Thinking About Change

Seismic Change in Britain this week:

We all witnessed a seismic shift in the political spectrum this week and, it is hard to say whether this change was a reaction or a revolution.  Probably both.  As we have talked about before, Art is about change.  A change in perception, a change in how you the viewer perceive your inner self and the world around you.  I do not think this will be the catastrophe the media is busy selling.  I do think it will change things significantly though. In any change there is opportunity and destruction, that is just the nature of change itself.

Something So Simple, Provokes Deep Thinking:

What provoked this inspection of change, something I think about every day, was oddly enough the basket chairs.  (See May 15th, 2016 post).  The test run on cushions and re-painting has been finished.

The front of the basket chair, re-painted with test run fabric and foam.

In the middle of back of the chair, I need to insert the metal plate that screws into the back piece of the chair.  I need a new part for it, which was some kind of paper construct and it had disintegrated over time.   So looking at the chair with a solution that I had constructed (see next photo) to be able to use them over the summer, I started thinking about how old the chairs actually where and what our nation looked like when I bought them.

The back of the chair. By stitching two ties into the back of the cushion and forcing them through the hole in the metal bar, I was able to anchor the cushion. However, there is not enough tension on the cushion to make it sit back into the basket, the way the metal bar did.

I bought these chairs back in 1984 down in Fort Lauderdale, FL from a regional department store called Burdines .  There was a marketing classic written about this time called “The Nine Nations of America” in which the authors, drew a map of the USA divided it into nine sections, naming them and then  detailing the regional differences within them and how the marketing and advertising had to be customized to those regions.  Burdines sponsored a lot of local and other regional talent and brought their work to their stores in Florida which was how I came to own these chairs.

I doubt they would be made today.  They are marvels of design and construct and the quality of the steel that was used to make them is too expensive now to even consider doing this type of work.  Only the very uber rich could afford them today.

All these wonderful regional department stores, have either gone out of business now, or just sell the ubiquitous brand labels known around the world scrubbing off all our edges until we looked like clones of one another.  Maybe the Brits just wanted to re-assert their own individuality and their own uniqueness, instead of being a silent cog in the wheel of the European Collective.