letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
Taschen
Books
List Prices: USD 30.00 GBP 17.00 | EUR 24.00 JPY 3800.00
on
chairs
We
are prone to sitting, when we are not standing or sleeping. So chairs, whose task
it is to conform to our posteriors - from something flat and hard (say a rock)
to something concave and soft (a lover's lap) - end up in our lives as facts.
And artifacts. And, art.
So
it is no wonder artists and designers have long worked with the chair as a kind
of de facto body art - an accessory to the buttocks. But chairs are also a proletarian
song of rest, a throne where power accumulates, as well as a metaphor for the
sitter (absent or present), indicating human form, desire, need, function. The
chair is a sculptural object as well, one to be considered as it takes up and
marks off space, including from the sitter's point of view.
Indeed
there is a chair for just about every one, every occasion, every place. The chair
is utterly human. There's a chair for directors, office workers, invalids (wheel
chair), babies. There are sofas for couch potatoes, beach chairs for babe/hunk
watchers. Seniors have their benches to watch the world go by, while delinquents
carve their initials into them. To eat there are dining room chairs; wingbacks
for reading, smoking cigars and drinking cognac; rockers for knitting and toilet
seats for pondering the state of the universe. And finally there are chairs for
dying - the electric chair.
Chairs
provide big and regular expositions around the globe, and these exhibitions tout
their varieties like flower or dog shows. Why? Because like opinions, everyone
has at least something to sit on. We can relate. We've been there, done that:
we've sat before-on pews, stools, saddles, embankments, or hot seats.
Some
artists who have focused on the chair quickly come to mind - Vincent van Gogh,
Lucas Samaras, and Warhol's 1971 silkscreen portfolio, Big Electric Chair. Joseph
Kosuth's 1965 One in Three Chairs, a philosophical inquiry into language and image,
featured a simple fold up wooden chair, a photo of that chair, and a silkscreened
black and white dictionary definition of "chair." Architects Frank Lloyd Wright,
Frank Gehry, and designers like Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen and Marc Newson have
made famous their take on the chair, or lounge. Each chose their material carefully,
molding in plastic, fabricating in wood, sometimes steel or redressing in fabric
an object that often competes with function, producing originals that teeter on
the zeitgeist and find a comfortable place in the world of function.
Gallery
Kreo in Paris-just off the gallery thick Avenue Louise Weiss in the 13th Arrondisement-regularly
highlights design statements in the form of chaise lounges and chairs. (www.kreo.com).
"Sit Down 1950-2001" featured a range of objects to sit on, although that was
discouraged. Kreo showed Guhl Willy's cement Garden Chair (1954), a souvenir to
slab concrete architecture. Newson's Wicker and Embryo Chairs were on view, as
well as his polished aluminum Pod (1993), a limited edition lounger.
Jessica
Padt Photo: Alexander Van Berge
And
then, there are some artists who, work quietly on their own personal obsessions.
Take the Dutch artist, Jessica Padt. Padt has a storefront workshop in the center
of Amsterdam, and where, in her sometimes surreal windows on Eerste Tuindwarsstraat
17, she asks: "What's in a chair?"
The
question is sometimes answered with chairs that defy their function: an ottoman
with plastic flies on it, a pair of wooden chairs covered with vines, objects
that say chair but really mean something else. The windows, a Dutch tradition
of most artist shops, serve as an installation space to simply make people stop
and look. "But most of my windows were so extreme people didn't understand them,"
Padt says.
Inspired
by surrealism and the French furniture team, Garouste & Bonetti whose chairs and
sofas are sometimes made out of live moss, Padt too, wants objects that "people
wouldn't sit on." She says: "Sitting is really not that important." And in a sense
she only uses the chair as a point of departure.
"What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," Padt, 39, says as she rips apart
a wooden frame with her bare hands. "They have to make me laugh."
Padt's
palette takes advantage of the wide range of potential materials her creations.
They allow her to mix metaphors with touch, pattern and function. Bright soft
fabric not often used for furniture but rather for clothes, curtains, carpets,
or found objects often end up in her workshop-and her home. Her steep, typically
Dutch, staircase is covered in a faux leopard skin.
Her
latest obsession is making little thrones-for children. One, covered in cow skin,
when overturned-as children will often do with objects-moos. The Dutch, Padt points
out, are the biggest milk drinkers in Europe (or perhaps the world), next to the
Swedes. In that spirit, she made an entire set of "cow chairs." They were ultimately
destroyed by her sister Renée's cat.
"Kids
can more easily enter into my own imagination," she says. "I always invent stuff
and kids like my windows… like the tiny wooden chairs with its leaves and birds…
they are twins… for twins."
But
Padt most enjoys making something out of nothing - or at least a nothing she's
recuperated from the detritus-rich streets of Amsterdam or just about to be tossed
out of her friends homes. She's happy with a knobby wooden frame she discovers
a block or two from her house, or the pair of wooden feet (for making shoes) and
a prosthetic leg I found along the canal and offered her.
An
old bathtub Padt stumbled upon was enticing for its elaborate iron feet and she
produced a fake kitsch fireplace from it, out of colored felt.
Padt,
whose work has been featured in Elle Décor (Holland), isn't trying to reinvent
the wheel, or the chair, does receive many calls to repair and reupholster vintage
1960s and 1970s designer pieces, particularly pieces by Pierre Paulin, Ko Liang
Ie, who designed for Artifort, a Dutch furniture company. But that doesn't stop
her from pursuing her own ideas that make her laugh, or sting.
While
Padt wants to make kitsch-filled panoramas - a set design, restaurants, corporate
headquarters, her commissions are invariably smaller, and unfortunately, she says,
conservative. Since chair work, and the upholstery that goes along with it, is
brutal on the body, Padt makes embroidery which will often find its way in single
pieces, like her Pigs, or as designs on commission chairs.
"I
wish sometime someone would show up and ask me to make something really crazy
for them," she says.
Her
"Go Lover Go," exhibited at the Norrtälje, in Stockholm (2000) for the exhibit
"Se Stasera Sono Qui" (If I'm here tonight), is a bit crazy. What is it with its
cornucopia overflowing with a little nightmare: nasty looking snakes in the grapes.
Ostensibly it's about love, saying "Don't get too close…"
"It's
not a chair," she says. "I'm not sure what it is."
Padt
produces few if any preparatory drawings and the ideas for projects come from
quietly working alone. Her vision is to fill spaces with objects that make sense
of a world gone mostly mad, she says. Now, she laughs, she's toying with the idea
of producing designer coffins. Maybe in the meantime she'll make her own electric
chair.
resources
Jessica Padt
Eerste Tuindwarsstraat 17
1015 RT Amsterdam Holland
Tel & Fax: + 31 20 627 8451
e-mail: jessicapadt@hotmail.com
Eero
Saarinen http://www.scandinaviandesign.com/eero_saarinen/index3.htm
Marc
Newson Lockheed Lounge (1986-88) from www.marc-newson.com
books
1000 Chairs, Taschen Books $30 US http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/books/architecture_design/all/facts/01822.htm
Elizabeth
Garouste et Mattia Bonneti (Michel Aveline, 1990)
Fantasy
Furniture by Bruce M. Newman (Rizzoli 1989).
*****Note:
we need to put link and retail price of book, 1000 Chairs if we use it… preferably
the cover. I'd like to use it… nice to make a connection with Tashcen. Huge art
book publisher out of Germany. I registered as a journalist with them. Need to
put the photographer's name on the image of Padt from Elle Décor/The Netherlands-OR
just leave it there. Photo: Alexander Van Berge
Matthew
Rose mattrose@noos.fr
affiliates
