Pat Tyree's Instruction Manuals

Pat Tyree uses John Tiong Chunghoo’s haiku, “The futon stored away a low table and some plates there – our dining room,” to inspire his work. The use of an instruction manual implies that the user must build their own furniture, and often times the furniture one must build is low quality. This translates the image of a low-income household from the poem; a futon and a low table, assumingly a coffee table, being used as a dining room table gives the reader an image of a household that has not been fully or properly furnished. The work also resembles instruction manuals that come with many Ikea products, even going so far to use the same typeface, Helvetica. The brand is known to produce cheap furniture so this only emphasizes the artist’s intentions
There are no written instructions to the piece, so it calls the user to use a do-it-yourself approach to the building of their own Low Table. The ambiguity of the objects and their dimensions would only bring the user even more frustration by being unable to know specifically what to buy. People look towards instruction manuals to guide them, but Tyree’s does the opposite by communicating images that can be interpreted in many ways, such as the rectangles. One can assume that they are lumber, but they can also be metal or another substance. The only measurement on the entire sheet is “1/4,” but no unit of measurement is applied, so this is essentially useless. Formally, the objects are arranged on the page in an unexpected way. There is a piece underneath the screws that could fit perfectly at the top, but Tyree has purposely decided to place it in a crowded area. His decision to place one extra staple at the end of the top row also seems to be teasing the viewer as well as putting objects both flush left and flush right. The work is also extremely large compared to a normal instruction manual, causing the reader to struggle with viewing the entire piece at once when holding it in their hands. These small decisions in the work that frustrate the viewer bring about a larger meaning in the work and the poem. Chinghoo’s poem