on chairs…
from “The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg, an interpretation“, pg 23-24
I am surprised to see that most of the audience has vanished, even though it’s still quite early, and I suddenly realise that there would have been less people at the Sorbonne in 1968, and that the meetings would have been much shorter, if only there hadn’t been any chairs…
About the chairs: this was the miracle of the evening. While I was out someone proposed that in order to start saving, each one should bring at least one chair, that it was not necessary to buy new ones and that the money would be better used for equipment for creation rather than furniture without importance, that to furnish this floor we would need at least 4,000 chairs and that at 200 francs apiece it would cost almost a million, a disproportionate sum compared with what we could use during the year.The proposition fell flat, but there weren’t any giggles either. It was such an amazing suggestion, and yet so practical and obvious, that nobody could either comment , or back it up, or make fun of it. It was a bit like the slap of Zen that suddenly opens the spirit and sparks off enlightenment. Even though I tried to be very concrete in my introduction, so far the debate had revolved around principles: all of a sudden, such a down-to-earth proposal of such brilliant simplicity re-centred the whole debate again and allowed it to come to a conclusion. Subsequently I have had the opportunity to notice the same phenomenon on various occasions, it is in fact a requirement before being able to come to a concrete solutions, and to be able to move a whole jumble of general ideas and intelligent and elegant considerations. I wonder if it isn’t a feature of our over-intellectualised culture, which favours discourse over action and, for the same reason, which rejects from cultural life all those who haven’t learned, either at home or at school, the categories and the agilities for such discourse. It was necessary to react against this, even if in terms of reaction, perhaps we have favoured too many other modes of expression than the verbal….
Let’s go back to the chairs..because this elementary furniture has set the tone for the centre. To opt for recuperated furniture meant that we were positioning ourselves radically apart from the fashionable cultural institutions., the luring design and the modern art filtered Kartell. It meant too, that we would straight away give up culture as comfort (or comfort as culture, which is more common) that we were ready to reconsider all aspects of life as cultural phenenomena, that to reflect on things as ordinary as the chairs was a pre-requisite to be able to rethink every aspect of culture progressively. And that is exactly what has happened.
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This passage reminds me of Utrecht-based artist Annette Krauss’s work “Hidden Curriculum“, where she worked with high school students in a think-tank style, workshop-based project. Its inauguration was demonstrated by the students participating in a chair-collecting exercise where they were asked to contribute a chair from their home to the home base of the project.
According to the descriptive text, this activity worked as a sign of commitment to the project, but it also undoubtedly functioned as a practical method of furnishing new social environments; Gustave Affeulpin/Albert Meister elaborates on throughout “the so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg;”concrete actions that help actualize more intellectual, principle-heavy discourse
