Interview with Matthias Pliessnig
Marian Halls
Matthias Pliessnig is an MFA student in Furniture Design/Sculpture, currently living and working in Madison, Wisconsin. His recent one-of-a-kind seating pieces incorporate the sleek lines of sailing vessels, interpreted to conform to the shape of the human body. He employs traditional steam-bending techniques and materials to achieve fluid lines and a sense of speed. Pliessnig has studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Kansas City Art Institute. Currently he is a self-employed artist-designer-builder and a project assistant to Tom Loeser, who heads the furniture program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Pliessnig's work has been shown nationally and internationally, at the Milan Furniture Fair and numerous other venues. His most recent collection – a joint exhibition with Stacey Webber entitled “Meticulocity” – was featured at the Silo Project Space in Stoughton, WI during September and October.
A concern for what furniture is and does travels through Pliessnig’s entire collection for this show, without any very visible appearance of furniture in the individual works. Based on an interview with the artist in the Silo Project Space on Sept. 29, this article investigates the absent-presence of furniture building in the collection as a migration – a potential movement of exploration embarking from the familiar realm of human utility into unfamiliar territory: the impulses that bring about a work of art. A movement from things we know how to use, whose existence we understand – to things whose appearance baffles us, though their journey may have begun in the same familiar place. Like any migration, it is impossible to know ahead of time the precise path the migration will take, what one will encounter along the way, or even precisely where one will arrive.
INDIVIDUAL WORKS
MIGRATION
The collection itself arrives at a migratory structure, the last piece Pliessnig built for the exhibition. “Migration, prototype 1” is a small version of a covered ship, composed of dacron stretched across steam bent wood strips, barely large enough to carry a child in its interior.
“So this is the last piece. I had a week before the show and I finished everything. And I was at the lake with a group of friends and I was thinking, why don’t people use the lake? It’s a great platform for artists to use; as a big stage you could do so many things. And we were talking about previous assignments we had in our schools to make flotation devices, and I started thinking it’d be amazing using this method if I could build large pods and have them all over and [have] people inside who have oars coming out of the holes, and they’d start rowing and it’d be wild because this material’s translucent so when the sun is behind them you can see your shadow on the outside of the pod. It’d be a really bizarre image. So I thought I’d try a really small version of that just to see what happens.”
The version he’s made spans 60 by 50 by 40 inches, and has one opening for entering and exiting, or from which to extend an oar. Dacron, a polyester fiber originally used to build aircrafts, has recently begun to be used in the construction of small sailing vessels. For “Migration, prototype 1,” the lightweight texture works well as an all-around cover. The asymmetrical structure of the pod suggests that it might refuse to travel over water in a straight line. Beyond this small detail the pod appears ready, poised to assume its function as the tiniest of ships.
It is evident that “Migration, prototype 1” meets the general function of a ship, if a ship’s function is to hold the body of a human over a body of water. But its asymmetry (unable to forge a straight line through the water), its size (sufficient for only the smallest and likely least experienced of sailors), the foregrounding of the image generated more than the destination for which its built: several elements suggest that the “migration” that governs this piece does not aim for somewhere in particular. Something made the production of this tiny ship necessary, but it was not the necessity to arrive at a specific destination. The movement to somewhere is there, but to where?
A migratory movement takes place at the end of this collection that departs from the preceding pieces in the collection. But the journey taken in “Migration, prototype 1” exposes a kind of migration that moves across the collection as a whole, and leads to an inquiry into how, and to where, the earlier pieces are also migrating.
FOUND
A form of necessity governs the creation of the tiny sculptures that populate a ledge along two walls in the Silo Project Space, surrounding the larger pieces. Most consist of no more than four or five objects – broken crayons, cracked pieces of wood, pins, twine, or string – linked together strategically to give the resulting creations a simple, but elegant, structure. These small sculptures are the oldest in the current collection. The earliest of them emerged years before any of the large sculptures, and their influence on his larger pieces has grown as the individual pieces continue to multiply.
“[I’ve been working on them] a long time. I’ve recently begun taking them more seriously. I didn’t really consider them art or anything they were just a product of boredom...Before I came to school I was working for myself for a couple of years and I was just doing furniture work...and I never had time and space to work on my own work. If I couldn’t sleep at night I was working on bills; it was really hard to make anything large-scale. so I decided I started to pick up scrap materials from the studio, and just started to fiddle with them in the basement...And I never took them seriously I always thought that they were going to be plans for later but then here, for some reason, I don’t know what it is but late at night sometimes I just kept stumbling into the studio and started playing more with that idea of reacting to little found objects and things in the room....and so it really started about a year ago that I started taking them seriously on their own...”
The small pieces emerged from the impulse to continue building sculpture, when the time constraints of other employment prevented him from satisfying this impulse. Each small gesture at sculpture would crop up in its turn during an idle moment, in the cracks of time left over after committing his skills to commercial furniture building and with the scarce materials and space available. What emerged at the far end of a few minutes was unpremeditated, the shape governed more by mood and intuition than by an image formed ahead of time.
Now that Matthias has returned to school, he hasn’t abandoned these found-object pieces, originally conceived as prototypes for larger-scale work. They began as by-products of work, but as they continue to emerge alongside larger pieces they have grown into complete instances of work in themselves. As they stand now, each one given its proper space along the walls of the exhibition room, they provide the opening for a new thought: the thought that it may be possible to express in the work of a moment, something that in the extensive planning of larger projects, gets missed. In their smallness and their urgency, they show an effort to capture the impulse that leads someone to create a sculpture, almost to isolate it from the thinking that tends to accompany or precede the creation.
LABOR
Pliessnig has begun to transfer this no-hesitation approach to the process of building large sculptures. To achieve the same mode of spontaneity, Pliessnig imposes constraints for how he can build the work, by setting a constant and then letting the work develop out of the limitations of that constant. He works very quickly to eliminate the kind of time that leaves room for deliberate decision-making.
“I set these constraints so that I could actually just not hesitate. I’ve been building those tiny sculptures for a few years and now I’ve been going crazy with them. This is really a tiny part of the collection – I have a couple hundred of them. And the nice thing about them is that there’s no hesitation because the material is all found... and it’s kind of going off of a whim...it can be very fast or very slow. .. but I wanted to try to bring that to a larger scale, the same methodology... and when I started to see how easy it was to bend the wood, how comfortable I was getting with that process, it seemed like an easy way to accomplish it was just to try drawing in space.”
The process of steam bending the wood assists in the process of working spontaneously. Pliessnig adopted steam bending to bend the wood he uses– mostly oak and ash. The advantage of steam bending in comparison to other methods is that the steaming process can actually change the curve of the wood fibers. The steam loosens the resins in the wood and when the wood cools, the resins have locked the re-shaping into place. Steam-bending is a very flexible but rapid process. There is a limited amount of time to bend the wood before it hardens and snaps. The process of manipulating wood in this way has influenced the direction of Pliessnig’s most recent work.
“Before, my furniture was built in a much more systematic way, and there was definite planning for where everything was going to go. But then I started to see that the wood could be bent, and there was so much freedom in just drawing in space, and I decided to just play.”
USE/USELESS
“Seizing Circle,” “Insum Itinerus,” and “Tripudio Bestia” all experiment with the potentials of steam bending wood for “drawing in space.” They each derive their form from constraints that Pliessnig set for himself before building. Aside from the constraints he assigns, relatively little formal planning is involved, and he doesn’t begin with an image of what the end result will be.
“That’s what’s really fun about it. It’s really freeform, where it’s building in the moment and very quickly. [“Seizing Circle”] was built very fast relative to the scale – in just two and a half weeks. Mostly it was just realizing how quick the process can be and taking advantage of it. So [“Seizing Circle] was built at ... the end of last semester, and that was kind of a step into working really freely. And the second part of the summer I started on [“Insum Itinerus”], which is a similar idea but using a closed form.”
Pliessnig started “Seizing Circle” with a series of three circles, bent from long strips of oak, poised in different positions in space. From there the objective was to establish a relationship between these three circles, using long steam bent strips to connect them to each other. As the piece begins to take shape the strips appear to trace lines in space between the different circles. Some of these lines then open up in new directions, suggesting places where three new circles can go, and a new circle is added. As in a line drawing, the eye begins to fill in missing contours, so a few strips going in the same direction or crossing in circular motion can suggest a tube-shaped vessel whose aperture is marked by the place where a circle opens up again. The form is open ended like that; new tubes or cavities can develop off of old, abandoned lines.
The title “Seizing Circle” suggests an ever-growing body, one that has the capacity to expand infinitely in three dimensions, overtaking the space into which it grows, by way of these triplet circles that derive their force from their ability to crop up at any point, at a moment’s notice. Viewers have reacted to this piece by suggesting that it resembles some sort of vessel, says Matthias, whether the pipes that running along the inside of a wall, or the capillaries that might surround the human heart. But where a human’s blood vessels lead in both directions to an organ, the receptacle or the source of the fluid that might run through, in “Seizing Circle” there is no suggestion of an organ to bound the flow. “Seizing Circle” comprises nothing but the continuously turning vessels, and the possibility for infinitely more. And where blood vessels and pipes exist to perform a particular function for human beings, “Seizing Circle” operates for no apparent purpose, except its own inexplicable impetus to grow.
FURNITURE/SCULPTURE
Only one sculpture contains a direct reference to works of furniture. “Restraining Thonet” consists of a Vienna cafe chair wrapped in steam bent strips of wood until the chair is barely visible beneath the strips. The Vienna cafe chair was designed by Michael Thonet in 1855. Thonet’s work was widely acclaimed because it was the first to use the steam bending method to make furniture. Thonet’s chair, which is steam bent like the non-furniture works in Pliessnig’s current collection, displays an elegance that is entirely functional. But in Matthias’s rendition of Thonet, the chair is constrained by something else, namely the steam bent strips that are shaped with no thought to function, whose spontaneous placement celebrates the impulse of artistic creation, which in this piece very literally overrides the object’s functionality. The steam bent strips “restrain” the value of the chair as a piece of furniture. There was an impulse, a sense of necessity that led to the creation of “Restraining Thonet.” But it is a necessity that departs from the necessity that brings about a piece of furniture. In the play between furniture and sculpture in this piece, Pliessnig enacts a question that moves through the sequence of sculptures in the collection: how are furniture and sculpture related to each other in the process of building?
“I guess I see the relationship as basically the differences between the different models of a reaction. Furniture is a more intimate relationship than sculpture. You actually touch it with the body, and you react to it and it reacts to you. Physically. Whereas, sculpture is strictly aesthetic and [you feel] it mostly with the eyes. ... Personally with my work, it’s something where sculpture is kind of my playground – it’s a sketchbook, a place where you kind of go crazy, and there’s nothing holding you back at this point from doing what you want. But with furniture and with function, there’s a pull back, you’re thinking about how someone’s going to react to this, or who’s going to touch this.”
The constraints a piece of furniture calls for can be entirely distinct from the constraints dictated by the necessity of art, which is what this collection of sculptures is about. The constraints that dictate the design of a piece of furniture are tied directly to how it will be used. The constraints that dictate the emergence of a work of art can be as small as an idle moment, or as audacious as an unbound migration by sea.
Matthias Pliessnig's work can also be viewed on his website,