A reason to look twice

Something feels familiar when I know what it is, what it does, where it belongs, who it belongs to, or what I can expect from it. Familiarity lets me move through the world without having to stop and figure everything out. Change one of those things and it can suddenly feel unfamiliar, even if it is still recognizable. For me, this is where art gets interesting: taking something I think I know, changing some part of it, and seeing how far it can move toward the unfamiliar without losing what allows me to recognize it.

Almost anything that surrounds me every day: parts of my home, neighborhood, or campus; my clothes, the dents in my truck, a bad ankle, an office chair, mismatched kitchen utensils, the seasonal views from my bedroom window. Familiar things are part of the background and foreground of my day. I don't have to think much about them because I already know what and where they are. They become so familiar that I stop really seeing them. A chair is a good example. I know what a chair is, what it does, where it belongs, and what I can expect from it.

Consider Joseph Beuys' Fat Chair (1964). It's an ordinary wooden chair with a wedge of fat resting on its seat. The chair is familiar. The fat is familiar. But the two things together are something else entirely. Wood is an expected material for a chair. Fat is not.

While fat is not a chair, it is organic and bodily. In Fat Chair, it rests on the seat where the fat of a butt would sit. And fat appears elsewhere in Beuys' work as well. The chair gives us something we recognize, while the fat disrupts that recognition. We still know it is a chair, but we no longer know quite what to make of it.

At the same time, the familiar profile of the chair becomes even more familiar—almost archetypal—against the puzzling wedge. Beuys chose an ordinary, recognizable chair, and its shape provides a strong contrast against the steep slope of the fat. The geometry of the wedge is nearly as interesting as the material itself. It seems to fit the chair and contradict it at the same time.

If it were not for the title, what other clue would I have that it was, in fact, fat? Fat can be symbolic; fat can be literal. It is familiar as part of our bodies, animal bodies, plant bodies, and consumer goods. We eat it, carry it around, cook with it, and sometimes spend a great deal of energy trying to get rid of it. What is unfamiliar is seeing it as a material in art. Maybe at one time it was unfamiliar to me, but not anymore. And by the literal sound of the name alone, fat is familiar.

FAT.

You just need to quickly see the word to feel a linguistic weight disproportionate to the subject matter it identifies. Or perhaps you visualize a form in your mind's eye or feel its sensation—maybe the sensation of your own belly fat, close and warm, like touching a piece of uncooked bacon or a block of soft tofu. The word itself seems to have a physical presence. It's short, blunt, and almost impossible to separate from what it describes.

And then there is the title, Fat Chair. Two familiar words brought together to describe something that isn't quite so familiar. It sounds almost too simple, even funny. Yet the title does a great deal of work. It tells us what we're looking at, or at least what we're supposed to be looking at. Without it, the wedge might be butter, wax, cheese, or something else altogether. Yes, cheese. A big block of cheese.

We haven't even explored color's role in this equation yet. The yellowish fat looks a little like butter or cheese. It has a geometric shape that makes it seem solid and static, almost architectural, while the material itself is associated with softness, warmth, energy, and change. The wedge could hold its shape or lose it, depending on the conditions around it. A wooden chair is expected to remain relatively stable. Fat is something that can soften, melt, and transform.

There is something peculiar about putting those two materials together. One seems to promise stability, the other change. One supports the body, while the other is associated with the body itself. The fat occupies the very place where someone would ordinarily sit, making the chair useless as a chair. And yet it is still unmistakably a chair.

This is where the relationship becomes interesting. The fat changes what I expect from the chair, but the chair also changes how I see the fat. Removed from the kitchen, the body, or some other familiar context, fat becomes a sculptural material. Its shape, color, volume, weight, and relationship to another object become things worth paying attention to. The material hasn't necessarily changed. Our relationship to it has. And perhaps we begin to see it for what it is, rather than whatever we expect it to be?

Of course, Beuys' use of fat has a larger context. He worked with it repeatedly, exploring its capacity to change physical states and its associations with warmth, energy, and transformation. There is plenty to say about Beuys, his materials, his ideas, and his place in twentieth-century art. That information adds another layer to the work, but it doesn't replace what we can see.

I don't need to know everything about Beuys to recognize a chair. I don't even need to know why he used fat to notice that something strange is happening. Someone familiar with Beuys' work brings something to Fat Chair that someone who doesn't know it cannot. One viewer might recognize his recurring use of fat. Another might think about the body, or furniture, or the strange relationship between a solid wooden chair and a material that can melt. Someone else might see nothing more than an ordinary chair with a big yellow wedge sitting on it. And someone might see cheese.

These aren't necessarily competing interpretations. They're different things people notice, informed by what they know, remember, and associate with what they're seeing. This makes me wonder how much of what we consider familiar actually depends on context. A chair in a kitchen is a chair. A chair in a waiting room is a chair. A chair in a gallery is still a chair, but now we're expected to look at it rather than sit in it. The change in context alone is enough to make us reconsider something otherwise ordinary.

Place a wedge of fat on that chair and the expectations change again. Something completely ordinary in one context can become strange in another. Sometimes the material changes, sometimes the function changes, sometimes the scale or location changes, and sometimes two familiar things simply end up in an unfamiliar relationship.

What's interesting is how little needs to change before we begin to see something differently. Beuys didn't make the chair unrecognizable. He didn't disguise it or radically alter its structure. He left enough of it intact that everything we already know about chairs remains available to us. That familiarity is what makes the addition of fat so noticeable. Without the chair, the fat would be something else. Without the fat, the chair might be nothing more than an ordinary chair. Taken together, they become Fat Chair.

Of course, Fat Chair has become familiar in its own right. It has been reproduced, exhibited, written about, and discussed for decades. It belongs to art history, which gives it another kind of familiarity. Someone who has encountered the work repeatedly may recognize it immediately, just as they would recognize a familiar chair in their own home. And that presents another interesting problem. What happens when something originally intended to challenge our expectations becomes something we expect?

I can recognize Fat Chair without really looking at it. I can know the title, the artist, the date, and something about the materials and still overlook what makes the object peculiar in the first place. Familiarity with the artwork can become another way of not seeing it. Maybe that is worth considering. Knowing something and looking at it aren't necessarily the same thing.

The more familiar an object becomes, the easier it is to substitute what we know about it for what is actually there. We recognize it, identify it, and move on. But spend a little more time looking and the familiar can become unfamiliar again. The slope of the wedge, the proportion of the chair, the color of the fat, the space where a person would sit, the relationship between hard and soft, stable and unstable. Details that might have gone unnoticed begin to matter. And maybe the chair starts looking less ordinary, too.

What interests me is not necessarily finding a single explanation for why Beuys put fat on a chair. It's how the relationship between two familiar things changes the way we see both of them. The chair remains a chair, the fat remains fat, but neither is quite the same once they're brought together. The transformation becomes interesting because recognition survives it. We need to be able to see some trace of what we thought we knew in order to notice what has changed.

Something that could have remained in the background has been pulled into the foreground. We start paying more attention to it. Something we normally overlook can suddenly seem interesting, strange, funny, beautiful, uncomfortable, or important simply because we took the time to really look at it. Maybe this is what making art can do to the familiar.

Change it, move it, enlarge it, reduce it, combine it, transform it, complicate it, make it out of a different material, use unorthodox processes and experimental approaches, explore juxtaposition, play with relationships, give it a good title, let the materials speak for themselves, list your materials (no mixed-media listings), give it a new purpose or function, work your metaphors, tap into your memories.

Not every change needs to be dramatic. Sometimes placing one thing beside another is enough. Sometimes a title changes everything. Sometimes the material itself does most of the work. And sometimes the thing we're looking at hasn't changed at all, we've simply found another way to see it.

Take something that has become so familiar that you no longer really see it, change something about it, and give it a reason to become unfamiliar. Then give someone enough to recognize it again. Give someone a reason to look twice.