GAETANO PESCE (b. 1939)

By 1970, the Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce had already established himself as a creator whose iconoclastic attitudes towards design chimed with the Pop Art sensibilities of the counter-culture. For the Moloch, Pesce distorts the Duchampian concept of the ready-made by radically enlarging a generic 1930s desk lamp, invoking the leviathan scale of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, that also referenced equally generic consumer products. Thus, a mundane, elemental and mass-produced utensil is now celebrated as an iconic, totemic metaphor for commercialisation and consumerism. Appropriately, and in synergy with these ethics, Pesce anointed his creation as Moloch – the ancient Ammonite god to whom certain Levantine tribes offered their children as sacrifice by fire, underlining flawed Utopianism, sacrifice and consumerism. Conceived at the close of the 1960s, Pesce’s Moloch fluently dissolves the boundaries that were perceived to exist between the fine and the industrial arts, to deliver a lasting icon of Pop Art design.
The Moloch was produced between 1970-1972 by Bracciodiferro, the experimental design studio of industrial furniture manufacturer Cassina, Italy. Originally conceived to be an edition of one hundred, it is estimated that less than twenty were ultimately produced before production was halted in 1975. An example of the Moloch, a gift of the manufacturer, is retained in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.