PROBLEM 0009: Buying Furniture and Art

In which the author considers furniture as something beneath consideration. In which utility is a deep distraction from something unnameable. In which a tiny lacquer box is not furniture. And where art’s more diffuse qualities finally hold court with a surprised author.

FURNITURE MAKES THE ROOM

This is going to be hard to believe, but when I look at a piece of furniture, I don’t think about it. Does anybody? If it’s a chair, I totally sit in it with gusto. There’s that. If it’s a sofa, I plop down and pull up a book or the remote, looking to relax. If it’s a table, I really sit at it with skill and acumen and then inevitably curse the crumbs under my elbows. But I honestly don’t consider any piece of furniture much beyond its utilitarian value  in the precise moment that I decide to use it. I don’t feel bad about this because furniture doesn’t derive its self-worth from such engagement. It has no brain, therefore it has no anxiety about such things. This is great. One less thing to feel guilty about. You can tell an inanimate object to go to hell and it can laugh at your insensitivity because in some way it’s already there.

When I buy a piece of furniture, it’s the same thing. There is a process, but isn’t really set in stone. Color? Yup, it’s got that. How’s that style looking? Will it fit the careless milieu my wife and I have haphazardly developed over the years? How’s this going to look with baby mess all over it? Probably awesome. Done and done. Feng shui committed suicide in my home years ago, after a brief stint as ambassador to the energies we kept away from it. Furniture is furniture. We know when we need it, then we buy it.

The qualifications for furniture becoming Hischier Furniture are few but obvious. If ain’t expensive, if it looks old, and it can withstand lots of bumps and scrapes, it’s in.

And while furniture may be art (see Problem 0000), Art is not furniture. Unless it is.

But I don’t really think it is. I’ve sat on paintings before. That only makes the artist angry.

So what are we looking at when we look at art, for purchase or otherwise? Are we looking for an object that is outside our normal frame of reference? Are we looking at something that activates our sympathies? Does it make us feel good? Do we stop and think because of it? Does it create some sort of event that we can then reference in the future? Is that what we are looking for when we buy/look at art?

Are we looking at our future memories? Is art an anomaly or part of our average, normal, prosaic lives?

THE RUSSIAN LACQUER BOX

For as much as I have liked/loved/obsessed about art in the past, I’ve bought very little. In fact, I’ve only bought one piece of art before that I can recall. A small, oval Russian lacquer box with a green wintry woman on the front. It was beautiful. I had come across this exquisite breed of folk art several years earlier and had always wanted one. Strangely enough, there was a store in the suburbs of Chicago that specialized in Russian wares. It was as if the proprietor had been relegated to Siburbia for crimes against the state (like bad punning). An odd store. But she had these boxes and I plopped down a hundred bucks for one that caught my eye.

As I drove home, I felt a little guilty. Nobody would understand why I spent so much money on something so, well, useless. And small. I couldn’t even fit inside.

But I liked it. I liked the painting on the surface. I liked the face of the mysterious lady with green snow gown and the white fox tail collar. The smooth lacquer surface was a tactile sensation that stuck with me, like a sticky vellum. It wasn’t furniture. It wasn’t utilitarian. It didn’t fit the atmosphere of my room, which didn’t really exist anyway. It hopped into my head and stayed there, like all Russians do.

What do I see when I pull that little box off the shelf and look at it today, years later? I don’t know. I just like to look at it. Is it something outside my normal frame of reference? It was, is, and always will be. It’s an oddity of human life, created by a hand I’ll never shake, by a name I’ll never know. It’s much lighter than it appears, much more detailed than I ever expect when I pause to look at it again. Inside is a weird word bead given to me by another artist on a spree. Looking at it takes me back to a more primal time, when folk lore was simply a matter of fact, a mode of thinking, not just a curiosity. I wouldn’t say it makes me feel good, but it certainly does something to me. I’ve never once been stimulated to thought by it, I’ve never approached it critically or with any theory in mind. The circumstances in which I purchased it were plain and, if I think about it, uninteresting. But I like it. 

That little Russian lacquer box is the only piece of art I’ve ever purchased, and now, ten years later, I am beginning to feel as if I’m starting to get it. I’m beginning to realize that some of us buy art just because we want to. Some of us look at art because (and here’s the dreaded word) it’s nice.

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