Garry Knox Bennett
GR Series #9: Early Twentieth Century Chair, 2003

On underside: “Early 20th C. Chair” #9 In Oakland GKB Anno 03

Material: Lacquered Wood, Plywood

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

This particular chair includes references to details of early 20^th century chair designs.

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)