October Essay - Proportion is Visible Reason.

If I wish to make a bed, to design one, can I do it the way I design a building?

Any object produced through work exists within a complex realm of ideas. This realm constitutes the boundaries which define its place within the categories of cultured objects. Donald Judd tried to make a coffee table out of a sculptural work and transgressed the boundaries which differentiate objects of furniture from those of sculpture. In his words, the work was debased and produced a bad table which he threw away. Revisiting this failure twenty years later, Judd concluded that the configuration and scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. Their intentions differ too fundamentally. The practical arts rely upon functional performance as well as artifice, and if they are reduced to either category alone they become (in Judd's words) ridiculous. The requirement that furniture house the body with care in an intimate manner means that, even more than architecture, it must focus its art towards its use. This implies that objects of furniture exist at the fringes of representation. They do not easily allow themselves to be used to represent ideas which are born from outside of their own reality. They do not easily conform to the insertion of artistic interest into their program. When making furniture, unlike art, one must place one's aesthetic desire within the scope of the object's own reasoned intention. That intention is firstly and always primarily the thoughtful and sober accommodation of the body through use. Furniture is inherently wrapped up in proportion, fit and the material interaction with skin under the force of the body. In effect, it must work for its value like few other objects . . . it must measure itself to the restricted movements and positions of the body, it must follow the body's proportions as it moves, and it must accept the body's need for comfort. Furniture must first exist as itself. In this way it may be described as minimal in its distillation of our otherwise wide arena of material interest.

Does this mean that furniture exemplifies the principles of minimalism? Both Donald Judd's art and furniture are admirable in their attention to the idea of the minimal. However, I think that the answer is a complicated yes. The best furniture tends toward the minimalistic satisfaction of its own nature, and the further its conceptual centre is from that focus, the more its usability and beauty are compromised. This does not mean that furniture cannot contain other ideas within its form. Only that it must ultimately rest upon its satisfaction of its own nature first. A bed can never be an idea of a bed. It can never be valuable solely for its likeness or affinity to art. A bed must exist as a bed before all else. That is where its meaning lies.

Does this mean that furniture does not share similarities with other things we make? For example, can it not share something with art and architecture? When I design my bed will it not resemble my architecture and painting? Judd contends that the various interests in form will come together in a consistent manner. I agree. But . . . this does not mean that they will look alike. Judd claims that "If you like simple forms in your art you will not make complicated ones in architecture." [2] I disagree. Because the design of the practical arts is driven by their prosaic nature, a like for simple forms which is appropriate to one discipline does not necessarily translate to another. We relate to our world differently according to what scale is appropriate to the specific manner of relation we are living at any specific time.

Human beings relate to the world in many different ways. In thinking about it, our location of it operates across a wide range: from the fine detail of specific references to the general resolution of our abstractions. The situation is more complicated when we consider the case of perception. The sense of sight can engage the world over a wide range of focus. Through need, interest or concentration we can simplify or complicate what we see. When running with speed along a trail, the forest is radically reduced; and one sees only what is necessary to safely land each footfall and to avoid collision. When we stop and contemplate the same wood, we can hold both its general character and its detail at once. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, we are capable of picking out sounds from background noise by seeking them. If we stop concentrating they become lost in the general discord. On the other hand, the sense of touch displays a highly restricted range of scale. In spite of its uneven sensitivity over the body, we may say that all of our skin is highly sensitive to a very fine scale of difference. Where it is most concentrated, our finger tips for example, our touch can discern differences to a surface which are invisible to the eye. We must remember that, although we relate to objects with all of our senses at once, when we do so we use each of them to different degrees at different times.

This means that our needs and abilities to interact with different parts of our world vary widely. The complexity of volume and sound we may enjoy within a piece of music may prove (and often does) to be uncomfortable within the background noise of daily life. In the same manner, the formal character of our physical environment can comfortably range across a wide variety of complexity and quality depending upon the scale of our interaction with it. At the scale of the city, many people find it impossible to find too much complexity. Here elaboration is experienced as interesting and rich as we move about through it. Regardless of our feelings about the pace and restrictions of city life, a high degree of complexity seems to be both characteristic and appropriate to an 'object' the size of a city. This applies equally to the landscape in general. However, such an appropriateness becomes less so in individual buildings. We demand that they work to simplify the manifold nature of the outside world in order to make places in which people can act in a more focused manner. If movement captures something about our manner of relating to the outdoors, repose does so when we are inside. Our comfort and use of indoor places requires a relative reduced range and amount of movement. In furniture, that repose is intensified . . . better characterized as rest in the sense that the body 'rests up close against' the item which holds its place. Here the body's options for movement are restricted (to sitting, laying, etc.) and through contact, the simplicity required of the object is even higher. It is only once objects themselves operate through being movable by the body (our utensils for eating are a good example), that an even higher simplicity than for furniture is required.

Our conception of, and feelings about, objects are coloured by these experiential aspects. When designing a bed it is necessary to realize that its inherent character requires a relatively simple solution. If it becomes too complicated, if its complexity is not subsumed under an appropriate overriding simplicity, it will appear just as ridiculous as if it were trying to first be an object of sculpture. Even more so, a room full of overly complicated furniture will suffer in its operation and will impact negatively upon our perception of it. We must be careful here. What does overly complicated mean? The arbitration of this must be according to the fundamental nature of the item. The assertion of individual interests; including taste, style and the like; lies outside of this accordance. Hence there is room for both the minimal aesthetic exemplified by Shaker furniture, and the somewhat more plentiful one of the Victorian era. Where there is no room, is where an interest in some aspect outside of the fundamental is asserted in spite of it. Then the object ceases to be furniture and begins to exist as something else. Or, in the case that it retains some usefulness, it might be considered a debased example of the furniture it approximates. The philosopher would claim that a category mistake had occurred. Donald Judd simply claims that other things, art for example, are incapable of becoming furniture.

[1] These words represent my understanding. In as much as it agrees with itself, it represents (illustrates) the postion it expresses. In as much as it exists as a work, it merely presents itself. In as much as it presents the history of its own inception, it presents the results of a private dialogue with the essay Donald Judd wrote titled "It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp." The title is derived from Judd's statement: "The art of a chair . . . is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair. These are proportion, which is visible reasonableness." Donald Judd, "It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp." In Donald Judd Furniture Retrospective, 7-21 (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1992): 7.
[2] Ibid.