Playtime at BCAM!

In Robert Therrien’s piece No Title 2003 (Table and Six Chairs), the artist presents just what the parentheses indicate: a table, and six chairs. However, the simple description does not give away the fact that this otherwise mundane dining room set is in fact ten feet tall and nearly thirty feet across. Therrien had each piece professionally fabricated with metal, which was then painted to look like the dark wood of the original set in Therrien’s kitchen that he used for inspiration. Every detail of the furniture has been attended to, from the aged metal hardware under the table to the subtle overlaps in the hand-made joints, to the round plastic feet on the bottoms of the chair legs.

The fact that Therrien went so far to accurately replicate the particulars of this ordinary furniture set makes the viewer’s experience of the piece entirely determined by its scale. He has made sure that no differences between his mammoth sculpture and the original set will attract a critical eye, besides the obvious. Upon encountering Table and Six Chairs, the viewer instantly recognizes the objects and overlays his memories of similar furniture onto his present experience with Therrien’s piece. In other words, the sculpture is a table and six chairs in the mind of the viewer, they just happen to be very large.

Once this recognition is achieved, the experience of Therrien’s work becomes more about the viewer’s experience of himself in its presence. The conscious understanding that the table and chairs are big, is outweighed by the viewer’s own sensation of feeling small. The artist is intending to trigger such a sensation because viewers are encouraged to walk between the legs, stand underneath, peer up at the bottom of the table, and so forth. From this bizarrely familiar vantage point, the work activates the memories of childhood, and incites the imagination to conjure up all the possible conditions of having such a vantage point. As I stand beneath the table I imagine whose legs would be jutting out from those chairs…there’s my mother, then my grandfather at the head, then perhaps my aunt with her black high-heels and crossed legs. As I continue to mill about below, I come to imagining that I am my cousin’s cat, China, rubbing up and down on all the various ankles, looking for a hand to pet me or perhaps smuggle me a piece of chicken skin.

The fertile imaginative ground in and around Therrien’s piece is the result of a profound sense of dislocation one feels when next to such fantastically sized objects. The piece is so large that when underneath it, everything beyond the legs of the chairs might as well be in another museum. Therrien’s use of scale in this piece is even more complicated than that, however. Each piece is not in fact fabricated directly to scale. Therrien based their measurements on how the original set appeared when photographed from the floor. And since every viewer is guaranteed to share that perspective, no one would ever think to question the objects’ dimensions. In this way Therrien in infusing his piece specifically with a child’s perspective (or for that matter, a cat’s, or anyone besides an average adult’s,) so that the jump to that childlike, imaginative state of mind is all the more immediate.

There is also something to be said for that fact that experiencing Therrien’s Table and Six Chairs and taking his imaginative cues is fun. Fun isn’t often the outcome of looking at art, though it should be recognized as a rather significant transportive device. There have been many artists who work with humor, making viewers smile with their clever jabs at the establishment, et cetera, but rarely does an artist harness the power of what is fun to us as children. There are no waterslides or pillow fights or costume chests to be found at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. In adult life, seeing the world in any way but the way it is, is usually deemed unproductive, inefficient, and even insane. Robert Therrien however captures in his piece the significance of the fun in pretending. His huge, uncanny objects are so other-worldly, that they instantly authorize the viewer to leave the world of the museum, and wholeheartedly engage in the invention of a world all his own.