CHRIS SCHANCK
In the historic former car-manufacturing town of Hamtramck, a city almost entirely surrounded by Detroit, artist-designer Chris Schanck invents eccentric sculptures that double as furniture. With a family of collaborators from Banglatown, his lively neighbourhood, he transforms discarded materials into gleaming, slightly perverse rococo tables, plush chairs and ghoulishly framed mirrors with a touch of evil and the bizarre. Yet these deeply strange and exquisitely crafted pieces inspired by the blossoming decay of an American metropolis speak eloquently of the power of manual labour, as well as of the triumph of utterly inventive ideas over cheap matter.
Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Photographs courtesy of Friedman Benda and Chris Schanck
Claudia Steinberg What made you move to Detroit in 2015 at a time when it was in a state of crisis?
Chris Schanck I had attended an art-oriented high school in Dallas, moved to New York to study painting and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts, then gone on for a master’s degree at Saint Martin’s in London – and immediately dropped out because I had a crisis of faith about being an artist. At a great art-fabrication studio in London, I met designers and architects and became more interested in those fields. I returned to New York and put together a portfolio good enough to get into graduate school at Cranbrook [just north of Detroit]; it was the furthest thing away from anything I knew, the kind of shift I was interested in. I began making sculptures you could interact with, which made me realise the power of the functional object. Moving to Detroit saved my life and gave me a trajectory.
Claudia With your “alufoil” technique, you cover furniture in this cheap material and give it a seductive, almost luxurious sheen by sealing it with clear resin. How did you develop this method?
Chris At Cranbrook, I was just looking at analytics and material attributes hoping for an emotional connection. If that happens, it feels like love, you have butterflies in your stomach and you take a leap of faith. I keep trying to explain it, but my current theory assumes a correlation between material and self-value. If the material you work with has little economic or cultural status and you manage to turn it into something unique then you also must be worth something. When I opened my studio in Hamtramck, we were really limited in terms of tools or access to equipment, so the early forms had a brutalist, straightforward style. We cobbled together what we could find or buy for very little money: steel fence posts, recycled foam, Reynolds aluminium foil from local stores and the adhesive to stick it all together. My house came with an attached studio that had been a dry-goods store. We worked there mostly with hand tools; we barely had any power tools. The forms we created were inspired by the surrounding area. I became really interested in infrastructure and fragments of architecture that had been shaped and distorted over time due to neglect or some kind of trauma.
Claudia You’re elevating the wreckage or detritus into luxurious objects, which sometimes refer back to design history, and with a seductive perfection and lustre.
Chris The pieces are not luxury items in a traditional sense; they contain no precious materials. What makes them valuable is solely the work people have invested in them.
Claudia Your studio feels quite a bit like a cross-cultural utopia, where art-school graduates and people from the auto industry and South Asian immigrants work together.
Chris I can’t take credit for that as a model; that variety is just a reflection of what the community looks like. I was quite surprised how well everyone worked together because people came into the studio with very different world views. Since we started in my home, things were intimate and required mutual respect. You get to know people’s life stories, you begin to care – and then it’s too late to turn back.
Claudia One of your signature materials is OSB, a pressed wood often used for crates or as an armature for furniture. It is never meant to be seen, but you transform it into, for example, an elegant table top dyed an emerald green and covered with a thick layer of resin, so the wood chips look like precious marquetry.
Chris This material has taken on a political connotation, beginning with Detroit and then evolving in recent protests. All the luxury shopping boutiques along Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York in summer 2020 were covered in OSB – the cheapest of materials used to protect the most expensive things. In Detroit, it has been used to shield old and abandoned buildings whose windows have been knocked out and doors ripped off. OSB was nailed or screwed over these gaping orifices, and the city would apply a single coat of black paint in a futile effort to expand the wood’s lifespan. When I moved to Detroit, my house was boarded up in that way. I took off the panels and gave them a quick sand. The black paint stayed in the crevices, which revealed the incredible depth of the material.
Claudia You reference both dripstone caves and 19th-century neo-Gothic in your work. Do these layers of the past tie in with your curiosity about the supernatural, with visions of the past and the future in your scrying tables?
Chris There are two kinds of overlapping ideas – one is practical, the other less so. I was raised secular, for better or worse, which left a hole that as a young person I tried to fill by treading unusual paths. Eventually, art started to fill it, from Vatican-driven works to abstract painting, but an exploration of the paranormal, the supernatural, of lost worlds and aliens was an early way of attempting to find meaning. Scrying is part of that vivid space between the rational and the irrational, between the constructs we agree to live by and the lives that we really want to live. The table creates the forum; you’re wrapped around it and its reflective surface is supposed to have a celestial quality. Imagine sitting around with your friends having a drink and talking about the past, the present and the future.
Claudia Some of your objects are elegant and contained, but others have a dystopian aspect with something ominous bursting through their refined surface. Are you addressing the Anthropocene?
Chris If you’re watching a specific piece of property or a building closely you can see the slow deterioration, the peeling back of the outer construction, slowly revealing its inner workings; there is something beautiful and human in that process that closely mimics our lives. It’s also a cautionary tale about the combined effect of human neglect and the forces of nature. I’m interested in things where I can see the hand in their creation. I’ve also learned to adjust to my surroundings, so what seemed at first like calamity and destruction was a misreading. During my first winter, it all looked deserted, but when everything blossomed in the spring, I witnessed the annual dystopia-to-utopia cycle, and realised that the people here were ingeniously economical with their materials and resources. They were doing their very best raising families, beautifying the neighbourhood and being self-sufficient. Once I saw that kind of resilience, I changed my perspective not just on the city, but on the world. It’s tragic, but it also leaves a lot of room for growth.
Claudia At the very beginning of your career you worked as an art handler at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Was that kind of physical contact with art an important experience?
Chris It was a demystifying experience. You expect the first art you’re introduced to – initially through books and then through institutions – to hold great meaning, and if you don’t get it then there must be something wrong with you. I worked at both MoMA and MoMA PS1, and there was the job that nobody wanted to do: dusting the permanent collection on the off days. To me, that was the top position. There were no docents, no guards, no visitors; I was completely alone with some of the world’s greatest works of art, a Brâncuși, a Picasso, and touching them with my brush. There was electricity in that touch and it gave me the sense that these works were done by people. That experience got me thinking about design as an aesthetic interaction. When you interact with objects, that’s when you break the invisible wall maintained in the visual arts by the prohibition to touch. I want my pieces to have a sense of autonomy, and when you interact with them, there’s that small electrical zap.
Claudia They are voluptuous and theatrical, and seem larger than life. They make you feel slightly small, a little bit like a child, viewing them with a sense of wonder.
Chris I do want that surprise, the confrontation with an unfamiliar thing. For any artist, there’s some kind of irrational, gut thing happening, and you have to get comfortable with not understanding it. Making something whose origin I know about but that still surprises me with its own life force is extremely rare – and wonderful. ◉