Snake America is back: it is a newsletter covering vintage clothing (for GQ) and furniture (here) and strength sports (Inverse—check out my latest story about asses). Today, completed furniture auctions.
Philip Johnson ashtray: I was looking at ashtrays, seeing what the expensive and the cheap ones that ended on LiveAuctioneers. The priciest ones were spy-related, CIA or KGB ashtrays with transponders or microphones in them, calling back to an earlier time when two things were different. Then, less expensive than those but still quite expensive, were designable ones, a Jean Prouvé ashtray that’s built like a stool that went for $10,000 about a decade ago. Then after that there was this. I have to admit it’s a good looking tray. It’s breathtaking even: this one’s a gift from Johnson to its owner, and so is more than just furniture or an accessory, but an item with provenance and a story, a link to the designer, letting some light in on his life. This is a very industrial looking ashtray, stark, a sort of connect-the-dots piece between the staid modern furniture of the ‘50s and harsh architectural brutalism from before then and which lasted much later. You have the Seagram Building, then this in the middle, then Ernő Goldfinger. That’s how I see it at least.
There’s something sad about the end of commodified smoking. I think it’s changed the pace that we’re living. Smoking is nothing and something, and when you smoke, which I don’t, you can sit dissociating, or meditating, or maybe just thinking, while ripping a butt down to the filter then starting another. It’s a great bookend to any activity: you arrive, smoke a cigarette, do the thing, smoke a cigarette, then you leave. Social cartilage, padding the the action. There’s a massive cottage industry—Michael Mann and Jia Zhangke films, Marlboro sweatshirts, tobacciana—a plankton to death, sure, but as looks go, it’s unfadeable. There are more beautiful ashtrays out there than can be collected. I wrote about some before, a few years ago, during the estate of Jim Walrod’s furniture auction. Three years ago—where has the time gone. I don’t have much more to say on the topic except what I’ve written up there and here. But it’s nice having singular-purpose items out there: no other products are more worthy of reorientation, and the disrespect that comes with using an item for an unintended purpose.
Pierre Cardin rug: I haven’t watched the Halston show but I heard the clothes and the furniture are not bad. The Halston book, the big one on Rizzoli (check), was for a decade perched on the front-left top of the stack of fashion monographs at The Strand a few years ago, when you get up the stairs, prime geography in that bookstore, and so I leafed through it once a week for two years, and can say I have more than a passing familiarity with the brand. It’s nice that he wore suits to go eat at IHOP. Only one button on his suit cuffs. Very good. I think suits are discriminatory against people with levantine coloring but that’s a zygotic theory that’s not yet a qualified subject for this newsletter. Halston had a tragic trajectory and a good and long run at the top. Here’s what Martin Scorsese said about gangsters:
From an interview with Richard Shickel, talking about Goodfellas. I think it applies to designers and artists as well. Or anybody. If you’re lucky, you get a decade. Halston got that, then he licensed his name. Cardin, as pointed out in this GQ piece, also did licensing, but he fated better. I don’t think I have the space here to discuss all the cool things Cardin did, or designed. His Brooklyn Museum exhibit was illuminating, and when I went to Paris his store highlighted my trip. What a genius. There’s a short moment in time, marked by those 60s mod dresses he did, that hasn’t been in any way replicated. Some of the colors and schemes and cuts from back then look like they’re out of a Blur video… which is awesome… but beyond the clothing and footwear, and hats, Cardin is maybe the most underrated furniture designer there is.
His work occupies a singular space; no one’s is similar. (This table looks like Colombo.) His clothes are the closest comparison: his furniture, like these tables, are as smooth and as loud as these dresses. One of my favorite things that he did is this bed, which is a marvel and one of the best that were ever designed:
Sort of like how John Carpenter directed movies and scored them. This rug is another one of Cardin’s triumphs. It’s by a different designer — maybe that was the case with the bed — and is like an updated Indian blanket, geometric and simple but a little bit difficult. The colors are easy. Cardin passed only a bit ago, at the end of December. It was nice to read the remembrances. No one bid on this auction though, oddly. I say oddly since good rugs, and anything else from Cardin, are expensive, and this was a deal.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit