Dakota Jackson Leather & Steel Dining Chairs - Set of 4 (SOLD)
(SOLD) A set of 4 dining chairs by Dakota Jackson. Made with leather, iron and wood. Chair backs tilt for additional comfort. Retain paper label. Late 20th century. Age appropriate wear, burnish marks to leather, scratches to lacquered wood backs. Structurally very solid. Measure each 19ʺW × 17.5ʺD × 34.88ʺH. Seat height 19".
DAKOTA JACKSON:
In
1974, Jackson's career as a designer began when Yoko Ono asked him to
build a desk with hidden compartments for husband John Lennon. "She
wanted to make a piece of furniture that would be a mystical object;
that would be like a Chinese puzzle," Jackson recalled in a 1986
interview published in the Chicago Tribune. The result was a small
cubed-shaped writing table with rounded corners reminiscent of Art Deco
era styles Touching secret pressure points opened the desk's
compartments. This commission helped build Jackson's reputation and
allowed him to merge his experience as a magician and performer with his
developing interest in furniture.
In 1978, a bed designed
for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg garnered Jackson even more
notoriety. Called "The Eclipse", the bed was described in The New Yorker
as "large, astounding, sumptuous, with sunbursts of cherry wood and
quilted ivory satin at head and foot. A lighting system positioned
behind the headboard switched on automatically at sunset and spread out
rays of light "like an aurora borealis, which grew brighter and brighter
until turning off at 2 am.
Commissions like these continued to
come in and Jackson soon became known as a designer to the rich and
famous. Some of his other clients from this period included songwriter
Peter Allen, Saturday Night Live creator and producer Lorne Michaels,
Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, and soap opera actress Christine
Jones.
The American Art Furniture Movement and the Industrial Style
In
the late 1970s, Jackson was among a small group of artists and artisans
producing and exhibiting hand-made furniture in New York.[5][31]
Jackson and his peers were part of the "American Art Furniture
Movement," a group sometimes called the "Art et Industrie Movement,
named after the leading art furniture gallery of the era, Art et
Industrie, founded by Rick Kaufmann in 1976.
In a 1984 Town &
Country article titled "Art You Can Sit On," Kaufmann said he created
the gallery to "serve as a locus to the public for artists and designers
creating new decorative arts. The works on display were "radical
objects" that drew from a number of fine art traditions, including "Pop,
Surrealism, Pointillism and Dada [which were] "thrown together with the
severe lines of the Bauhaus and the Russian avant-garde, mixed with
Mondrian's color and filtered through a video sensibility—all to create a
new statement. The article described Jackson as a "ten-year veteran of
the genre" and pointed to the "clean forms and quiet colors" of his
furniture.
Jackson showed a variety of industrial-looking
lacquer, metal, and glass works at Art et Industrie, including his
Standing Bar (also known as the Modern Bar), a lacquered cabinet that
Jackson designed in 1978 for his wife (then-girlfriend) RoseLee
Goldberg.
Other works from this period include the T-Bird Desk,
Self-Winding Cocktail Table, and the Saturn Stool, which became one of
Jackson's most recognizable works after being included in exhibitions at
The Whitney, the International Design Center, and the American Craft
Museum (now known as the Museum of Arts and Design), and in
advertisements for Diane von Fürstenberg and Calvin Klein.
The Saturn Stool by Dakota Jackson
The
Sun-Sentinel described the Saturn Stool as "a pink planet seat
surrounded by a pale green ring on an aluminum hydraulic lift. The
anodized aluminum and lacquered wood stool became synonymous with
Jackson's work and, a decade later, it was used in an ad for Absolut
Vodka titled "Absolut Jackson".
Jackson called this body of work
the Deadly Weapons series. In concept and style, these works straddled
the worlds of art and design and drew inspiration from the cutting-edge
technology of the day, such as the Rockwell B-1 Lancer, or B1 Bomber as
it was commonly known. In 1984, the New York Times described the
connection between the fighter jet and another of Jackson's Deadly
Weapons designs, the B1 Desk: "Like the airplane, whose wings shift in
flight, the desk has parts that slide open and unfold, including a
secret compartment."
Jackson's work during this period became
associated with the industrial style for home furnishings, a new design
trend that was documented in Joan Kron's and Suzanne Slesin's 1978 book
"High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home. In the
catalog for The Whitney exhibition "High Styles: Twentieth-Century
American Design," curator Lisa Phillips pointed to Jackson's Saturn
Stool as an example of contemporary products with a "high-tech hardware
look.
SOURCE: Wikipedia