Arjay Stevens – Global Chair

Arjay Stevens photography
monobloc Item to Use
ThE GLOBAL CHAIR
✨️✨️✨️
The GLOBAL CHAIR
Monobloc most successful piece of furniture – tool design object ‘crown of efficiency’ democratic mass product…

…these are some descriptions of the plastic stacking chair, which is produced in billions.

I call it Universal Chair or Global Chair.

If you travel a lot, if you are a photographer and thus see the world with open eyes, then you quickly. notice how a cheap industrial product takes advantage of globalization.

Since about thirty years I could observe the phenomenon “Monobloc’, as it is called by technicians, not only in Germany, but worldwide. Perhaps it was the outlandish situations in which it could be found that attracted attention.

Quickly the project “Universal Chair” was started: It led already in 2008 to my solo photo exhibition in Cambodia, in the German-Cambodian ‘Meta House’, (a small documentation can be found at the end of this book).

I already saw this plastic chair as an art object at that time.

We had also invited young Cambodian artists to my exhibition “The Universal Chair”: They were given one of the common white plastic chairs, which they were to shape into a new work of art according to their own ideas. The results were surprising and diverse….

The special feature of the chair made of polypropylene is its light weight (about 2.5 kg), stack-ability and low price. This predestined it to become a global product worth billions. Nobody knows how many copies actually exist.

In fact, the plastic chair is not only a chair for the consumer society of the world, it is also an art and cultural object: It has even conquered the world of museums. The “Global Chair” is a design and a piece of capitalism history, they say.

“It is precisely its contradictions that make it a symbol of the complexity of the material culture of our time” (Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany). To the world phenomenon “Global Chair” and its incredibly

many users, let this coffee-table book be dedicated.
Arjay Stevens