Chakaia Booker. Empty Seat.

A sealed corridor and the smell of rubber

From 1 November to 21 December 2024, David Nolan Gallery in New York showed Empty Seat, an exhibition by Chakaia Booker. Visitors opened double doors into a narrow corridor linking two airtight rooms.

The first thing they met was not a work but a smell. Faint but distinct. The smell of industrial manufacturing, of things being made and chemically transformed. The Brooklyn Rail reviewer noted a strange mix in it: newness and debris at once. Like walking into a garage or a factory.

The smell led the way. Visitors followed it down the corridor before their eyes found anything. The sealed rooms held it in, keeping it from drifting into the street.

The source was the material. Every work in the room was made from old tyres.

Burnt and flattened tyres, gathered from the city

Booker gathers burnt or collapsed tyres from around the city. She cuts, shears, warps and rivets them onto wooden backings or metal supports. It is demanding work, refined over some three decades.

The colour is the black of rubber, which comes from carbon black added in tyre manufacture. In places the surface flashes an almost metallic sheen. In others, the bead wire shows, the steel hidden in the rim.

The largest work was Empty Seat, from 2006, measuring about 6 by 15 by 2 feet. Twisted rubber rises toward the ceiling as if trying to break from the wall. The reviewer saw a cyborg creature in a wild dance.

Beside it hung Untitled from 1996: a wooden frame straining to contain a swarm of dismantled, contorted tyres. Bottom Half, from 2008, a creaturely cluster of strips, sat at the border of wall and floor. Strayed, from 2019, let go: strips hung on metal props, draping, curling, spilling onto the floor.

Rubber carries history

Tyres suggest speed, machines, things going obsolete fast. But rubber has a history older than the car: plantations, enslaved and forced labour tapping latex, an economy that took from land and people.

The review reads Booker's work within that history. The single black of rubber speaks to modernist traditions and to racial identity. The tread patterns, cut and rearranged, take on an abstractly African look.

The title plays on two opposite ideas: empty and full. An empty seat marks someone who has left. It is also a place kept for someone to come. Booker's work stands there, between remembering and forgetting.

The review says one more thing. These tyre beings do not look back. They seem to arrive from the future. Out of the waste of the machine age, Booker shapes forms that have no name yet.

Why the smell matters

Without the smell, these works would still stand. They have form, mass, deep black. But the smell keeps the visitor from forgetting that these are real tyres that ran on real roads.

A photograph of Empty Seat shows a striking black form. In the room you learn more: this material has been hot, worn, burned. It came from the kerb and the scrapyard. It has not stopped being itself.

That is why the rooms were sealed. The smell is not a side effect to be managed. It is part of the work, kept in the way a gallery keeps its light.

Many artists have brought smell into the gallery on purpose, as a material of its own; more on that in olfactory art. With Booker, smell is not added. It was in the object all along.