The Odd Couple
American Art Furniture
1980 - Now

Art furniture is a central component of Superhouse’s programming. While the gallery has a global view, this exhibition narrows its focus to the US, exploring a group of transgenerational American artists’ diverse tendencies, philosophies, narratives, and perspectives over the past four decades using furniture as a central component of their practices. The exhibition, with an installation designed by New York-based architect Andre Bahremand, combines rare, historical pieces from the functional art movement of the 1980s, the studio craft movement spanning the 1980s through the 2000s, and contemporary sculpture.

Stephen Markos
Founder & Director of Superhouse
Curator of The Odd Couple

Artists on view:

Alex Locadia
Dan Friedman
Elizabeth Browning Jackson
Ellen Pong
Ficus Interfaith
Garry Knox Bennett
Gloria Kisch
Howard Meister
James Hong

Essay The Odd Couple
By Glenn Adamson, American curator, writer, and historian

Art. Furniture. Such apparently simple words – it’s amazing what happens when you put them together.

People have been doing just that for a long time now, since at least the 1860s, when the phrase “artistic furniture” first gained currency in England. And for at least as long, the conjunction has been causing controversy and consternation. Already in 1876, the cabinetmaking cousins Rhoda and Agnes Garrett – among the few women to achieve success as professional designers, in that era – decried the “machine-made carving, the tiles and the gilded panels which are displayed ad nauseam in what is advertised as ‘artistic furniture’.”  What was important, they wrote, was not aesthetic embellishment for its own sake, but “sound construction and delicacy of workmanship.”

Fast forward a century and we find Donald Judd, in his customary tone of absolute certainty, writing that “If a chair
or a building is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. The art of a chair is not its resemblance to art, but is partly its reasonableness, usefulness, and scale as a chair.” From his point of view, art and furniture might perhaps inform one another, but they were things utterly and forever apart.

The historical record suggests otherwise: art and furniture have stubbornly refused to stop hybridizing, and in all sorts of unpredictable ways. This has been by no means a direct lineage of succession, much less a stable canon. The instinct to use chairs, tables, and lighting not just functionally, but as expressive vehicles, has recurred in such varied contexts as the Aesthetic Movement (who's supposed excesses raised the Garrets’ ire), French Art Nouveau (“the delirious art of men raging to do something new,” in the words of one British critic), Czech Cubism, Surrealism, Italian radical design, and Feminist art of the 1970s by Kate Millet and Nicola L.

If there was a time and place that art furniture came of age, however, it was in the 1980s, in the USA. This was the time of postmodernism, of promiscuity between disciplines, of experimenting in public – without a control group. Notably, it was a moment when the tactic of “appropriation,” that is, the neo-Duchampian act of claiming just about anything and using it in an artwork, was widely practiced. The perfect conditions, then, for the odd coupling between art and furniture to take center stage.

Not that big a stage, mind you. We’re talking here about just a handful of galleries, foremost among them Rick Kaufmann’s enterprising Art et Industrie, which opened its doors in 1977, in Manhattan. Initially Kaufmann concentrated on Italian radical design, but he had the perspicacity to realize that there was avant garde material to be found in the USA, too. And he had the instincts to present it effectively to the world. Of Howard Meister’s early chairs, including the jagged Juvenile Offender (1984), he told the New York Times, “They look dangerous, and one of them actually is. It's not a chair one would want to run into in the dark.”

Multiple streams flowed into Art et Industrie. As if in direct response to Judd, the program was defiantly unclassifiable, and included people from every conceivable background: sculptors of long experience (Gloria Kisch, Forrest Myers), a trained architect (James Hong), a graphic artist (Dan Friedman), a textile designer (Elizabeth Browning Jackson), a ceramist (Michele Oka Doner), a performance artist and illustrator, herself rather unclassifiable (Pippa Garner). Each member of this all-star cast brought a unique sensibility with them, making the gallery an explosive mixture. That unstable compound was also present in its curious name, rendered in French mainly as a jest, but nonetheless meant to be taken quite seriously. Kaufmann was offering aesthetic provocation and practical production in equal parts, available to anyone with the guts and vision to buy into it. This was not either art or industry, but somehow both at the same time.

That question of industry, which is to say production, remained fraught. Back in 1970, Wendell Castle, then and since the reigning king of sculptural furniture, had complained that he was “just making things for rich people.” (That complaint, too, went back to 1876, when William Morris is said to have muttered darkly to one of his own patrons about “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.”) In a fit of democratic-spiritedness, he changed course to focus on furniture in molded plastic: “Mass production seems the only answer.”

In fact, it wasn’t the only answer, and was only a brief diversion for Castle himself, who rarely darkened the factory doorstep again.It turned out that the strategy of making either related series or limited-edition pieces – the strategy that Kaufmann’s artists typically employed – was a winning formula. It allowed for a certain efficiency of production, making the work more accessible than sculpture of comparable scale and significance, while still allowing full creative rein. This was the approach that Judd himself adopted, and other artists like Scott Burton, too; it was also prevalent among the protagonists of the Creative Salvage movement in England, foremost among them Ron Arad (whose work Kaufmann introduced to America).

Importantly, this quasi-serial methodology was also embraced by the studio furniture movement – a phenomenon that ran right in parallel with radical design, so closely that it can be difficult to distinguish the two. True, studio furniture was distinguished by its greater investment in making by hand; many of the Art et Industrie artists had their work fabricated, much as Memphis and other Italian radicals had done. Studio furniture also had its own specific history, taking shape as it did within the American craft movement that began in the 1940s; and it had its own role models, including Wharton Esherick, George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, and Castle himself.

By the 1980s, though, studio furniture had become a multivalent and exploratory creative situation. Emerging talents like Garry Knox Bennett, Tom Loeser and Wendy Maruyama were well aware of what was happening in New York, Milan and London, and their work reflected those influences. It had a visual and conceptual dynamism, and a vibrant polychrome palette, that was strikingly different from their predecessors. They too were supported by adventurous galleries: Snyderman-Works and Helen Drutt in Philadelphia; Gallery at Workbench in Manhattan; Pritam & Eames in Long Island; and finally Peter Joseph, also in Manhattan, which briefly set a new standard for ambition in the field.

All these various art-furniture encounters failed to cohere into a single phenomenon; perhaps the trajectories were just too different, the lines between craft, design and sculpture still too brightly drawn. Yet in retrospect, it does seem a single multifaceted thing: why are figures like Terence Main and Richard Snyder, who did make their own work by hand, not usually considered studio furnituremakers? Why are Bennett, Loeser and Maruyama not positioned within the historiography of radical design?

The signal contribution of the present exhibition at Superhouse is to bring all this material in one place, making its mutual relevance abundantly clear. The project also brings new voices to the table – a new generation whose energies echo those that surged in the 1980s. It’s no accident that their work often resembles that of their forebears: Ellen Pong employs the same Platonic chair form that Meister did, and with comparable cleverness; Kim Mupangilaï has the sculptural prowess of a young Wendell Castle; Sean Gerstley’s Open Up cabinet has a coloristic, active surface reminiscent of Loeser’s work; the illusionistic work of Lucas Bourgine and the duo Ficus Interfaith would have fit right into Rick Kaufmann’s program. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, there is new work by Wendy Maruyama, 72 years young and making some of the most life-enhancingly vibrant work of her career. Objects like these need no classificatory system to validate them. Each is its own proof that the art-furniture equation can be solved again and again, its terms infinitely varied, its solutions both surprising and satisfying. Two little words. Put them together, and what do you get? A big wide world.

Exhibition design by Andre Bahremand

New York-based architect Andre Bahremand is an interdisciplinary designer whose work spans across urban design, architecture, interior design, and curation. Graduating with a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Melbourne, Bahremand's career has been enriched by collaborations with globally renowned architecture firms and luxury brands such as the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), MVRDV and LVMH, elevating his approach with international insights and unwavering standards of excellence. The Odd Couple is the first in a series of spatial interventions that aim to create meaningful installations that enhance the gallery's visitors' experience. Superhouse and Bahremand's partnership promises a dynamic series of works that will continue challenging and elevating the intersections of art and space.