Ceramic Chairs: Sittable?
Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant commissioned a bunch of these lovely porcelain re-makes of ubiquitous monobloc chairs by craftspeople at the Jiao Zhi studio in Xiamen, China. In contrast to their millions of plastic counterparts, these are named after the people who made them – so that their identity is never lost:
Utterly functional in terms of its cost-benefit ratio, western standards of taste obviously assign very little aesthetic value to the resin chair. By hand crafting it in porcelain and rendering it as a unique art work the original functionality and following low aesthetic value of the resin chair are brought into comparison with the value added status of the artwork. I titled each of the chairs with its color and the names of all the workers involved in their construction to ensure that this information will never disappear as they circulate in the art world.
Very nice. Closeups after the jump!
