When is a chair more than a chair? When it's art.
By Sally West Johnson '72
Originally, Chris Howell '05 planned to wire his chair so that it would scream at people as they sat down, but eventually the better angels of his nature took over, and he settled for a more meditative approach to his project. The assignment for Eric Nelson's studio art course, Form and Structure in Sculpture, was to design a chair for "a particular person, a scientific principle, a historical period, a cause, a deeply held belief, or a favorite activity."
Howell's response was a chair with an attached telephone that is hooked up to an answering machine under the seat cushion. He entitled his work Sit Down, Call In, and he explains it like this: "The chair is formed to fit the body. It brings sensation to areas of the body we often ignore. The act of sitting initiates a flow of sensory information within the body: texture, support, weight, comfort.
"Our awareness shifts from visual stimulus to the tactile relationship between our posterior and its cradle. Sit Down, Call In explores this process of kinesthetic communication by encouraging the viewer to literally place a telephone call to her rear end. A digital answering machine records these conversations, accumulating tactile sensation, body image, and the physical and emotional bond between brain and behind.
Sit Down, Call In asks viewers to delve into their relationship to their posterior via its most common companion: the chair." For his part, Nelson, a resident sculptor and
professor of studio art, says the chair project is one of his favorites for his intermediate students because it combines fundamental principles of sculpture—form, space, structure, texture, and size—with the technical challenges of transforming a concept into a self-standing, real-world object that can maintain its shape and form. "I use the chair because it's so familiar to us," he explains. "Usually, we see it as a source of comfort, but it can also be as grand as a throne or as functional as the seat of a Conestoga wagon. Everything depends on the context, and I want the students to put this form in a context."
Tyne Pike-Sprenger '05, for instance, discovered that the inherent physical properties of her material dictated the form of the finished piece. She used dried daylily stalks that she collected at first from her mother's garden in West Dover, Vermont, and later from clumps of lilies all over the area; she discovered the mother lode of daylily stalks at the edge of a pond hard by the 15th hole on the College golf course. Once she had gathered all the stalks, Pike-Sprenger wanted to connect them with wires running along the top and bottom, to create a lounge chair that had a magic-carpet effect with loose, flowing lines.
"The structure was trial and error," she says. "The key was the suppleness of the stalks. I found that if I wet them and left them outdoors overnight, they would have just the right amount of flexibility." She also discovered a pattern of light and dark striations in the stalks that she used to good effect. But the chair remained a work in progress until the night before the installation opened, when she decided to suspend her chair in midair to accentuate its bird-in-flight form. "My mom is claiming the chair for her new house," says Pike-Sprenger with a rueful laugh, "but I'm afraid it doesn't travel very well."
The 13 chairs, on display in the Pit Space of the Johnson Memorial Building for two weeks in November, were as varied and open to interpretation as the students who designed them—in effect the exhibit served as a Rorschach test for sculptors and viewers alike.
Junior Matt Corrente's chair of lodgepole pines wrapped with twine soared three stories, rising above the Pit Space, climbing past Johnson's main level, and stretching toward the building's skylights; in Corrente's words, the chair was "defying the physical limitations of the space."
Jake Whitcomb '06, on the other hand, remained firmly earth-bound with his solid, squat bench made out of white pine. Whitcomb constructed the bench by using a chainsaw to carve slices from a felled white pine, then fitting the pieces together so that the joints were held together by nothing more than the weight and bulk of the wood. It is the rough cut of the wood, he says, that emphasizes the bench's connection to nature.
Sydney Atkins '05 took the opposite tack, rejecting the natural in favor of the man-made, the rounded, rough forms of wood in favor of the square corners and sharp edges of metal. Atkins's hunt for materials took her at first to the Middlebury town dump, "where I met a guy who was a sign collector. He sent me to the Middlebury Transit Company, where the guys helped me find old street signs and taught me about the history of the signs."
This was Atkins's first experience working with metal. "It was a huge learning process—I learned about what can be welded and what can't, what has to be bolted," she says. What she ended up with was a park bench made of traffic signs and old road markers, bent to look a little like human forms seated on the bench.
But the best part, she adds, "was the chance to get out into the community and meet all kinds of wonderful people. I have to take a photo of the bench so I can send it to the guys at the transit company to hang on the wall."
In at least one instance, a chair took on a life of its own, refusing to cooperate with the grand plan of its sculptor. Bothered by what she perceives to be a culture of pervasive female beauty, Jean Prendergast '05 was determined to construct a symbol of defiance. Using pages torn from glossy magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue (which she believes, promote "images of dainty, beautiful, useless females, whose hair, weight, and clothes define them"), Prendergast set out to make a vanity stool that would serve as a mocking symbol of the culture. She turned the pages into papier-mâché, fashioned the stool from the gluey material, and, once it dried, shellacked it to a glossy sheen.
"It is shiny, colorful, appealing—and structured almost in the tradition of a vanity chair," Prendergast says. "And yet it is completely unstable, feeble, useless," she admits. "It can hold no weight; it can be used for nothing other than appearance, and can barely even support itself."
As if to emphasize the point, on an early November afternoon in Johnson, the three-legged stool refused to stand up. "We tried," says Nelson, pointing at the sprawling stool with its legs splayed out around it. "We tried glue, everything we could think of to attach the legs to the seat. Nothing worked. We finally decided it just wasn't meant to stand."
Sally West Johnson '72 is an award-winning writer and frequent contributor to Middlebury Magazine. She wrote "The Nature of Nurture" in thesummer 2004 issue.