Art Rocker is goons

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

There is a particular kind of object that resists being known. Not because it is complex, but because it refuses to stay still long enough to be categorized. It sits between furniture and sculpture, between use and idea, between the serious and the absurd. Richard Artschwager spent a career making exactly those objects.
The Art Rocker began with a trip. Paul, then a young architecture student in Toronto, took a trip to New York and walked into the Whitney Museum. Two shows stopped him. Wade Guyton and Richard Artschwager. What he encountered in Artschwager's work was a sculptural chair reduced to its platonic form. A rectangular volume for the seat. A rectangular volume rising at the back. On the side, a veneer depicting the very chair it described. The piece illustrated itself. It was austere and humourous. Paul kept a photograph of it.

At the start of Studio Goons, we found the photograph one day. Paul drew an arc across the bottom of it. The idea was to make it rock. He built a prototype. It looked like it should be uncomfortable. It wasn't. It looked like it shouldn't work but it did, in a way it was difficult to explain until you sat in it. The rocking motion introduced something unexpected into a form that had otherwise been stripped of everything optional. A sense of idling, of pause, of time passing. Not play, exactly. More like the physical equivalent of thinking.

It has since appeared in exhibitions, in press. People have admired it, questioned it, photographed it. It is the piece the whole language of Studio Goons grew out of.
Studio Goons was founded on the intersection of architecture and sculpture, use and restraint, the functional and the irreducible. The Art Rocker does not exemplify that position. It invented it.
Hand built, birch plywood, satin black finish. Dimensions: 300 × 460 × 900mm.

Art Rocker. Studio Goons.

ART ROCKER
21C04-AR01

Chair/Rocking Chair
Edition 1/3
Archive Collection
Black satin hand finish

Reference note
RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Furniture/sculpture
The distorted scale of an everyday object.
The tensions and contradictions inherent in the task of grasping and defining familiar objects and experiences.
Sprüth Magers Berlin