Outside on Wilson’s private deck, seven simple chairs painted white or left as unfinished wood are arranged around a Javanese teak chaise. Wilson bought these pieces from Bali, which he visits every December—some at a gallery called Aulia in 1998, the rest from his friend Nunung, who runs an eponymous antiques shop in Denpasar. Their placement at awkward distances from one another prescribes an intellectual gathering, not a relaxing afternoon nap or sunbathing session, thus incarnating Wilson’s maxim, “Comfort is a state of mind.”

Downstairs from Wilson’s quarters is the center’s main gallery, a double-height space with a second-story balcony. There, an ice-fishing stool from Greenland, made of wood, hide and fur and acquired through the dealer Björn Wandall, in Denmark, sits next to a prototype for the noted Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld’s asymmetrical Berlin Chair, from 1922. Beside them is one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s austere seats for his Unity Temple building, in Oak Park, Illinois; Wilson bought it in 1992 at Michael FitzSimmons Decorative Arts, in Chicago. The chairs are arranged in an order that suits Wilson for now, but those who know him fully expect the installation to change at any moment. “Bob constantly rethinks the organization of his pieces,” Siebert notes. “Not just to accommodate new acquisitions but also to generally mix things up and make them new, keep them alive.”

At the other end of the gallery, a wooden Donald Judd desk-and-chair set—the epitome of understated elegance—clashes with the nearby Miss Blanche Chair, 1988, cheekily constructed by the famed 20th-century Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata from acrylic resin decorated with red paper roses. The latter limited-edition work, like many of Wilson’s own designs, is named after a character from a play (A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche DuBois). Wilson acquired it privately in New York in 2001 for $51,000—a steal, considering that an example of the same model went for $86,000 in 1997 at a Christie’s New York design auction and that another resides at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Given how much character each of Wilson’s chairs possesses, one can’t help but wonder which is his favorite. “Maybe the Rietveld or a little seat made for me by a four-year-old boy out of colored plastic straws,” he says when asked, his own childlike sense of wonder in evidence. It’s hard, though, to imagine a chair that could embody Robert Wilson: unique, provocative and never one to sit idle.

"Chairperson" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.