two kitties

Chairs that look like mountain goats.

This week, Two Kitties needs to blow off a little steam. It's Thanksgiving. I want to laugh and I want you to laugh with me. Never fear - there are plenty of deeply serious and troubling things in the "What's On My Mind" category, if that's what you're looking for. If you just want to sew something out of an old sweater, there is a category for that as well. 

For now, let's take a look at a couple of chairs I found on a shopping trip in Minneapolis. $2975.00 EACH.

Showing them to my husband and pretending I'd bought them? Priceless.

Claes Oldenburg: Soft Toilet

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet (1966). Wood, vinyl, kapok fibers, wire, and plexiglass on metal stand and painted wood base.

Garden Chair

I love, love, love, this idea. I have an antique chair frame sitting on the deck right now - but haven't been able to decide what I want to do with it. I think I'll spray paint it vamp red and plant it in the woods.

For whatever reason, I can't link to the original post, but you can find it - and many other interesting thoughts - on http://www.shedstyle.com

Tejo Remy Rag Chair

Designer Tejo Remy makes the Rag Chair by bundling old clothes together with polyester packing straps. The chair sells for $4300 at Droog, a website worth checking out just for the sake of it. Remy will accept bundles of your old clothes, for your custom order.

The chair has something in common with a small, but lovely book I read last summer called Love, Loss and What I Wore. A collection of memories organized around by what the author, Ilene Beckerman, was wearing at different moments in her life. Sometimes it was the moment that mattered to her, at others, it was the person - often her grandmother - who sewed the dress for her.

It would be interesting to go through the process of bundling up all those significant moments and then...watch a stranger sit on them.

Siah Armajani - Gazebo for Two Anarchists

Siah Armajani - "Gazebo for Two Anarchists", originally uploaded by benben.

I visited Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York a few years ago. I still think of it often.I sat in this chair, one of two inside Siah Armajani's Gazebo for Two Anarchists: Gabriella Antolini and Alberto Antolini, 1992 The piece is made of wood and teel painted blue-green, white, and black. It measures 10'6" x 32'6" x 8'5"  The gazebo sits upon a specially constructed hill. The views of nature and the physical space of the structure feel restrictive and confined.

It makes you wonder about the Antolini's, doesn't it? I can't find out much about them, but I know that the Antolini's were anarchists and followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian working to overthrow capitalists around the turn of the century. Gabriella was in prison for a time, caught transporting dynamite around Chicago. Perhaps the gazebo, the bars, and the bridge refer to that period of separation.

Storm King curators settle each piece into an appropriate piece of landscape. The scale of the park is incredible. I've never seen anything like it - usually sculpture gardens are tight and crowded. It's a joy to be able to walk for miles and just "find" a giant Calder in the woods. These three are the work of Mark di Suvero.

The gardens are closed until April 1, which gives you plenty of time to plan your visit. And then you'd also get to see the Storm King Wall created by Andy Goldsworthy.

I'd Have Rather Spent the Evening Talking to My Dog.

I just had a dinner party. Our guests talked the entire night without ever asking me a single question. I felt like furniture.  I sat on everything really interesting about me until they went home.

This chair is from pop-artist Allen Jones erotic series. It's in the Tate Collection.

Marcel Wanders: Crochet Chair

Marcel Wanders' "Crochet Chair" was the hot thing at Design Miami 2006. Wanders created sheets of traditional crochet, then molded them using in epoxy resin cast over a chair form. Twenty were manufactured, and twenty were sold.

Protection from Modern Life: Designers Nacho Carbonell and Mary Hale

Spanish designer Nacho Carbonell has created a chair-pod where you can, quite literally, curl up into a ball and escape the stress of every day life.

Carbonell's piece is part of the upcoming "Joe Colombo - Design and Invention of the Future" exhibit at Kunsthaus Graz.

Mary Hale, a graduate student in Architecture at MIT designed Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass for a course in Visual Design at the University.

Hale sees Body Mass as a tool for mental escape, a soft physical barrier that envelopes and protects the wearer with a cushion of personal space. There are times in my life when I wish I would have had one of these:

The course, called "Give Me Shelter" featured clothing and accessories designed to help wearers negotiate the gap between work and home, self-confidence and unease, and over- or under-stimulation.