Chairs for torture, death and extreme pleasure.
The Cucking stool and Ducking-stools where used as instruments of social humiliation. They where torture devices used on women who where “troublesome and angry and who broke the public peace”. Sometimes they where used to punish women who where committed for sexual offenses like bearing an illegitimate child, or prostitution.. Cucking stools where also known as “Tumbrelers” (which I don’t think they thought of when branding tumblr.com).
Apparently it was a gender specific device. Men where humiliated and tortured using stocks. Both where used in public spaces. The convicted in the cucking stools where lifted using a crane and exposed to the public gaze or pushed around the town. The ducking-stool was used to dip women into the water (as illustrated above) and re-enacted on this youtube-holliday video. I guess a modern day version of this is found in the carnival games, where you drop girls into water. They bare a resemblance to “wet t-shirt competitions”.
Tramp Chairs are described in detail by The Criminal Wisdom blog. In short they where used in small towns which didn’t have jailing facilities. Tramps loitering in the towns where confined into the chairs in hopes of convincing them to leave town. People would walk past and mock the person sitting. The chairs could also be pushed around town to reach a wider audience.
Photo above via http://maggs224.hubpages.com/hub/The-Miami-Police-Museum
Tramp Chairs bring to mind cages people dance in kinky- (or seemingly kinky) clubs. This goes to show that yesterdays torture devices are today’s fetishes. Chairs in general have their place in the world of erotics. You can find “tips on sex positions” using chairs in the Cosmopolitan and here is a great blog post where the author is trying to figure out how King Edward VII used his “love chair” .
In an earlier post we briefly covered the “Japanese Automatic Electronic Bionic Sex Chair (NSFW)”.
Some artist have erased people from the picture and show only chairs having sex (video link). Chairs having sex is not as weird as it seems.. Not stranger then using chairs as the main charters in horror movies. The organic shapes of “the love chair” reminds me of the world of H.R Giger and the chairs he has designer. Which have their place in the world of fetishes.
Overweight King Edward VII of the United Kingdom used the “siege d’amour” when visiting brothels, in Paris (1890).
Cucking stools and tramp-chairs seem childish when compared to Inquisitional chairs some of which where rumored to be used until 1800 in Germany. (Here is one in Poland seen on Google Maps street view). The odd thing is that when you do an online search about the subject, search engines guide you to bdsm sites (or maybe it’s just me and my queer browser cookies). Chairs like this where used in interrogation. Straps where tightened to cause pain and bloodshed, in hopes of answers.
Chairs in interrogation are a big theme in general. They cause stress in the interrogated just by their looks. Interrogations scenes are commonly illustrated with grimly lit images of chairs in dark spaces. Perhaps the tradition of “chair related torture” is enough to convince the interrogated on how serious the situation is. As we have moved from a discipline societies to societies of control (text by Gilles Deleuze. The idea is also explained by in this video), physical straps to confine persons being interrogated are no longer needed.
A verbal command of “Remain Seated” is enough to confine a person to their place. If you stand up in the wrong time it’s enough to justify punishment; fear of which works better then pain it’s self.
It is important to note the importance of light in these modern interrogation scene illustrations and re-enactments. In the prime time of enlightenment philosophy Cesare Beccaria wrote a book “On Crime and Punishment” (1764). He argued that public places where people gather should be illuminated using street lights. If every corner of the city would be lit the amount of crime would drop. People could keep an eye on each other and dubious character would fee less capable of committing crimes.
CHAPTER XI. The illumination of the streets, during the night, at the public expense […] are means to prevent the dangerous effects of the misguided passions of the people.
His argument turned into a standard. Street lights pioneered surveillance cameras (which need light to work). Street lights and control (and tyranny) walk hand-in-hand. Studies after an other have been made on the subject of “street lights and crime” (here is one general overview). In lines of this.. It’s portrayed to be affective if a strong light is focused to a person being interrogated.
It’s poetic if you think of it! A bright light will make person reveal the truth… A light will “make him talk”. Just in case you will be interrogated here is a shortlist on how to survive it.
I recommended a simplified short movie called “Interrogated Chair” (2012) by Zachary Meyer. The chair in the movie is animated using strings and you can picture a person being interrogated. (A similar technique of “chairanimation” was also used by painter Iidu Tikkanen in her video-work. Which well cover later in this blog.)
Interrogation styled spiky chairs have been recently used in art too. A great example is “Pay-to-sit” by Steve Man. The artwork presents a clear statement: You have to pay for the exclusive right to sit without fear of pain.
According to the Telegraph the particular chair the journalist is sitting on was auctioned.
When it comes to torture: Less is more. The most horrific chair-like device for torture is the Judas Cradle. It’s pretty apparent how it was used. It seems there where two sorts cradles. “Solo versions”, which where more accurate (illustrated below) and “bench-like pyramids” described in this blog post (NSFW). The device was especially designed to cause pain in the genital area.
“The victim is hoisted up … and lowered onto the point of the pyramid in such a way that his weight rests on the point positioned in the anus, in the vagina, under the scrotum or under the coccyx…” “forgottendreams” on engelfire explains.
Using chairs for torture and death is not a thing of the past. People are still being electrocuted, tortured and interrogated using chairs especially crafted for the purpose. At the same time people dance erotically with chairs.
“The History of the Ohio Electric Chair” tells a grim story. The cruelest part of it is how a craftsperson who helped to build the chair, ended up being executed in it. The idea of electrocuting people to death was conceived by Alfred P. Southwick (a dentist, hens the chair) but the most recognized inventor associated to the development of the electric chair is Thomas Edison, the father of “Electric light” and the modern light bulb’s. This creates an interesting bridge between the concepts of crime,interrogation&punishment and illumination&the era of enlightenment.
Judging from these snippets of the recent history of “special chairs”. The NO-CHAIR-DESIGN Campaign and especially the invisible chair we’ve build, could be read as an anarchistic project. Instead of depicting our self as noble chairmen (who have the money to sit without the fear of being tortured).. We are in a process de-chairification which will result in to a future where chairs and institutions dependent on them are rendered obsolete.
If you are interested in illumination, gaze (enlightenment) and electricity (modernity) here is a video-artwork which touches the subject and an audio documentation of a performance piece covering light&technology (in Finnish).