My Obsession with Chairs...

I haven't been out of art school for very long now but I've gotten an itch. I have an itch to be creative! In school I had constant pressure to be creative and produce art objects. It was nice to have relief from that pressure for a bit but now I feel just plain lazy (what with being jobless too).

Now I find myself with an obsession of sorts… I’m not obsessed with chairs exactly just a philosophical idea in which the chair happens to be a wonderful vehicle of expression. This idea has been in my mind for a couple of years now and I wish I’d done this as a school project. Below are previews of my three chair project installments and of course my artist statement. I have a couple of ideas in which I will expand this project in the future but I feel like I gotta get this stuff out or else it’ll just be waaay to much to have to post ALL at once. Plus I hope to get feedback, a bit of shit, into some debates and of course constructive criticism; all of which I will use to produce higher quality expansions… Thanks!

Artist Statement:

If you would like to view this as plain text it is at the bottom along with some finishing notes...

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

I will be posting each part as soon as I can... Part One is mostly an introduction to all things chair and is sort of an expansion of my artist statement... I hope those of you who indulge me by looking through all this mess enjoy it and get something out of it. I haven't gotten this quite out of my system and you can look forward to expansions of this project in the near future... Anyway as promised my artist statement in plain text:

What is a Chair?

I know this is a silly question. Most of us are pretty comfortable in our understanding of what a chair is. The same is true for 1+1 and knowing that it equals 2, right? There is a long mathematical proof that, well, proves that one plus one equals two. What I’m attempting here is a philosophical proof of sorts in which I want to understand this thing called chair. What is it about a chair that makes it so? Is it one single objective characteristic or a jumbled mess of subjective characteristics?

The question that interests me most is when does a chair become a chair? There is a problem with my analogy though. Numbers are these perfect intangibles that exist inside our minds where a chair exists in both. If you were to imagine a chair in your mind what does it look like? Is it basically just an “L” shape with four legs and maybe arm rests? This is an essential form that we use to judge all other chairs and it is “perfect”. The universe however, is not. The problem as I see it is with Platonic thought (not to be confused with the lowercase platonic meaning “free from sensual desire”). The philosopher Plato had this crazy idea that there was this perfect place where there were perfect everything’s and it was either black or white. Our brains love this because it’s so neat and tidy. Fortunately the universe is a much messier, complex and interesting place than that.

Philosophy isn’t for everyone. Science isn’t either. I also in no way claim that philosophy is a scientific endeavor or vice versa. But it is this understanding of when a thing becomes materialized and you can call it a chair (or anything really) that the two endeavors overlap and things get really interesting. It isn’t the chair I’m really interested in, it’s the thought process. It is this process that so many people don*t understand, or care to. This is frustrating to me because those same people make decisions that affect my life and so many others (including their own) in negative ways. This process and way of thought gets to the heart of our scientific understanding of the universe and how it works.

By taking a close look at a chair, when a chair becomes a chair and when it becomes something else, will guide our understanding of most scientific principals. There are many examples in science that I could give, but my favorite, and I think least understood, is evolution. Evolution happens over a long period of time where one species of creature changes slowly into another/others. Think of it like this, there is no point in which a boy/girl becomes a man/woman. There are many cultural ceremonies to mark this but they are pretty arbitrary. One doesn’t just wake up one day as an adult just like a creature doesn’t suddenly start birthing a whole new species. There are pressures that guide that species into the new species much like a child growing to be a “good” or “bad” adult.

I’ll leave you with this cliché of a question… is an acorn an oak tree?