The Art Museum is full of chairs

Amy Halliday

The art museum is full of chairs. 

Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) — rustic, with a straight wooden back, straw seat and no armrests; empty, but for his pipe and tobacco resting at one corner — at the National Gallery in London has long been viewed as a surrogate self-portrait for the absent figure of the modest, reflective artist. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Joseph Kosuth, in One and Three Chairs (1965), presents us with a folding chair bracketed by a full-scale photograph of it and a dictionary definition for the word ‘chair’. The modernist triptych elaborates the relationship between an object and its verbal and visual referents: the chair as container for conceptualism, but vacated, once again, of the body. 

Recently, as part of an exhibition interrogating the absence of Black women artists in art historical narratives, museum collections and display, I installed Helina Metaferia’s A Seat: Pulling up a Chair next to Joseph, in conversation with Nzinga, Rosa, Shirley, Solange (2017). The work simultaneously alludes to, complicates and exceeds Kosuth’s by including a performance video of the artist interacting — wearily, joyously, determinedly, frustratedly, creatively — with the folding chair, alongside the definitive words of Shirley Chisholm, first African-American leader of the Democratic National Committee: 'If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.’ Metaferia pushes the chair beyond the conceptual, the symbolic, insisting on the embodied and relational: in 1955, Rosa Parks (the ‘Rosa’ of the title), for example, refused to vacate a bus seat for a white passenger, catalyzing the Montgomery bus boycott that became a cornerstone of the civil rights movement in the United States. Chairs are a matter of power, of access, of belonging, of bodies.  

The art museum is full of chairs.  

But there is nowhere to sit. 

Chairs, through their absence or presence, their design and orientation, orchestrate our movement and direct our attention, indicate how our bodies are to be arranged in space and in relation to others. The sleek, minimalist benches that traditionally attend museum spaces (if there is seating at all) have no armrests, no back support. We are held to attention (and must hold ourselves upright) for short periods of fully frontal contemplation. Comfort is an afterthought, a distraction, even. 

Once you denaturalise the idea of a chair — recognizing it as what artist and educator Gina Siepel calls a ‘social sculpture’ — you start to notice the ways in which we’re subliminally told how to ‘be’ or belong (or not) in different spaces through the seats we’re offered (or not): the classroom chair, the office chair, the lounger. For the longest time, I’ve taken up residence on the floor in front of artworks; a somatic reorientation that I’ve found opens up new observations, affects and perspectives. At least half the time, I’ll be asked to move by a slightly perplexed docent, as if my act of sitting presents a direct, if ambiguous, affront to the sanctity of the space. 

In 2021, in connection with the Sir Frank Bowling retrospective at the Arnolfini art gallery in Bristol, I attended a day-long series of somatic-centered programming called ‘How do you feel?’ — I was delighted to find myself surrounded by beanbags, folding chairs and movable benches for variously sitting, slouching, reclining or perching around the galleries. Together with participants, the facilitators mused on the radical possibilities of rest and comfort in public space, especially from an inclusion and accessibility perspective. And together, through guided engagement with artworks based on embodied prompts, we came to a new fullness of aesthetic observation, experience and affect flowing from this reorientation; breaking free of established codes of gallery conduct. A year later, I returned to see the Paula Rego exhibition: they’ve kept the beanbags. And they’re very popular.  

Of course, despite a long tradition of venerating the Madonna Lactans, there is also a long and overt history of museums exiling or sanctioning breastfeeding parents in public gallery spaces. The inclusive design of a baby-feeding seat for museums and other public spaces, then, is a distinctly radical proposition. It stakes a claim for care, for carers and for caretaking. It not only considers the embodied experience, needs and comfort of the caregiver — making space for arms to rest, for feet to plant, for bottles to nestle, for books and toys and bags to stow away — but also asserts their legitimacy; their right to take up space. 

And while the chair can be easily integrated anywhere in a museum, such that you can experience the works around you from your seat, it   is also in and of itself a curated series of multi-sensory artworks, provocations and pathways: Jade Montserrat’s drawing, the audio pieces by Nicola Singh, Magda Stawarska-Beavan and Krissi Musiol embedded in the wingback design, this little zine. Feed fundamentally replaces exile with immersion: settle in, sit back, take your time, take up space, take care.