MORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD

Boscobel, the handsome nineteenth-century house-museum in Hudson County, New York, gives poignant testimony to the new American spirit. Built between 1804-1808 by farmers States and Elizabeth Dykeman, it was inspired by Boscobel Castle in Shropshire, England, where Charles II hid in a tree and then a priest hole after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester.

It’s instructive to compare Boscobel to the Neuer Pavilion, the delightful summer home Schinkel built for Friedrich Wilhelm III inside the gardens of Charlottenburg in 1824. Both homes are built with two stories in a nine-square plan, with the rooms settled around a central staircase. And both are rendered in a restrained neoclassical fashion, built from flat surfaces embellished with raised motifs and flat patterns.

The Pavilion, though originally a royal residence, is compressed and – because crafted by Schinkel – exquisitely proportioned and detailed. Its exterior columns and pilasters appear etched into its taut white stone skin. Boscobel, originally a working farmhouse, is about four times as large. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, with eccentricities in its plan. The columns, pilasters and festoons on its facade are cheerfully overscaled, like theatrical makeup. (Our guide suggested, kindly, that these motifs were designed to be seen from boats passing on the river below.)

But if Boscobel is brasher and noisier than the Pavilion, it’s also looser and freer. Large windows invite the eye to wander off into the landscape. There’s room to move about inside, to pass others on the stair, to hide in the corners, to linger for hours inside one of its rooms. Its architecture seems governed by pragmatics rather than proportion, and its ornament by personal preference rather than rules. And that might speak perfectly about America, then and now.

Photograph courtesy of Boscobel. House and Gardens.

January 19, 2020 by Nalina Moses

YOU DO YOU

After wrestling with a recalcitrant employee at a meeting last week, my boss told him, with a shrug of the shoulders, “You do you.” This could be the motto of the newest generation of product designers, whose work is represented handsomely at this year’s Collective Design Fair.

The overall mood is sophisticated and twee. I’ve thought before that our current moment in design is a throwback to the 80′s but, after walking through CDF I realize there’s something essentially different. Today’s design work isn’t principled formally; it’s casual and idiosyncratic. Each object is about realizing one small idea – about narrative, material, proportion – in hallucinogenic detail, but without an overarching set of beliefs. This is form-making without rules, personal design. Which isn’t to say it isn’t substantial or complex. All the objects and artwork here are immaculately crafted, curated and installed.

The mood is, almost always, playful, and the objects are like toys – whose only function is to amuse and delight. Even the most practical pieces (chairs, tables, drinking glasses) are overwhelmed by their idiosyncratic form, so that their everyday functions seem secondary. The most spectacular installation is the R + Company booth, which contains a balloon-shaped couch welded together from nickels, a six-foot-tall bead-encrusted mushroom, a hanging chair shaped like a wasp’s next, and spiked ceramic vases that look like exotic fruit envisioned by Dr. Seuss. Each object feels immediate, as it has been fabricated directly, without refinement or engineering, from a child’s crayon drawing.

Modernists defied formal conventions to challenge staid bourgeois notions about what a table was, what a window was, and what a house was. Now, perhaps because there is no authoritative dogma to rub up against, designers are defying convention simply because they have the freedom to, and because they’re bored doing ordinary stuff. The results are lovely to look at, and emotionally slight.

R + Company installation, Collective Design Fair, 2017. Photograph by Nalina Moses.

May 13, 2017 by Nalina Moses

NO SO SIMPLE

In lieu of church, I walked to the Met on Sunday morning to see a show of Shaker objects culled from the collection called Simple Gifts. There is an immense maple dining table held together by pin-sized wood dowels. There is a handwoven bolt of wool, just wide enough for a dress, with softly jagged edges, dyed darker than midnight. There is a chair made with such minimal material, and fuss, that it looks like a line drawing of a chair. All these objects are handsome but none has the revelatory, purifying effect I was searching for. They are sort of beautiful and also sort of unremarkable.

What is remarkable is their purposefulness, their unapologetic pragmatism. There are no tchotchkes or decorative pieces here, like those that fill the ceramics, metalworks and furniture halls surrounding the gallery. Each is, instead, made to meet a particular need, and each of its attributes responds to an aspect of that need. A cabinet has drawers just wide enough to store bolts of fabric laid flat. A sewing table has inches marked off along its front lip to reference when cutting patterns. A knit glove has open fingertips so one can sit inside, near the window, on a cold day, and turn the pages of a book.

This pragmatism is strikingly apparent when one steps into the Shaker Retiring Room, just footsteps away. The room is furnished with a constellation of everyday objects, and without any decoration. The atmosphere is sensually spare and dramatically rich, as each object speaks powerfully to its use. There is a desk and chair for writing in a journal and keeping accounts, a rocking chair with a footrest for knitting and mending, a small iron fireplace for heat in winter winter, a bed for sleeping (it’s too narrow for much else) and small high windows to let in light. Each thing is simple in form and rich in life.

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum.

September 18, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THESE CHAIRS CAN TALK

Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Perez Art Museum shows her sculpture to great advantage. The large, bare, squarish concrete galleries it fills flow seamlessly into one another. Her sculptures, assemblages of found objects (furniture, clothing, hardware), are set out within them loosely and purposefully, pulling a visitor this way and that, in a state of semi-distraction, as she moves through.

Salcedo’s most powerful works, made from 1989 to 2008, take, slice, turn, reassemble, and seal shut with concrete traditional wood tables, chairs, bureaus, bed frames, and almirahs. This is the kind of furniture that filled our grandparents homes, and that can be found in thrift stores today. By recombining them and filling their voids with concrete the artist renders them useless, helpless, mute. The pieces are immaculately crafted; the wood frames are precisely cut and fastened, the concrete is poured to a soft sheen. Their careful syntactical play (a chair turned to face a wall, a table stacked upside-down within the frame of a dresser) engenders a sense of unease and confusion. Ominous questions arise: Whose bureau is this, and where is she now? Things are deeply and quietly out of order.

These are gorgeous sculptures. They recall Eva Hesse’s ability to infuse common materials with talismanic power, and Rachel Whiteread’s quiet disruption of conventional architectural scale and language. But what’s most remarkable is the power of each piece to speak – clearly and seriously – about silence, history, political oppression and personal dignity, themes Salcedo has spoken about throughout her career. With works like this, she doesn’t need to say a word.

Installation View, Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016. Furniture by Doris Salcedo, 1989. Photo by World Red Eye, courtesy of Perez Art Museum and Doris Salcedo.

June 26, 2016 by Nalina Moses