Articulating the Empty Chair
By Greg Fallis
Andrew Wyeth featured an empty chair in one of his paintings. So did David Hockney. Van Gogh did it twice. Photographs of empty chairs abound. Visual artists are drawn to the image of the empty chair. It's an evocative and compelling image, summoning up unexpected emotions and stirring memories. And yet... it's just a chair. It's not obscure; it's not mysterious; it's not a form that requires deciphering and interpretation.
Why does such a mundane object draw so many artists? How does a chair acquire that much emotional power?
There's an iconic scene in the movie The Matrix in which the character Neo says "There is no spoon." More than 2300 years earlier, Aristotle told us "There is no chair." Neo was making a comment about the permeable relationship between reality and perception; Aristotle was speaking directly of the physical world. He was saying there is no universal chair; there is only the concept of "chairness."
"Chairness" can be expressed in a variety of forms, materials, languages. It doesn't matter if it's made of wood or plastic; it doesn't matter if it reclines or rocks; it doesn't matter if you call it a chaise or a stuhl; it doesn't matter if it's designed to be comfortable or discomforting. In the end, a chair is what it does, and what a chair does is simplicity itself: it is a structure for sitting.
An empty chair, therefore, is not fulfilling its "chairness." That unfulfilled purpose is the source of the image's power. It's the power of suggestion. An empty chair suggests somebody is going to sit on it or somebody has sat on it. It suggests something is about to happen or has already happened. That suggestion applies whether the empty chair in question is a milking stool, an Eames lounge, a porch swing, or an electric chair. The eye sees the empty chair; the mind fills in the gap.
The empty chair is about a moment gone by or a moment yet to come. We've all experienced the power of such moments... the joy, the pain, the anticipation, the sorrow, the hope, the loss. We all know the empty chair.
