The Transposer
Sleight of Mind
Maker of Magic

For Dakota Jackson, a chair is a chair is not just a chair. There’s an element of physical and philosophical legerdemain that grooves perfectly with the parquet of his past. To start, there was his boyhood training, starting at age four, as a professional entertainer, a third generation magician who spent his New York-based kidhood in Manhattan, the boroughs, and their New England and Mid-Atlantic environs performing with his father and sisters. Then there were his teens and early twenties, when, while continuing to perform as a magician in the U.S. and Europe, he applied that same discipline to dance and the piano and, later still, to the design, manufacture and studied understanding of, and considered appreciation for, furniture.
            “I discovered I was a builder in the early 1970s when I moved into a loft in SoHo,” Jackson says, noting that this was bohemian SoHo (as opposed to Balenciaga SoHo) filled with rough spaces ready for art and artists and not kitted out with Bulthaup. Necessity being the mother of invention and, in Jackson’s hands systematic execution, he simply began making utilitarian objects, beds, bookcases and the like, while also learning the basics of electricity and plumbing. “It was without precedent; I had no formal education in design,” he says. “But what I did have was an intensity of focus and determination to elevate my skills to a level of accomplishment that would make my work desirable to others.” What he desired was that his work also be entertaining—on levels both obvious and subtle. “Magicians are always working with objects, implements and elements: boxes are used to disfigure, dismember and restore people, hats produce animals. It’s the endless idea of infinite possibility, and I wanted to transfer that to furniture.”
            Not surprisingly, fellow SoHo artists and magicians of all stripes were soon flocking to Jackson, asking for pieces to serve their quotidian as well as professional needs (he once made a birdcage large enough to hold a human, and there was no shortage of hidden compartments and cleverly concealed drawers). “As an entertainer and magician, you have to capture your audience, engage their attention, force them to surrender their beliefs,” Jackson says, “And do to this, you have to become accomplished, which requires intense rehearsal, as well as the critical ability to look at what you’re doing—not to look in wonder at what you’re doing, but how to consistently improve. Then you learn how to combine that facility with timing and interaction with an audience, and at last you have a performance. It is the same process, I found, with furniture.”
His watershed commission came in 1974 when Jackson was twenty-four years old. It was a desk, wooden, compact, with curved lines evoking the Art Deco style and meant to be a kind of interlocking Chinese puzzle. It was ordered by Yoko Ono as a present for her husband, John Lennon. “It was a functional writing table, something that anybody in the room could recognize,” Jackson explains, “But it was also something very private, a personal experience that was uniquely John’s.” Faster than you can say “Imagine,” high-profile commissions rolled in from the likes of singer-songwriter Peter Allen (a bar), for fashion designer and style setter Diane von Furstenberg (the Eclipse Bed), for Lorne Michaels (an executive desk), for Jann Wenner (a media console/library). Of equal importance to the Lennon commission itself, certainly in terms of Jackson’s development as a designer, it was the first time he thought “formally” about design, and therefore the first time he defined himself not as a builder but as a designer. Early pieces, such as the Saturn Stool and T-Bird Desk, “explored balance and the potential danger in objects,” says Jackson, and, made chiefly with industrial materials such as auto lacquer, glass, aluminum and other metals, they were represented by the seminal art furniture gallery Art and Industrie.
In hindsight a career’s genesis and chronology often assume the impression of ineluctability, as though these steps and those that followed were inevitable. But Jackson’s truth is far more involved, conscious and determined. “I didn’t want to be a sculptor, a fine artist,” he says, “I wanted to develop a connection between objects and use, between people and their individual experiences with those objects, to fuse functionalism with illusion and bring spontaneity and movement to my quest.” With no ideal school to attend, program to enroll in, or immediate role model or mentor at hand, Jackson did what any successful autodidact must do. He educated himself, and in so doing came to understand what part he wanted to play within a broader cultural, historical, artistic and industrial context.
First he drew distinctions between the history of decorative arts in Europe and in the U.S. In the former, high tariffs, political, cultural and language barriers, disparate traditions yielded multiple design centers and designer communities that in turn were supported by local industry. Jackson describes the result as a kind of Middle Eastern marketplace, a great overall emporium full of specific, unique, vibrant responses to local needs, tastes and interpretations. “It was an organized disorganized movement that developed over the last 300 years, and which, with government encouragement, coordinated avant garde artistic movements and industry.” As abstraction was explored before World War I in France as Art Nouveau, so was it explored in Germany as Jugendstil, in Austria as Sezessionstil, in Scotland as the “Glasgow” style (among other names), as Arte joven in Spain, as Arte nuova in Italy, as Art Nouveau in Belgium (the same name but a different interpretation than in France), and as Nieuwe kunst in the Netherlands. “One could almost call it tribal, and this innovative dynamic continued largely intact through the 1970s and ‘80s, as seen in examples of Memphis, [Ettore] Sottsass and the Superstudio, and in [Alessandro] Mendini’s work. Looking at it as a big picture, there were consistent creative waves that swept over Europe, explosions of exuberance and development of design, different colors in different places and at different intensities, but in terms of a continental canvas, ongoing and consistent.”
There was no correlative in the U.S. “The highs and lows are tied to manufacturing,” says Jackson, who sees inconsistency in the last sixty to seventy years in the relationship between design, the marketplace and their intermediary, industry. “The avant garde doesn’t work independently of industry, which has the ability to realize these designs.” Between the wars Jackson points to former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius at Harvard, Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, excellent exhibitions and shops at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, manufacturers such as Herman Miller that “were focused on innovators,” and widespread industrial interest in the burgeoning International Style. But post World War II, “everything came to relate to a task environment: partitional furniture, and tract homes and tract aesthetics, mostly dependent on traditional design.”
As such, while there was an avant garde in fine art, there was no dec art response to Abstract Expressionism, or later to Pop Art and Op Art, and although Jackson admires the post war greats of American studio furniture making, such as George Nakashima and Sam Maloof, for him that path held no interest. “I saw it as post Stickley, post Mission-style, anti-intellectual, anti-industrial and without an edge. Nor was it a movement.” Ditto the work of innovative mid-century designers such as Ray and Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, George Nelson, Ward Bennett and Vladimir Kagan; provocative but, for Jackson not part of something larger. And while he liked the creations of Richard Artschwager and Donald Judd appeal, they were interested in addressing furniture through a paradigm of fine art or, as Jackson says, of raising the question of function in an art piece. “They were speaking through art, and for what I was interested in, this was a conflict. I didn’t want ambiguity but a direct market for the furniture and my designs.”
Instead, for design clarification and inspiration Jackson turned to a discipline he knew well, modern dance, and the artistic movement that was then prevalent and, in SoHo, pervasive: minimalism. It was the breaking down of tropes, reduction, analysis. “Thinking and argument were important to me. When I was starting, I was very much influenced by the trajectory of dance, the repetitive line and the nuance of that line, as well as by the stream of movement,” he says, adding these influences were complemented, enhanced and reinforced by his study and appreciation of minimalism in fine art and music. “Once I understood materiality and context, I could move from the decorative to the fundamentals of design.” Artists particularly influential to Jackson include Phillip Glass, Terry Riley and Richard Serra, and choreographers Tricia Brown and Laura Dean, who “explored precise, geometric shapes and forms, and the dissected those forms,” and with whom Jackson worked.
An aesthetic and philosophical foundation established, one that would allow for experimentation and growth, the question then became: How to manufacture the designs? Jackson’s response was big and bold. He started his own factory. “As a kid, I’d always wanted to be an industrialist,” he says. The catalyst had nothing to do with the idea of being a Fat Cat in a limousine on 5th Avenue, but because he was fascinated with the idea of vertical integration: the conception of ideas and objects; the engineering and building of prototypes; the development of a production process; the creation of financial, marketing and distribution channels; the building of factories; the training of workers; and, above all, the creation of jobs and encouragement of craft and artistry.
Not by magic, but by the alchemy of sweat, creativity, resolution and the compelling power of excellence, Jackson built an atelier cum factory, where for the past 35 years the company has continually refined the proprietary techniques by which Jackson’s designs are realized. In addition to in-house manufacturing, Jackson is equally committed to fostering a diverse and creative atmosphere within the factory. For the last 20 years (or so), Jackson has had between two and five interns per semester from schools such as RISD and SCAD, and the company has long employed, sponsored or hosted designers and craftspeople from across the globe, each adding his or her own techniques and traditions to the mix. Among the factory’s employees, who currently number about 75, 15 different nationalities are represented.
Another aspect of the business during the early years was vintage and antique furniture restoration. “If you love furniture as I do, it’s perfect because there’s no way to be any closer to true masterpieces. I took them apart and put them back together. For two to three years I was the largest antique restorer in the U.S.,” Jackson says. He also, in 1979, started his own piano company, recruiting Steinway’s head foreman and “best ten furnishers.” Apparently there were no hard feelings, because in 2000 Steinway & Sons invited Jackson to take charge of their Tricentennial Piano, an edition of 300 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the modern piano. Designed and engineered by Jackson, the instrument included a number of new mechanical components that became part of a single production language and standard for both Steinway America and Steinway Hamburg—a success prompting Jackson’s 2007 Grand Concert Piano, a limited edition grand piano manufactured jointly by Jackson and Steinway and intended for use in concert halls, and the Arabesque, scheduled for completion in late 2010 or early 2011 and available for commission.
From the formation of the company, Jackson’s work has been included in any number of gallery and museum exhibitions: Further Furniture, curated by the Surrealist historian Nicholas Calas at the Marion Goodman Gallery, the Cooper Hewitt (where an archive of Jackson’s drawings is maintained), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the London Design Museum, the Deutsches Arkitecktur Museum, and “Skin,” curated by Ellen Lupton at the Cooper Hewitt and currently touring Europe, including the Vitra Museum in Germany. Jackson’s designs are included in many of these and other institutions’ permanent collections.
With “Skin,” Jackson explored light and transparency, which in some ways brought him full circle back to magic. “Magicians, you see, never conceal. Like light, they direct attention.” What he’s thinking about now? “The iPhone, which is like a high-tech vending machine, the kind you see in Japan, and consumerism, and how we’re responding to all of this,” he says, adding that the forms have not yet crystallized. “It’s a little like the 1960s and Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, hearing light and seeing sound.”
Whatever dreams and designs may come, Jackson’s vision for his company remains unchanged: to continue to build on the foundations that carry his brand forward with meaningful, well-made design developed by highly trained designers, craftspeople and engineers, and manufactured in-house through a hybrid of high-tech, cost-effective production techniques alongside skilled craftsmanship. Forever modern—and magical.