New Materialism: Getting intimate with your furniture

By Rachel James and Sharon Mashihi

We live in a consumer culture. The trappings of capitalism are everywhere – even on non-commercial entities. You can’t escape. Drive down the 101 and you'll see billboards hawking the iPad2. Flip through the San Francisco Chronicle, and you might find half the paper written by Macy’s. Unless we try really, really, really hard, you and I are materialists.

But artist Sasha Petrenko is defining a new kind of materialism – one that challenges us to get personal – deeply personal – with the everyday objects around us. Petrenko is a professor in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco, and she’s created an interactive performance called Pieces-of-You-Topia. At The Lab in San Francisco, she’ll demonstrate how to embrace a new materialism – guilt free.  Producers Sharon Mashihi and Rachel James took part in the exhibit when it was in New York, and they bring us this first hand account.

*     *     *

RACHEL JAMES: What if instead of condemning materialism, we embraced it?

SHARON MASHIHI: I’m Sharon Mashihi.

JAMES: And I’m Rachel James.

MASHIHI: And this is what Sasha Petrenko’s new materialism looks, sounds, and feels like…

Instructions for movement with furniture. Number one. Hold yourself in such a way as to be the piece of furniture.

JAMES: I’m pretty sure I was crouched on the floor next to the chair and I had my arms raised.

MASHIHI: And I was in this crawling motion next to the stool trying to emulate it.

Number two. Look under the piece to see how it’s made.

JAMES: So I’m kind of peering under the stool awkwardly and the wood was really worn down, I could see this rusty staple.

MASHIHI: I tried to get close and look at the fibers of the material so I was really doing a good job.

Number three. Listen to the piece.

JAMES: Okay – Sharon, do you want to explain what exactly is happening here?

MASHIHI: What, dancing with the furniture isn’t how you usually spend your Saturday afternoon?

JAMES: You know what? It’s not … it actually is not.

MASHIHI: Okay, okay – Sasha Petrenko has created a performance workshop…

JAMES: By performance, you mean dancing with the furniture.

MASHIHI: Yeah! And not just any furniture – a Czech cubist chair, an Eskimo fishing stool, an American tavern table from 1724. The performance was held at the Watermill Center in Southampton, New York. The center holds a huge collection of artifacts that span thousands of years, and Sasha took advantage of that. But the unusual –

JAMES: And extremely valuable –

MASHIHI: Pieces of furniture were just the icing on the cake – the point of the work, of this New Materialism, is to bring us closer to the kinds of objects any one of us would find in our homes.

SASHA PETRENKO: It’s kind of like a new materialism and it’s a deeply thought-through sort of process of getting to know these things that occupy our lives. So that we can maybe put aside this aspirational materialism and think about what we have now.

MASHIHI: A couple of years ago, Sasha began looking to her past for inspiration in her work. This got her interested in Utopian societies.

JAMES: Utopian societies, like where everybody lives on an island communally, making decisions together, they’re all happy.

MASHIHI: Yeah, yeah, that. And like … communism. The revolution. Russia. Years before Sasha was born, two free-market loving Russians escaped the country and found each other. As much as her parents hated communism, it was where they came from.

JAMES: So Sasha began researching. She scoured through art books, found photographs of what Russian artists were making in the ’60, ‘50s, ‘40s, ‘20s, and then, a revelation.

“Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”

JAMES: Those are the words of Alexander Rodchenko, a Russian constructivist artist who lived in Paris in the 1920s. Rodchenko and his contemporaries believed that art should be linked to everyday life. That artists should step out of their studios and step into the factories, into the places where everyday objects are made.

Number 11. Ask the piece, “Who made you?”

MASHIHI: As part of her fieldwork, Sasha visited factories to see how objects were made.

PETRENKO: A furniture manufacturer, a ceramics manufacturer, and also a press. I feel myself as a builder, as a maker – there’s these moments when you’re working where it’s almost like a dance, where you are so familiar with the process that there’s like a grace to it.

JAMES: Sasha Petrenko studies the evolution of an object, and her work invites others to question what kind of materialism they think best suits the world today.

PETRENKO: It was really amazing to see the reaction of the audience and how they started to get it. I could really feel that people were thinking, “Oh, that night stand I’ve had for all those years…” Maybe that will prevent them from saying, “I should just keep working tonight because I need to buy that new thing.” No. I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna have a nice night. And I’m gonna put my cup of water on the night stand that I’ve had for 20 years and that’s gonna be good. It’s gonna feel alright.

Number 12. Tell the piece your name.

JAMES: I’m Rachel James.

MASHIHI: And I’m Sharon Mashihi.

Sasha Petrenko's Pieces of You-topia is part of a two-week long series about materialism and how we relate to objects.