Abstract

The essay is about arranging furniture as a furniture art for the mind. The immediate cause is the chair in the Tate’s exhibition in London “Hogarth in Europeµ: the mahogany chair on which William Hogarth sits in his late self-portrait. In question are the associations of the chair with a slave trade of colonialism and nation-building in the eighteenth century. The essay investigates the “chairµ in the history of philosophy and the arts as a string of connected images – from Lichtenberg to Walter Benjamin and Arthur Danto. It looks at perspective, form, and posture, but even more at the experimental-experiential wit that forces a rearrangement and revisioning of one’s most sedimented thoughts about things. What, it asks, does it mean to engage an armchair thinking for culture and the mind?