Snake America is back: it is a newsletter covering vintage clothing (for GQ) and furniture (here) and strength sports (Inverse). Today, completed furniture auctions.
Michael Graves center table, ended, $1200: I got in a pretty spirited argument with the one friend I have who runs laps around me in furniture knowledge and who works in the movies doing that, about Michael Graves and Wendell Castle. I said Graves’ work, such as it is, was more organic than Castle’s. We agreed Castle’s strange, warm, frightening demon furniture was scary; I said because Graves’ was dumber he was more organic. My friend disagreed. He’s probably right. He knows his shit.
But here’s the thing. There’s something about Graves—there’s something about architects—and how his designs evolve, talk to each other. That Graves-designed Team Disney building, the Fed bank in Dallas, this thing… he’s the king. He’s designed clock radios—I think they look nice, my friend Nat showed me them—hotels and dinnerware for Disney? He’s the king. Some of it looks ugly at first. There’s a line in the Margiela documentary, I watched it for the first and second time just a month ago, where he says he chases aesthetics that repel him… that it’s good to face it. Then they’re less ugly…. the Moss Icon song “Mirror” is about that, sort of. That principle, unstated, is why hemlines rise and fall, why Crocs, flowing big pants, late-90s chintz jewelry, list goes on, have become palatable. They didn’t look good then they did: the repulsion strikes a chord, we chase it, we hold it. Looking at Graves’ Disney work, I wonder if there’s a way that might happen. Right now it feels like mainlining frosting straight out of the can. So maybe a few years away.
We can be generous here: Could Graves be critiquing Disney with his designs? Making something as scary and hideous as Fantasia? Look at the plates again… Castle’s poisoned dark shapes in this sense are more organic, they resemble nature more, look like Fantasia, a forest in England, or tattoos by Will Sheldon. Whose stuff is so frightening. Maybe Castle is Lynchian…
My modernist friend likes Esherick the most out of the three. Graves, though, is wilder. He doesn’t just flirt with bad taste… he goes beyond it. He has so many commissions it takes work to draw them together. They have almost nothing in common. Maybe it’s the length of his career, or the fact that he’s designed just about everything. It’s a very long list. Some are prim, some are singular, some are 1 degree off. Mature work, younger work. This table is ripe and it’s dumb. Something about it stinks just a bit. Margiela might like it, it reminds me when my friend Nick got a durian shake at Pho Grand and the waitress asked, “are you sure?” when he ordered it and he said yes, and she laughed, and asked him, “you’re sure?” again, and he said yeah, and he got it. He nursed it, and every time she came around again she’d ask him how he was doing, and at the end of long dinner — couple hours — she came by with the bill like, “still working on the shake, huh?” and when we left around closing time it was only half finished. Winiche was there, so was Jay.
This thing you need to build up to: wood looks cheap, lined like metal, no grain, unholy, post-natural, simpler shapes than Castle but crueler and gaudier. But it all feels like the Picasso napkin sketch story to me. What architect is going to spend a week on a table? This guy’s building domes for Federal Reserve. He can do a table in five minutes.
Frank Gehry ‘Power Play’ Knoll chair and ottoman, $2500: Gehry doesn’t get a lot of respect these days, but he’s obviously doing all right. He’s like Miguel Cabrera a decade ago. Nobody talked about him but he still cleared 20 million a year. Gehry was a wild man but the wild stuff out in the world that came before his work, that we’re seeing again now, was more colorful than what he did, which in retrospect looks less insane now than it did in the ‘90s. The ‘70s Italian, ugly Baughman Miami cocaine, tangential pieces like Miller Wilkes chairs… at least the Italian stuff felt crazier than Gehry’s work. Not to compare artists... Some of these styles which predated Gehry have since crested, with Instagram, and it’s created a strange new phenomenon of democratic theoretical design criticism. In that no one seems to have any of this furniture but everyone’s sick of it. “I’m sick of this look,” someone might say. Or alloy certain people with a certain sofa. Over before it even begins, an invisible living room belonging to a critic preferable to an overexposed, on the nose one. It seems off. Trends can get ruined for sure, but since furniture is heavy and hard to transport and expensive it moves slower, literally. It’s strange to approach furniture like clothes, it seems mean to bag on what people have in their home. And all these pieces look 1,000 times better in person.
It’s all too cerebral anyways. Which is the enemy of everything: who knows what a piece of furniture means, whether it’s important, whether it’s in style, whether it’s passé? Why be so mean? Cerebral discussions of interiors always seem to miss the point: anyone good figures it out on gut; the chief functions of material goods are to create employment; way down the line is what an item says about its owner. Design can be great, but any meaning a customer finds is not by intention.
It’s also lacking context. Italian design isn’t expensive now, or everywhere: it’s just not dirt cheap and invisible like it used to be even three years ago. Anyone who’s been into furniture for more than two years would know this. People who have these pieces are now showing them off, and stores, because they’re worth money now, are displaying couches and lamps that otherwise would barely sell here. You could buy a Soriana for $900 a few years ago. You could get a Boby for $50… the list goes on. In no universe was that going to last: they were always going to get more expensive, because they were good. (And had always been incredibly popular items in the most important design country in the world… though it’s still kind of cheap there because there’s a lot more stuff in Italy, etc.) The secret’s been out for years. When you’re late to the party, you pay the time tax: retail, spending the money… pay now, pay later… This Gehry piece is on another planet altogether. You can still get Power Plays from Knoll; the wood on the new ones looks off. They’re eight times as expensive as this auction. From 1992, it predates many qua Gehry architectural commissions. I don’t see a line between this and those. But I don’t study his work. Both the PP and Graves’ table feel rattled off in five minutes, a full five minutes of thought with a 40-year build-up of design and experimentation. Sometimes five minutes can feel very long. Mature, ripe, free and easy… what’s better than that?
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit
Last issue: fake Cassina end tables, real Frattini chair