#HTE
Tools & Craft #39: Seventeen Utopian Benches You Can Build
I love seeing any gallery show that’s about furniture. A few years ago I attended artist Francis Cape’s “Utopian Benches” exhibition at the Murray Guy Gallery in Chelsea. Cape created a series of benches based on designs by people seeking Utopia (more on this in a bit). My son and I arrived at the gallery prepared to be enlightened, to be entertained, and to sit down.
The exhibit consisted of seventeen benches arranged in a grid in a large airy room. The arrangement screamed “Art” so your first inclination was to walk respectfully around them and try to get a visual sense of them. While all the benches do the same thing, they all look different, with different forms of joinery, differences in size, profile, and decoration. But that’s not the point.
Eventually you sit down on one. And of course you try to form an opinion: Is this a good bench? What makes it special? Do you want to build it? You wiggle your butt against the bench and then get up and sit in another bench and do the same thing. This gets boring.
Then you start talking to someone, and since there are all these benches around, the natural inclination is to sit down and talk. In my case, I had a very interesting conversation with my son and then with Janice Guy, one of the gallery owners. As the conversation progressed, we moved seats a couple of times, and the point of the exhibit became clear. This show isn’t about a bunch of benches. Sure, it’s convenient to see them all in one place, and we all have favorites. What’s important is how we react with a group of benches.
If you have a long bench, people can sit next to each other without really having to talk to each other. With two opposing benches, you can easily have a conversation. Benches, unlike dining chairs and sofas, speak to the communal. A single-seat chair is about the person sitting in it. A room of benches is about how groups of people interact—and that’s what this exhibit is really about.
The benches in the show are for sale, but—true to the concept of the show—the benches are offered as “small gatherings” of at least three. And this is genius. Think of it in the context of a home. A single bench up against a wall or something is a plebeian piece of functional furniture handy for sitting when you’re taking your boots off. A “small gathering of benches” in a den or living room begs to be sat on, rearranged, and made into a social focus of an area. For me, the most important takeaway from the show is how the way furniture can make people interact. I’m usually so focused on the details of a piece that it’s pretty easy for me to forget the context of how the end users will use the furniture when it’s in situ.
This exhibition was based on Cape’s book (which we stock), We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from The Shakers To The Separatists of Zoar. I leafed through this book over a period of several weeks before reading the whole thing one morning whilst firmly planted on that ubiquitous urban communal bench—the subway.
For all the enlightenment in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was still a pretty inhospitable place for small religious sects, and many migrated to the United States in search of religious freedom. Many of these groups were highly communal, and the simple, backless bench was a sign both of piousness, and equality. Except in a very cursory way, this thin volume doesn’t explore the beliefs of any of these groups. Instead, it investigates the construction, and reasoning behind different styles of bench. Each chapter deals with the basic history of a community and provides a measured drawing of a communal bench that would have been typical of the community.
This is a superb book to consult if you want to build a bench or two, and the benches are largely of very simple, straightforward construction. The book is a very interesting read with enough background information to inform without getting bogged down, and the round-up of bench styles is a real eye-opener on what can be done with a basic traditional form. For designers and furniture makers, We Sit Together provides an interesting overview of the implications and ideology conveyed by even the seemingly simplest of objects.
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This “Tools & Craft” section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.
http://www.core77.com/posts/63191/Tools-n-Craft-39-Seventeen-Utopian-Benches-You-Can-Build