My parents living in London in 1962 found they could furnish our house with antique furniture affordably.
Our house was modest but full of quality old crafted furniture. As a child I marvelled at the elaborate carving and elegant proportions of the pieces we had.
When our family returned to Australia, the furniture came with us and my chest of drawers at home remains from that time.
My partner’s family also collected antique furniture and the austerity of the harsh buildings in which we live is softened and lifted by all these beautiful antique pieces.
I suppose it was twenty years ago that antique furniture came to be known as ‘brown furniture’. It was not seen for what it was, but for what it represented. The brown furniture was space and light consuming. It was less functional than ‘built-ins’ and new lighter equivalent pieces. It also represented a set of unsustainable values, of furniture as signifiers of class or privilege.
The end of ‘wood’, which the antique represented was disregarded by the more pressing ‘functionalist’ considerations of the times.
The range of the quality of pieces was rendered flat by all of it identified as ‘brown’. It had become affordable but this time round (about 1990) the fashion circuit, nobody wanted it.
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In the 1970’s when steel was the material of choice for young sculptors, it was seen as a permanent material. It reflected the still certainty of the industrial age. It was durable, affordable and immediate. No secondary casting process was required. That steel might corrode over time was not evident when it first appeared as the material of choice. In that fast changing world, time did not ‘pass’ because the present was so compelling, so pervasive.
It was quite a rude awakening then that in about 1980 steel sculpture became ‘brown sculpture’. Suddenly all the steel sculptures were the same sculpture. The brown sculpture was limited by the inherent language within the material and the ‘formalist’ philosophy apparently embodied there, or so it was percieved.
The sculpture connoisseur would see through this uniformity to particular qualities of works but the shock and freshness of steel that it first emanated in the sixties and early seventies had evaporated. To overcome this ‘brown’ fatigue sculptors painted works with industrial paints. The implication was that industrial materials required industrial finishes to represent their pure nature. The painted sculptures presented themselves as equivalents to the other luxury items available to consumers, such as cars and other goods.
Paint too is a time blocker. The painted surface reflects newness and time is paint’s enemy. Sculptors started using stainless steel to overcome the ‘brown’ problem. All that glitters surely has some value, the sculptures mused. The third alternative to escape the browning of sculpture was to come indoors to avoid the outcome of being outside. The sculptures conformed to the demands of indoor living by shrinking. There is a strong movement towards ‘modesty of means’, to justify this move. The recent miniature show at Defiance Gallery is the tip of this particulat iceberg.
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The brown furniture and the brown sculpture shared many qualities.
Initially desirable, both quickly became seen as taking up space. By 1990 space was a diminishing asset. With an increasingly mobile population, brown furniture and brown sculpture were anchors that would impede mobility and therefore progress.
Both the brown furniture and the brown sculpture were scaled to the human figure. Both depended on being inhabited by the body either literally or metaphorically.
Both the sculpture and the furniture drew light. Nether emanated it. In the age of the flickering light so much brown was shadow.
I remarked to my daughter about this brown phenomenon of sculpture and furniture. She responded, ‘You neglected the brown house you have lived in for 45 years’.
Our formative years leave a deep stain time is reluctant to shift. Are we at our best when we build upon our formative experience towards a mature language as the masters have indicated is a wise course of action?
Or should we pay heed to what others, outsiders see, to what we see, afresh?