Somewhere along the way Dave took an ordinary chair and made it impossible.
It started as a bow back Windsor side chair, the sort of thing that turns up in every second hand shop in the country. Turned legs, a hooped back, five spindles. A machine made object that thousands of people have owned and nobody has ever looked at closely.
Then he filled the seat.
Spools, beads, blocks, caps, turned wooden shapes, a dense city of them packed edge to edge across the whole surface where a person would sit, rising in places to the height of the back. He carried the same treatment up around the rim of the hoop, so the frame that holds the seat is encrusted too. Then he painted all of it a single deep red, chair and accumulation together, until you could no longer tell where the furniture stopped and the sculpture started.
What is left is a chair that has been permanently retired from being a chair.
I find this one of the funniest and most serious things he has made. Furniture is the most obedient category of object we own. It exists to be used and otherwise to be ignored. Dave took the most ordinary example of it and made it demand your attention by making it useless.
The best documented thing in the archive
When I went looking for photographs of it, I found nine.
Nine is a lot. Most of Dave’s sculptures survive in a single frame, shot once, years ago. This chair was photographed in 2018 and again in 2019, front, back, three quarter, side, and one close detail of the seat. It had been filed under five different names in five different folders, because the shots came off different cameras in different years, and nobody had ever seen them together as one set.
That mattered more than it sounds. To rebuild an object in three dimensions you need to see it from several sides. With one photograph you are guessing. With nine you are not.
Turn it
So here it is as an object rather than a picture. Drag to rotate. Scroll or pinch to zoom.
Look at the back. That is the part I keep returning to. In every photograph ever taken of this chair the back is the side you cannot see, and the underside of the seat is a place nobody points a camera. They are there now.
Put it in your room
It also exists as a file your phone can place on your floor at actual size, thirty six inches tall, which is exactly how tall the real one stands.
Tap the button, then point your camera at the floor and stand back. It arrives at its real size, thirty six inches tall, and you can walk around it. It is a large file, so give it a moment on a slow connection.
To stand this piece in your own room at its real size, open this post on a phone or tablet. The button needs a camera, so it does not appear on a computer.
There is a particular joke available here that I did not expect and cannot resist. You can now stand Dave’s unusable chair next to your own perfectly usable ones and look at the two of them together. One of them will look ridiculous, and it will not be his.
What this is for
Every one of these becomes a thing that can travel. A sculpture in a studio can be seen by whoever walks into the studio. A photograph of it can be seen by anyone, but it stays flat and it stays on somebody else’s terms, at the angle the photographer chose.
This is neither. It is the object, turnable, at its real size, in your hands or on your floor.
There are thirty more waiting.
