April 18, 2015

"I grew up with: midcentury furniture, and I still get a sense of rightness from living with it."

"I don’t think it’s only because of a generational memory; 60 years later, some of these objects still seem unsurpassed. I have two chairs designed by Gio Ponti the year I was born [1952], which are really perfect."

Said the artist David Salle, responding to a prompt (in bold face) from The Wall Street Journal, which includes pictures of various things including a chair, but not the Gio Ponti chair he declared perfect. I'm going to guess — consider the possibilities — it's this:



Salle also praises the book “Several Short Sentences About Writing,” by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which (I see) says things like:
Why short sentences? They'll sound strange for a while until you can hear what they're capable of. But they carry you back to a prose you can control...
Dot dot dot because that sentence actually turns out to be long and I'm transcribing and don't want to transcribe it all. Do you need to learn to control your prose? Did you forget about the usefulness of short sentences? Do you need a book to remind you?

Salle also has this:
A transformative technology can: change how you hail a cab, but I’m not sure it changes the structure of things that are really important to me. When I was in art school, the first portable black-and-white video cameras were introduced and quickly became part of the artist’s tool kit. There was a lot of talk then about how they would fundamentally transform art. And of course they did no such thing.
When I was in art school, circa 1970, we were invited to become entranced with a dot matrix printer that could only print letters and numbers but which could produce a crude image of, say, a face because of the way various letters and numbers read as darker or lighter from a distance. Is this where we were going?

9 comments:

Sebastian said...

Klinkenborg proves short need not be good.

Laslo Spatula said...

That chair would look really nice with a pretty naked girl sitting on it.

Not much obstruction.

I am Laslo.

CWJ said...

The chair is wonderfully proportioned. Very striking.

Bob R said...

Or maybe this?

J2 said...

It's probably the white chair with black legs which is in the main photo.

CWJ said...

J2,

I was all ready to challenge you, and then I found this.

Dimore Studio Squat #1 – Gio Ponti Chair

I think you are right.

Althouse, you are probably far away from this post by now, but thank you. I did not know Gio Ponti but now that I do, Iu thank you for the introduction.

Ann Althouse said...

Thanks for fighuring out which chair it was!

I was just guessing, based on what I liked.

Big Mike said...

The most comfortable chair ever designed is the 18th century wing chair.

Zemkarlos said...


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