00:07thanks everybody for coming along and I
00:10think is the most filmed I've ever been
00:14while talking but I'll try to get
00:16through it quickly and painlessly but I
00:20will want to talk about pain today I
00:22think probably the reason that rob was
00:25sort of invited me to join this Jamboree
00:26which has been very stimulating is that
00:29I have written about the history of the
00:30design of computer interfaces and did a
00:32book on the history of IBM and its
00:36collaborations with a whole host of
00:37modernist architects graphic designers
00:40industrial designers and so on amongst
00:43many other things to try to solve a
00:45particular problem which is how do human
00:46beings interact with Computing Machinery
00:50and how to stabilize that relationship
00:53and aesthetic terms but when I actually
00:55got a chance to talk to rob about what
00:56he did want me to talk about he's like
00:58no don't talk about that they can read
00:59that so I said fine well maybe I'll talk
01:03about something that I didn't get around
01:04to doing in the book which is another
01:07piece of research is sort of ongoing
01:08which is about the history of chair
01:10design particularly in the 20th century
01:12so here you go a bunch of iconic 20th
01:18century chairs designed by architects
01:20and them for the most part and the
01:22instances I've given you here they're
01:23probably very familiar but what I want
01:25to do is to actually locate within the
01:28history of the design of chairs the
01:31emergence of a particular attitude
01:33towards design that I think has served
01:37as a kind of fixed idea for the way that
01:41we interact with all sorts of other
01:42equipment and that is the notion of the
01:46pure surface so and it's intimate
01:49application to the surface of the body
01:51in particular I'm not going to bore you
01:55with a long history of chairs chairs are
01:57very old machinery they've been around
02:00as you can see here from way way back
02:02there you get some Greatest Hits we'll
02:06some highlights of the history but what
02:09is peculiar about the history of chairs
02:11is that for a long time nobody sat in
02:13them they were the province of only
02:16cultural elites and the erisa
02:20aristocracy at the most satin chairs the
02:23rest of us peons didn't do that at all
02:25we if we sat sat on benches or on one
02:29legged stools there were tools for
02:30performing work or we sat on the ground
02:33in many instances it's only in this
02:36period here where we're into the
02:40Enlightenment that the rise of the
02:43bourgeoisie of capital markets in the
02:47mercantilist capitalist period and then
02:49an industrial capitalism here's one of
02:51my favorites chair made out of pieces of
02:53the HMS Victory to celebrate or
02:57commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar that
02:59chair sitting becomes endemic in Western
03:01cultures and we get a reconfiguration
03:05totally of the way that we apply this
03:07sort of seemingly basic and simple tool
03:09to various cultural applications not
03:12just practical applications but symbolic
03:15ones chairs are all bound up in the way
03:17that we communicate to one another about
03:19power and there are many sayings and
03:23folklore and so on that to overturn
03:25chairs is to overturn a social order and
03:29the history of art is full of images of
03:31revolution that I make use of the chair
03:33as a kind of site of reconfiguring human
03:37relationships and that doesn't change in
03:40the 19th and 20th centuries at all but
03:44the riddle that I'm going to try to sort
03:45of explore whether you guys today is how
03:47it is that this idea this very complex
03:50symbolizing and working machine of the
03:53of the chair which has just an
03:55incredible diversity of array of
03:57articulations get Sri theorized as a
04:00single surface compound curved
04:03very complex but nonetheless sheer
04:06surface that would be applied to the
04:07human body to do a particularly weird
04:09thing and I'll get to what that weird
04:12thing is in a second so I want to start
04:15in maybe a kind of surprising spot for
04:20but with the Bauhaus the young marcel
04:22breuer who was put in charge of the
04:25woodworking shop at the Bauhaus in vimar
04:28and then again in Dessau and cranked out
04:31an extraordinary array of chair designs
04:33throughout the 1920s in that capacity
04:37and to sum up his achievements years
04:40later he created this this poster 1926
04:45mapping his progress into the almost the
04:49whole human history of chair design done
04:51in miniature a beginning with his
04:53so-called African chair done with
04:55Gunther stencil in 1921 and then
04:57progressing as you can see I hope quite
04:59clearly I brought some more detailed
05:00images that will make this easier to
05:03register a progress towards a
05:05simplification of the chair and our
05:07rendering it of it as a structural
05:09armature that holds surfaces in tension
05:12so we get this woven surface here we get
05:17this even more tenuous one influenced by
05:20Gerrit Rietveld there you can see what
05:22he's looking to quite clearly this
05:26absolutely beautiful chair here which
05:29you can see in profile there and then he
05:33also leaves a bunch of that his chairs
05:35out he made many more designs um so ones
05:38that don't really conform to this linear
05:39trajectory towards the tension structure
05:42are eliminated despite the fact that
05:44they're beautiful design objects in
05:46their own right culminating in 1925 with
05:49his famous design for the Vasa Lee chair
05:51named after his friend and fellow
05:53BaoHaus Fleur Vasily Kandinsky where he
05:58really seems to achieved the structural
06:02principle that he'd been working towards
06:04over all those years and of course he
06:06worked it out in other ways as well in
06:09subsequent designs he continued working
06:11but in this funny poster that he uses to
06:14make this argument about the trajectory
06:16of the history of the design of the
06:17chair whether grandiosely projected his
06:19own history as well we get this weird
06:23moment in this film at the end and I
06:27latch on to this image and use it as a
06:30motivation to explore what happens
06:32subsequently in chair design so we get
06:35this gotcha moment the last frame in the
06:40in this film has a figure of a seated
06:44woman excuse me suspended in thin air
06:48her posture relaxed arms and legs draped
06:51over invisible supports the chair it
06:54seems has disappeared
06:56an inversion then not unlike that of the
06:59plot twists you might find at the end of
07:01a thriller has cherub in exchange for
07:04sitter object exchanged for subject if
07:06so by what means how and perhaps more
07:10importantly we might ask why a brief
07:12caption down at the bottom of the image
07:15which is obviously a little small for
07:18some of you in the back to read it says
07:21gives us a clue it says life it gets
07:26better and better every year in the
07:28future we will sit upon an elastic
07:30column of air this is sort of amazing
07:33prediction about the future of chair
07:36design the chair bro reminds us even if
07:39you can't show us is still there
07:41imminent present composed of a concealed
07:43and imagined technology but we might say
07:47then that the chair and drawers film
07:50like Marx's famous table from the first
07:53chapter of capital walks out on stage
07:55and stands on its head and evolves out
07:58of its brain grotesque ideas far more
08:01wonderful than if it had begun dancing
08:03of its own will and one might object
08:06that the stage for Marx's table of
08:08course is the market which is not the
08:11same stage that we're dealing with here
08:12a more experimental and pedagogical
08:14context of the Bauhaus but that's true
08:18but I think we should also not forget
08:20about the Bauhaus is ambitions to
08:22mass-produce all of these chairs for a
08:24market the structure of the stage of the
08:28market is a structure not of a thing
08:29itself but rather the thing considered
08:32from a particular point of view that of
08:34abstract exchange value and it's on
08:36these grounds that I think we can
08:38productively make use of Marx's
08:40powerful aesthetic concepts of the
08:43subject object relations that are in the
08:45marketplace to understand this strange
08:48film or poster in light of the vanishing
08:51act between the last two frames Brewers
08:54asking that we viewed his chairs through
08:55a simulated time image of film solely
08:58from the vantage point of their status
09:00as surface structures and moreover these
09:03surface structures were clearly meant to
09:04understand from the beginning and ending
09:06moments of the film are derived from
09:08their ability to take on the forums and
09:10the subjectivity of their occupants or
09:12sitters but why does the chair disappear
09:15as soon as the putative ideal seating
09:17subject arrive arrives
09:20weirdly marks again can be quite clear
09:23on this point by coming out on the stage
09:25at the table who our use value also
09:28disappears in Marx's reading what is
09:31there instead is a super sensible and
09:33social fetish and fetishism the whole
09:37theory of commodity fetishism the tables
09:39commodity engenders a situation in which
09:40quote the products of the human brain
09:42appear as autonomous figures endowed
09:45with a life of their own which enter
09:47into relations both with each other and
09:49with the human race end quote one
09:52appearance has been substituted for
09:53another the thing a dusting has become
09:56image dust build it's precisely this
09:59kind of quick change that we're seeing
10:01in Brewers film images of his chairs and
10:03their futures as jean-luc null see the
10:06wonderful French philosopher has argued
10:07quote entering and exiting that's what
10:10makes the image appearing and
10:11disappearing the image disputes the
10:14presence of the thing in the image the
10:16thing is not content simply to be the
10:18image shows that the thing is and how it
10:21is the image is what makes the thing out
10:23of its simple presence and brings it
10:25into present 'ya to being out in front
10:28of itself turn towards the outside this
10:31is not a presence forest subject it's
10:33not a representation in the ordinary
10:36excuse me Oh mimetic sense of the word
10:39it is on the contrary if one can put it
10:41this way presence as subject in the
10:44image or as image and only in this way
10:46the thing whether it's an inert thing or
10:49a person is posited as subject the thing
10:53that's non C's I think very wonderful
10:55explication of how images work in
10:57relation to you know the thing Li world
10:58that we all live in the chair in the
11:01final frame of Bros film is an image of
11:03a chair in which the chair does not
11:05appear elastic rather than plastic
11:07functional rather than formal it's
11:10invisible form conforming to the woman's
11:12body rather than to its own properties
11:14as a static object this is a powerful
11:17image of what we commonly refer to as
11:20comfort and I'll come back to that term
11:22in a few minutes on Bauhaus film thus
11:26puts the question to us what happens to
11:28the chair aesthetically considered ie as
11:30an object in relation to a subject when
11:33the first principle governing its design
11:35that we should not experience the
11:37experience of sitting causes it to
11:39disappear from view I said weird riddle
11:42and it was a preoccupation of several
11:45other figures at the Bauhaus and I'm
11:47gonna try to steer us through a few
11:48different examples but this is
11:50moholy-nagy doing experiments with
11:52lifting objects into the air using
11:54compressed air in this case a
11:56screwdriver seems a very dangerous
11:58experiment to do but never never mind so
12:02we're gonna go from Breuer on a little
12:04bit of a tour of some successors to
12:07Brewers idea exploring the notion of the
12:10chair as this surface is exact
12:13contemporaries Heinsohn boto rosh wrote
12:16a book der stool which uses much the
12:18same kind of visual vocabulary in
12:21addition to taking up the same mode of
12:23illustration showing sitting bodies
12:25suspended in midair in various poses the
12:27rashes began their treatise on chair
12:29design and manufacture with the simple
12:31claim that quote daran daran dementia is
12:33funding plans annotated akkada blundin
12:35ie in English the modern purse is bound
12:39to the place or seat that's the plots of
12:41his activity and quote whereas this
12:45modern person may be engaged in any
12:46number of activities by making use of
12:48his or her various active organs they
12:51argued the organs of the legs and rump
12:53were required not to participate in any
12:56form of activity but rather to bear or
12:58support to try again or to Doutzen the
13:02active organs the chair then had to be
13:04considered as a situation in which one
13:06as if it had no legs no rump and here's
13:10some more images from this sorry that
13:13this one this is a hunting stool that
13:15they idealized as a support for the body
13:18the support must adjust itself the
13:21nature of the activity it should do this
13:23to the greatest extent possible in their
13:24view up to a hundred percent they say
13:26while not limiting freedom of movement
13:29the ideal it must follow bodily
13:31movements giving way to changes in
13:33posture this flexibility and
13:36accommodation of the body could be
13:37accomplished the rashes argued only
13:39through rigorous analysis of varying
13:41postures the bodies themselves and
13:43through designing chairs in profile in
13:46addition to analyzing conventional
13:48postures with Briers technique of
13:50removing the chair from the image and
13:52that's an idea that has a long afterlife
13:54in organ Amish as we'll see they also
14:00designed their chairs precisely to mimic
14:02the posture of the human body in its
14:04various poses the sitting subject that's
14:06embodied in the object and then the
14:08object granted this subjectivity imposes
14:10this impressed subjectivity back upon
14:13the sitter as was the notion of a
14:15prosthesis this strange attitude towards
14:18the design of chairs was elevated to the
14:20status of a guiding principle on an
14:23international stage by several different
14:25people particularly emigrated from
14:27Europe to the United States during the
14:31rise of Nazism and World War Two and so
14:35here are just showing you two examples I
14:37love altos a sitting and resting man
14:40smoking his little pipe there here
14:43amused and arrows drawing of the posture
14:45of the person on one of his sinuous
14:47s-curve chairs but by far the most
14:50important figure in this story is the
14:53figure of Brewers student and star pupil
14:55at Harvard Eliot Noyes who became the
14:59first curator of industrial design at
15:02the Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and his
15:06first exhibition the competition organic
15:08design and home furnishings of 4241
15:11radicalised burrs realization of the
15:14chair as an invisible mediation between
15:16object and subject on the inside cover
15:19exhibition catalog alongside his own
15:21definition of organic design and
15:23provocative quotes from Plato and st.
15:25Thomas Aquinas William Morris Adolph
15:28Lowe's noise included two quotations
15:30from Lewis Mumford in particular that
15:34emphasized Mumford's early conviction
15:36that in order to cope with modern
15:38technology the human being must be fully
15:41integrated physically and psychically
15:43with that technology whereby Munford
15:46asserted technology would become
15:48humanized or naturalized and in his book
15:51technics of civilization technics and
15:53civilization of 1934 from which those
15:55passages are taken I'm not going to
15:56quote them at length to you today
15:58Mumford clearly states that the site at
16:00which these two elements human and
16:02machine met the what we call today the
16:05interface must therefore be the site of
16:07design reform and so noise has a brief
16:11essay on chair construction in the
16:14catalogue where he insists this could be
16:16accomplished through an articulation of
16:18the chair as a surface the traditional
16:21armchair built by hand he said and
16:23weighing as much as 45 pounds was
16:25gradually being superseded by terrace
16:28built out of less material and designed
16:29to be mass-produced by machines and to
16:32illustrate the point
16:33noise included just such a chair in the
16:36exhibition haphazardly torn apart and
16:38locked in a steel cage actually in the
16:41exhibit I'm sorry I don't have a photo
16:42of the jail that it's in in front of a
16:45photo of King Kong and identified by a
16:48large sign reading cathedra gargantuan
16:51genus americanus weight when fully
16:53matured 60 pounds habitat the American
16:56home devours little children pencils
16:58fountain pens bracelets clips earrings
17:01scissors hair pins and other small flora
17:03and fauna of the domestic jungle is
17:05rapidly becoming extinct and quote
17:09so the vaguely humorous but critical
17:11point was pretty clear the problem with
17:13such chairs was not their size but their
17:15depth the chair noise implied needed no
17:18depth but only a structure and a
17:20functional surface so by applying some
17:23modern functional principles such as
17:25s-curve Springs and forming the chair
17:28out of rigid but pliable materials
17:31like steamed plywood and so on designers
17:38could produce chairs of what he called
17:39extreme elegance along rational lines
17:42and the winners of the competition
17:43Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen did just
17:46that with their their conversation chair
17:50the drawing includes an elevation drawn
17:54on a grid of a human figure and the
17:56continuous lines of contact with the
17:58surfaces of the chair all other
18:00structural apparatus notably here in the
18:02drawing that are blowing up for you a
18:04little bit here the legs is all the
18:08structure is emitted leaving only the
18:10chair in its putative essences surface
18:12this approach to designing and profile
18:14coordinating the shape of the chair to
18:15the postures it must sustain as we've
18:17seen already and a lot of examples has
18:20this long pedigree before but where
18:23noise and and and Eames and siren and
18:27would take it is kind of where I'd like
18:29to turn our attention now although this
18:33abstract and sectional human figure that
18:36they draw here was in 1940 not yet based
18:40on any scientific or even idiosyncratic
18:42measurements Eames eventually went on to
18:44derive a system for actually taking
18:46moulds of a normative human body to
18:48establish the curvature of the chairs
18:50sitting surface this began with a
18:52project intended to revive his
18:55architectural practice after he moved to
18:57Los Angeles with his second wife Ray
18:59Eames during World War Two in 1943 they
19:02learned that the Army's regulation metal
19:04legs plants were in fact doing more harm
19:06than good to wounded soldiers and so
19:09calculating the problem was due to the
19:11rigid linear geometry of the splints
19:13they designed this famous icon of modern
19:16design a single piece molded plywood
19:20splint that conformed to the curve form
19:23of the average human leg of course the
19:25average human leg was actually Charles
19:26Eames's own leg so a little bit of
19:30self-aggrandizement there and a real
19:32understanding Ankita new understanding
19:34normativity by looking at that example
19:36the symmetrical holes relieve the stress
19:38of the bent plywood service and provided
19:41spaced thread bandages and dressings
19:43wounded legs this anthropomorphic
19:46technique anesthetic from the splint in
19:50which an object is carefully
19:52compensating for the pathological body
19:55renormalizing the wounded Oregon by
19:57imposing an ideal shape or normative
19:59shape of that organ back on to it again
20:02emphasizes the curious paradox of
20:04physiological science and organic design
20:06logic the form of the human body is
20:09abstracted and exteriorized be embodied
20:11in the object and then reapplied to the
20:13dismembered body whence it came all in
20:15the effort to make it and keep it whole
20:17so we're just pulling things apart in
20:19order to put them back together as
20:21wholes aims soon turned these
20:24therapeutic casting and warping
20:25techniques he developed in the design of
20:28the splint towards the problem of chair
20:30design quite famously in an exhaustive
20:32series of designs for the furniture
20:33company Herman Miller and I'm not gonna
20:35go into any of that in detail and
20:37obviously a lot of that is going to be
20:38familiar to those design buffs amongst
20:41you already but I want to turn our
20:48attention to a sort of different way of
20:50looking at this problem rather than the
20:52museum gallery and the domestic sphere
20:58and that involves looking at the
21:01syncretic applied science of ergonomics
21:03which we've actually bandied about as a
21:06term quite a bit today and is obviously
21:08a big-ticket item in googles and lots of
21:13other companies activities in short
21:18economics is the effort to invert the
21:23terms of an industrial logic that had
21:25prevailed in the previous decades it's a
21:29new term it's invented in 1949 in a
21:32British naval research laboratory that
21:34all those details aren't so important
21:36but what it really does is it imagines
21:39rather than finding a person who is
21:42appropriate to doing a particular task
21:43that would be the logic of Taylorism to
21:46invert that logic and and explore
21:48instances and so these are examples of
21:50projects developed under a Taylor ista
21:53mindset instead imagines a situation in
21:56which there is no way
21:58there is no human that could perform
21:59this work so what kind of apparatus can
22:02we apply to the body in order to protect
22:04it in this new hostile environment which
22:07can range from high-altitude bomber
22:08aircraft to your desk and so here is
22:13just an emblematic series of images that
22:16deal with ergonomic saz the man-machine
22:19system and we can think of the interface
22:22is the - that sits in between man and
22:25machine or human and machine in that so
22:31I just brought a few more images of this
22:33sectional attitude towards depicting the
22:35human body as a surface these are from
22:38Henry dreyfuses famous manual and then
22:42this is from Ron John's book still
22:45consulted by some designers today about
22:48how to shape our gear and here again you
22:52see this technique and that's what I'd
22:54like to turn our attention to a little
22:57bit so see ya so I just wanted you to
23:03the wrong spot there we go
23:05here this is the attitude of organ aam
23:09the human body and I want to just give
23:11you a little bit more insight into where
23:17one of the path breaking studies that
23:19helped form the the field of ergonomics
23:22was the Swedish anthropometry banked
23:26acre Blom's standing and sitting posture
23:28of 1948 the year before
23:30ergonomics and human engineering really
23:33become common places in all areas of
23:36design since all books on ergonomics
23:40demand that they be read by their cover
23:42let's start there the profile
23:45ornamenting the cover is ostensibly that
23:47of a chair if so however it is a chair
23:49composed only of this now familiar
23:51single continuous surface with a slight
23:54seat slightly tilted back towards the
23:55backrest and a gently protruding bulge
23:58at the base of the back and you've
23:59probably already guessed that this is
24:01arc of lumbar support it's the first one
24:04really it is the model for the one you
24:09experience when you sit in the car for
24:11instance but on closer inspection we see
24:15that this is no chair
24:16where are the back legs how does this
24:18chair remain standing
24:20returning to the title we see that this
24:22book is not really a book about chairs
24:23at all but really about postures and
24:26their form and how to conform them a
24:29curve on followed the tradition of those
24:32gruesome 19th century anthropometric
24:35studies that had established the human
24:37body's center of gravity by freezing
24:39cadavers and various positions and then
24:42thrusting steel rods through them it's
24:43rather unpleasant business most of the
24:46book is a rather dry discussion of the
24:48various stresses acting upon the body in
24:50various positions sitting standing and a
24:53lot of others here in his own original
24:57experiments however Aker Blum developed
24:59a set of ideal measurements for chair
25:01design through a new combination of
25:03statistical methods x-ray photography
25:05and a peculiarly gross
25:07a grotesque invention removing the spa
25:10spines from cadavers to submit them to
25:12various stresses associated with sitting
25:14despite the violence of this operation
25:17Aker Blum preserves a rather clinical
25:20tone throughout especially when
25:21describing his test subjects many of
25:23which were John and Jane or perhaps
25:25given the contexts Finn and Inga doze
25:28recovered from the local morgue for
25:30example one specimen was identified as
25:33following quote l1 - l4 three segments
25:36from a man aged forty four years
25:38Norma build wait 72 kilograms about one
25:41day after death cause of death alcohol
25:43alcoholism was cirrhosis of the liver
25:45and a acute heart failure were freed
25:48from muscles and tendons unquote so
25:51these vertebrae which were removed from
25:53the bodies and and then drilled holes in
25:55the lead shot is put into them and their
25:57x-ray photographed under different
25:58tensile conditions are what he's working
26:03with in order to create an organic
26:05ameliorative holistic approach to design
26:08it's really quite extraordinary slightly
26:13so by mapping out the curvature of the
26:15other elements of the skeleton as well
26:17especially the femur and the hip bone
26:19here you can see him using exterior
26:20photography in a different way
26:22Edgar Balam likewise calculated the
26:25proper curvature of the seat surface the
26:27proper distance between seat and
26:28backrest and so on using force diagrams
26:31derived from simple Newtonian mechanics
26:33he calculated the proper tilt of each as
26:36well balancing the forces carefully to
26:38ensure that the chair would not only
26:40impart a slight curvature to the body
26:42but also hold the seated body in place
26:44actually actively intervene in the
26:47person's posture one might expect a
26:49rather radical design to emerge from all
26:51of this but sadly no the first chair
26:59design using his method by the Swedish
27:01designer Gunnar cliff is surprisingly
27:03conventional in appearance only the
27:05jaunty curvature of the backrest to
27:07provide lumbar support and slight tilt
27:09of the seat reveal the extensible
27:11advances made by the scientist no
27:13attempt to conceive of the chair as pure
27:15surface and formal terms is in evidence
27:18here there's no visual rhetoric of that
27:20yet while a kabuemon echo may have
27:24lacked a certain amount of imagination
27:26to achieve this the tape techniques that
27:28he pioneered nonetheless became
27:29essential contributions to economic s--
27:32which we've already discussed this
27:36neologism formed from the Greek words
27:39for work and natural law but it's this
27:43activity this active role of ass
27:45objectified object that I'd really like
27:48to explore the implications of as we
27:52move forward here so skipping over
27:58something as an interest of time okay
28:04modernist design historiography has
28:07reinforced an understanding an ergonomic
28:12understanding of the modern chair even
28:13as it has refused to really address its
28:16implications and perhaps the best and
28:18best-known work on chairs by an
28:20architectural historian which is the
28:22chapter on the constituent furniture of
28:25the 19th and 20th centuries and zigfried
28:27gideon's mechanization takes command
28:30Gideon establishes a common trope in the
28:33narration of the development of
28:34modernist aesthetics Gideon for his part
28:37sought to eliminate the conventional
28:39understanding of aesthetics from his
28:40analysis ruling taste his term the
28:44ornamental excrescences of chair design
28:48had to be peeled away banished exercised
28:50in order to reveal the emerging
28:52modernist technical object a revolution
28:55against what he called the reign of the
28:57upholsterer in lieu of this ornamental
28:59surface Gideon claimed what the
29:01historians should consider is the
29:03merging of subject object in a truly
29:05modern chair a functional surface and
29:07his conclusion is radical in its
29:09implications and here's what how he
29:12writes about it he says to know how the
29:15American would sit if the ruling tastes
29:17were not master in his house we must
29:19watch him at the office how the desk
29:21chair behaves beneath him with almost
29:24organic flexibility and how he
29:26unconsciously varies his posture without
29:28end the American in the office seems to
29:30become one creature with his chair as
29:32the Arab with his horse and quote
29:35amazing right guy could really write and
29:38write weirdly so given what I've tried
29:41to show you guys so far I think it's
29:42fully unsurprising to find that in this
29:44small chapter the human figure
29:46disappears as quickly as it appeared in
29:48the discussion of the 19th century
29:49subsumed into the dynamic unity of
29:52surface and structure epitomized by
29:54Breyers cantilevered tubular metal and
29:56Altos bent plywood chairs a different
30:00kind of claim about the progression
30:02towards the realization of this magical
30:04surface is offered up by Nikolaus
30:06Pevsner and pioneers of modern design
30:08originally published as pioneers in the
30:10modern movement in 1936 and issued in a
30:13new and revised edition in the year of
30:15ergonomics this formal birth of 1949
30:19although it's hard to imagine pattern
30:21are using this is such a formulation
30:25it's pretty amazing that he locates the
30:31beginning of all of modern art and the
30:33synthesis of art and labor the synthesis
30:37of art and technics in a chintz and
30:39essentially in textiles and he
30:43approaches this whole problem of the
30:45surficial logic of modernism from that
30:48vantage point I won't go into the
30:50details there either in interest of time
30:54so that I don't bore you with art
30:56historical details which I of course
30:59revel in but in pevsner's story he can't
31:06reach actually using this logic much
31:08past 1914 that's beyond the scope of his
31:11study but also some of the terms that he
31:13uses start to break down so I'd like to
31:16look a little bit at that this whole
31:19question of comfort and and of course
31:23its opposite what by which is actually
31:26defined in the dictionary discomfort
31:30okay so there's lots of critiques of the
31:33ideology of comfort from dismissals to
31:36Corrections of the theory and these
31:39critiques of the bourgeoisie to the most
31:41nuanced contemporary attempts to
31:43articulate a functional organ on --ax
31:44for instance the work of Galen Krantz at
31:47Berkeley who's one of the foremost
31:49critics and a apologists for chair
31:54ergonomics in heard the chair rethinking
31:57culture body and design she raises
32:00questions about the cultural
32:01sociological and economic aspects of the
32:04chair she looks closely at studies of
32:07the chairs usage in various contexts and
32:09levels stinging criticism at the myopic
32:11character of much of ergonomic research
32:13however hers is no straightforward
32:15sociological critique rather it involves
32:19her embrace of the physical discipline
32:21of that the Alexander Technique and an
32:24of an ethos of personal responsibility
32:26in relation to posture in fact she often
32:28lectures lying down on the floor as a
32:31way to sort of model this behavior for
32:34her students in the end we learn perhaps
32:37to our great physical benefit that if we
32:40shift our posture from time to time and
32:43avoid numerous harmful physical effects
32:45of sitting we can design better
32:46environments for ourselves every weary
32:49of those objects that are plainly you
32:51know in this view of the world out to
32:54so going even further than her
32:56ergonomic forbearers Krantz supplants
32:59any question of aesthetics with a
33:00question of damage very
33:02straightforwardly the design and use of
33:04chairs is for her no longer a matter of
33:06defining social relations of beauty or
33:09ugliness or even of economic or
33:11political organization rather the
33:13quality in the sense of both value and
33:15essence of the chair is determined by
33:18its ability to accommodate the human
33:20body and its practices without unduly
33:23hurting it any messy and difficult
33:25questions of deontology ie should the
33:28office worker be in the office all day
33:30are alighted and supplanted with an
33:32ideology of this personal responsibility
33:35so it's an ideology if we can say with
33:39all two sir maybe many of us wouldn't in
33:41this room but that ideology in general
33:44has no history then it is no more mor
33:47than evident that the ideology of
33:48flexibility offers no substantive
33:50advantages over that of the ideology of
33:52surface insofar as both remain
33:55entrenched within a protective enclosure
33:56of disciplinary assumptions that emerge
33:59from the repeating image with which I
34:01began my remarks today an aesthetics
34:03that replaces the that places the
34:05comfort concept of comfort at its
34:08logical core is bound by the very
34:09structure of the relations deposits to
34:11short-circuit like peace comfort is a
34:15negative concept the absence of
34:17discomfort and it has no positive
34:20qualities every commentator on comfort
34:22explains this it's only visible and
34:25aesthetic aspects or symbols are
34:27embodied in artifacts of its making
34:29cushions and pillows curtains warm fires
34:32and hearth soar whatever you imagine
34:34when you think about being comfortable
34:35floating in a sensory deprivation tank
34:37whatever your jam is so what precisely
34:43is comfortable about these things I want
34:46to suggest that in order to elucidate
34:47this negativity of comfort which in all
34:50ways is a concept that appears to be
34:52qualitative but then disappears into its
34:56other discomfort or pain means that we
34:59have to look closely at pain itself and
35:02this is a fascinating realm of study and
35:04medicine in the 20th century in
35:07particular in the most probably
35:10thoroughgoing modern treatment of the
35:11subject of comfort which is a book
35:13called the mental and physical aspects
35:15of pain also published in this landmark
35:19year of 1949 the endocrinologist VC
35:21medve identifies a excuse me a core
35:27problem in the very definition of the
35:28phenomenon ancient Greek II States
35:31offered dozens of names for the
35:33different kinds of pain and of pleasure
35:34and Plato asserted that man should be
35:36trained from childhood to find his
35:38pleasures and pains in the correct and
35:40proper objects however this specific but
35:43diffuse body of concepts had been
35:45concentrated and reduced by the time we
35:48arrived in modern English to the single
35:50word I'll be it a word with many
35:52connotations unhinged from any secure
35:55reference med phase in his
36:01interpretation the modern word paid and
36:02left only one avenue for its definition
36:04that of articulating the absence of
36:06pleasure he writes pain does not possess
36:09an obvious sense organ like hearing
36:11sight smell taste or touch it concerns
36:14every part of the body its main
36:16characteristic is unpleasantness and
36:20again a negative thing according to
36:22medve competing medical theories of pain
36:24both physiological and psychological
36:26emerged in the 19th and 20th century is
36:29oriented around two central hypotheses
36:31one the sensory theory in which pain is
36:34another sensation or since or just sense
36:38sensory apparatus like heat are called
36:40brightness or dimness etc registered by
36:42a specific though as yet undecided at a
36:47level at her level beyond the threshold
36:51stability and then to the emotional or
36:54psychogenic pain theory it's where this
36:57is where you experience pain through the
37:00mind even when no direct physical
37:02sensational experience can be identified
37:04as the proper cause of the suffering
37:07both medbay argues are relevant to a
37:10future comprehensive theory of pain
37:12however to date the the physician is
37:15left only with the language at one
37:17degree of removed from the phenomenon
37:19itself as he points out in this
37:22wonderful passage he says pain may be
37:24sharp stabbing cutting biting pricking
37:26stinging burning to my smarting pinching
37:29gnawing throbbing boring dull aching
37:30crushing griping colicky lightning
37:34shooting tearing or slight moderate
37:36severe agonizing excruciating with the
37:38help of additional phrases for instance
37:40as if finer nuances can be described
37:43which can be understood even by those
37:44who had no personal experience of a
37:47certain type of pain and quote so pain
37:50from that day has an analogical
37:52structure like comfort which is
37:54associated with objects it's always
37:56associated with something else usually
37:58an adjective or gerund derived from a
38:01verb describing the process of wounding
38:04however types a painter localizable
38:06within the body itself as medbay
38:08stresses the quality of pain this is him
38:11writing the quality of pain is not a
38:13function of the stimulus in an injection
38:16of 0.5 ccs of hypertonic saline produces
38:19burning in the skin aching pain in the
38:22muscles and pain of a different tone in
38:23the subcutaneous tissues thus quality of
38:27pain is a function of the injured tissue
38:28this tissue will always give pain of the
38:31same quality whatever the stimulus end
38:35quote pain he says is again quoting in
38:39the phantom limb of a person who lost
38:41his arm the body image remains when the
38:44part of the body is lost and the
38:45opposite occurs in the same core Dakotah
38:47lamech lesions where the body image
38:50although the part remains and quote pain
38:54thus has a location a locus within the
38:56body but that location is only
38:58determinable if the body has an image of
39:00the location affected
39:02it is in this image that the excess of
39:05appearances causes pain and though this
39:08image that that pain covers over and
39:13through this image pain covers over
39:14other sensations obliterating and
39:16replacing any other self generated image
39:18of the body the architectural historian
39:21interestingly joseph rick wert seems to
39:24subscribe at least in part to this point
39:26of view when he states in at the outside
39:28of his often republished and cited essay
39:31the sitting position a question of
39:32method but to sit in the chair is to
39:35return to the womb and every act of
39:37standing up is a rebirth echoing the
39:40pain of childbirth following this logic
39:42to sit in the chair is to surrender one
39:44subjectivity to return if only partially
39:46to an objective state belonging to
39:49another body an attempt to turn back the
39:52clock on our unceasing and violent
39:54encounter with the world it is I
39:57considered as an imaginary experience to
39:59disappear and as Elaine Scarry has
40:02famously written in her wonderful study
40:04on pain quote the shape of the chair is
40:08not the shape of the skeleton the shape
40:10of the body weight nor even the shape of
40:13pain perceived but rather the shape of
40:16perceived pain wished gone and the idea
40:20the I dose or appearance of the chair of
40:24comfort is thus an erasure of an erasure
40:27of forgetting of a disappearance if the
40:31chair partakes and this sort of double
40:33disappearing act a process that we could
40:36figure with any number of images from
40:38the history of art that use chairs as
40:40portraits of an absence for instance fan
40:43posts here his chair from 1888 how can
40:47we then think about the chair as a
40:48concrete fact an attention to an
40:51anesthetics a means of recognizing the
40:54concealment of relations between
40:55subjects and objects of subjects
40:57becoming objects might allow us I
40:59propose to acknowledge that with in
41:02conventional aesthetics lies a series of
41:04over determinations as to the permanence
41:07and presence of appearance but I'm
41:09moving a little bit ahead of my
41:10concluding argument here
41:13and I want to just explain very briefly
41:15what is meant by anesthetics in this
41:18instance first of all talking about
41:20aesthetics I'm talking about the science
41:22of subject object relations not just
41:24what one likes in terms of rock music or
41:27flowers not it's not a sensibility but
41:30rather a way of describing the way that
41:31we relate to the world an anesthetics is
41:34a way of thinking about this situation
41:38being negated subject object relations
41:40being destroyed and instead looking at
41:41the media that relate them to one
41:43another and construct them as such if
41:45only temporarily and so what I want to
41:48do is think about the limited sense in
41:51which we deploy that term anesthesia in
41:53studies moving forward as just the kind
41:57of medicine that you use to stop
41:58experiencing pain for the purposes of
42:00undergoing surgery or or whatever
42:02experiencing chronic pain and instead
42:05expand that term outwards and in fact it
42:08was thought of that way in the 19th
42:09century and we've gradually lost this as
42:12the routinization of anesthesia in
42:16medicine and surgery has has expanded so
42:20I'm gonna skip over some of the finer
42:22points of that and instead try to sort
42:28of attend to a difference between these
42:30chairs that we see here plainly
42:32rendering the dialectic between pain and
42:37pleasure or a presence and absence that
42:40haunt the history of art here quite
42:44familiar and famous ones of course
42:46Kossuth three chairs and some even more
42:51sort of disturbing images here that's
42:54probably the worst one I'll show you
42:56utterly awful work of art but Rachel
43:02Whiteread is wonderful casts here would
43:03be another iconic example of this
43:05figuring of an absence and the
43:09ameliorative and still organ onic sense
43:12of design that this is where I'd like to
43:13end the Aeron chair designed by chadwick
43:16and stump is the direct product of an
43:18ergonomic and strictly imagistic
43:19genealogy taking his a cur blonde study
43:22as a paradigmatic and adding in a
43:25sistex produced by nearly three
43:27generations of anthropometry s and
43:29experimental psychologist and so on this
43:32chair is both the actualization and
43:33symbol of an ergonomic point of view
43:35almost every single element the backrest
43:38armrest the seats the casters of the
43:40chair is removable in more than two
43:42dimensions transforming each element
43:44into an organ of its own the Aeron chair
43:47is the anesthetic developed into a
43:49coherent aesthetic as stumped tells it
43:52quote the transparency of the chair as a
43:54visual element was in keeping with the
43:55idea of transparent architecture and
43:57technology which Aaron pioneered in
44:00advance of Apple's transparent iMac
44:02computers he points out privately just
44:06as the computer presents the user with a
44:07putative ly transparent image of a tool
44:09while concealing the impossibly complex
44:12mimicry of formal logic that constitutes
44:14its inner workings the Aeron chair asked
44:16us to see through it while missing that
44:18which it masks it accomplishes this
44:21through the palliative logic of
44:23ergonomics against ummph
44:25he says organ Amma Klee it ought to do
44:27more than just sit there it should
44:29actively intercede for the health of the
44:32person who sits in it longer than she
44:35such statements as this sound perfectly
44:37rational we're used to thinking of the
44:39chair as an immunity of agent soothing
44:41balm applied to a burn restoring our
44:43bodies back to ourselves what is
44:46important here though is to read stumps
44:49statement again this the chair is not
44:51just sitting it's sitting for what its
44:54invisible in the images that the Aeron
44:56chair is the extent to it it asks us to
44:58become object an abstract component
45:01within an extrinsically determined
45:03man-machine system systems as a manual
45:07by the management guru Leslie Matthews a
45:09points out are always invisible until
45:12you give them tangible form so I'm
45:14looking in the study to artworks and
45:17also to the theater this is a set design
45:19for use on UNESCO as marvelous absurdist
45:21play the chairs a kind of another
45:25version of Waiting for Godot as a way of
45:27exploring that because otherwise we
45:30can't really see what touches us so
45:32thanks a lot for your attention and I'd
45:34be happy to take any questions
