The World Does Not Need Another Chair
"In a world where instant gratification lies on the other side of opaque processes and experiences, deliberately letting all our ideas germinate is countercultural."
Guest Contributor Emeka Emetuche reflects on Studio Guapo’s fireside chat this past month in Los Angeles. Studio Guapo is Matt Pecina, New York-based furniture designer and the conceptual director of Pink Essay.
When I was 16, my high school rolled out a new art history class in its attempt to create a more “well-rounded” curriculum.
I’d sit in the back each day, flipping through textbook pages of Monet, Manet, and the Old Masters, half-listening to the day’s lecture. Eventually, one painting caught my attention—Magritte’s The Treachery of Images: a simple drawing of a tobacco pipe with the phrase “This is not a pipe” written unceremoniously in French below it.
And of course it wasn’t a pipe, just a drawing of one. In today’s landscape, that distinction feels unnecessary at best and pretentious at worst. But at the time it was made, it was an important one. During an era where the quality of “fine” art was dictated by the degree to which it replicated the world according to a set number of conventions, separating the painting from its subject was radical. The surrealism of Magritte and his peers and successors was a textbook countercultural movement: a response to a rapidly changing world that was still governed by old ideas.
Countercultures can be defined by their rejection of institutional standards and disruption of conceptual space. They represent the intentional unraveling of what we know in a purposeful move towards the uncomfortable. This unraveling has taken every form imaginable in the decades since the surrealists, from punk music’s rejection of bloated, commercial glam rock to skateboarding’s reclamation of urban public space.
In the language of a more recent one of these movements — hacking — countercultures are a kind of social computing. Through a sharp, even violent, break from norms, we reprogram our personal and collective sensibilities and arrive at different answers to old problems and, ideally, we start asking different questions all together.
Last Wednesday, I was lucky enough to catch Matt Pecina of Studio Guapo give a brief talk in LA about his work. Matt’s talk highlighted selections from his portfolio, including the Guapo Rocker: an eclectic and deceptively versatile chair which debuted at Pink Essay’s Physical Education 2 show last year.
The Guapo Rocker struck me not only as a design object but as an extension of an ever-evolving idea. Many countercultural movements in design stem from a single image or motif; his is something Matt explicitly alluded to in his talk, recalling being 17 with no direction or plan – just the idea of a bed and a guitar, and later, just the mock-ups of the Guapo Rocker.
That mental image was proof of how a single point in time can be stretched into a continuum, and of how our ideas can reflect who we are or were at a certain point. With no CNC machine, the Guapo Rocker first came to life as a graphic on shirts and tees: a chair design that shunned angularity in its own subtle self reference was transposed into an equally self-referential and irreverent subculture. In the world of streetwear, community is built around a distaste for consensus and formality.
Similarly, there’s a playfulness in the idea behind the Guapo Rocker — an inclination to play fast and loose and break things which goes beyond the chair’s original design. Naturally, people who resonated with streetwear and skate culture gravitated to Studio Guapo’s Guapo Rocker clothing drops, building support for what would come next and emboldening a willingness to let mental images be a dynamic guide.
That willingness to let go of perfectionism carried into Pecina’s next iteration of the idea, embodied by his guiding concept of the “Rough Draft”. As the idea for the Rocker moved through phases, from a mental image to a graphic on a tee, to a rough wooden skeleton, each level of abstraction brought with it a certain audacity — the energy it takes to bring an idea into the physical world, to be able to touch and bend and saw and shape it, with your own hands.
That brand of audacity is uncomfortable. And on top of that, it’s really fucking hard. Not just because it requires being loud in your expression but also because you must be consistent and not lose track of that one guiding mental image. In a world where instant gratification lies on the other side of opaque processes and experiences – in our technology, in product design, in the media – deliberately letting all our ideas germinate is countercultural.
The Studio Guapo fireside chat was not about how the world needs another chair. From my point of view, it was a reminder of not only what we can do with clever ideas and a little scrappiness, but what those ideas can do for us and the communities we build if we allow them to evolve along with us.
So, start with something. Today. Even if all you got is a rough draft. #theshapeswemaketheshapeswetake
The Studio Guapo Fireside Chat was hosted by Vague Promises of Treasure at Soho Warehouse in LA. VPT is an arts organization aiming to acknowledge all forms of creative expression and provide a platform for a diverse range of artists to display their works in pop-up locations all over the world. VPT has no permanent physical location, utilizing its nomadic nature to spread art wherever it requires to be seen. VPT seeks to fulfill the promise of art as a tool to educate, shift paradigms, and bridge communities.
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