A friend of mine needed a chair recently. After several weeks spent shopping, he found only one that seemed perfect. Unfortunately, it cost $175,000.00. That seemed excessive, so he started his own furniture-design company.

There was a reason the chair cost $175,000.00, however. It was made out of teddy bears. Each teddy bear had been wrenched with a struggle from a different screaming three-year old child who knew that once the bear was pried from his chubby little fingers he would never see it again. And when you sit in the chair, you can hear the faint echo of their shrieks of loss—a trace, the absence of a presence, or perhaps the presence of an absence. The chair was designed by two brothers, Humberto and Fernando Campana, one of whom, Humberto, originally studied law. So stealing teddy bears from children comes naturally.

I’m kidding, of course. The bears in the chair (sort of like “the ghost in the machine?”), officially called the Banquete chair,Teddy Bears—a compilation of stuffed teddy bears on metal base in a limited edition of twenty—were not stolen from children. Who would do such a thing? Snatching teddy bears from small children. The risk of injury from angry parents would be significant. Lawyers don’t like that sort of risk. The teddy bears were bought from a store, probably sourced wholesale, and the entire design is innocent and fun.

And yet the chair made me wonder. Chairs often make me wonder. I’m sitting in one right now. It’s made of old Balinese plows. Two-hundred-year-old recycled teak plows. My writing desk is an equally old teak door, full of holes, perfect for all the computer wires for a laptop, two monitors, printer, wi-fi router, and so on. Chairs make me wonder, and yet I’ve been sitting on this thing for years, an absurd numbers of hours per day—as Hemingway said, writing is 10% talent, 90% cast-iron ass—without ever truly looking at it. Not until an editor sends me an email that says, “Write about furniture.”Only then do I look down.

Two ageless Balinese plows. This chair, my chair, spent decades in some farmer’s hand, behind an ox. It probably passed from father to son for several generations. Do Balinese make love in ricefields beside their plows, when no one is looking? Do they argue? Laugh, sing, dance? Does all of that somehow make its way through my butt cheeks, spine, arms, hands, brain, does it affect my writing? My previous chair was also two hundred years old. It came from Harvard’s Langdell Law Library. They were renovating when I was there and every student was allowed to take one chair for $5, a price nearly as absurd as $175,000. In my chair, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Story, Learned Hand, Friendly, all the great jurists of America found their answers and resolved their problems. In my old chair, perfect function and symmetry were embedded in ancient oak. In my law library chair, the word was invented and stripped of its shadow. But does it matter? Has it made a difference to my ideas, my posture, my ass? I’ve often been told I was born two hundred years too late. Perhaps the cause of my outmoded value system is neither nature nor nurture but furniture.

The danger of accepting an article about furniture is that it becomes about design. It’s almost impossible to talk about furniture and stick to chairs and tables and bookshelves—there’s a gravity towards bigger, endless subjects, like “the difference between art and design.”But I don’t want to go there, I really don’t. I want to talk about the tree that turned into two plows that turned into my chair. I want to talk about Japanese “pervert chairs”(sukebe isu), and how their prices have gone up with the recent increase in the price of oil. I want to talk about Learned Hand (yes, that really was the name of one of America’s great judges, and no, he had nothing to do with pervert chairs). To mention, maybe, the Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner, whose Treehouse Kit (2005) was perhaps my single favourite piece at the 51^st Venice Biennale, a tree built out of mass-produced, modular Ikea furniture, which could be dismantled into its constituent parts—a chair, parasol, ladder and bed—with Ben-Ner sitting up on the tree like a modern, bearded Robinson Crusoe. In order to stabilize the ladder, Ben-Ner ended up folding a photograph of his wife and children to act as a support.

I want to talk about all that, and yet those bears trip me up. I can’t stop hearing the absence of those shrieks. The robbed children and angry parents. Because in that (missing) cruelty and risk lies the line between art and design.

It’s true that when I look at the work of truly great designers, geniuses in their field like Stefan Sagmeister, I don’t see that line. I see art, often art that is far more interesting than most of what I see in Chelsea or London galleries. The fact that he uses a billboard rather than canvas makes no difference. And my favourite wall-decoration right now is from a furniture factory, a collection of old wood from broken-down once-colourful fishing boats assembled on a painting-like wood panel by Nyoman Birit for his Oman Gallery in Bali. The years of ocean-wear on the wood and paint add something to my home, something I want to have close to me. Memories of Indonesia, of the place between sky and sea. 

And yet sitting in my two-hundred-year-old chair, I do see a real difference between art and design, even if this is one of those macro-perspective lines that disappears when looked at too closely. Zoom in to the boundary between the ocean and the sky, and what you find is chaotic micro-turbulance, mass transfers across the aqueous boundary, and a general diffusive and turbulent interplay at the air/sea interface. But zoom out, and the ocean is clearly not the sky.

Designers who see themselves as artists try to increase that turbulence. Their pieces demand fine or unique or rooted materials. They incorporate narrative. They strive for transcendent aesthetics in ways that are very close to the creation process associated with art. And their presentation similarly imitates art openings, from the parties to the blending of art forms, such as the inclusion of performance. When Marcel Wanders “held a thumping party [at the 2007 Milan furniture fair] to show off his 15-foot-high lamps and other furniture of distorted Alice-in-Wonderland scale”in the words of Michael Cannell, Wanders’girlfriend “hung upside down half-naked while mixing vodka drinks from bottles affixed to a chandelier. Form followed frivolity. Function was left off the guest list.”

Every decade seems to see an increase in this design-world tension between the Alice-in-Wonderland, sensational, impractical, neo-Surrealist designers seeking self-expression and the serious neo-rationalists whose Modernist goals are still to make better everyday products. And if the field is now mature enough to support such widely separated wings, it’s at least in part because the celebrity designers, those often associated with the impractical side, have been consciously stretching for design to reach art. In the words of Murray Moss, the owner of Moss, the world’s best design store, “Designers and their true supporters have fought hard over the last fifteen years to expand the definition of design, not shrink it. Yes, to ‘notch it up.’To cross established boundaries for the discipline. To allow design to address multiple tasks—including function—as well as the myriad other concerns that might be compelling to the designer. To expand the criteria with which we evaluate design, not shrink it. To not be afraid to talk about a ‘narrative’embedded in the design of a particular chair, or the sculptural nature of a table. To not relegate art solely to those flat canvases one can hang on one's wall over one's purely ‘functional’sofa. To allow designers the opportunity to evolve from simply being our society's slavish problem solvers to—at their best—simultaneously being our poets. And some are doing this anyway, like it or not.”

I don’t disagree with any of this. I appreciate designers trying to break down the boundaries between art and design. That attempt to cloud the issue, to add secondary messages and twists and origins through narrative and concept and sculptural form, makes the design more interesting, more provocative. And if an artist can hang a chair from a gallery wall—or throw a thousand of them in a gap between two buildings, as Doris Salcedo did for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial—and have it instantly metamorphose into art, then why shouldn’t designers fight to claim some of that space? 

It’s dangerous to ever say something is “not art,”and yet to me the teddy bear chair is clearly design. It is too obviously functional—with the function being not one of sitting so much as identity projection. In the words of designer Dan Friedman, “What designers were doing was creating visual identities for other people—not unlike the work of fashion stylists, political image consultants or plastic surgeons. We had become experts who suggest how other people can project a visual impression that reflects who they think they are.”

I don’t believe art needs to hang on a wall or sit on a pedestal. I’m a believer in “art and life.”I do feel in my gut that it does matter what chair I sit when I write, though I’m not sure I could articulate why. But there’s a corporatism to much design that makes me uncomfortable, that seems antithetical to art. And it goes beyond the mass-production and mass-marketing, beyond even the fact that those teddy bears are sterile rather than stolen. It comes from the whole self-branding that is so ubiquitous in today’s society. Yes, people often buy art for the same reason, but, in general, art is not created directly for that purpose. Its creation is rarely as teleological as the teddy bear chair or even one of Maarten Baas’burnt 1938 Steinway Baby Grand pianos, no matter how much his burnt furniture gets criticised by the neorationalists for being nonfunctional.

That’s perhaps why I find the best design to be intensely personal. Whereas the whole “personal mythology”approach to art turns me off as being narcissistic, I find that it works well for design, because design needs that humanization. If it’s sufficiently personal for the designer, the buyer then gets something with a soul, someone else’s soul, that prevents the furniture from being solely a prop to his own image. A trace of that otherness remains, no matter how much the buyer might agree with the piece.

When I asked Stefan Sagmeister—definitely one of my favourite designers—for an image of one of his furniture pieces, I didn’t share any of these thoughts. And yet the chair he sent me was made of wicker sculpted into the shape of text from a diary entry he’d written while sitting on the balcony in Bali where he ultimately planned to place the chair. Here’s what it said: “I very much love sitting here looking out over the Sayan Ridge with a large pot of coffee and a medium size cigar and letting my mind go. Life is still good. Just saw a spectacular sunrise and now the incredible lush greens of the rice paddies pop my eyes out. My big toe appears to be very dirty.  But it's just a bit of congealed blood underneath my skin, acquired during a morning walk through the jungle with John. The small mosquitoes are a pain, so tiny they are basically invisible. Their bites itch for days even without scratching. Stop sitting here staring into the air. Better get going! Take a shower and start the day proper, there certainly is enough to do here, I have already a whole list ready to go.”

Now that is a chair in which I could sit and wonder.

Caption:

Guy Ben Ner, Treehouse Kit, 2005, sculpture and video installation, wood and hardware sculpture, carpet, mattress with silkscreened cover, dvd (running time 10 minute), dimensions variable (tree: 15 x 15 x 13.5 feet)

Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York

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Alexander Boldizar is a writer and editor based in Bali