Artspace Gets Perverse

Two chairs face each other in the window of Artspace’s gallery on the corner of Orange and Crown. One is interwoven with hair. The other one is occupied by an enormous, amorphous pink blob. In another part of the gallery is a schematic of the plans highway developers really had for the city of New Haven decades ago — plans they may well have implemented if the federal funds hadn’t run out.

The chair and the highway plans are connected. How?

In Artspace’s latest exhibit, ​“Perverse Furniture” — running now through June 29 — the common thread pulling together the chairs, the highway, and the work of 15 different artists is the Bauhaus, a German school of thought founded 100 years ago that had a profound effect on architecture, art, industrial design, and yes, by extension, city planning.

If you’ve heard the phrase ​“form follows function,” that comes from Bauhaus thought. So does ​“learning by doing.” The most achingly minimalist, modernist house designs owe something to the Bauhaus. So do the sleek designs of Olivetti typewriters. So does Ikea furniture — along with, for that matter, the Pirelli building preserved in Ikea’s parking lot.

Bauhaus thought, as the exhibit’s accompanying notes put it, sought to ​“understand humankind’s place among machines” and sought ​“the possibility of a perfect marriage between art, technology, and industry.” At its core were many ideas that have stood the test of time, such as the one that someone who designs furniture should also have the skill to actually build it; someone who designs houses should have a craftsman’s practical understanding of the materials that go into building them. At its best it could produce things of great utility and beauty, from kitchen utensils to houses to monuments. At its worst, its utopian ideas curdled; it could assume that entire sections of cities could be torn down and reshaped according to one man’s vision — and didn’t it always seem to be a man? — regardless of that city’s history and who was living there, and what the city might have meant to them.

But curators Sarah Fritchey and Aude Jomini, who is an architect by profession, arrived at the idea for ​“Perverse Furniture” starting with, well, furniture.

“Any time you add furniture” to a room, Jomini said, ​“it becomes a problem.” It shapes the room and how people move in it. It tailors their expectations for how they’re going to live in a particular space. And both Fritchey and Jomini had noticed that absurdist furniture had started showing up in contemporary art exhibits, a lot. That got them thinking about New Haven’s own industrial past — Artspace is located in the building that used to be the Chamberlain Furniture Company — and about the Bauhaus.

A century ago, ​“the division of labor” in factories, Jomini said, ​“was something that Walter Gropius,” the founder of the Bauhaus, ​“wanted to undo. He wanted designers who could do it all.” That raised questions. ​“How does a designer take control? How does a designer justify his work? Do you make things for the greater good?” Those questions persisted whether that designer was making a teacup, a parking garage, or a new city.

Fritchey caught Jomini’s pronoun use; a century ago, it really was always a he.

There was ​“complete subservience of females” in Bauhaus ideas, Fritchey said. Industry and architecture were ​“male-dominated worlds.” And often designers were overseeing craftswomen — particularly textile workers — whose ideas shaped the ultimate designers, while the male designers got all the credit. As Bauhaus ideas scaled up from furniture to architecture to city planning, and moved from Germany to the United States thanks to many Bauhaus thinkers immigrating here after World War II, that power structure in which the designer’s vision was all led to some very undemocratic decision making.

The double approach to the legacy of the Bauhaus, celebrating its achievements and its rigor while also highlighting the harsh power structure it could create, is what all the artists in ​“Perverse Furniture” respond to in some way, and it gives the work, and the exhibit overall, some real teeth. Or in the case of the work of Berndette Despojols, hair. ​“She thinks a lot about gender stereotypes,” Fritchey explained, ​“especially in art.” So the hair is a nod to those unnamed women weavers who helped create those famous Bauhaus chairs; the blob in the other chair, a nod to the family the artist is unapologetic about not having.

Jessi Reaves’s Night Cabinet (Little Miss Attitude) also plays with the Bauhaus’s sometimes uneasy relationship between art, design, and craft, something she learned firsthand as a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design who went on to work for a furniture maker. Her piece is “a onesie for a sculpture,” Fritchey said. “The artist’s mother,” who sews and makes her own clothes, “started crying when she saw it.”

“It’s a sausage that wants to be an S&M body suit,” Fritchey added, further explaining that it is actually quite functional as a piece of clothing; it zips and unzips like a onesie.

Sit, the title of Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s piece, comes across as a dare that the artist already knows no one will fulfill. It’s a chair already on its way to becoming something else, growing away from its designer and the original design, taking on a life of its own.

Meanwhile, with Back Talk, Bob Gregson created a chair that you can sit in, but might rather not. First, it requires two people to work will, except that one person ends up being in charge of the chair, Fritchey said. That you sit facing away from each other but then observe one another through mirrors makes the interaction that much more awkward. ​“You’re turning your back and being a creepy voyeur at once,” Jomini said.

If Gregson’s piece draws attention to and upends the power dynamics Bauhaus thinking kept hidden, artist Esteban Ramón Pérez’s piece seeks to explode it. He grew up in an upholstery shop and uses the skills he learned there to make art reflecting his collective Xicano culture and its fractured relationship to the country he lives in.

Amid the artists’ work in the gallery is a display put together by Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum. The display traces the evolution of Bauhaus ideas to city planning in New Haven, which began with a city plan commissioned in 1941. As World War II ended, the city, along with the country, had ​“a new energy,” combined with ​“an extreme fear of falling back into depression,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. To avoid a repeat of the past, in a sense, they would sever ties to it through design, and put ​“everything in its right place,” according to a single, grand vision.

In 1953, modernist-inspired and French-born consultant Maurice E.H. Rotival conceived of a plan to create a small system of highways involving a ring road through downtown that would connect the offramp from the incoming I‑91 with the Route 34 connector. Had it been completed, downtown would be an even more radically different place than it became under mayor Richard Lee, who harnessed federal funds to transform the Elm City into the Model City.

“You might wipe out an entire neighborhood, but that’s okay, because this road will be more efficient,” Bischoff-Wurstle said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. That didn’t mean that the ideas that fueled the Bauhaus movement were all bad. It might mean, however, that ​“ideas can change, or be corrupted, or just not work.”

The pieces around Bischoff-Wurstle’s display show several of the many ways that those ideas didn’t work, particularly in the voices they silenced. At the same time, they offer a way forward. Maybe the architecture they would produce would be stranger still, applied to buildings and cities. Or maybe the art in the exhibit suggests that some ideas shouldn’t be scaled up from furniture to buildings to cities at all. Maybe it’s more about simply making space for as many voices as possible, leaving grand visions behind, and letting things develop slowly, one tiny step at a time.

“Perverse Furniture” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through June 29. Visit the organization’s website for hours and more information.