Danish artist Jens Haaning´s (*1965) work is not exactly much about Monobloc chairs, still it may tell one or two things about the object. Haaning has worked extensively on globalization related issues. For his work “Chair Exchange” (2004) he swapped all the chairs from the café terrace of Sydney´s Museum of Contemporary Art for those from the restaurant Phuong Thao on Do Son, Hai Phong in Vietnam. The Vietnamese got some non-descript metal-plastic seat shell commercial chairs – while Sydney was sitting in beige Monoblocs and metal folding chairs of the kind you see a lot in Asia.

With “Chair Exchange” Haaning builds on older works of his, namely the 2001 “Klub Diplomat” where he
exchanged one of the chairs of his gallery for a chair from the private foreigners club Klub Diplomat, both places in Copenhagen, and the “Redistribution” project, he staged between London and Karachi in 2003.

“Redistribution” takes an even more radical approach than “Chair Exchange”: He shipped all the chairs from prestigious London ICA´s café and placed them in a street in Karachi/Pakistan where anyone who needed a chair could just simply pick one up. At the ICA cafe, meanwhile, there was a framed photograph of the chairs in situ in Pakistan.

Harun Morrison in a blog post about an artist talk Haaning gave at London´s Whitechapel Gallery:

Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.

Speaking of taste: Funny how the ICA as well as the MCA both have these boring, Polyprop-esque chairs in their cafés. Will we live to see the day, people stand up and say “Enough with that stuff.. Get some more imaginative furniture please!” as we saw it happen with Monoblocs over the last decade?

When I am in London next time, I´ll have one more reason for a visit to the ICA – checking the current seating. In Sydney meanwhile, not much has changed apparently after Haaning´s intervention: This flickr-photo, taken four years later in 2008 clearly shows much the same hideous model again, that Haaning had shipped to Vietnam before.

Images copyright and courtesy of Gallery Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen and Jens Haaning.

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