Garry Knox Bennett
GR Series #4: Granny Rietveld, 2003

On underside: Granny Rietvelt #4 In Oakland GKB Anno 03 #779 2

Material: Red Oak, Hand-Caned Seat, Polished Brass

The chair is part of Knox Bennett’s “GR Series”, which is comprised of humorous riffs on Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic Z Chair design.

The aptly titled “Granny Rietveld” features a hand-caned backrest poking fun at the furniture that stereotypical grandmothers often have in their homes. The ovular caned backrest is also reminiscent of the iconic Thonet Bentwood No. 22 chair.

In an interview with curator Stefano Catalani (SC), in the exhibition catalogue “Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker”, Garry Knox Bennet Garry (GKB) explained:

SC: You started with the Zigzag chairs. You made sixteen chairs drawing inspiration from the design of Gerrit Rietveld’s 1934 Zig-Zag Chair. It’s a quite spartan chair in its original concept. What captured your interest about this model?

GKB: I’ve always looked at that chair as kind of a joke. I thought, “What a dumb chair this is!” And when I made the first, the ladder-back chair, which started out as kind of tongue-in-cheek, I sat in it, and it was a surprisingly comfortable little chair! I mean it works really well. You can get your feet behind it, when you tuck your feet under yourself; there’s no stretcher that gets in the way. It’s a good height: 18 inches, pretty standard. And it’s got some spring to it; it’s got a little limber to it. So then I have to admit, I actually fell in love with the model. From then on, I was fairly serious. Obviously I’m using puns in a lot of the titles, or a lot of visuals, but I got pretty serious about it.

SC: Did you build all the Zigzag chairs? Or are some of them Garry Knox Bennett’s “readymades”?

GKB: I think any original Rietveld chair would be a pretty expensive proposition. I don’t even know anybody who’s manufacturing them. But it’s a very easy chair to construct. It’s unbelievably simple.

SC: A lot of dovetail joints…

GKB: Yeah, but I modified it. I think in most cases, my engineering is better… I mean, they put dovetails in that real hard angle; I don’t even know who could make that dovetail. But they did, and they support it with gussets. I never saw a real Rietveld, but in all the pictures I saw, they had nuts and bolts in them, or they had these gussets stuck in them or battens. Instead of dovetails I used a spline joint: I set up a jig for the table saw, and sawed through the wood. I think there’s anywhere from twelve to maybe fifteen splines across. Then I milled down a piece of wood that fits in that slot, glued it in there really good, then sanded it all down even.

SC: What kind of wood did you use for your Zigzag chairs?

GKB: Any wood that was available. The wood wasn’t important.

SC: Rietveld’s Zig-Zag chair design is a stark and minimal assertion of function and form: four planes in space, four straight lines in profile. Did you fall in love with its lines?

GKB: It’s such a simple form that it allows itself a lot of manipulation. It’s an easy form to build off visually and physically: color, or what you can stick on it, like the wings or the ladder, or the Mackintosh high back. If you want, make it into an armchair!

(Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker. Bellevue Arts Museum, 1 Jan. 2006, p. 77-78)