Six Constructions
exposition
Galerie Kreo
09/03/02 – 20/04/02
Martin Szekely
Alison M. Gingeras
Six Constructions: An imagined dialogue
Shifting the eye. Displacing questions.
Such simple and unpretentious directives, as watching and asking questions, are the basis of a rigorous, pragmatic initiative. Watching and asking questions are the primary cognitive impulses which allow one to cut through a field of endeavors (concerning both the object and the conceptual production) clouded by inflationary discourse, self-consumption, and confused references…
Design is cannibalistic. It feeds off itself.
In the wide field of visual culture, no single discipline (high or low, traditional or new, functional or purely aesthetic) has retained a sense of autonomy. Visual artists have cannibalized design to such an extent that the very notion of use-value can no longer be used to distinguish an “artistic” project from a “design” project. The post-utopian community and the furniture objects of Atelier Van Lieshout, Jorge Pardo’s house which is also his artistic opus in Los Angeles, and the functioning “Donald Judd bar” built by Tobias Reyberger fo the Munster Skulptur Projekte are all striking. Examples of visual artists blurring the boundaries of the desire of visual art to not only cannibalize its own history but also neighboring disciplines. Just like design.
Is it reactionary or visionary to think about the specificity of a discipline, to ask questions about the status of visual art and object production today? Is it possible to reconsider the fundamental issues that have been eclipsed by this process of blurring of disciplinary boundaries?
In order to reevaluate issues such as use-value, one must also ask use for whom?
Designer’s “objects” are alienated because of their condition of “design objects”, image objects, milieu objects, fashion objects…
As in the case of visual art, this loss of disciplinary specificity coupled with its own cannibalism has allowed “design” to take on ambiguous uses. How many times have curators (of art, fashion, marketing — the very notion of curator has now become an important figure in the culture at large) used design to some ends that did not correspond to the original intention of the object? Is design a field of object production at the service of others? Can design be a critical, self-sufficient form?
The furniture-object is not self-sufficient.
Why make a dish? Why sit down? Where to sit? What is a table? A wardrobe? A light fixture?
What symbolic or exchange value can these objects presume to hold?
To attempt to answer to these questions about the foundation of these “furniture-objects” requires taking into account the cultural and material environments in the present tense. To do the opposite would be outdated, passé.
The cultural and material context today is riddled not only with this general sense of confusion (whether it be deliberate in terms of an ideological vision—would all this cannibalism the be what is left from a postmodern leveling of high and low art, functionalism and aesthetics?) but also with a lack of retrospective analysis. It is all too easy to ride the current flow and exchange of images, of fashion, of cultural status quo.
Is it possible to create a cultural practice neatly inscribed between the impossibility of the avant-garde (with its naivety concerning new forms) and of passive acceptance? What would be the starting point of such a practice? Not only to return to elementary questions and essential functions of everyday life, but also to take risks in regards to reception of the object, its use, and its value.
One objective: breaking the link with “furniture making” (le mobilier) and its history. And instead finding again the link with our primal necessities as physical and mental beings.
These constructions are supports. Supports for our bodies and for our objects.
Tabula rasa is almost impossible in any field of production whatsoever. But it might be necessary to suspend the charged weight of history
and the self-referentiality of a discipline to get to the basics, to engage in a serious reexamination of one’s practice.
The materials used for these constructions are not specifically concerned with the domestic sphere. These constructions are not pre-destined for a specific milieu. They don’t belong anywhere, therefore they belong everywhere. Their real scale and dimensions are made in reference to the human body. A human whose first need is to be isolated, to be raised from the floor.
Can furniture be considered as a pedestal?
Something that looks like a lounge chair — a flat surface on an incline scaled to a prostrate human body — yet whose angle of incline is unexpected and offers an open, trapezoidal space underneath.
An object which at first glance recalls a bookshelf in its stature but seems unnaturally truncated. Where is the vertical element supposed to hold the books in place? Is it okay to sit on the rectangular base that lifts the construction off the floor?
A table that seems to be pared down to an essential line, a simple volume — two verticals and a horizontal plane — but which has an awkward horizontal “foot” that continues horizontally at its base, on only one side. Does it need this strange appendage to hold itself up?
Or is this an aesthetic choice — at taste for asymmetry?
If photographed outside of all architectural context, they have no sense of scale.
Where do these materials come from? Metal support structures and fiberglass panels that do not carry the heavy symbolic weight of their industrial origins.
The pleasant color and luminous quality of these constructions counterbalance their perplexing nature — these are analytical objects, they pose questions, but they are visually neutral. These six constructions seem to come straight from a laboratory rather than from a designer’s studio.
What if these “furniture-objects” lost a little of their presence to become nothing but diagrams, ledges, supports, necessary extensions of our bodies?
Underneath these open-ended objects are recognizable forms — there is no tabula rasa.
By keeping a whisper of the familiar (a table, a chair, a desk, a bookshelf), Szekely is able to create objects that retain use-value (these constructions are not hybrid furniture-sculptures) without being completely codified. They generate a gentle sense of ambiguity because of this subtle play of asymmetry in terms of both form and use. Szekely confronts us with deceptively simple questions — is it okay to sit here, is it okay to use this in this way? Szekely doesn’t give us an answer — his constructions always retain the form of a question. The person who is standing in front of these objects must decide for themselves if it is okay to use these objects in the manner they choose.
The only answer is intuition.
This exhibition “six constructions” is not an answer, but still a question.
More than just questioning the history of furniture, Szekely humbly but effectively challenges the routine behaviors, the social conventions, and the cultural contexts that have formed this history.
Signs for furniture?
Martin Szekely, December 2001
Alison M. Gingeras, March 2002