Reitveld's Chair

Tips create a (harmonious) transition from an object to the space around it. Modern objects truncate this transition.

Decorative architectural elements make a transition from severe geometric shapes to the air around them - moldings, capitals, cornices, for instance. In contrast, Reitveld created a chair that highlights it as an automonous object, not so much embedded in space but separated from the space around it. (Or perhaps he is trying to embed it in the space around it, differently, with a composition of planes and lines. This still leaves the problem of ends. Look at the way he painted the ends of the arms and supports yellow, as if to say, this ends here, right here and only here, no ands, ifs or buts.) Rather than making a transition to the air around it, it seems to be next to it, abutted to it. There is no soft landing, no easy introduction of the one to the other. It is just there. I wonder if the need for a transition, for the work of the tip, is mythological, even superstitious, in nature - as if there needs to be a third agent (an angel) to introduce earth to heaven. The Reitveld chair is anti-mythological, empirical, scientific (just the facts, mame). Here is the chair, here is the body that sits in the chair and here is the space around them. No nimbus of mystery or layers of meaning.

Not only do tips create a transition but they also seem to play with the space around them and perhaps the space plays back, tickling each other. Or are they fighting for supremacy, which will win the human object or the all-engulfing space? There is no fight, no conflict between the Reitveld chair and the space around it or rather there is a different kind of conflict because the chair and its space are equals, they sit side by side, in a way they are even intertwined, but I get the feeling that they are like strangers on a train. No, not that exactly, because they are more tense and intimate in their relationship - a silent marriage or the relationship of siblings. Equal, in a tense equilibrium but not communicating, intimate through the proximity of a lifetime but not in harmony and definitely without flirtation. Tips flirt. The elements of Reitveld's chair end abruptly, they are literally cut off.

Tips create a spectrum between a thing and air (nothing, the void). As a tip reaches its apex there is less and less of the object and more and more space until and some point there is only space. And visa versa from space to object. With the Rietveld chair this spectrum is more articulated - there is only the chair and the "not chair", no moment where you feel that there is less and less chair, fading to nothing.

Don't get me wrong. I love this chair, that is why I am talking about it. It is one of the pre-eminent modern objects, embodying architecture, design and sculpture in one thing. It is an important work of art. But to understand tips we must look at the tipless.