On a more sinister note, at the 1993 murder trial in absentia of the Philadelphia guru Ira Einhorn, an empty defendant's chair was retained. Above all, the chair is a memorial, a common gravestone image of the nineteenth century. The patriarchal Puget Sound industrialist John S. McMillan even memorialized himself and his family as a set of chairs around a dinner table. Yet chairs can stand for social disorder as well as order. A chair lying on its side in a painting or print like Hogarth's Marriage la Mode is a convention for a disordered life.
Chairs remain potent emblems both of human variety and of common fate in our own time.
Photographs of a handful of chairs in the street have represented conflagration and survival in modern Lebanon and Bosnia. Doug Fitch '81 demonstrates his version of radical reclining. Designed in a sophomore tutorial at Harvard, the chair flips over for prone reading and may be stood on end as sculpture. Courtesy Doug Fitch on the Day Without Art by assembling dozens of chairs and stools of every kind in a gentle spiral. In our presence, as well as in our absence, we lend our character to our chairs.