drystonepaul.com - "The importance of being furnished"

The importance of being furnished

Between February and April 1998 I toured many lonely parts of upland Britain, videoing and photographing chairs in various settings. The resulting video entitled "A chair is a chair whichever way you look at it", documented fifteen of these locations.

Each image was pondered upon for as much as four minutes, in which time nothing much happened apart from the occasional cry from a passing gull or gust of wind. I enjoy testing the patience of an audience with these 'moving photographs'; in time based medium one expects something to happen, but in this case nothing much does.

By placing familiar household objects like furniture within the realms of a 'wilderness', the view becomes familiarised and seems somehow safer. In the same way it can be argued that a photographic composition defines margins and boundaries which helps to organise an image and remove any sense of threat to the viewer. This dislocation from reality allows the denial of nature and its inherent threat to human-kind. It makes us feel we are masters of our environment.

To me this notion is almost as ridiculous as carrying a chair up a mountain. During Easter 1998 I climbed 'Red Screes', a 776 metre high mountain in the Cumbrian Lake District, taking with me a dining room chair. As the video shows, many attempts to use the chair for sitting on were thwarted by the gradient of the hillside, and for much of the time it became a burden.

This was not intended to be a heroic gesture, but an acceptance
of my reliance upon the domestic. I concede that as much as I
would like to, I cannot cut myself adrift from these material
things. Perhaps it was an attempt to colonize the hills, to stamp
my authority, or maybe I just deem it necessary to make my life
more difficult. In the absence of religious belief I am tempted
by burdens in order to justify my existence.

( video stills )

The videos were exhibited as part of an installation in November 1998, which comprised of the chair which went up the mountain, placed upon a patch of turf, and a tent pitched on a patch of carpet.

"The importance of being furnished" video was displayed on a four inch monitor inside the tent, and the other video was shown on a fourteen inch monitor on a plinth on the grass. This formed an open space for viewing, and a more intimate private space within the tent to limit the audience numbers and to reflect the solitary act of mountain climbing. The tent and the small monitor were mechanisms with which to draw the viewer into interacting with the piece.

Special thanks to Ross Baker for technical assistance.

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Exhibition poster >>