Furniture Finds New Form as Sculpture

Truly embracing Joost van Oss and Sherrie Levine’s recent collaborative work--the product of their yearlong residency in the Getty Research Institute’s scholar program--requires a leap of faith. The five silvery aluminum sculptures on display in the institute’s gallery are replicas of three tables and two chairs designed in the early 1900s by De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld. Aside from the material and the lack of color (the original furniture was made from painted wood), there are no observable differences between the old and the new objects. Which makes it difficult to get around an unsophisticated but not unwarranted question: Why bother? Surely the Getty can afford the originals.

Like most of Levine’s work, the Rietveld sculptures are not merely copies but rather conceptual interpretations intended to evoke questions of authenticity, authority, reproduction and ownership. The intellectual framework the artists use to come to these issues, however, is not easy to access, entwined as it is in a closed-circuit art historical discourse. The wall texts, which stumble awkwardly through artspeak ambiguities, offer little assistance: “These sculpture prototypes pay homage to Rietveld and the De Stijl movement, but the homage is no mere tribute,” they tell us. “Levine and van Oss copy a table and chair, but at the same time they do not copy a table and chair.”

Ultimately, and appropriately, it is something about the objects themselves--perhaps what Levine has called the “aura” of her works--that dissolves the “why bother” question and leads into the project’s conceptual nuances. That aura emanates from the painstaking details of the objects’ construction: sharp lines and precise angles; smooth, flawless textures; and the clean shine of aluminum surfaces. By investing precisely manufactured reproductions with their artistic essence, Levine and Van Oss mean to create objects that rival the authority and cultural predominance of the originals, cheekily subverting cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s famous pronouncement that the development of mechanical reproduction in the 20th century did away with the aura of individual artworks.

The degree of formal perfection cultivated by the artists gives the sculptures an obsessive, even fetishistic quality that mingles uneasily with the ascetic ideals embodied in Rietveld’s original designs. This furniture--with its flat planes, hard surfaces, and asymmetrical orientation--would never have been particularly comfortable. In Van Oss and Levine’s hands, however, it becomes downright uninviting. The clinical sheen of the aluminum eradicates any sense of domesticity or familiarity, not to mention playfulness or fun, that painted wood can convey, and the metal’s razor-sharp edges make the objects seem not only uncomfortable but dangerous. Rietveld endeavored to make furniture that reflected the aesthetics of sculpture; Van Oss and Levine have made sculpture, with all its asocial and anti-functional connotations, out of furniture.

Because this body of work lacks the overt (and often feminist) sarcasm that characterizes much of Levine’s past work, its political inclinations are more ambiguous. On the one hand, the series seems to be poking fun at the utopian but ultimately unsustainable social vision of early European Modernism. On the other hand, it clearly emerges from a genuine love, perhaps even awe, of Modernist design. This balance of satire and esteem puts an interesting spin on the issues of authority and cultural significance that these objects raise.

It is likely that the sculptures would come across more clearly when installed--as they are intended to be, according to the brochure--in symmetrical groupings of half a dozen or more (the five current pieces are described as prototypes). The order and repetition in such an arrangement might tease out some of the more subtle conceptual details. As it is, the series stands as an intriguingly skewed homage that is only strengthened by its own sense of paradox.

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The Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 440-7360. Through July 8. Closed Monday.