Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 18, 1992 TAG: 9202180248
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
FOR RUSSIAN ARTISTS, AMERICAN STYLE MEANS SEARS
The great leap forward in East-West relations is about to take a strange turn. Three Russian emigres now living in New York have been shopping around for the real America. They think they have found it. At Sears.Constantin Boym, a furniture designer, and his friends Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, conceptual artists, have issued their two-part manifesto:
"Sears products exemplify the contemporary American esthetic for heavy-duty beauty." - Komar and Melamid.
"Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly. Some things are Searsy." - Boym.
"Searstyle" is a not totally ironic design movement that Boym is calling "the design alternative for the '90s."
An exploration of what he termed the "visual and emotional heritage of Sears," it will be unveiled Friday when his "Searstyle Furniture" exhibition opens at the Full-scale Gallery in New York.
The next day, an exhibition of "Searstyle Fine Art" by Komar and Melamid, which will feature the Kenmore Symphony, a musical recording of the inside of a Sears refrigerator, opens at the Ronald Feldman gallery.
Perhaps it takes a non-American perspective to understand and appreciate the real Sears, the repressed Sears.
"Of course, is beautiful!" Melamid said of such all-American wonders from the current Sears catalog as the Magazine Rack Floor Lamp, a combination of three objects in one (page 1342; $109.99 for one; $89.99 each for two or more). "Sears is the hidden treasury of America." he added.
According to Richard Tedlow, a business historian, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what American book he would give to every Russian, his answer was the Sears catalog. But FDR could not have predicted Searstyle.
Boym, Melamid and Komar have yet to inform Sears about their movement. But like any self-respecting promoters, they have big plans. "Searstyle" comes with its own press kit and campaign button (though not Sears's money-back guarantee).
It also has a fashion component. The three have commissioned John Mincarelli, who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, to design vintage Searstyle clothes, including a mousey beige man's jacket with wood-grain lapels. (They disapprove of Sears's recent move to go stylish in its clothing department.)
A Sears spokesman in Chicago, told of the forthcoming exhibits, said: "We obviously have not seen the designs so we can't comment. But we certainly would agree with their assessment that Sears is about as American as you can get."
The three friends, who all grew up in Moscow but met in New York, conceived of Searstyle two summers ago while vacationing in a summer cottage decorated with Sears wood-grain walls, in a place prophetically called Vinalhaven, Maine.
"When you step into an American interior, your heart beats differently," explained Melamid, who immigrated to New York 14 years ago. "We are interested in things that define this life, in the power of the environment. We're formed by invisible things we don't pay attention to, like refrigerators. So we try to capture the lost beauty of Sears."
The ubiquity of Sears, once a mail-order symbol of middle American aspirations, came home to Melamid when he moved into a condominium in New Jersey and realized that his refrigerator was a Kenmore. "I said, Kenmore? What was this Kenmore?"
"Kenmore was Sears."
For Boym, who started his own design studio in New York in 1986, the Sears catalog is an inexhaustible source of design inspiration. "There's modern, there's kitsch and there's Sears," he said.
"It is a symbol of all those good, practical, dependable things America has given the world," he said. "Honest things. Democratic things. Things that work. Things that are about necessity, not style."
Boym's esthetic fearlessness seems to know no bounds. He is happy to tell you, not totally in jest, that America's greatest furniture design is the La-Z-Boy recliner.
To high-minded designers, such a statement is about as popular as Japanese leaders' comments about the laziness of the American worker.
To illustrate his convictions, Boym ordered "authentic" bits and pieces from the Sears catalog - including that icon of American leisure the corduroy backrest - and reconfigured them as elements in chairs and tables of his own design.
"I want to bring the language of Sears into contemporary design," Boym said. "If I exhibited Sears chairs by themselves, nobody would get it."
Komar and Melamid's Searstyle art consists of grainy beige and brown fake-wood-printed panels ("hand cut from genuine plywood"). Each panel has a word on it, and they can be combined to form statements like "Oh, Heavy Dark Hot Sears."
The idea is to let customers combine panels to their own specifications, as if they were ordering chair legs or cushions from the Sears catalog. But the prices are not Searsy: the panels cost $2,100 for the first three and $500 each thereafter.
The three maintain that they are not judging middle American taste, but rather recording Sears the way an anthropologist might, as a sort of American potlatch gone crazy.
They say their goal is to create an American equivalent of the Italian Memphis design movement, to do for Sears what Robert Venturi's "Learning From Las Vegas" did for Las Vegas (causing acceptance, that is, among snobby intellectuals who wouldn't be caught dead there).