12: The Eerie Chair
Do you ever drive through a suburb and notice all of the chairs? The various empty seats from the porch to the yard that await a sitter? I have always wondered at the eerie melancholy that chairs as lawn ornaments evoke. I wonder, is unused outdoor furniture aspirational? Is the pretty cast-iron chair at the corner of the yard supposed to be charming and inviting, though it’s hard, cold, moldy, and exposed? Or is it just for show?
When I see a bench or a chair posted like that, as if a totem or beacon of some long forgotten sense of community, my minds eye directs a short film: lonely woman buys unnecessary outdoor chair because it is nice teakwood and matches her front porch set, takes it home, unloads it from her Chevy Suburban and totes it around the yard until…until ah, yes, the rogue corner looks good. She places it there, steps back to the street to assess her exterior design, and is satisfied. She returns to test the sitting spot, sighs in between its wooden arms, and imagines some random and unrealistic day in which she will use it to read a book in the morning. She thinks maybe it could use a few flowers around it, and departs for the rest of her life.
An empty chair facing away from your home, populating an otherwise unlandscaped yard, is like an unreplied-to invitation. Does one have to weed-whack underneath it and mow around it like some inconvenient island? In cities, outdoor chairs are less likely to appear though more likely to be used. In rural places, there’s enough vacant space in the first place that an empty chair is the least of the visible absences. In the suburbs, though, a perpetually empty and beautiful chair floating through manicured bermuda grass like the ghost of social past is sad. It is forlorn and it is lonely. I think of the unhappy and bored wives in Edward Scissorhands, the cloned houses made of ticky tacky, the disarray of emotions that live inside them.
It’s also distinctly noticeable that a yard full of randomly placed lawn ornaments is a different experience to the voyeur than a yard full of empty seats. The ornaments are just that--ornamental-- for looking at, for decoration, whereas our divorced chairs and benches await a sitter. They are expectant. They are un-receiving receptacles evoking a reaching, hollow feeling of absence.
In a book review of Mark Fisher's “The Weird and the Eerie”, it’s explained how “places are eerie; empty landscapes are eerie; abandoned structures and ruins are eerie. Something moves in these apparently empty or vacated sites that exists independently of the human subject, an agency that is cloaked or obscure.”
I found it apt that Fisher focused on places as eerie when they were empty of humans. Abandoned lawn chairs may then act like a ruin in this way, like the fall of a microcosm of mankind that is a sleepy suburban empire, red shiny plastic fading to dull pink, excess bedrooms fading into dusty disuse.
“This account of the eerie is not just an evocation of post-imperial melancholia, a haunted aftermath, but something with political energy and bite. Marx, after all, reached for the language of the supernatural to grasp at the spectral substance of surplus value or commodity fetishism.”
The idea of commodity fetishism as a spectral substance posited as supernatural in language ties directly into the unmanned chair. “In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people.”
The woman in the earlier imaginary short film created a social relationship with the merchandise of a chair, which is exactly the eerily ironic feeling I’m getting at. To purchase an unnecessary chair, a functional item as decoration, is not only strange because it will never be used, but also because it will remain empty of another human form forever, singularly nonsocial. It screams “surplus!” into a suburban void and then echoes into the weary corners of every polished and square acre of yard.
In collecting a gallery of photos to feature here, I recollected an artist I’ve followed on Instagram for a while, Mars Black, who often features empty furniture in desolate natural landscapes to evoke this exact sense of eeriness, that something is “off”, that something vaguely ominous pervades the picture. I included their painting titles as well, because their names are as much a part of the viewers experience as the imagery.
