This Was Tomorrow by Michael Samuels at Spacex Gallery Exeter

This Was Tomorrow by Michael Samuels

This month inside the Spacex Gallery there is a wall of furniture stretching eight metres in length that dominates and darkens the usually airy room.  Michael Samuels’ Tragedy of the Commons looms over gallery visitors as a monumental shrine to modernist furniture.

However this tribute does not lie with the renowned bohemian artistic output of the Omega Workshops under Roger Fry, or its polar opposite; the iconic planar forms and clean lines of Mies Van Der Rohe. Instead Samuel’s chooses predominantly G-plan furniture to construct his work. The inexpensive domestic raw materials mean that the sculptural form straddles the boundary of high art and everyday life in a challenging way.

The formal qualities of the sculpture clearly indicate the construction process. The overtly visible G-clamps and ratchet straps cannot be avoided in their semi-neon colouring. The eye is drawn towards the ways in which the sculpture is seemingly held together. This reverses the normal tidiness (and boring design) of the G-plan furniture as it would have stood in the post-WW2 home. None of the edges of this sculpture line up, it is a mess of doors opening the wrong way, draws which do not quite fit into one another and nooks filled with speakers and desk lamps bent to fit within the small spaces.

In its current formation the furniture is denied its normal usage, however the piece invokes a sense of industriousness and vibrancy that is often lacking from domestic furniture. There is a sense of chaos, but it is one that is contained in a solid wall giving the sculpture a weight and sense of stability. The cluttering of the planes of wood provokes an intimacy which does not exist in the raw materials of G-plan furniture.

 In his construction of Tragedy of the Commons Samuel’s creates something new. Whilst at first the sculpture looms and appears an oppressive wall of 70s junk, within the angular spaces is an energetic, abstract reworking of modernist design. Samuels’ creation perhaps would please the modernist demi-gods after all, Mies Van Der Rohe’s famous aphorism ‘God is in the details’ applies with Tragedy of the Commons, as the overused and underappreciated G-plan furniture assumes a new level of respect from the viewer through flawless construction and attention to detail.