The Chair in Question Armchair Philosophy and Furniture Art (original) (raw)

Bending Modernity: Chairs, Psychoanalysis and the Rest of Culture

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2009

Coming from the premise that in order to capture the social in action, we have to be able to re-construct or re-assemble reality through parallel histories, I propose to re-examine the notion of modern subjective culture by focusing on a historically specific interaction of human and non-human actors. The main vehicle of comparison utilized for this purpose is the cultural history of psychoanalysis and contemporary furniture design.Specifically, the bent-wood furniture and its emblematic example, the Thonet chair, are used to recover a cultural history of design through bending. By cross-referencing such design practice with the contemporaneous to it moment of psychoanalysis, I propose that the cultural logic of the fin de siècle, viewed through this particular configuration of the human and material cultures, rests on the practice of plasticity; a conditions which, since then, has become an indispensable component of modern individuality and its numerous identity “construction-projects”.

Corporeal Furnishings in the Sixties: Furniture as Art and Its Intimacy with the Body

The repetitive use of chairs and other furniture in sculptural forms in the 1960s in particular, certainly suggests, in a “real” way, the presence of the human form without the figure, but not merely to suggest man’s rise or fall but the contemporary state of humanity. Artists in Europe and America used the iconography of the empty chair as a way to respond to social conditions that reflected the lack of heroic humanism in contemporary society; Europe in the 1960s was still recovering from the destruction of World War II physically and psychologically; alternately America was involved in the Cold War and the Red Scare of communism. The fact that these sculptural forms occurred across various art movements suggests an accepted iconography for the absent body among artists who wanted to address the human condition in its contemporary state without addressing the heroic classical form. The only way they saw to reject that classical heroism was to avoid the human form altogether.

The Logical and Phenomenological in Martin Creed’s Chairs

Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Martin Creed , 2022

The artist Martin Creed’s work appeals to two apparently contrary tendencies: analytical logic, which encourages a detached examination of objects, and phenomenal qualities that break down this detachment when the chairs are viewed as comfortable or homely. These two tendencies can be more precisely described by appealing to Martin Heidegger’s well-known series of distinctions between ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘readiness-to-hand’.

Why the Armchair in the First Place? Then Why Get up from It? (And Why Did Some Remain Seated

Oceania, 2016

Charles Lyell advised young geologists that to discover the nature of the bigger world required travel. In the field of the natural science this had its exemplars inspired by Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Joseph Hooker; in the field of geography it had the model of Cook's explorations. Yet by the mid-century even in the discipline of geography it was the armchair theorist who held sway. British anthropology came into being at the time the armchair was at its zenith, when the theorists in their studies understood that those out there on the ground could not see the forest for the trees. It claimed the perspective of the centre was required to bring order to all the observations. This article argues that the discoveries of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century existentially challenged the European view of humanity and that the aim of stay-at-home British ethnological research was to retrieve a history of being human. However out on the colonial frontier, the prerogative of the ethnog-rapher became increasingly the Indigenous presence they confronted. The trees were more important than the forest. The information they sent back, backed by the authority of contact undermined the authority of the long perspective of the armchair, which was increasingly riven by contradictions and absurdities until it looked like no perspective at all. But the metropole still claimed ascendency as Alfred Haddon's expedition of 1898, laden down with the instruments of the psychology laboratory set out to confirm grand theories. It found instead that effective method in anthropology was to seek familiarity with a people, the method already employed by the colonial ethnographers.

From the Moral Mound to the Material Maze: Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty

Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 2003

This essay investigates the luxury debates as context for one of the most challenging treatments of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain: the artist William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty (1753). 1 Our understanding of the Analysis benefits from contextualisation, since it is significantly different from other texts in the field of philosophical aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain. 2 It engages with its central concerns, but declares its opposition and superiority to the field, and reshapes its framework. The aim here is to elaborate on the nature of this opposition and difference in which the aesthetic values associated with beauty are grounded in the substances of the human body, and in a psychology which allows appetite a key role, as a version of materialism which makes particular sense in the context of the luxury debates. To present-day readers of the Analysis, it will seem unremarkable that aesthetic values associated with beauty should be grounded in the body and its appetites. Yet the dominant paradigm for philosophical aesthetics in early eighteenthcentury Britain grounds its aesthetic values in the divinely ordained response to the abstract qualities of orderliness in the universe, and to moral character in human beings. Puzzling to the present-day reader is why Hogarth has little to say about what a beautiful human body is like in terms of specific features, and yet has a lot to say about how a beautiful body stands, sits, gestures, moves and dances. In this too the Analysis's departure from the parameters of aesthetic writings can be understood more clearly in relation to the luxury debates. The contention here is that aspects of Hogarth's position are shared with the modernisers in the luxury debates. In this context, the Analysis's materialism and apparent 'amorality', in comparison with the moralising project of philosophical aesthetics, can be seen as in line with those modernisers who sought to demoralise, that is undermine the purchase of moralism, in the analysis of social and economic change. Hogarth also shares attitudes compatible with modernising materialism with the writers of dance manuals: the celebration of the physical and psychological basis of the human love of variety and change, and pragmatic support for the human need for social distinction through the confident exercise of self-presentation.

POCKET-CALLS: POINT(S) OF CONTACT BETWEEN ART PRACTICE AND PHILOSOPHY

Kaiak. A Philosophical Journey, 8: Interfaccia, 2021

Written as the first lockdowns of the COVID pandemic forced us to confront the practical realities of withdrawing from the world, this essay responds to the apparent ‘ontological softening’ of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) set out by Graham Harman in Art + Object (2020). It aims to return the ‘complement’ paid by Harman and considering how contemporary art can be useful to philosophy rather than how OOO can be useful to contemporary art? Following Harman’s analysis of art critics Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg work, the essay sustains the metaphorical narrative of the telephone-call drawn from Jospeh Beuy’s sculpture Telefon S – – – – Ǝ,1974, as means of un-packing the weird aesthetic of absorptive beholder-artwork theatrics that Harman sets out in support of OOO’s quadruple object. While outlining salient points raised by Art + Objects, there is, in the context of this journal, an assumption that the reader has sufficient familiarity with the key principles of OOO to allow meaningful comparison with philosophies of relation, represented here via the work of Barbara Bolt, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, as a socialising superposition. However, rather than enflame extant ontological hostilities the essay focuses on the handability of practice as a mode of knowing or revealing. This comparison serves to highlight key methodological differences between the contortions of Harman’s art historical reading of Real Objects of art as being withdrawn behind the surface of representation, and the practices of Post-object artists Jim Allen and Bruce Barber in which the artist doubles as a performer immersed in their own psychic experience. The point being made that Harman’s vicarious method of allure is predicated in a violent resistant to presence, whereas art is premised on a practice of care that is held present in theatrical contact: an aesthetic distinction regarding the proximity of substances though which Harman argues for aesthetics as first philosophy. The intended ‘complement’ is thus returned by suggesting that one way in which contemporary art can to prove useful to philosophy is by asserting that in as much as care is an aesthetic that takes form in practice, philosophy might resist the violence of representation upon which the withdraw of OOO object is based in deference to the aesthetic practice of care as the foundation of metaphysics. Key words: Object Oriented Ontology, Post-object Art, practice, contemporary art, philosophy, performance, aesthetics

On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud

2017

Sit back, or should I say, recline, with your copy of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud by Nathan Kravis (2017). Kravis wears many hats penning this work, as psychoanalyst, art historian, Freud biographer, cultural critic and furniture connoisseur. He shepherds us through the history of reclining and of the couch itself, and how troubled psyches came to lay their heads comfortably on their analysts' couches millennia later. And throughout, he breathes life into the themes of luxury, social intimacy, and healing through his carefully selected commentary and images. On the Couch allows the reader to reflect more broadly on how history, culture, and bodily ritual shape the modern doctor-patient encounter. The narrative of the couch begins in ancient Greece and Rome, traveling through Renaissance painting and sculpture, to covers of The New Yorker. Kravis guides the reader through the first-century frescos and funerary urns, unpacking the concept of reclining as a symbol of luxury and privilege. We then greet religious works depicting the Virgin Mary anachronistically laying on a bed. While she would have been too poor to have given birth on beds like those depicted in the twelfth-and thirteenth-century nativity scenes, Mary reclining on the bed signifies domesticity and status that contemporary viewers would have understood (28-29). The sofa evolved in the eighteenth century, and with it, a home for intimate conversations within a domestic milieu (35-43). The reclining nude in works by Giorgione to Canova and David from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries reinvented the recumbent position from the classical age, bringing with it eroticism and what Kravis deems, a transgressive, force. The eighteenth-century French aristocracy embraced the sofa, which comes from the Arabic soffah (cushion), and its partner, the ottoman'' (39). These furniture pieces and their popular designs ''evoked the romanticized Orient,'' visual