HOLY SIT!
Cranbrook Chair Show
@ Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit
www.caidonline.org
2211 Rosa Parks,
Detroit
313-899-CAID
Thurs-Sat, 12-6
April 9 through May 5

Are you sitting down to read this? Well of course you are! Our society spends an inordinate amount of time seated in chairs. Whether we’re working, eating, driving, watching TV, or now, surfing the Internet (caught ya!), there we are, plopped back in our chairs, slowly but surely becoming one with the furniture.

It’s not altogether clear how much we think about our chairs, beyond immediate issues of comfort. However, the students at Cranbrook Academy of Arts (since its inception, its graduates have made a prominent contribution to the sphere of furniture design) have once again put a lot of thought and creativity in expanding the look and concept of what it means to be a chair. This is the fourth permutation of the organically perpetuating annual chair show from the Cranbrook crew, and it just might make you think about what you’re sitting in right now – and why it’s not a whole lot more interesting.

FULL DISCLOSURE ALERT: I am on the board of CAID where this exhibition is being held. What that means, is that when another board member stated that this show needed a home and proposed that we could be it, I (having seen all of the previous incarnations) said “cool” and voted for it on the spot. I also swept the gallery before the opening night. And most importantly, I didn’t feel one iota of hesitation before testing out each and every chair! And whether you’re on the board or not, neither should you.

As the show’s primary thrust is on playing with the idea of the chair, an analysis of what it means to sit or an examination of chair culture as a whole, is for the most part absent. (This might be a worthwhile thread to incorporate into future exhibitions.) “Holy Sit,” like its predecessors, is a wonderful display of creativity and a whole lot of fun no doubt for the artists and certainly for the visitors. One of the most obvious pleasures, besides viewing these as artworks, is, well, SITTING in them – actually interacting with the artwork. In a scene that normally maintains a certain distance and decorum, the opening saw the velvet rope discarded, as people sat, lay on, (smelled!) fell backwards on(!) and had fun with all of the artwork. And for that reason alone it was a delightful sight that galleries might embrace more often.

With so much to see and sit on, (there are 32 artists involved all in all) obviously not every artist and chair will get a mention, but here’s a sampling:

This is Detroit, so that ensures there will always be pieces made from the discarded remains of the city’s industrial past. A strong example of this came in the form of an upright rectangular cube chair by Rowland Ricketts covered in industrial belts that once kept the assembly line moving. The belts made for a comfortable and appropriately industrial look. Shan Sutherland’s “Ice Curule” resembles the curve-legged chair of ancient Rome (a “curule” ), and is made from a block of ice (its seat) with legs made from the old-time large tongs once used to carry similar ice blocks. Kind of rough for sitting, what with large metal teeth reaching upwards and being made of ice and all, but an extremely unique form and innovative blend of the materials’ function and appearance.

This form of recycling can become a kind of nostalgia as well, like Mark Moskovitz’ “Real Task Chair,” which combined a tractor seat with an old office chair – quite comfortable actually. Co-curator Jeff Sturges’ “ Down but not out” is a chunk of a tree, a forking branch that we might have clambered up to and sat in as children, and now, chopped up and resting on the floor, becomes a perfect chair for adults who’ve stopped climbing trees. (But perhaps this will re-awaken that impulse.) Aaron Blendowski’s piece, “First Chair/Large Chair,” really spoke to viewers’ inner child. This chair, more of a bed really, consists of a platform high off the ground complete with an innovative step (a stump of a flag pole extruding from it’s middle) to leap up into it, and then delightfully soft and decked out with pillows to kick back in. If this playfulness didn’t make it a children’s bed for adults, then the fort concealed underneath the bed’s enclosed walls, complete with peephole to gaze out and cubby hole entrance to climb in, cemented the deal.

And then there are things functioning as other things. With two bends in corrugated metal sheeting, co-curator Robert Brooks and collaborator Ed Liang made a surprisingly comfortable and exceedingly simple low to the ground chair. Steve Bowden and Peter Evonuk made a similar bent form out of an entire wooden door! This made for a surreal, humorous, as well as functional form.

A few chairs on display are just art that happens to be centered around the chair. Jessica Frelinghuysen’s “The impending disaster at the meeting of Annie Oakley and President William McKinley” is a small, plain wooden chair filled with about as many holes (obviously intended to be bullet holes) as the number of letters in her title (in reference to one who lived by the gun and another who died by it.) While the aforementioned may have been less than functional (not much structural integrity left after all those holes went through it!) Jada Schumacher’s “Sushi” chairs were both an artistic treat and quite functional. These are made from an outer wrap of colorful fabric, “stuffed” with stacks of magazines (not included.) They make for a nice, low seat, and really look like sushi.

“Sonar Terrain” by Warit Tulyathorn does, as its name suggests, resemble an exotic undulating terrain, perhaps a mapping of the range of radio or sonar signals. It’s a two-seater (at least) and allows for a number of interesting ways to converse with another person, outside of the norms that we’re accustomed to while sitting. Mike Rossi’s green metal rocker with matching green ottoman offers elegant design, and is perhaps the most functional and practical of the pieces in the show.

Matt Miller’s “Free Public Heat” made of heating duct works, is a functional bench/chair and when placed over a Detroit steam cover, served as a source of heat for those sitting or sleeping on it. In this, Miller has created a powerful project reaching far beyond chair design, which we will delve into in these pages in more detail in the near future.

Kate Ludwig’s “Wall Stool Paper” is just that, a folding stool, decorated the same as the wallpaper it sits in front of. However, on closer inspection it turns out that when folded, a notch on the chair’s underside allows it to hang on a hardly visible nub on the wall, effectively camouflaging the stool. Functional and extremely efficient, but for its design this might fit right in at a Shaker home. (Known for their simple and practical furniture design, Shakers got their name from a description of their ritual dancing and shaking and speaking in tongues – my second chance in two weeks to use the word glossolalia!)

The final mention is not really a chair at all, but a video of a chair, or rather a video of the life span of a chair. Built entirely out of ice (the second ice chair in the show – this must be happening in Michigan!) in the Berkley backyard of Christian Cutler. After the chair is constructed and Cutler exits the scene, the yard is left completely alone, by humans at least, leaving only the time lapse camera to capture what unfolds. Over about a two week period, the chair slowly melts and falls apart, and the video concludes when the last remnants of the chair’s ice disappear. But the time lapse captures something far more than the chair’s dissolution – as the sun arcs across the sky, shadows race across the ground, radically transforming the look of the landscape over the course of each day. Icicles extruded from the chair (while it was still standing); footprints in the snow turn into big patches of bare ground before new snow comes and melts all over again; occasional blips on the screen, which might at first appear to glitches in the film, are in fact birds frozen in flight by the camera’s shutter. This tiny backyard scene becomes dynamic, almost chaotic landscape.

Cutler has created a metaphor for our lives: we may sit in our chairs day in and day out trapped in a repetitious routine, yet all around us, if we but look, the casually miraculous is happening every moment.

Bring a friend or three, and have an exceptionally good time just sittin’ around. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com