Another fantastic piece in the show is Konstantin Grcic´s 360°. As one of only two seating apparatuses featured in Graphic Design: Now in Production, this non-chair found its way into the gallery as part of a larger installation, Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich’s Empty Words (separate post to come soon) and therefore does not exist on the registrar’s official checklist of pieces featured in the exhibition. Thank you Jürg for bringing this wonderful ‘tool’ to our attention.
Curator Andrew Blauvelt (left) and artist Jürg Lehni during installation.
Jürg sitting on his 360° while setting up Empty Words. (swivel chair or swivel camera??)
Grcic constructing the first mockup for 360°.
Description below pulled from Grcic’s website:
360° is neither a stool nor a chair, but something inbetween. Its name implies that it swivels around and that one can sit on it in all directions. It is meant for seated activities that require a constantly changing posture. 360° is not intended for long stints of work in a static position. Instead it encourages a form of dynamic sitting, short term, ad hoc, improvised – moving around.
“Konstantin Grcic´s radical take on the office chair shatters the ergonomists´monopoly on workplace design and turns a bumrest into a tool. Sitting on it in a traditional way is the least successful approach – you feel a vertiginous sensation that everything that should be there isn´t. (…) In its efforts to shake off the flattened, generic experience of traditional office furniture, Grcic has made something that asks us to think of a chair-as-tool, or chair-as-device. (…) What´s happening here is a strange trick – where by undoing the direct functional performance of a chair, Grcic makes the 360° somehow more functional. By un-inventing the normative perception of the chair, he asks its user to be party to the imaginative invention of sitting. (…) And somehow this provisional quality feels like a relief from a more conventionally comfortable chair. Sitting on it here in my office, it feels less like work, more like doing something.”
(Excerpt form a text by Sam Jacob published in ICON magazine, September 2009).
The other chair in the exhibition is Eric Ku’s Chair/Chair.
In the Gallery…
Ku’s Chair/Chair in the typography section of the exhibition.
From the gallery label… Eric Ku’s Chair is made from pieces that when taken apart, spell out the word “chair.” Ku was inspired by a famous work by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs(1965). Kosuth placed a real chair in the gallery next to a photograph of the same chair (photographed in that gallery) and a definition from a dictionary.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965).
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