Here at Rysz + Rysz we often suggest soundtracks as you view a work of art or eat a meal. Consider this one type of micro-experience—a way to enhance an activity by pairing it with another. Artspace’s exhibition Perverse Furniture is loaded with the kinds of pairings we admire. A repossession of the Bauhaus’s legacy with a critical spin on Bauhaus 100 anniversary shows, the theme is haunted with dualities: form and utility, craft and art, utopia and oppression. It’s a labyrinth with many paths. As one entry to this riveting, coolly intelligent, and darkly playful show, we recommend the music Artspace provides.

Curators Sarah Fritchey and Aude Jomini invited Chris Ruggiero to craft a companion playlist. Ruggiero calls this a mixtape. Apt word choice. Physically there is no tape, but the technical relic signifies handmade and intimate, a supplication and a declaration. Which this playlist is. Scroll for tracks and listen while you walk through the galleries.

The setlist glints with glam rock and post punk. Mechanical anthems by Kraftwerk and Space Art blur the interplay between humans and objects. Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s sculpture Sit (2016) appears to be a chair covered in viscera-like plaster, a slumped figure melting into its own support system. The defiant feminism of Bernadette Despujols’s Bimbo Chairs, with untamable hair writhing from the caning on Marcel Breuer Cesca-style models, and the mashups of sexuality and domestic/workspace ephemera in Brian Galderisi’s photographs, are vivid against Roxy Music’s serenade to dream homes and inanimate lusts: the sensualization of stuff, the fetishization of what we buy and own.

As Jomini writes in her introductory essay—an impeccably researched lyrical guidebook not to be missed for context—this is music about “the inner-life of objects.” Each song casts a mood as you investigate personal relationships with art that conjures subconscious discomforts. Think about the furniture you use to live and work. What are their secret histories? How do they imprint you, and you them? Bryan Ferry purrs in your ear, “Home oh sweet home / it’s only a saying.”

5/23/2019