#cesarecasati

Image Courtesy of MoMA

Cesare Casati & Emanuele Pozio, Pillola Lamps

In the Cooper Hewitt I saw an interesting piece featuring four giant structures in the shape of pills. I would only later find out that Cesare Casati and Emanuele Pozio, the artists responsible for this work, had made the structures into workable lamps. This art was made in 1968 as part of Italy’s Anti-design movement and the purpose behind these pill shaped lamps was purely to humor anyone who had set their eyes on them. However, I had a different take on this work.

Each pill was the same size, shape, and symmetry, however, each had a distinctly colored cap. One was blue, one was red, one was yellow, and one was green. All simple, innocuous colors that were attached to something with such a disastrous meaning. A pill. As in a drug. As in a pathway to addiction. As in losing control. As in a lifetime of suffering. As in what tears apart families and crushes the future of promising lives on the daily. Something barely the size of a peanut has the power to swallow someone’s life whole just like they had once swallowed that pill. How something so small can have such a gargantuan impact on a plethora of lives is baffling to me.

The representation of the pills in the work of art was spot-on. The various colors of the caps signified different types of medications and the simplicity of each pills’ placement felt almost like a slap in the face. A slap for ever thinking that something that can fit on the tip of a finger almost undetectably, could be so vile. Although the artists attempted to showcase the lamps comically through their portrayal as pills, what resonated with me most was the meaning of the pills that they left out of the art: their lethality.