Snake is a weekly newsletter covering good furniture, undervalued, or eternal. Not many auctions this week—many houses on vacation. Immediate auctions at the top, and Quick Hits at the bottom, but first…
Housekeeping:
My publisher Shining Life Press will have a table at the Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair August 10-13. Event will be at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (only a few minutes away from where the bank shootout was during Heat). Info on the event follows:
And I’ll also be doing a Q&A on the night of the 12th, for the book, so keep that open.
Will Ferrari get it together?
Auctions:
Pearson for Knoll swivel chair, Austin: I spent last week in Austin and was enamored; I always am, it’s like home to me there, and I hadn’t been for 14 months which, for me, is the longest I’ve been away in years. People talk now about how the city has changed, and I suppose that is true, but it’s always been sprawling. Not that a deep judgment can be made from a weeklong visit, but the houses I saved on Zillow a few years ago didn’t jump up that much in price when I checked them again after logging in for the first time in years just last week. I expected real estate prices to be more expensive across the board. They are, especially on the East side, but not as much as I thought. Janet Yellen’s fault? Perhaps. This chair, by Max Pearson, is an anonymous workhorse, though only makes sense in dull navy; lighter colors, like tan, look cheap, and brighter colors steer it to close to Saarinen’s womb chair. These things don’t go for any money. Auction has lots of white-hot dogshit, as well as some rugs, burlwood, and memorabilia around the 2005 USC-Longhorns championship game, which itself is as much of a work of art as any of the items I’ve written about in this newsletter, or anywhere else. $100
Big lacquered coffee table, Austin: There is something between styles here: very demonic proportions—super wide (34’ deep, 4.5’ wide), not that tall—that recalls the later work of Michael Graves, which played with both morality and space (look up his Disney architecture, but only on an empty stomach), and is what gives this its evil… and combines it with, dare I say it, Italian plastic items of the 1970s, like those by, say, Vico Magistretti. Vico and his countrymen mostly stuck to ABS plastic; this may be wood with lacquer (I’d have to see it in person; I’m not Furniture Batman), but in photos, especially the big one on the auction page, there does not seem to be a difference. No real price history—lacquered stuff tends to be very old looking, or Chinese—but that’s to be expected for a designer-less piece. If anyone knows a good restaurant serving menudo in New York, please let me know. $100
Cassina FLW barrel chairs, Austin: Also from the above auction, one of the better Cassina items from their Wright collection, which began in about 1989, and is still in production (in some countries) but deeply tough to buy new. Does it matter? Lots of hits—the Taliesin table, which the house also has—and the chair of the same name… all of which auction regularly. The sweet spot of licensed furniture; the real canon is so expensive it’s really just more for institutions—this is priced, comparatively, like a print. Not cheap—a single chair has been running between 6 and 900 lately; lots sit at the higher range—nor worth purchasing unless you have a dining table that would play off these correctly, since they’e not very flexible. Still—no way to argue against these, not even at $2,750
McIntosh MA6500 amplifier, Oakland: Wild auction in California with a stockload of unrelated items: platinum jewelry, Danish mid-modern pieces, including the QH highlight below, Persian rugs (many), paintings (horses), Olmec sculpture, bentwood Thonet chairs—and this, the only item with some technical capacity. If you watch movies about people whose lives are spinning out of control, often they have a nice stereo system. And while people in the real world don’t need a good amplifier much any more, I still contend it’s a worthy addition. I like the brutalist NAD items more, but that’s because of how they look; the MA6500 is as good sounding and working an amp as one can buy new (obviously); actually, prob. better.
One’s on eBay for a few large; there aren’t any completeds on there, or on LA; I know scant crap about stereos but I have the feeling that prices shot up very high during the pandemic for collectibles like this when people were sitting around with nothing to do. And rightly—compressed audio files are prob making us deaf. Another thing about music is that the limited vinyl production, like, of say, a Shakira album pressed on vinyl for marketing purposes, which bottlenecked production for people who actually make records, has started to improve. It reportedly does not take 18 months for a 7” to get back from the plant anymore. Snake’s Lock of the Week at $850
Hannah/Morrison for Knoll sling lounge, Chicago: All the designers, all the creative people, all the craftsmen and tailors and stitchers in the world can’t do anything that replicates real, living patina. Machines can’t do it, it can’t be sped up, it can’t be replicated or hyper-tried. Only TIME and the weather and nature, perhaps, can do so… in a Tolstoyan sense, it is the Lord and the universe, making something unique and unalterable surpassing the hand of man. Or maybe it is just jeans. But this is not to say every piece of furniture looks better used, or patina improves everything. I just feel as if furniture, which is a very new to conspicuous consumption, could go the expensive correctly-used way soon. (APC butler but for chairs.) This is probably Bruce Hannah and Andrew Morrison’s best-known chair; the two had a fruitful relationship for Knoll and worked mostly in aluminum. (This table is perhaps their best work.) H/M chairs tend to go for nothing—even this daybed was cheap. Decent auction: Ford Model Ts, a Ted Williams signed baseball, Hopi pottery, steelcase, Japanese knives (I know nothing about Japanese knives), a fine Danish bed with the good headboard and a candle holder so large they had to photograph it outside. $225
Quick Hits:
Panton System 123 swivel chair set, Austin, $600 (futuristic, a little plain)
Burlwood coffee table, Austin, $600 (Cardin table’s shape, regency-adjacent)
Danish teak cabinet, $200, Oakland (never see this two-tone; pictured)
Gary Hutton shelves, $250, Oakland (p. advanced, modern/Memphisy/cheap)
Space age barstools, $300, Oakland (good enough, but quite campy/rockabilly)
Thanks for reading.
Snake