When asked what A/D is or does, our common reply is that A/D exists to make functional objects with painters and sculptors. That bare bones statement extends in many directions, first perhaps into the past. Artists have always made such things; jewelry for their lovers, a bench for the studio, toys for the children. I was told once that Durer designed a chandelier.
The 18th-century French painter Hubert Robert, "Hubert le Ruiniste" as he was called, painted idealized landscapes enhanced by equally ideal ruins, was commissioned by Marie Antoinette to design chairs for the Petit Trianon. Three of them still stand in the dining room there. Piet Mondrian, an artist deeply concerned with the relationship of art to the rooms in which it lives, made tables and easels and chairs, deeply elegant objects constructed out of detritus: old crates, a folding chair. Alexander Calder made jewelry uncommonly kin. He once wrote to his sister, "I think best in wire," and a brooch of his was made of an unending piece of wire, looping and returning on itself to achieve completion.(fig 1,2)
There have been entire movements that were impetus for such objects: Rodchenko's Worker's Club; Malevich's porcelain; the Bauhaus of course. Meret Oppenheim's Table aux Pieds d'Oiseau, one of the great pieces of artists' furniture, at once entirely Oppenheim and perfectly furniture of her period, was shown in Paris in 1939 in an exhibition of furniture by the Surrealists (fig 3).
A/D's field then is traditional. The reason I think that I have been invited here today, is that there are a dozen artists in studios in New York alone, at this very moment, who are asking, "Where is the line between art and object? Can I draw it here?" Design has become another tool, one determined to involve not the eye of the viewer but the entire body. In fifteen years A/D has gone from perplexing anyone who walked through the doors to being an "oh-of-course" phenomenon, at once old fashioned and cutting edgea very nice place to be.
Artists have brought us projects over the years. I remember Gary Stephan coming to the door with a small cardboard model in the palm of his hand, and saying, For fifteen years I've wanted to make this chaise lounge. And so we did, though the first three woodworkers told us that it was impossible, that wood couldn't be made to behave that way. (fig 4) Of course, making objects with artists, one encounters this frequently. They do not begin with the proper seat height for a chair or the technical properties of a material. They begin somewhere in their private art history. The chaise, I believe, began with scrolling ribbons held in the hands of Raphael's angels. A standard repeat for upholstery fabric seems to be eighteen inches, so that all the chairs around your dining table will match. But Georgia Marsh's fabric has a repeat so large that only the eye makes a connection from vine to vine. (Her idea of printing the vines in white ink on a translucent linen fabric, so that when the sun shines through them they read as grey, and at night read again as white ink on white, is one I've seen used often in the commercial design field. Georgia took it to completion, and also had print a version in pale grey ink on heavy white linen, the visual equivalent.(fig 5)
I suppose Richard Tuttle's Lamp with No Style fits in here somewhere. He had read that Elsie de Wolfe felt no one could invent a new lamp. It would always be Classical Revival or neo-Etruscan. And so Richard made a lamp with no previous design history, giving it that title always difficult for collectors Lamp with No Style. (fig 6)The first lamp that we made with Tuttle, Mei-mei's Lamp, looked so simple, so effortless, that the very good woodworkers we hired made them wrong. The simple sheet-rock screws have to be off-center; certain ends of the wood have to be rounded, but others not. (fig 7)
When Bill Wegman designed a wallpaper border, a print of seventy-eight screens that nonetheless uses only three colors, we must have made two dozen strike-offs: can the grey ink be more brown, more red, more transparent? (fig 8)Because of this, if we find several fabricators who can make the piece (and of course at a certain point, A/D drops out all together, and the work happens between the artist and the fabricator) then we choose the nicest, because we know we will be very difficult clients. Artists live through their eyes: the approximate gesture is not satisfactory.
Our usual way of working is to send a letter to an artist whose work we admire:
Dear Ed Ruscha, Dear Roni Horn, is there an object in the world that you think needs reinventing?
If the answer is yes, then A/D finds the fabricator and makes the prototype, produces the edition and installs a show. It is often true that the most difficult step for the artist is choosing the object. It can be a teaspoon. It can be a fountain. I have always regretted not pushing harder for an idea someone had years ago to make a mobile home. In theory, there are dozens of artists walking home from the store or along a beach and muttering, A chair? No, not a chair, maybe andirons.
I would not try to define the place where art leaves off and object begins, since I've seen so clearly that each artist answers that question differently. Kiki Smith's paperweights are sculpture, works that she in fact called "public sculpture" in an interview that I read.They are meant to be held in the hand, hefted, toyed with, caressed, but still. are serious work. (fig 9).
For years, Richard Tuttle has worked with the idea of the wall: a piece of wire pinned to the wall at one end with a delicate pencil line tracing it shadow; his brilliant installation at Mary Boone's gallery which also used a hand-drawn line rising from his sculpture, which made the wall drop back and almost disappear. With the wrought iron element of his chandelier floating in space, he is free of the wall entirely. His Smell of Trees began its life as a sculpture and became a lamp over time. The line for Tuttle is not so much blurred as carefully not drawn.(fig 10)
Jennifer Bartlett's most famous painting, Rhapsody, is made up of hundreds of equal-sized panels. Each portrays one of three or four simple forms: a house, a tree, a cloud. Her paintings look nothing like any of the forty-three blown glass vases we published--but the genesis is the same. You begin with a simple cylinder, and then you push it, over and over, until you've rung all the essential changes. (fig 11)
Among the historical exhibitions we have made was one of John Chamberlain's foam couches, the first of which was a huge foam sculpture that he cut in half and made into a sofa. He went on to carve great blocks of foam into seating shapes, always with the same two butcher's knives. These became more complexagain a perfect marriage of work and period, the ultimate 1970's furniture but still very recognizably Chamberlain(if that is you know his foam sculptures, which are exquisite, but less known than the metal pieces, perhaps because they suffer from what the insurers so wonderfully call "inherent vice." Foam disintegrates. The sculptures are unlikely to be around in a hundred years' time. The sofas were so successful that when we had a show, I would come out of my office and find that a dozen people who had wandered in hours earlier were still sitting, lying, on the couches, chatting away. (fig 12, 13)
Rauschenberg, the man who made a yards-long print with an automobile tire, made a lamp around the time that Chamberlain was carving his couches. Tire Lamp is an ugly, gorgeous object, with tail lights recessed all the way around the hollow of the tire, so that it casts halos of light and halos of shadow. This was published in an edition of four. The coffee tables shown are prototypes for an edition never published, made around the time that Rauschenberg was involved in EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology). There are no motors involved, but between the light at the base of the table and its glass surface is a drawer full of water. The tin can resting on the table top has a paintbrush affixed to it that extends down through a hole into the water. One is meant to grab the can, and move it, stirring the water with the paintbrush, and casting patterns of water and light into the room. (fig 14)
Artists have used A/D as well to offer gifts to the world. Chuck Close's Self-Portrait/Tapestry, which we published at the same time as his Lucas/Rug, is very like his famous black and white self portrait, but is made only of fine threads of black and white silk. It sells for a twentieth the price of his prints. Lichtenstein's Interior with Blue Floor wallpaper is his version of a scenic 19th-century paper–a panel with a castle rolled up next to the panel with a river followed by a panel of trees–but his is of a room. (fig 15)It's basically a huge print–eight and a half by twelve feet. when we first installed it, carpeting the gallery at the same time with Gerhard Richter's wall-to-wall nylon carpet, an emphatically un-precious object with the colors stamped on, it sold like any wall-to-wall by the thirteen-foot-wide roll. (fig 16) We sold it for $2,500. Not quite mass market, but still a gift. The wallpaper was emphatically just that. Lichtenstein wanted it glued flat to the wall, no frame, no molding, no implication of painting. In my mind, I contrast this with Close's Lucas/Rug, hand-knotted silk lozenges of color that from a distance resolve into a portrait of Lucas Samaras.
At the gallery, we put it on the floor. Chuck hung his on the wall in the studio. At a distance of more than ten feet, it looks like a painting. Rachel Whiteread, on the other hand, made something that looks like her work. But in fact she used the opportunity to make a daybed to invert her sculpture-making process. Furniture is built and the daybed unites three volumes that could not be cast from a single bed. If you were lying under a bed and looking up at the mattress pressing down through the bed's slats, it would look like the surface of her daybed. The overall form is of two mattresses stacked one on top of the other. Then in each of the four corners is a narrow hole, as of a leg extending down.(fig 17)
The show "Versions of Contingency" came out of a pencil drawing on the wall of Jack Barth's studio. He had drawn an oak branch with an acorn hanging from it, and written those words, followed by "Old end game, lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing," which is a quote from Samuel Beckett as I remember. This became Noughts & Crosses, a tic-tac-toe game. The board was a print, the first he'd made. In the gallery, along with John Cage's mesostics and a Carl Andre floor piece, we set the litho stone on a table. The markers were beautiful silvery oak branches.We'd researched forms in the collections of the New York Botanical Gardens. (I don't think Jack needed this research, but it was fantastic to go through boxes of specimens gathered in Georgia in 1911 and in California in 1896.) To play the game, you came in to the gallery, sat down, and picked up this gorgeous object, made by an artist, and you broke it: you break off a leaf and play it as an X; you break off an acorn and play it as an O. To use it, you had to destroy it. Many people were unable to play. And then, when you'd finished the game, you swept the board clear. We had an idea that the gallery would fill up with leaves and acorns. Instead, people took them. Our rule (unwritten, unspoken) was that if you played the game, you could take one, but if you didn't play, then it was theft. (fig 18)
At the time he made this folding desk, David Deutsch's paintings were of idyllic, brushy landscapes, with observatories and pylons here and there, the mark of man but no less beautiful than the meadows and trees. The desk has always seemed to me like one of those objects, drawn out of his painting, made three dimensional, and placed in the world. The whole thing folds up flat; a metal handle wraps around the legs and holds them in place, so you can carry it out in the countryside, give it a shake, and set it up. (fig 19)
Of all the artists who make furniture, Donald Judd must be the best known at the moment. He has designed dozens of pieces and his architectural ideas have been of great influence and he is also famous for dividing art from object: A chair is just a chair. He rejected his first public foray into furniture design, Double Coffee Table, I think, because that line was not drawn clearly: a few years after making this piece, he made a floor box of the same materials and the same dimensions. The prototype for the coffee table – in which the top slides open, the hardware is visible -- was destroyed, or so Judd wrote. More interestingly, he destroyed one of two prototypes, and kept the other, a thorn in his side, until he designed a brilliant series of metal furniture in 1984. His furniture is didactic: you sit, you stand, you lie down. There are no hybrid positions (although do note that the hookah-smoking shimmering blob of foam that is Chamberlain's first couch is called Judd's Couch). Early installations always set the pieces at a decorous ten foot distance from each other, spot-lit in a white box space. The first installations ever made that showed life's disorder intruding on those pure forms, with books on the bookshelf and sheets on the bed, took place only a few years ago. The metal furniture was installed at A/D while Madeleine Hoffmann of the Judd Foundation replaced all the furniture in a hotel Room at the Mercer Hotel with Donald Judd's equivalents. (fig 20, 21)
The artists that we've worked with are varied, and consequently, the objects are varied as well. To me, the common thread has been that the artists have taken on the demand with seriousnesswhich is not to cancel out delight. The great beauty of A/D has been that it gave artists a place to think. Galleries only exist for the ideas of the artists. Granted A/D took this further than most, acting as midwife, or maybe fairy godparent, to the initial thought. Its great beauty has been to give artists a place to think. This is not my idea, but a loose quote of what Kiki Smith said about the gallery.
