What’s Up With
Everyone’s Small
Wooden Stools?

If you’ve spent any amount of time wading through the self-replenishing cascade of artfully fussed domestic tableaux that pool in a specific corner of Instagram, you may have noticed, past the thicket of Serge Mouille swing arm lamps and pitched-just-so Wegner chairs, a very specific taste for this sort of handmade object. A small, rough wooden stool; a studiously draped patchwork textile; a wabi-sabi ceramic tea cup that catches the morning light in a way that suggests—ludicrously—enlightenment. These objects create a loose expression of modernist design, less the lucid blonde wood modernism of mid-century Scandinavia that has by now been trampled into something close to meaninglessness but an organic version, pleasingly imperfect, and deliberately homespun.

Uncertainty agitates change, so there's some natural rejection here of the slick, machined aesthetic of retailers like IKEA, who did more to promote a European idea of accessible, functional modern design among Americans than anyone, as well as its step-up alternative, West Elm, which did more to flatten that idea into a smooth pablum. This rougher strain of modernism, as optimized for Instagram, also rejects the so-called minimalism that we’ve been told, endlessly, gained favor as an aesthetic marker of enlightened consumerism but has also mostly been hollowed out by commodification. Instead, online shops like Tiwa Select and Cholo Clown advertise “found objects” like weathered Japanese Noh masks and $650 sets of ceramic "vessels” as a more soulful choice for the youngish and urbane who find themselves adrift in a spiral jetty of fraught taste.

There’s comfort in the handmade, but the style mostly flatters the self-conception of the consumer for whom mass retailers have become too provincial (though they too now offer an $800 “primitive vessel” print, credit to their trend team), even if the act of ownership is just as bloodless. These accounts seek to elevate housewares to the station of fine art, without having to metabolize art’s potentially messy provenance and history. There's something to be said for making beautiful things more accessible, a response to auction house dominance and the increasing inaccessibility of the art market. Amie Siegal's 2013 film Provenance addressed this feedback loop brilliantly, tracing the market for modernist Jeanneret chairs from dusty piles in forgotten Chandigarh storage rooms to the whipped flurry of auction to the genteel stasis of living rooms in London and New York. Online antique shops feel like both an answer to that loop but also an extension of it. There is minimal emotional investment in clicking to buy a pile of Japanese restaurant matchboxes from the 40s-80s, a recent Tiwa offering, and even less friction. They sold, of course, and I wonder what their new owner will do with them, souvenirs of memories he doesn’t have.

As more of us remain moored in our own homes, our gaze is drawn, on a daily basis, to the inadequacies of our space. The small faults that were tolerable when we had places to go and restaurants to dine in have become less so. Feathering our nests has become less a hobby than survivalist priority, the million things we’re forced to look at every day becoming either a balm on our mental health, or a burden. So the turn toward a more deliberate decor is expected. “Buying less, better things,” is effectively the millennial cri de coeur, its superficial virtuousness banging on like an unending TED Talk in high-minded drag, shaming us for owning cheap, mass-produced furnishings.

But there is also something sinister, latently colonial even, in mashing distinct folk arts divorced from their cultural contexts into Instagram-calibrated vignettes. “Found objects” necessitates the question, “Found by whom?” Who are these for? Everyone their own private studio apartment Christopher Columbus, endlessly curating small corners with vaguely African wenge wood stools. It's the same misplaced virtue that animated Airbnb’s promise of a more intimate or profound engagement with one's world (the persistent lie of the “global citizen”), while the real effect was the propagation of simultaneous housing crises. Tiwa Select is run by Alex Tieghi-Walker, who has worked as a creative lead for Airbnb, an overlap that doesn't exactly feel like a coincidence.

Jonny Ribeiro, the Sante Fe-born, Brooklyn-based interior designer who runs Cholo Clown, writes that the objects he deals in are given “new meaning by preserving and contextualizing them in our own world.” He also writes, “we are custodians of these relics.” But those two ideas are at odds. Recontextualizing relics necessitates at least a small erasure of their history. Some of Cholo Clown’s listings credit an artist, but the provenance of others, like a “vintage wood puzzle block mold” (sold for $850.00) or “impasto painting of blonde women” (sold for $450.00), is anyone’s guess.

Ribeiro too does creative work elsewhere. His credits include interiors at Ralph Lauren’s private RRL Ranch in Colorado, a supreme fantasia of the American West as conjured by Lauren, a master of American self-invention. There’s an overlap with Lauren’s worldview too, a totalizing vision of luxury expression that sprung from the Bronx-born child of immigrants and eventually touched every aspect of what has come to be referred to as “lifestyle.” Ribeiro’s goals are so far more modest, but it’s easy to see in his spare inventory and Instagram staging the hinting at a total lifestyle, one enlivened by enigmatic biomorphic sculptures and Ligne Roset Togo chairs (a creative director favorite). It’s unclear how deeply these Instagram purveyors are versed in early 20th century Japanese aesthetic movements, but it also doesn’t matter. Their rarefied presentation and pricing vacates any claims to mingei’s governing idea. Aside from their functionality, a principle mingei criterion was that an object be accessible to the masses. “Society cannot be proud when a product is available to only a select few,” Yanagi said. “Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.”The reflex is attractive. Brands need only insert a few pieces of modernist art into their mood boards to telegraph a moneyed sophistication. Smoothed and curated for the benefit of wealthy aesthetes, a fetish for organicism becomes a shorthand for good taste.

In addition to functional, rough-hewn pottery, the ceramicist Jim McDowell makes face jugs, disquieting pieces with human likenesses seized in rictus grins or baffled consternation. Most if not all of them have Black features, somewhat exaggerated, thick lips and broad noses with flaring nostrils. This is because, as McDowell writes, slaves were denied gravestones, so face jugs, made by enslaved Africans like his great aunt, took their place. His practice seeks to honor that history. “My face jugs are ugly because slavery was ugly,” McDowell writes. You can buy McDowell’s face jugs through Tiwa Select, but you would have to do your own research to know anything about them. In a digital showroom, they’re presented as a piece of decor, the same as a sake cup, or a ceramic lemon juicer.

There’s something jarring about seeing McDowell’s face jugs in the Noyes House, the International style pavilion that the architect Eliot Noyes built for his family in New Canaan, Connecticut. McDowell’s work is part of Tieghi-Walker’s contribution to an exhibition of contemporary design organized in part by the design fair Object & Thing that also features work from Mark Grotjahn, Lynda Benglis, and Green River Project, the overall effect being a high-test Instagram feed brought to life. Clearly the organizers knew who they were talking to. Reservations for viewing slots are sold out, and the waitlist is closed. McDowell’s jugs, placed on a handsome, low-slung Brazilian modern coffee table, look as shocked as anyone.

Max Lakin is a journalist in New York City. His writing has also appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, GARAGE, The New Yorker, and more.