Sum of Its Parts
Sum of its parts: 1978 Wagner J16 Rocker exemplifies my love affair with the humble crate and all that is embedded within it. The crate serves to preserve, protect, hide away, forget, and document. It is an overlooked signifier of value and a utilitarian workhorse. Designed in 1944, the J16 rocking chair was one of Hans Wegner’s first designs for production, and does not exhibit many of the traits that his later, more recognizable work came to be known for. This particular chair was manufactured in 1978 by the original Danish manufacturer, FDB Mobler, just as it would have been in the original production. It has been painstakingly disassembled, with minimal destruction, and permanently entombed within 8 individual custom crates, one for each “type” of part, all carefully custom fit for each component. Through this act, the chair enters a new phase of its life, but never fear, as Joseph Kosuth would likely agree, this chair is still a chair. It is, however, no longer able to serve its intended purpose. What does it mean to collect something, to hide it away and protect it? What gives our beloved icons value? Is it the sum of its parts? Is it the revered icon who designed it? Is it the laborer who manufactured it? Is it time? Does the act of crating something imbue it with value, regardless of its pedigree? By removing something from circulation, is its value increased or decreased? How do we understand the object when it is no longer in the form to which that value is attached? Are the disembodied elements of this beautiful functional thing worthless? Does the act of destruction serve to break us of a certain kind of hero worship? Does the eternal reverence of such icons hold us back, and can we shake our obsession with certain works of art or design and their creators? This object has been dematerialized, shipped piece by piece in its new reliquaries, and reunited in a different form, forever referring to its former glory and forever changed. The heirloom becomes a collection of relics. Sometimes we need to take things apart in order that we might better