Chairs on Exhibit: The Bottom Line

Designing a chair is no simple matter, architect Larry Scarpa discovered when he first set out to invent his own version of this common piece of furniture.

As soon as he began to think about the whole notion of resting on one’s bottom, he found himself delving into the historic meaning of the chair as a symbol of rest and a seat of the soul.

“The technological evolution of the chair fascinated me,” he explained. “I felt I had to express the entire history of ‘chair-ness’ in my design in order to give fresh meaning to the simple act of sitting down. Anything less would have been inadequate.”

His “Evolutionary Chair” rests on a smooth concrete stone. The crude base supports a finely crafted, hinged and folding wooden back and a welded metal swivel seat of stainless-steel mesh. The primitiveness of the concrete chunk contrasts with the subtlety of the wooden joinery and the high-tech gloss of the steel seat.

The work is part of an exhibition, “Chair as Art,” at the Gallery of Functional Art on Main Street, Santa Monica. The exhibit, which opens today and runs through July 19, includes 70 or so contemporary chairs designed by architects, artists and furniture makers.

“We’ve collected a range of designs from around the U.S. that represents the aesthetic, functional and formal possibilities of the chair,” gallery owner Lois Lambert said. “I was amazed at the variety of expression the artists contrived out of this simple and useful object.”

The chairs on display run the gamut of the un-sittable, the elaborately obvious and the almost unimaginable.

Artist Therman Statom’s un-sittable $3,700 “Sculpture About Chair” has a glass seat and back, housing a series of small sculptural scenarios. Resembling a static trash art video game, it is a witty comment on the civilized absurdity of sitting.

Philip Garner’s $800 “Suctionaire,” with its seat made of red rubber toilet plungers, contrasts with Jon Brook’s sticklike, seatless “Styx Ladderback” chair.

Los Angeles artist Jon Bok’s $2,000 bottle cap-studded “Folk Chair” is plated with flattened Folger’s coffee cans. Ries Niemi’s pair of powder-coated, gray steel “Profile” chairs features facing male and female silhouettes that the designer suggests “could speak to one another.”

Some of the items displayed have the effrontery to eschew wit, irony, philosophy or sheer cleverness for the grace of beautiful simplicity.

Superbly crafted in bird’s-eye maple and lacewood, “Canilune,” an $1,800 work by Massachusetts artist Thomas Stender, resembles a slender new moon. The delicacy of its detailing make it seem ghostly as lunar light.

The romance of the chair as seat of the soul inspires several “Chair As Art” designers to wax poetical.

“I’ve been sustained by the magic at the heart of life,” declared David Rudolph, designer of the “Cloudy City Chair,” which looks like a miniature Manhattan skyline in maple.

Profile Inspiration

The profile of his wife, Kena, inspired the corrugated metal silhouette of Mel Zaid’s “Love Notes.”

Shaped like an African slave woman with pierced lips and pendulous ears, the silicon-bronze “Ubangi” chair makes a socio-historical statement. “It asks the question, ‘Is a chair happy or sad?’ ” said designer Philip Miller. “Does it support its burden with a smile, or does it groan under the burden of a load it doesn’t deserve? If you hit my chair with a hammer, it sings!”

The rocket-powered black steel “Time Traveler” is H.G. Wells-meets-Capt. James T. Kirk. Dane Scarborough, who designed the sets for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new sci-fi movie, “Total Recall,” suggests the sitter should “warm up the retro-thrusters and set the desired past or future destination date.”

Urge to Design

The urge to make art of the chair has a long history in modern design. Several chairs on display in Santa Monica--such as “Canilune” and Mark Schlabaugh’s high-backed maple dining chair--resemble classic early 20th-Century designs by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and America’s Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mies van der Rohe’s famous chrome steel and padded black leather “Barcelona” chair is on permanent display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Bauhaus designers Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius also created chairs that have become sleek icons of modernism. Eero Saarinen, Alvar Aalto, Charles Eames and, more recently, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi and Arata Isozaki--designer of the Museum of Contemporary Art--have crafted highly expressive seats.

“Perhaps the idea that a piece of furniture can be art is simply an extension of what the early Modernists talked about in their effort to take good art to the masses and out of the museums,” Akiko Busch wrote in an article titled “Unusual Comforts” in Metropolis magazine. “The new generation of furniture makers claim that . . . these pieces can be perceived both as art and functional furniture.”

Object as Art

Lambert has no quarrel with this concept. She plans a series of furniture-as-art shows through the rest of the year, featuring tables and lighting.

“Any object can become art if an artist creates it,” she said. “Van Gogh can paint a peasant straw-seated chair and transform this humble functional thing into a potent symbol.

“Everything functional has a symbolic resonance beyond its mere usefulness--or because of it. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a chair is a chair is a chair. Amen.”