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Interview: Seth Footring
Black Helmut occupy that interesting liminal space between product and art where there’s a level of thought that goes beyond cool for the sake of cool. During this conversation I got a real sense that these two guys are sensitive to art and taste but also appreciative of people who actually make things for a living and I think that their products are a reflection of that. The products are a combination of grit-under-the-fingernails workshops and refined artistic taste: beautiful folding chairs and matching table, limestone bookcase lamps and more.
Seth Footring: Could you give us an intro to who you are and Black Helmut?
Curtis Felton: Okay, here we go. Curtis Felton from Grand Rapids, Michigan, 160, height 6 feet tall.
We were both in San Diego; he was at school, I was living life and kind of learning to know how to make things in a fabrication shop. We became friends through running into each other at punk shows/similar works places/similar friends. I have to give a lot of credit to COVID to be totally honest, it's like our hands needed to be forced to finally think really hard and critically about what we want to do with the skills that we have and it became clear that it was art/objects. We want to keep evolving, whether it's education or I don't even know what, I keep forgetting what ideas I have but right now, it's furniture and sculpture. I hate referencing
Chase T Young: We will bleep that out, we'll just say redacted...
Curtis Felton: So in the middle of 2020 is when we shook hands, we spoke the same language and then of course a few months after that, I moved to Indiana and he moved to London. So that was pretty fun. I feel like a quite common question people ask is where is Black Helmut? It’s redacted on the bio because we actually don't have an actual physical home.
Chase T Young: I'm Chase Young. 150 , five foot nine.
We don't live in the same place. Nor have we, the only time we ever lived in the same city was when we started like Black Helmut in 2020. He moved out of San Diego in October 2020. I moved to England in 2021. He is now back Western Michigan. So this is us in Detroit [earlier this year] actually being in a space together physically and designing and talking as we're doing it in the same space is like a really unique fun thing. It's when we're at our best, we have more ideas in two hours when we're together than we do in three months when we're trying to do phone calls. We have the same ideas at the same time.
Seth Footring: How do you decide who does what for the brand?
Curtis Felton: So when we started Chase had a certain amount of skills and I had certain other skills and now we're evolving. Yes, I'm more of the hands on engineering building, but we design collaboratively.
Chase T Young: Even when I was in London, all of the operations were always wherever Curtis was because Curtis has been he's been making stuff since he was a child. Like he's been making stuff longer than I've been alive. You've been making stuff since you were like ten...
Curtis Felton: That's possibly true...
Chase T Young: Insanely true, so true! People always are like very complimentary to the level of craftspersonship that the work has. That's literally all Curtis. I've sanded the top of this DJ booth and that is probably the most time I've ever spent physically making a Black Helmut object. I was never where that stuff was so I don't really care that the world knows that but it feels like an even split between us for the brand and how people know Black Helmut is very equitable. We both possess the voice and we speak from the same point of view about Black Helmut; it’s a collective voice that we've established together.
Seth Footring: Tell us about the DJ booth you’re making and what you’re up to in Detroit.
Chase T Young: We ended up doing it out of like found brick, cinder block. We were doing research and watching different boiler room sets and DJ booths always look the exact same so we like wanted to really freak it and just like have some fun with it and luckily this guy [they’re working with] is like pretty open and was just down to do something crazy.
Seth Footring: How Burning Man does it look?
Chase T Young: There's this artist from like the 70s in the US called Gordon Matta-Clark. He would find an abandoned home and then crack it in half straight down of the middle, almost like found architectural salvage. So the DJ booth feels a lot more calculated than like Burning Man'd out.
We're putting the finishing touches on it. We need to retain this pride in the material as the material rather than like trying to narratise it into being some fake historical bullshit like Daniel Arsham style or like Damien Hirst style. So it's, it's been interesting, we’ve really enjoyed it and Detroit is a very, very sick place.
Seth Footring: I only know Detroit from Danny Brown and all those urban decay pictures that were in like the New York Times.
Chase T Young: Prince Concepts, the guys that we're working with, built this as like mixed use park, planted a ton of trees and really retained a lot of the spirit of what Detroit is. It's not like about like making this perfect image of Detroit or making it in the image of like other successful cities, it's about like letting the charm of Detroit and the emergent qualities of Detroit be themselves. The space we’re in is a gallery in an old mechanics building. To our left, there's a gallery called Materia and then to the right there's a restaurant.
Instead of like doing a full landscape run he'll spread 1000s of Clover seeds over a field and that is the landscape. Clover is an endemic weed. We really aligned with the philosophy that this guy is pushing.
Seth Footring: And you were in New York before that?
Curtis Felton: We did a pop-up show here a month ago. We got this incredible hookup for an office space here that was like an unfinished, awesome, huge industrial space. We were let's just have fun with this and curate it with some artists and showcase our work, meet people, have some drinks and a DJ, let’s be the catalyst of something for many people, not just us and it was an art party too.
We got connected with Prince Concepts and through the event it’s opened up some really cool projects that we're working on. This is the first of many so we're doing a site specific, functional sculpture that happens to be a DJ booth and we're gonna be looking at something soon in a few more weeks. So Chase will be doing a lot more flying this summer than expected.
Chase T Young: I did just get the Spirit Airlines credit card though, Spirit is like the American version of like the Ryan Air but it makes Ryanair look like shit.
Curtis Felton: I did not want to talk about Spirit Airlines.
Chase T Young: I'm a huge Spirit Airlines guy, I just got the credit card, you spend $1,000 they give you 10 free flights. If you spend $1,000 in the first 60 days of having the credit card. Why would you not do that?
Curtis Felton: What do you call it when you're supposed to like market another company?
Chase T Young: I don't know. But I just did. Because I love spirit brand. Sir, I would love to fly Delta. We don't have the bread so I fly Spirit and that's okay.
Seth Footring: Nice. Would you do a collaboration if they asked you?
Chase T Young: I would collaborate with Spirit Airlines in a heartbeat. [to Curtis] Dude new tray tables!
Curtis Felton: Actually... the cart that they push down the aisle would be sick.
Seth Footring: So what else was happening in New York?
Chase T Young: We participated in NADA Flea, NADA is the New Art Dealers Alliance, which we were stoked on because NADA is a big deal in the art world. They work with a lot of like smaller galleries, non-blue chip galleries, their goal is to always be working with galleries that are that have been started by real people, not trust fund galleries.
They put on this event every year called NADA Flea, which is a showcase just in their office space in the Lower East Side in New York. We were there as like kind of the only furniture/art/objects people. So it was essentially a very cool visual exploration because we had never seen our stuff in that way, which was really interesting. The sickest thing about it, though, was people coming through.
On the Friday night before NADA we get word that the L train is not running for the weekend, we were just like, great it's over, there are no Black Helmut fans in Manhattan, they're all in Brooklyn. Black Helmut is in New York City, or Brooklyn, they’re the vast majority of people who purchase directly. But roundabout way to say it was very sick of meeting people who came to this event, specifically because they had like been following Black Helmut for a while it was incredibly cool. It was like having people come specifically to hang out for 20 minutes.
Seth Footring: Do you have a big scary workshop with lots of fun looking machines in it?
Chase T Young: We’re very fortunate to have access to those things but we do not have that personally.
Curtis Felton: I mean, I would say this is like a kind of a direct kind of quote from Damien Hirst too and it's true, his favourite part of the entire creative process, definitely back then and not now, were the relationships he made. He had to work with these blue collar boys who had no idea what he was talking about. That's exactly how I felt, it's my favourite part, going into these machine shops where they're making parts for John Deere tractors but they're like, “wait, what do you want done?”
I'm like, I need this done perfectly this way. And they're like, “Okay, I guess”, but they nailed it. We have a couple of machine shops across the Midwest that we go to for the folding table and a folding chair. But for stonework there's a studio in Bloomington where we get all the limestone from that we make stuff there. It's kind of like super inconvenient but also it's just the reality of what we have access to.
Chase T Young: Doing this stuff is incredibly expensive to fabricate. Especially when you have big ideas, sometimes they're not the easiest thing in the world to fabricate. A long term goal for Black Helmut is to be able to create a space that has all the big scary machines without a big scary vibe.
Seth Footring: You guys seem to be really in to art history and the history of design, are there any artists or designers you like or that you don’t like?
Chase T Young: It's sick to be the position where you can say who you don't like and it doesn't matter.
Chase T Young: We have some we have some heroes and we also have some Black Helmut heroes, in the spirit of why we do what we do.
Curtis Felton: Chris Burden.
Chase T Young: We're huge Chris Burden fans. You know, he's the artist who famously had himself shot in a gallery space, but that's not why we fuck with him really at all...
Curtis Felton: His performance and sculpture and his process and whatever he's expressing, that's exactly how what we're channeling things in our design process, especially with Beam Drop.
Chase T Young: I think it's a really big one for us. Beam Drop is huge, it is my whole shit. Then Gordon Matta-Clark. We can go on and on about like, I really liked the California light movement and that sort of thing like Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, those sort of fellas. We both are really inspired by Earth Work, which is unlike the original. We probably don't even need to mention Donald Judd but he’s someone we're both huge fans of.
Curtis Felton: We can say confidently our most favourite artist to experience in real life is Walter De Maria.
Chase T Young: Walter De Maria goes so hard. Earth Throne in New York...
Curtis Felton: It's a big influence
Curtis Felton: One artist that I don't have a lot of respect for is KAWS. Fuck KAWS.
Chase T Young: KAWs definitely, like KAWS by name like all caps K-A-W-S is like, I would like go to where was I was in some major European city at their contemporary art. I walk up to the contemporary art museum, and there's a giant KAWS sculpture, and the whole Museum's just KAWS why are we doing that? It's just really tough for me. They're action figures, they're not art work.
Seth Footring: RIP KAWS. Could you talk about the process of what you choose to design next and in what material?
Curtis Felton: That process has been pretty organic: we started doing smaller stuff like the wall racks and then the folding chairs. In some ways it's the dumbest, hardest thing to do but we always knew we were going to do a folding chair that had functionality. After that it's like well, a chair needs a table. The whole process was never too thought out.
Then I started experimenting in stone so we've been playing around with limestone. I would say what we're most excited about is it's like moving forward is lighting. We have a really cool dining room table idea that I'm pretty stoked about too. When we sell enough stuff, then we have money to make the next thing. It's just trying to build out our arsenal; trying to expand our moodboard.
I don’t love working with wood that much. It's so high maintenance structurally, it needs so much help and the same with steel but stone is just blowing my mind; I love how gate kept it is and I love how heavy it is.
Chase T Young: It's interesting, though, because you asked about concrete but it’s limestone and the assumption is always that it's concrete, because that is what people think about the material.
Curtis Felton: We do want to do some cast concrete, I just said we're trying to find a concrete that isn't so destructive.
Chase T Young: Yeah, concrete is really tough on the environment. So is every material ever but we try to look for solutions but even aluminum is tough because it's really difficult to find aluminum that is actually infinitely recyclable. We really do try with what we do to steward like ecological responsibility that is important to us, just like where things are made is really important to us. And we really work hard to get parts fabricated in the US, which most people just don't do. It's a lot more expensive. It's a lot slower.
Curtis Felton: I just got hit with my favourite reason why I love stone, which is because wood and metal turned to ash, it will fall apart but stone will literally live on forever.
Seth Footring: I guess most people don’t know all that much about the materials in front of them or what it takes to make something.
Curtis Felton: I don't want to weld a bunch as it’s really labour intensive but I love how it looks when metal is bent. I had do all this research and there's two types of aluminimum: 5052 which can bend but everything else is 6061. So then I had to convince the guys in the shop that this was actually 5052 that it was not going to break.
Seth Footring: Do you have a favourite non-Black Helmut item in your life?
Chase T Young: All of my books. I love print and I never ever get rid of a book. I have a bookcase and my wife really likes the bookcase colour coded. So like there'll be like Sally Rooney next to the xenofeminist manifesto which I think is like so funny.
Curtis Felton: A Leatherman, or there's a lamp by this design studio named Caster that I think is very inspiring to me.
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Links:
Issy Wood - Artworks for Sale & More | Artsy
The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation: Amazon.co.uk: Laboria Cuboniks: 9781788731577: Books
Gordon Matta-Clark | MoMA
Walter De Maria | Gagosian
Chris Burden’s Impossible Artworks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
014 - 5K, Detroit — Prince Concepts