THE STARS ARE OUR ANCESTORS (Kissing Chair)

In his exuberant and welcoming ‘hybrid throne’, Jeffrey Gibson offers a queered version of a kind of seat known traditionally as a kissing chair, or tête-à-tête. Emerging in polite European society of the nineteenth century, these chairs were designed to encourage flirtatious conversation, placing two people side-by-side and not quite face-to-face. In its structure and style, Gibson’s version is itself flirtatious, combining Native beading and star symbolism with painted marine ply and Brancusi-like legs in tough bronze ‘heels’ (some of the most remarkable nineteenth-century Native chairs, Gibson points out, are themselves creative acts of adaptation). Moreover, Gibson has added a third seat to his chair, suggesting other forms of conviviality than a traditional two-seater can encompass. This seat was developed soon after the outbreak of the pandemic, at a time when sitting together with others had become frightening rather than potentially romantic. Gibson acknowledges this distortion of intimacy with a series of coloured glass panels, which allude to plastic COVID barriers while paying sidelong homage to the use of Perspex by American artist Donald Judd. Gibson wanted, he said, to ‘channel the tension of being in someone else’s space’. But the throne-like feel of this chair, its colour and embellishment, make it clear that sitting down here is special – that those who choose to take a seat with others should indeed feel regal and selected. While thrones are usually reserved for a single monarch, this chair is available for anyone and everyone to sit in.