FI ISIDORE
Silk scarf left behind at Donaustrasse 1, November 1873
Alterered bent-wood chair, used vinyl marley dance studio flooring, latex, bangles, found text, silk garments, marquetry drill, antique strap clamp,
88 x 120 x 120 cm, 2025
Price on asking
Words from the artist:
A bentwood chair staged on a piece of used, marley vinyl dance studio flooring--scuffed by dancing shoes, rehearsal marks. Under one leg, a long printed letter of found instructional text explaining the process of steam bending in wood. Portions of the curved bent wood elements of the chair have been removed, restaged across the dance flooring, and replaced by an assemblage of found objects. Hanging off the chair: a collection of silk garments and loose accessories.
Steam-forming solid wood relies on the memory bent into its fibers. The material retains its strength in an atypical way, through pure horizontal tension versus the perpendicular, penetrative strength most common in furniture joinery. Construction is a language that vocalizes some utterance of what form and force can be. Bent-wood gestures towards a non-normative notion of structure and function through flexibility and expressive materiality.
Staged on the fragment of dance studio flooring, two imaginary scenes are lived out through the formal language of the chair. One of the erotics of its construction. One of a fantasy of the characters that its history of construction and use set into movement in the world. This imagination takes root in the 19th Century cafe culture that the original Thornet bent-wood chairs were designed for. The garments hanging off the bentside and seat of the chair might belong to some young Vienese bohemian, or one of the women who sanded and polished the first editions of the chairs in the Thornet factory. Here, one can imagine the advent of the technique of steambending, and the queer sensuality of these novel curves, as engendering the mise-en-scenes that would transpire in those spaces.
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