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Transcript

CS — Christopher Schreck
DM — Doug McCollough

CS
As an entry point for discussing Rosebud, maybe we can start by talking about your experience with L.A. Door, since it sounds like this latest piece is in many ways an extension of ideas you explored with Katie.

DM
L.A. Door is the project I did with Katie Payne from 2019 to 2023. Katie and I were friends, we were romantic partners, we were collaborators, and we connected over furniture. I met her when she was the gallery director at Billings Auction in Los Angeles; prior to that, she had a degree from Sotheby’s in American Fine Art and Decorative Design. My background was in furniture design and furniture making. I was interested in a huge range of furniture: Danish, French modernism, American Studio Craft Movement, almost everything except ‘brown’ furniture, which was actually Katie’s wheelhouse. She opened my eyes to that whole world, and I realized how fertile it was, with motifs and building techniques and this whole history that I had not appreciated. It’s also very un-hip. Katie and I felt like we were all alone in the ‘brown’ furniture world, and I think that gave us a lot of freedom to think about that style of furniture—by which I mean things like blanket chests, corner cabinets, highboys, Federal style, Philadelphia 1700s, Queen Anne, etc.

L.A. Door was all about identifying these iconic American forms: stuff that was really fashionable, but also certain folk pieces that were detached from what was fashionable at the time. We would go to places like the Yale Furniture Archive [Ed.'s note, now the Leslie P. and George H. Hume American Furniture Study Center] or the Winterthur Mansion in Delaware, which were places Katie knew about through her time studying at Sotheby’s. As we were studying these various forms, we realized, “Okay, these are all classic American forms that are in the textbooks—but it would be terrible to write a history of American furniture design without also including something like the La-Z-Boy, right? It’s arguably one of the most important furniture designs to come out of the United States.” So, we were going to fancy museums, looking at these really important antiques that were the height of craft and fashionable design for their time, but then we’d go into a thrift store and say, “Wait, this stuff’s kind of iconic too, right? This is also really important to American furniture history.” It leveled the playing field, in a way, where you look at them with the same respect, the same eye, and then it becomes this big party. It’s like when you go to a party and there’s celebrities, but there’s also ne’er-do-wells, and everybody’s co-mingling. It just makes for a better time.

So, to get back to Rosebud, Katie and I would have lists of these forms we wanted to explore, like the corner cabinet, the blanket chest, and so on. The rocker was on there, too, but we just never got around to it. L.A. Door eventually ended, but I continue to be inspired by the way we worked and our whole approach to celebrating American furniture, so I wanted to get to the rocker. I was looking at a lot of rockers, everything from Shaker rockers to Danish rockers by Hans Wegner to production rockers that were made in large quantities in places like North Carolina. There’s just such a broad variety, and they all have their own lines and forms. I remember looking at this one rocker, a production rocker from North Carolina that was inspired by the Shakers. This one was armless, and all the beauty, all of its DNA, was in the back section. The finials, the bentwood backrest, the curvature of the posts, the shape of the rocker, all the drama was right there. The seat was just this box that was attached to it—also quite beautiful, but it wasn’t adding any information that wasn’t already contained in the back and the rocker.

So, from there, Rosebud arrived through sketching: looking at images in books and online, picking and choosing my favorite elements from all of these different rockers, and putting them into one drawing of one object. I definitely wasn’t setting out to make a sculptural artwork per se; I was just processing information and sketching to find out what I was interested in as far as rockers, trying to reveal something to myself. So, I ended up with this sketch of what became Rosebud, and I thought, “I like that. I want to make it.”

CS
It’s interesting, because although you may not have been thinking of Rosebud specifically in terms of formal art-making, it does seem to diverge from your usual ways of working. For example, there’s the question of surface treatments: Where so many of your prior pieces emphasized the natural traits of the materials and employed them almost as graphic elements, here you made a point of producing a very sleek, opaque finish that obscured the wood grain. Can you talk a bit about how and why you achieved that effect?

DM
I showed the idea to Katie, even though L.A. Door was at its end; I also showed it to Benjamin [Critton] and Heidi [Korsavong] of Marta, who had shown L.A. Door in the past. We were talking about how to finish it—should it be raw wood? Should it be glossy? Should it be painted? If so, what color?—and I remember Katie and Heidi both said it should be black. I thought that sounded a little too contemporary, too ‘design-y,’ so I tried all these other colors and finishes, and nothing was really sticking. Eventually, I just tried black, and they were right, it should be black, but it wasn’t quite that simple. The wood I was using was ash, which I chose because several of the piece’s components, like the backrest and the posts, are slightly bent, and ash is the classic wood for bending. However, it’s also a very open-pored wood, so if you paint it, you really see the wood grain pop, and that felt a bit distracting to me. So, I tried something that I hadn’t done before, where you mix up spackle and combine it with water to make a paste, which you wipe into the pores and then sand off. It fills the grain, so when you paint over it, you get a smooth finish with no wood grain showing through. I found that that really flattened the piece and made it almost like an image of itself, if that makes sense. There were no distractions anymore. You weren’t thinking about the fact that this was made in wood; it was just about the silhouette and the shape, and this allowed the concept to come through free of any noise. You could take in the idea a little more easily, I think.

CS
For sure. It adds to this overall sense of decontextualization, where you have forms and materials removed from both function and association. It renders them newly anonymous, in a way, which kind of frees up the viewer to consider the object on its own terms and, as you said, winds up opening things to a broader range of readings.

DM
Yes. I think it’s two things that do that: it’s what we just talked about with the paint, but it’s also the removal of the seat.

CS
Right. I remember you telling me that in sketching out the piece, you felt like you'd landed on something ‘pure,’ and I have to think that a big part of that had to do with the removal of the seat, which essentially means the removal of functionality.

DM
Exactly.

CS
Speaking of sketching, is that your usual process for developing ideas? What kind of steps are taken ahead of the physical production of a new work?

DM
Well, it starts with having a background in craft and knowing how things are made, so that when you’re going to a museum or flipping through a book or scrolling on Instagram, you’re looking at objects and you have a sense of how they’re made. I feel like that’s sort of critical, and then you start drawing. I’m not a very good drawer, but I’m okay. I can sketch and get my ideas on paper well enough to communicate to myself or other people. Sometimes it’s late at night, sometimes it’s in the morning with coffee.

The other important step is that I always run it by other people. I feel like I’ve had more success and more fun the more I’ve taken myself out of the center of things and put myself more in a circle with other people and the history of it all. Obviously, there was the collaboration with Katie, but I also run ideas past friends and family, and people like Ben and Heidi. And then, of course, in dealing with historical designs, you’re in conversation with a whole history of designers and builders. You’re asking them about how they produced things, the choices they made, and you’re adding to a bigger conversation. The less I feel like I’m an isolated designer drawing in my kitchen, the better.

CS
Yes. Actually, that’s part of what I find compelling about your continued references to Shaker furniture—not only with Rosebud, but with the drying racks you showed with L.A. Door at Marta last year. The fact that you were drawn to this specific section of a rocker because it resonated with you aesthetically, as a form, is really interesting, just because Shaker furniture is so often framed in terms that emphasize the austerity, the practicality, the technical precision, and then equate that with their religious ideology. But as you’ve said, within their approach, there was still an allowance for aesthetic decision-making, for really interesting visual asymmetries, as well as for allusions to outside design traditions—which makes sense, considering those early generations of Shaker craftspeople were converts who had previously lived and worked in the outside world. Many of them would have been familiar with the neoclassical motifs that were in fashion at that time, and I think that is reflected in the items they produced. So, to look at their work through that lens, being able to point to these aesthetic decisions and references and then acknowledge the way that certain aspects of Shaker design have been echoed by later generations of artists, from Charles Sheeler to George Nakashima, Ellsworth Kelly, and Donald Judd, all the way to contemporary designers like you and Green River Project and so on, is really interesting, specifically because it situates that earlier work in a living tradition, as opposed to some insular, stand-alone field of production.

DM
Yeah, definitely. I had never really thought about it that way. That’s really interesting.

CS
Have you ever seen Shaker furniture in person? Have you ever visited a landmark village, that sort of thing?

DM
No, I haven’t gone to the big ones, but I’ve seen some of the original pieces in museums and they are amazing. I feel like looking at Shaker furniture is this amazing palette-cleanser. We look at everything now: we move around from Danish to postmodern to French modernism; we look at a million different things in a given day, and then we get obsessed with stuff. We’ll look at one furniture movement for weeks and say, “This is the best thing ever,” and then those interests will shift. But whenever I come back to Shaker furniture, it feels like, “Take a breath. Let your shoulders down. It’s not that complicated, guys. Stop overthinking it. Beauty’s a much quieter thing. Let go of your ego. Stop trying so hard.” Then you get bored of that—you want to flex that ego again and go out and party. But it’s an amazing thing to return to, I find.

CS
Absolutely. Getting back to Rosebud, another defining element of the piece is its potential for kinetic movement. You have presented movable objects in the past—I'm thinking, for instance, of the [La-Z-Boy] rocking chair that you showed [on behalf of Built-In] at the Neutra VDL House in 2021—but here, you’re dealing with motion without necessarily pointing towards an overt function. It’d be great to hear a bit more about that aspect of the piece.

DM
When I think about movement, I think about how it brings life to the piece. Something that I didn’t really intend or anticipate is that to me, and to people who have seen it, it’s easy to anthropomorphize Rosebud. That’s been a common conversation that other people have brought up to me. What also resonates with me is the fact that it rocks and it moves, but when it’s at rest, it has meaning, too, because it’s not moving, even though it can. It can actually feel a little bit sad.

A rocking chair is almost like a dog, right? It’s waiting for its master to activate it, like, “Let’s go outside,” or whatever. A rocking chair just waits around all day until work is over and its sitter sits down with a cup of whatever and starts using it. Then it’s serving its purpose, it’s feeling useful, it’s feeling the love of its counterpart. But when Rosebud is static, it’s sad because it’s limited. It’s literally unable to accept love because it’s missing a part. It’s unable to have human connection because it doesn’t have a seat. So even when you move it, it’s sort of odd, because it’s kind of just spinning its wheels, which I think is also pretty relatable.

CS
Is this a mode of working you'd like to explore further? Do you see Rosebud as a one-off, or could it be the first in a potential edition or series?

DM
I wouldn’t make another that was exactly the same. It’s definitely the only one. But I could envision there being more that have their own personalities and that might feel like siblings to Rosebud, like a little friend group. I would love to do that. I have other priorities right now, in terms of what I’m making, but I could definitely see it being a larger family of work.

CS
Rosebud was recently included in the Rites of Spring group show at Marta. Can we talk a little bit about how you chose to install the piece?

DM
My main thought with the installation was that it should be on a circular plinth. I find a chair’s best angle is often its rear quarter, looking at it not directly from the back, but rather to the back and a little bit from the side. For whatever reason, I love that angle of a chair. I feel like the front is usually the least interesting, though not as a rule—like Hans Wegner, who in my mind is the best chair designer ever, his chairs look amazing from every single angle. But in general, I think chairs should be viewed at 360 degrees, so to me, the circular plinth was a necessary feature of the installation, along with its location in the show, putting it adjacent to the oak bow that I made that hangs on a wall. Having said that, I do think putting it up on a plinth probably discouraged people from activating the piece. Anyone was allowed to, but I think the plinth may have made people think they had to ask, or just to assume that they couldn’t.

CS
As you mentioned, along with Rosebud, the Rites of Spring show included a wall-mounted work that you'd produced in the shape of a decorative bow. The form itself is based on a found object from a thrift store, right?

DM
Yes. My friend Bianca Stilwell is a professional furniture and art dealer, and she’s made a niche for herself exploring thrift stores and estate sales in and outside of the Southern California area. When she finds something interesting, she’ll get on her Instagram Stories and say, “Hey, I’m at this thrift store, and I just found this crazy thing. Does anybody want it?” So, she found this oak bow and posted it, and I was like, “I want that.”

When I first got the piece, I hung it up in my house and just lived with it for a while. Initially, I was hanging a tote bag on it, but then I thought, “Why am I putting my shabby, ugly tote bag on it? This thing is too beautiful.” So, I began to use it as a decorative object. I loved it, and people who came over loved it—it’s just this undeniably positive, sweet, kind of optimistic object—so I decided I wanted to remake it and share it with people, because it felt meant to be shared. The form of the bows I made was an exact replica of the original: I took the thing apart and made templates of all the pieces out of red oak, which is the lesser of the two oaks, meaning it’s cheaper than white. White oak is what you see in fancy homes, whereas red oak is what you see in thrift store furniture. I also stained the oak to give it that brown-honey color you see in a lot of thrift store furniture. So, I made twenty or so of these bows, but I wasn’t making any money on them; I was selling them for just enough to cover my costs and a little bit of my time.

The other thing about the original bow was that it wasn’t labeled or signed, so the longer I had it, the more I wondered, “Where did this thing come from? Who made this?” I mean, it was clearly made in someone’s home studio or garage or something. I sort of imagine it being made in the 1980s or 1990s, maybe somewhere in the Midwest.

CS
In my mind, it feels like the bow is coming from the same world as the La-Z-Boy recliners that you presented with L.A. Door.

DM
Yes, it’s easy to see them in the same home. I’m really glad you said that, because I think a commonality that the two objects share are their unpretentiousness, along with a genuine desire for comfort. LA-Z-Boys aren’t particularly beautiful, but the experience of sitting in one is amazing. I just think they suffer from terrible branding. The name contributes to this cliché of it as this chair for a slovenly dude—literally, a lazy boy—but actually, the word I would use to describe them would be restorative. You can get in a La-Z-Boy, recline it and work on your laptop for four hours, and when you get up, you’re not clutching your lower back. You spring right up and feel great.

In my mind, there are two theories of ergonomics. One would be a chaise lounge by someone like Bruno Mathsson. He made these beautiful bentwood chairs that are wrapped in cotton webbing and have these amazing lines, but the thing about his chairs is that there’s only one way to sit in them. It fits your body perfectly, but only as long as you stay in one position. It does not rock. It doesn’t have a lever that changes positions. You can recline, but you cannot move—whereas a La-Z-Boy can recline, but they also rock. It’s actually a natural evolution of a rocking chair. You can sit up, you can recline halfway, you can recline all the way, you can rock. You can move around in it, and I feel like comfort over a period of time requires that you move around a little bit. You can’t do that with the Bruno Mathsson designs. So, the La-Z-Boy is functional, but it’s not attractive, and the fact that it’s not attractive is a big reason that it has never really broken into [bourgeois] design spaces. There have been attempts to make them more elegant—for instance, I think Todd Oldham might have done a design for La-Z-Boy—and usually, they’ll add a weird tapered wooden leg or something, trying to give it a mid-century feel, something a little sleeker. But in doing so, they ruin the comfort of it for the sake of elegance.

CS
Right. In thinking back on your L.A. Door pieces, the interventions were pretty minimal—maybe some reupholstering or updating the handles, but nothing fundamental.

DM
That’s right. Before I met Katie, I was collecting La-Z-Boys, thinking, “All right, no one’s done anything with the La-Z-Boy. I’m going to do something cool with the La-Z-Boy.” And honestly, I think I was taking a more Todd Oldham approach, where I was trying to make it look cool, and I just couldn’t. So, I had it on the back burner forever, but then I met Katie. I was talking to her about it, and she was like, “Just reupholster it in something cool, and maybe we can make a new handle or something.” That was the key idea: Don’t fight the design, celebrate it. Celebrate how schlubby it is, the overflowing cushion of it. We learned how to do that together.

But to bring it back to the bow, I agree, it’s easy to see them in the same space together. It’s funny, because I think the bow is immediately aesthetically beautiful, whereas the La-Z-Boy might not be, but somehow, they’re speaking the same language. Both of them care about you. You look at the bow, and it almost has open arms—and a La-Z-Boy literally has open arms that you sit between.

CS
Right, and although one comes from the crafts world and the other from mainstream consumer retail, both items would also seem to fall squarely beyond the scope of taste and aesthetics that distinguishes so-called fine art and design—which brings us to the idea of amateurism, which I know is something you’re quite interested in.

DM
Yes, I think that’s what I’m most interested in right now. It’s an interesting word, ‘amateur.’ I think the original spelling is A-M-A-T-O-R. I’m not sure how you pronounce it, but it meant ‘lover,’ or ‘to love,’ and I think that’s sort of key. That meaning has changed over time; it kind of feels like it changed along with the progression of capitalism. So, if its original meaning was ‘lover,’ it became something closer to ‘non-professional’: someone who doesn’t fully know what they’re doing, or doesn’t get paid to do it; someone who wouldn’t be recognized as a standard bearer. It becomes pejorative, even to the point where it can mean ‘unskilled’ or someone prone to doing shoddy work. And I think that’s all well and good. On the one hand, it’s sort of a bastardization, where the word’s gone from this beautiful thing to this pejorative—but on the other hand, I like that, because it kind of carves out its own space outside of capitalism, outside of expertise, and it takes on more of a folk meaning. There are no more rules, in a way. There’s more room to play around. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s not being made to be sold or evaluated by someone who might be selling or critiquing or reviewing it. I think that energy comes out in the bow.

CS
Definitely—and it seems like these ideas are at the heart of a new project that you’re in the process of launching. Maybe you can give us a sense of what you’re working on.

DM
Yes. I’d like to explore this world of amateur creators more deeply, but doing that can be difficult. Basically, you can scour eBay and you can scour thrift stores. So, I’m going to start to travel later in the summer, going to yard sales in the Midwest, going to estate sales and thrift stores out there, just trying to find objects that have that beautiful amateur energy. If I could find the actual makers of these things, that would be first prize. I would love to meet these people, interview these people, potentially collaborate with these people, make work that’s in conversation with theirs, and possibly show our work together in some sort of context that could be local to them, or here in a gallery in Los Angeles, or some combination of the two. That would be the dream—but if I can’t find anybody, I’ll just have to do what I can with the objects that I do find. Really, the goal of the project is just to commune and collaborate with amateur artwork, and to share that with as many people as possible.

CS
I remember you telling me that there was something about the design of the bow that made it feel like it ‘belongs to all of us,’ which ultimately made you feel comfortable with replicating the piece despite not knowing who its author may have been.

DM
Right. A lot of it has to do with the intent. Like I said, when I was first making the bows, I was not making any money. The intent really was to share, and I’ve always been upfront about the fact that it’s not my design. In a way, I think about the bow more as a form, like a blanket chest or a highboy or a rocker. When Katie and I would do riffs on these classic forms, we saw it like country music, where these pieces of furniture were like old country standards, like “That’s How I Got to Memphis.” With those songs, other people’s covers of them are almost as important to the song’s place in the culture as the original. It’s what keeps them alive, in a way. I think that’s something that Katie and I honed in on, and it’s something that I still carry with me. So, whenever I’m confused about what it is I’m trying to do or look for or make, I return to this question: “What are you celebrating?” That's kind of my center, and as long as I’m celebrating something, I feel good about whatever comes out.

—

Doug McCollough’s Rosebud was recently included in Rites of Spring.

Christopher Schreck
is a Chicago-based writer and editor whose work has explored subjects ranging from art and design to wig-making and digital conservation. A former editor at KALEIDOSCOPE, his writing has been featured in publications like Mousse, office, CURA., and Aperture, among others. Christopher also runs the popular blog and Instagram account Art Damaged and serves as co-host of the Abundance Zine podcast.

Doug McCollough
lives and works in Los Angeles, California. McCollough (b. 1982, Tokyo) is formerly one-half of the Los Angeles furniture practice L.A. Door, who previously showed work with the gallery on behalf of the group exhibition Built-In at the Neutra VDL House in 2021, and again in their aptly-titled Open & Close solo exhibition in 2023. McCollough’s work in furniture, cabinetry, and sculpture rigorously and winkingly updates and recontextualizes diverse instances of American decorative arts.

Motion in Field
is hosted and produced by Christopher Schreck in tandem with and on behalf of Marta Los Angeles. Motion in Field’s theme music comprises portions of Leaving Grass Mountain, composed and performed by Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.