I do not know who the Prime Minister of Tamil Nadu is, or was. All I know is that a startling image of him appears in the midst of Morrison's celebrated silent lecture and picture book, "A World Without Words". Which is known, in that reduced Morrison way, as AWWW. AWWW first appeared in 1988, his response to an invitation to lecture. That way, he didn't have to talk about himself, which is an activity he doesn't particularly enjoy. He had collected all the images - which are of objects that inspired him - in the six months after he finally left the Royal College of Art in 1985, by which time he already had several items in production. It is an eclectic collection of 130 or so images, ranging from an Yves Klein "Anthropometric" female body-print to the late 1940s architecture of Rome Central Station.
AWWW is now being revived - remastered in digital form, running for 18 minutes - at the Design Museum, from May 11. Morrison's studio is making a little cinema booth on the top floor to show it. He has been doing a bit of light housekeeping on AWWW - weeding out a few images he feels aren't so strong or don't make good pairings with others, planting a few new ones such as an ancient Greek bronze duck or a somewhat humanoid 19th century American hayfork. But the Prime Minister of Tamil Nadu is still in there.
He cuts a jaunty figure, this PM, hand on hip in a kind of scarlet and gold tuxedo, complete with co-ordinated eye-searing tie, sunglasses like early TV screens, pencil moustache, lips painted to match the tux. Topping the whole ensemble is a white woollen fez, set at a rakish angle. He is set against a background of bright blue sky with fleecy clouds. That's the Prime Minister of Tamil Nadu. The style is that of a Bombay cinema poster, without the lettering. You can't quite work out what he's got to do with Morrison's work. Why is he there?
"Well - " starts Morrison, and then pauses for a long, long, time. "He's a clear example of something," he offers wrily. We look at the picture in the book for a while. "It's an image that carries some weight," he adds, almost inaudibly. Another very long pause. Then he throws in the towel. "I suppose all of the images were chosen pretty much on the spur of the moment. It wasn't as if they were qualified by any particular criterion. It was more a case of - that'll do, that'll do. And then pairing them up."
The Prime Minister of Tamil Nadu is not quite alone in speaking of another, un-Morrisonian, world. You see plenty of things that fit the austere Jasperish image - tall timber fishermen's huts on the beach at Hastings, an Eames plywood leg-splint, American grain silos, Jean Prouve chairs and so forth - and then you see Gala Dali's egg-shaped boudoir, or a matador in full regalia, or circus performers, or a Danish postman in immaculate brass-buttoned scarlet uniform. Then there are the slyly or overtly erotic images, culled from Indian sculpture, Carlo Mollino photographs, Italian sugar packets, wherever. Furniture design - which is what Morrison trained in - is after all entirely to do with the body.
Some of these things - particularly the furniture and architectural details - have a direct bearing on Morrison's subsequent work. A photo of three ordinary wine bottles in a row translates directly through to an early designed product of 1988, named with disarming directness "Three green bottles which could also be clear". That attitude - you could call it anti-obfuscatory - also informed his famous 1988 plywood furniture range: "Some new items for the house". No fancy Starckian names. Just a description that has a kind of old-world courtliness about it. Go back to AWWW and you'll find endless functionalist furniture, particularly by Enzo Mari, informing those designs.
