Gord Peteran redefines what it means to be a chair

GORD PETERAN’S “MUSICAL BOX”

Gord Peteran’s furniture sort of explains a lot of things, possibly even why Wickes just went bankrupt. The 34 creations in “Furniture Meets Its Maker,” now wrapping up a two-year traveling show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, include tables of junk wood, chairs too dangerous for sitting, and conversation pieces defined by their obviously missing parts. It’s the kind of stuff you sometimes see emerging from a delivery van. (Remember how people loved it at Levitz—but by the time it got to their living rooms . . . uhhh, you know . . . not so much? That.)

But here everybody gets a kick out of Peteran, the Canadian-born craftsman whose twisted takes on the stuff of our everyday sitting and storing and lounging and displaying come across as genius—albeit with the same kind of shrugging smartassery as the delivery guy who carved that long scratch in your coffee table after insisting he could get it through the front door.

“If something’s not worth doing, it’s worth not doing well,” opines Peteran in his Top Ten Shop Rules, which turn out to be a dozen quippy tongue-and-mind teasers that he pretends to live by. “If something’s worth not doing well, it might be worth doing perfectly.”

You can see how this could get old—it sets you hoping that Peteran periodically adheres to Rule No. 7 on his list: “Learn to shut up.” But that’s before you get your face out of his understatedly beautiful (yet overcompensatingly wordy) catalogue and see how Peteran enables us to view our oldest accoutrements with fresh eyes.

Must something be functional to be furniture? Must our tables be sturdy and level to truly be tables? Must a chair be assembled in a way that is strong and possible to sit on—and is it still a chair if it is lying on its side? What sounds are required of a music box? Do suggestions of sex qualify a contraption as a sex device, even if it clearly would never work? Does simply wanting to sit on a plush red chair inside a burnished-wood and shiny-glass box with an electric cord coming out of it make it something, whatever it is?

Peteran seems to say so, though despite all the verbiage in the catalogue and on the various display cards—describing his style as “furnitural” and his repairs as “upholdstery”—he would never come right out with it. For confirmation of that, refer to another of his Shop Rules: “What people say is quite often a clue to what they’re thinking.”

Peteran, who obviously thinks a lot, would prefer that we use our heads a little, too. The familiarity of his pieces—their recognizable shapes and materials—gives us a comfortable start. But where they eventually go and what they are meant to do (try “nowhere” and “nothing”) can feel like driving past the house you used to live in: a place full of memories that don’t fit there anymore.

In that sense, one of the most meaningful pieces in the exhibition is Prosthetic, an old, broken down, high-backed, wicker-seated chair that Peteran has “repaired” with an extravagant brass brace and seat. His work has clearly analyzed the problem, but his solution has left the chair as dysfunctional as when it was broken. It’s a pretty good metaphor for so much of what has gone wrong, and how we attempt to fix it.

On the other hand, for all the pure craftsmanship and meticulous reinvention evident throughout Peteran’s art, even he would admonish us not to overthink it.

“Medically speaking, your head is connected to your ass,” he notes in another of his Shop Notes. “Always error on the side of ridiculous.”

GORD PETERAN: FURNITURE MEETS ITS MAKER LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART  2300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90803  562.439.2119 | LBMA.ORG | TUES-SAT 11AM-5PM | THROUGH SEPTEMBER 7 | $6-7

Tags: art, furniture, gord peteran, lbma, Long Beach