Western makers have found the Chinese chair both an inspiration for modernism and a reminder of its relationship to the human body.
George Ingham - Ming Chair 1997
This was an installation exhibition in Craft ACT Craft and Design Centre that sought to sketch by means of the lineage of the Chinese chair, an understanding of design as being a trajectory of information through both time and space.
'A Klee painting titled Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth open; his wings are spread. This is how one views the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees only one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But, a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'
The Chinese Chair is a recent exhibition of six chairs and their stories curated by Rodney Hayward and Nigel Lendon of the ANU School of Art at the Craft ACT Craft and Design Centre. The intention of the curators was to create insight through the juxtaposition and intersection of visual and textual information: to awaken perhaps in viewer's minds parallel experiences or an understanding that such experiences could exist. Such knowledge is to understand a little how this net, this matrix of the tangible and intangible that we call design is an essentiality of humanity.
Design never comes simply and uncluttered. It always expresses human things. Each visitor to the exhibition would perceive it differently. A chair is a tangible enough structure, but these, and their accompanying wall-texts are uniquely translatable into the viewer's world. Such objects have been described as boundary objects-objects that are simultaneously containers and carriers 2 .perhaps much as a humble, straw-seated chair portrayed in a bedroom at Arles could also express the solitary despair of van Gogh.
The exhibition was, further, an understated challenge to the perception of the hegemony of Western design. The challenge is thrown down of, 'Explain this'. Explain the designs of another and apparently independently evolved chair making tradition. 3 To look at structure, process, style, and function in wooden furniture, especially chairs, across the Western Europe-China divide is a fascinating exploration of parallel solutions and the inevitability of common outcomes driven by the demands of the material.
'Style' can be considered, at least in part, as the logical outcome of the accumulation of knowledge: the knowledge of what 'works'. A chair's tectonic design in both cultures essentially derives from the management of the forces generated through its structure during use.
In 1997 the late George Ingham traversed this question, both for his own processes of discovery, and as a teaching methodology. What Ingham saw in the design of the Chinese chair echoed the appropriations by the great Danish designer Hans Wegner. Their potential as new forms remind us of the fundamentals of a chair's possibility. A chair with its top rail and arms in a single piece for example, is an unrestricting chair. The finessing of Ingham's translation of these forms into his Ming Chair was part of his passionate sense of process that is common to all fine craftsmen. Yet, it is a chair for meditation, reflection in every sense of the word. Its 'story', written by Pru Ingham, reveals that this remains its enduring daily function.
A chair speaks eloquently about its design: its structure, its proportions, its use, and about its generative culture. The 'Ming Meditation Chair' by Peter Giles is a prototype of understanding and was set as the fulcrum of the exhibition. Through our post-Bauhaus eyes it has the physical gesture of the unadorned 'modernity' of Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture from the late 1920s. It is Breuer's 'openwork outlines sit[ting] lightly in the room.' Yet, by its scale alone, this sixteenth century Ming design form is insistent that its story springs from another part of the human family. Its tapered upward stance for example, expresses one relationship of man's universal experience of gravity-our minds soar, yet our bodies remain heavy. For Giles, facing the limitation of scant published evidence of its original detailed form and structure, the challenge was to understand the apparent historical cultural contradictions between modernity and antiquity through practical scholarship: that is, by building and re-building the structure to find out why the original chair looked the way it did. Thus, the chair's validity is not in its superficial newness, but from its tangible exploration of concerns of material, structure, and culture through a contemporary maker's knowledge and imagination.
The research has thus been something of a quasi-archaeological process, which stimulated the particular character of this exhibition. Of course Chinese furniture has its literature, reflecting a growing understanding in the West of the range and diversity of the historical material culture in China. However, such publications are of little assistance to the maker who wishes to understand the 'Chinese puzzle' of their complex joinery and construction. This can only be revealed through the study of actual chairs. This led directly to the historical dimension of this exhibition, by 'framing' the two contemporary chairs with four historical examples.
The hardwood chairs from the Ming period have become a near art form for the West: they have been elevated in a value hierarchy to have become products of immaculate thought rather than objects sullied by utilitarian concern. However, throughout these chairs there is a wonderfully considered play, a tension even, between material and structure. A play of structure characterises the gamut of chair status. The traditionally styled, Southern China round-back vernacular armchair loaned by Nigel Lendon has a degree of equivalence with the English Windsor chair in its ubiquity. Both styles inform the European-Chinese design divide. However, in process and structure the Chinese chair asks a lot more of its materials: it has a sense of solid wood being understood as fibre, like its alternative, bamboo 4 .
The thematic choice of the chair for this exhibition was for its role as a surrogate for the human body. The chairs were conceived as devices for mediation, translation and the interpretation of design in the widest possible sense. They are installed as sculptural objects, framed and elevated from function by plinths, and contextualised by the 'stories' displayed on the gallery walls. Each of these conventions had a purpose in the context of the gallery experience and allowed the viewer to reverse both the scholarly and aesthetic strategies employed by the curators. The viewer may read each chair's history, as a connection to something evolving significance and appreciation. Alternatively, the group of chairs may have been read as the evolution of style and cross-cultural influences. Or, perhaps finally, the viewer may have imaginatively returned these objects to their mundane origins, to sit in them, to have contemplated them from within their individual frame of reference, and thus be blown (like Klee's Angelus Novus ) into their future potential.
As individual narratives for each chair, the wall-texts acted on and pushed or pulled the perceptual experience of each in ways that would not have emerged by simply assembling six chairs in a gallery. The owners' narratives are complex and various, yet each set alive the chair in question. Some aspects of their stories were explanatory, some analytical while others leave parts of their interpretation to tantalize the reader. The provenance of some chairs was given in terms that were intensely personal and emotive. In other instances a process of scientific investigation complements historical and stylistic analysis. The stories reveal that the social life of these 'things' is far richer than their status as commodities. In the details of their passage around the globe, meanings and values are at once iconic-as signs of cultural difference-and intensely personal, as evidence of their makers' and owners' passages through space and time. 5
Two of the chairs had come from China in recent years, and their owners reflected on their understanding, appreciation and motivation for bringing them here. For Janet DeBoos who owns a matching pair, 'They are my chairs. They are not merely something to sit on. They are the architecture of a space where I can be seated.' When sitting on a chair we extend beyond ourselves.
The other two chairs had longer Australian histories and revealed the depth of Chinese cultural history in Australia. Charles Merewether's hybrid chair can be traced to Fong Lee's Emporium in Wellington, NSW in the 1920s. The provenance of Nigel Lendon's vernacular round back chair has grown in interest and complexity in unexpected ways as it is subjected to a forensic analysis of its material origin. While it stylistically parallels its southern Chinese antecedents, through electron microscopy the identification of the timber species making up its elements it is revealed to have a strong Australian and regional provenance. While at the moment an unsubstantiated romantic vision, it might have been possibly made by a craftsman of the gold-rush era of the 19th century. 6
A chair speaks about the perception of the human form and its generative culture. We look for patterns that make sense. Why this way? What for? A chair can simultaneously function and comment on its function. To explore this collection of chairs was to find things that were hidden, and be reminded of details that had fallen out of value. In finding these attributes, a maker's knowledge and imagination brings comparison and speculation, plausible interpretations and renewed appreciation. We think through our body and remember its relationship to objects. The chair can be a manifesto, or a milieu in which we create ourselves.
Notes
Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History , quoted in Amy Forsyth, 'The Trouble with History' , Woodwork , 2003(#83), pp 72-76
2 Boundary objects: http://kmwiki.wikispaces.com/Boundary+objects
3 Locally, this topic was explored by the eminent sinologist, C.P Fitzgerald through his book Barbarian Beds: The origin of the chair in China London, 1965
4 Berliner, Nancy and Sarah Handler Friends of the House: Furniture from China's towns and villages , Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, 1995; Handler, Sarah Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture , University of California Press, 2001
5 Arjun Appadurai The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective , Cambridge, 1986
6 The work-in-progress of identifying the timber species by light and scanning electron microscopy has been carried out by Dr Roger Heady, Research Associate, School of Resources, Environment and Society, and the Electron Microscopy Unit, ANU
Rodney Hayward and Nigel Lendon are both staff members of the School of Art at the Australian National University. Rodney Hayward is the Head of the Furniture/Wood Workshop and Nigel Lendon is Deputy Director and Graduate Studies Convenor.
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