “head” of a river, the “leg” of a table); substitutions in color, weight, material, or size (an indigo wedding cake, a Styrofoam sledgehammer, a glass automobile, a titanic tube of toothpaste); the incorporation of multiple heterogeneous elements within a single object (a Rube Goldberg machine, a hundred-headed Hydra, a cyborg); or dislocation (an underwater classroom, a ski resort in the desert). After inventorying such foundational modes of establishing meaningful connections, Munari concludes with some brief reflections on the forging of connections between connections. Here fantasy sets to work anchoring a now lighter-than-air floating glass automobile to the ambergris-scented leg of a table in the form of a bear’s paw or imagining our cyborg as a 300-meter-tall monster ravaging the Manhattan skyline as it munches drones as if they were gnats.
