The living room. The room alive.
There was a time the room we call the living room was called the parlor, used for guests and occasions while most of the living was done elsewhere in the house. And of course there was the era of the family room when most of the living was done there (Parcheesi!). Great rooms aside, the living room lives on in the center of the life of a home.
As much as modern design has been criticized for squeezing the life out of the room with its seductive simplicity, it’s never really been the case, except perhaps in the pages of a mag. Life has always crept back in with a river rock on the mantle, a handmade ceramic vessel, and by the very fact that objects appear, disappear, shift in relation to one another–two chairs angling toward each other four degrees further as the conversation continues. And the current redeployment/reembrace of the modern, particularly here in the Northwest, has come hand in hand with the incorporation of the handhewn, the organic, the handmade.
In The Living Room, currently on exhibit at Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft (724 NW Davis), objects from the Museum’s permanent collection by Jack Lenor Larsen, Sam Maloof, Peter Voulkos, Marguerite Wildenhain, David Shaner, Victoria Avakian Ross, and others are grouped with familiar mid-century modern furniture in tableaux of living and dining room as well as displayed in more traditional cases. Fitting the multiple meanings of its title, the exhibition of these rooms alive will be reconfigured twice during the run of the show.
It may or may not have been the intent of the MCC, but the exhibition also brings up consideration of the in-flux nature of the word “craft” and craft’s cultural position as it considers its ancient origins in the creation of necessary objects for use (a barrel, a bowl, a piece of weaving destined to be a waistcoat), its evolved position as “decorative arts,” and in recent decades the blurring of the lines by craft artists and institutions between fine art and fine craft.
The Living Room runs through March 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Craft.
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