When Robert Wilson was a child in the 1950s, he visited his Uncle Sherrod’s white adobe house in New Mexico and was amazed by the elegance of a wooden chair positioned next to a floor mattress and ceramic pots. Later, one Christmas, his uncle gave him the tall, narrow chair. When Wilson was 17, he recalls, Sherrod’s son wrote him to say that “his father had given me a chair and it was his.” Wilson gave it back.
For our maestro of modern theater, now 81, that gift and its subsequent loss ignited a seven-decade passion for chairs. Wilson doesn’t just collect them; he designs chairs and casts them as characters in his operatic productions. For the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, in Lausanne, Wilson has directed a different kind of production: he was invited to scenically stage the exhibition “A Chair and You,” which opens on October 28 and features hundreds of pieces—dating from the 1960s to the present—chosen from the collection of another chair-ophile, the Swiss entrepreneur Thierry Barbier-Mueller. The show includes designs by Ron Arad, Maarten Baas, Tom Dixon, and Ettore Sottsass as well as Niki de Saint Phalle, Franz West, Donald Judd, and Lawrence Weiner.
