Johnny Swing is a master welder, dairy farmer, sculptor, and somewhat devious poker player. He’ll tell you what’s in his hand just because that’s not the way things are done, then dare you to bet against him. Swing’s work sits beside de Kooning’s, rests on the lawns of the Duke of Cornwall and the Storm King Art Center, and is displayed in Christian Dior stores in Beverly Hills, Tokyo, and Seoul. He’s also a leader in the American Studio Furniture movement, his work considered on par with contemporary masterpieces by Ron Arad and Marc Newson—a position that makes Swing chuckle, feigning complete ignorance. For a former ’80s Manhattan art-kid troublemaker who used to hang with Basquiat, the development of Swing’s art from explosive installation to folk-art avant-garde has been linear, but the thinking that goes into his craft has been as curvaceous as the lines that run through his current work.  

Swing first started making furniture from coins in 1997, with Penny Chair. Using a design based on Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chair (with legs inspired by Tatlin’s Tower, a tightly wound, constructivist monument designed in 1920), Swing’s initial piece was met with resistance. Consisting of 6,500 pennies with over 30,000 individual welds, the piece was basically a riff on Harry Bertoia’s iconic design. The indifference toward the piece sent Swing back to an actual drawing board, where he conceived his first completely original coin furniture piece, Nickel Couch (2000). With its graceful organic shape and unconventional use of materials, Nickel Couch got traction immediately.

“I’ve always been a sculptor,” says Swing. “My goal wasn’t to make furniture; after Penny Chair I felt defeated. I needed to create my own shape. I thought I was doing something smart—not in a sarcastic way—but taking something from the past, collaborating with the past and adding a sense of brilliance to it. No one got it. But the day Nickel Couch came off the mold, it got picked up by a local paper and went national within a week.”

Swing on his Brookline, Vermont, hobby farm, photo by Paul Specht

A Connecticut native, Swing, 56, moved to southern Vermont in 1995 from New York, a city he didn’t find conducive to marriage and a newborn. The family rented, then bought, a 200-year-old house that had once belonged to Swing’s grandmother, a well-known suffragette, in the tiny farming community of Brookline. The setting—a hobby farm with cows, sheep, and chickens—is a stark contrast to the sleek, urban vibe of the furniture he creates in the glass-and-cement studio Swing built a mile away. “I worked in New York City for 13 years,” he says, “and people thought my work was so urban. Now I’m in the country, and all of a sudden I’m a ‘Vermont artist.’”

While his work has been shown in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Miami, it’s taken 22 years for Swing to have a show in the state where he lives: a solo exhibition at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, which ran July 21 through September 17, 2017. A proverbial labor of love, the exhibition featured seldom-seen lamps, built like ominous alien lily pads, that had been in storage for years. “They’re some of my favorite works,” he says. “The lamps are like doodling for me— basically free-form organic structures with a lot of structure inside them. It took an enormous amount of effort to put them up, but it’s valuable to remind myself how much pleasure I got in making them.”

The most recognizable feature of Swing’s furniture, besides the overtly sensual curvatures that run through nearly all his work, is the use of U.S. coinage as the primary physical component. Creating furniture out of pocket change can have a disconcerting effect on the viewer. While the lines of the work are reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi, or maybe an original earthworks drawing by Robert Smithson, up close, the aged dollar coins of his more recent work pull the viewers out of the realm of aesthetic curiosity, and push them into a sociocultural analysis of the work.

Half Dollar Chair (2013) in the Manhattan home of a private collector, photo by Jamie Diamond

“I use old coins because I love the history of them,” explains Swing. “Say a piece has 8,000 coins in it—what’s the least amount of people that have owned those coins? Say 10 per coin: that’s 80,000 experiences locked up in that work. How cool is that? This history of a single piece is just mind-blowing.”

Eventually, the viewer starts to wonder just how much the work cost to build. Swing faces this question every time the work is shown. “Money is way more dynamic than functional,” he says. “A shovel is functional, but are people precious about their shovel? What we’re really talking about are the materials the furniture is built with. [If you’re] using round metal shapes to make furniture—if it’s not coins, the next most logical thing would be a washer. But ironically, you can’t get a washer the size of a 50-cent piece for 50 cents! It all starts with a Yankee mentality of thriftiness—and it’s really funny to think of using coins as being thrifty.”

Nickel Couch, 2000, photo by Jamie Diamond

The other question in this, Swing describes, is whether the furniture is worth more than the coins it took to build it. The question comes not only from people trying to be funny, but also from a place of deep uncertainty, especially when confronted with a couch made of more than 8,000 dollar coins. Compared to the work of Richard Prince or Andy Warhol, whose mastery comes in the form of reinterpreting images, Swing’s work incorporates the literal money itself, setting up a whole other slew of questions and considerations.

“That question approaches a viewer’s insecurity and morality,” he explains, “because [the furniture is] clearly worth more than the money it’s made out of. The fact that people are interpreting the art on that level means they are confronting the value of money, and [the idea] that money has an implied intrinsic value. There’s something beyond my control, in a really positive way, about using money as a medium to work in. Does it put me in a little bit of a box? Yes. Am I the coin furniture guy? Yes. Do I resent it? Sometimes. But at the same time, I feel really privileged that I’ve come up with a way to pose these questions, especially about the intrinsic value of art.”

Penny Chair, 1997, photo by Jamie Diamond

David Eskenazi, an early Swing collector, notes Swing’s instinctive sense of design and raw organic sensibility. “There’s an intuitive level of craftsmanship that goes into the furniture,” he says. “A lot of people are creating biomorphic forms, relying on computer models to develop the shapes, pushing the forms to their extreme. But with Johnny, the shapes all spring directly from his hands, and sometimes a chainsaw. His furniture isn’t symmetrical; it doesn’t fit classical molds of what furniture is supposed to be. It’s not geometric or perfectly symmetrical, but that’s part of what makes [the pieces] so surprisingly comfortable.”

Swing’s gut-level approach is compelling. Going back to Penny Chair, and most notably in Ring Chair and Ring Couch (2012), Swing has developed an ornate arachnid style to his furniture’s legs and backing, none of which is drawn up ahead of time. The backings are completely free form—visualized, then built on the spot without blueprints or instructions. The work appears kinetic, or as Swing calls it, “like the feeling of a cat when it’s about to pounce.” And while the couch might be made of coins or ring shapes, the angular backing is seamless and ornate, like subtleties in an extended jazz composition, adding depth and signature to the work instead of being a mere pedestal on which it stands.

For a master of the American Studio Furniture movement, organic lamps, chairs made of glass jars, and coin-centric couches might very well be the heart of Swing’s work, but his fixation with currency and response to it as craft material sometimes moves from eccentrically sensual to truly disconcerting. In addition to building stuffed animals from paper currency, Swing stitched together a rug in the shape of an American flag (Dollar Bill Rug, 2017), which was exhibited on the floor of his New York gallery, R & Company. Even though Swing testified in front of Congress in 1994 under the Visual Artists Rights Act regarding the eventual destruction of one of his installation pieces, he considers Dollar Bill Rug less a political act and more a performance-art piece. So is this new direction a shape of things to come? “I don’t foresee the work getting more and more pointed. I think it’s going to keep its rounded edges,” Swing says, gesturing to a half-built dollar couch. Then again, he’s a hell of a poker player, so with Swing you never really know.

For more images from our shoot at Johnny Swing’s studio, visit our subscriber-only gallery. 

Johnny Swing–furniture maker
Brookline, Vermont
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Top image: Murmuration, 2012, welded nickels and stainless steel; 32.5 × 132 × 55 in. Photo by Jamie Diamond

The post To Coin a Chaise appeared first on Take Magazine.

When Brattleboro artist David Nielsen was asked to talk about his work on WVEW’s “Art Talk” hosted by Jim Maxwell, he decided instead to use the broadcast as a platform to discuss protest art in America, as well as a creative call to artists to take a political stand and make their voices heard in the wake of the painfully divisive presidential election. Take Magazine spoke with Nielsen about the role of art in these turbulent times.

Why is art especially important right now following the election?

DN: For me, and I think for a lot of artists, art is about affirming your humanity, about saying I’m alive and this is what I’m doing. This is what I believe in during my very brief period of time on this planet. We have elected an anti-human president and we have an anti-human government. It reminds me of the Reagan years. It reminds me of both the Bush wars where there was a populist movement of folks who didn’t want anything to do with war, didn’t want anything to do with the destruction of the middle class, didn’t want anything to do with the monopolization of power in the hands of very few.

I think it’s incumbent on artists and those of us who give a shit about their lives and about what happens after we’ve gone to make a stand in whatever way is possible. It’s not just about the stand that we’re making for ourselves today: it’s about what we leave behind for the next generation of artists and human beings, so they can see that there were people who didn’t like the direction the planet was going in, and wanted to do something about it.

When you talk about protest art in response to a particular political climate, what are some of the historical periods that really speak to you?

DN: The entire twentieth century, actually. Protest art was made throughout the entire twentieth century. Sometimes it was direct protest art, and sometimes it was observational art after the fact, like Picasso’s Guernica. Photographs of soldiers in the moment they’re being shot. Spoken word poems. Text-based art like that of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. And then we get into identity politics, especially in the 70’s and 80’s with women identity artists. That need to speak up and have a voice. One can directly say, Fuck you, Trump as a form of protest, or you can make something magnificent that goes beyond just the anger and gets at the heart of what it means to be a human being with a conscience.

We’re a pretty solid band of blue here in New England. Do you think that living in a progressive region impacts how we, as a community, respond to our current political climate, either positively or negatively?

DN: I know this will piss some people off, but I think that it can make us complacent because we feel less directly threatened by what’s going on. I recently saw a protest march in downtown Brattleboro. There were a couple hundred people there, which was heartening. I went over, and a fellow in the middle had an acoustic guitar and they handed out paperwork and everybody was singing “We Shall Overcome.” I thought it was complete bullshit and I walked. It’s an easy, unfocused, not terribly useful, not galvanizing, thing to do; and I understand there’s a need for community, but I think the election has just shown us that these are much more wicked times than a happy little ’60s protest song will ever manage to fix.

I spent ten years in Portland, Oregon before I came out here, and Portland has had some of the rowdiest protests of any city in America. Even in a blue state you can be angry. Even in a soft little town like Brattleboro you can be outraged. I think a lot of people are dealing with hurt right now, and they’re choosing to indulge and wallow in their hurt as opposed to saying, let’s just move past that. We’ve already been through this; we know how this goes. Eventually we’re going to be angry, and eventually we’re going to mobilize, and eventually we’re going to make decisions that affect our lives. Let’s just get there right now as opposed to waiting and seeing how we feel about things later. I think we’re pretty clear about how we feel about things. It’s what we do about things that matters.

Le Morte de Gaia | THANK YOU #1, 2012 | acrylic on canvas

What’s the most important takeaway for you from the election?

DN: When Roe v. Wade is threatened, when our civil rights are threatened, when trade deals are threatened, when our sovereignty is threatened, when the white supremacists have klan marches in support of Donald Trump and the Right begins to flex its very grotesque muscles, we really do need to learn to protect ourselves. In an era of state’s rights, we need to be more proactive, instead of waiting to have these things dictated to us. That is what the Right has done. I think it’s a lesson worth learning.

Nielsen’s discussion on protest art can be heard on “Art Talk” with Jim Maxwell Friday, December 9 at 4pm on WVEW, 107.7, Brattleboro, or streaming at WVEW.org. Following the broadcast, Graffiti Sandwich in downtown Brattleboro will host a show featuring Nielsen’s Le Morte de Gaia (The Death of Earth), a triptych of triptychs about what happens when the first thermonuclear bomb drops. The work will be up through the end of the year.

The post Art in The Age of Uncertainty appeared first on Take Magazine.