Interiors by Pardo - Jorge Pardo installations at Dia Art Foundation - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2001 by Nancy Princenthal

Jorge Pardo gallery installation and redesign of the public areas at New York's Dia Center inject a blend of high modernism and hothouse color into the industrial landscape of Chelsea.

It's hard to overstate what a lung-filling exhilaration it is to step into the Dia Center's West 22nd Street lobby as transformed by Jorge Pardo. The entryway has been expanded, and additional windows provide abundant light, which is revved up by ceramic tiles laid on the floor and around columns in sunny shades of orange, gold, lemon, pale blue and lime. The admission desk is now an island in a sea of open space that flows back and left toward a greatly enlarged bookstore, featuring bright, comfortable high-modernist furniture (including classics by Marcel Breuer and George Nelson). The tiles and the glass-walled openness extend to the ground-floor gallery, where Pardo has installed Volkswagen's full-scale model for its 1995 Beetle. There is also an enormous computer-generated mural by Pardo on one wall and, positioned unobtrusively in a hallway, a rather battered-looking wardrobe designed by Alvar Aalto for a Finnish sanatorium. A final component of the 9,000-square-foot project is a cluster of five hanging lamps made of nested red and orange glass bells, visible through the windows of an adjoining office.

The associations that come to mind are varied: in addition to automobile showroom and clinic, they include school cafeteria, airport terminal and ladies' lounge, all ca. 1960, or, in the present, a retro-chic design store. Art museum is not high on the list. But then nothing here supports simple art/design distinctions. On the one hand, the prototype Beetle is fabricated of non-drying brown clay, making it the very image of (arty) uselessness; on the other, the mural in the gallery is printed on paper adhered to the wall, which, along with its irresistible and utterly unobjectionable abstract forms, makes it a lot like (functional) wallpaper. Deliberate category swapping of this kind is, of course, a late-20th-century and contemporary staple, often animated by a desire to send up the commercialism of much fine-art practice or to stretch beyond narrow expressive intentions. What distinguishes Pardo's approach (and that of some of his peers, Andrea Zittel most prominently) is that such issues are not engaged critically.

Rather, Pardo operates in a nonpartisan spirit of rampart-crashing good cheer. Richard Gluckman's 1987 design for Dia was acclaimed for its clarity, purity and flexibility, and on the ground floor, as throughout the building, the spaces seem hushed, grave, even reverential. In this context, Pardo's installation is a little like laughing in church. But then, unapologetic good cheer seems son to be suffusing the New York art scene this season, starting in the upstairs galleries at Dia, where Bridget Riley's giddily dazzling paintings are hanging [see "The Serious Slapstick of Martin Kersels"].

Pardo, whose most ambitious project to date is his own Los Angeles house (it constituted an offsite exhibition at L.A. MOCA in 1998) [see "Front Page," Dec. '98], has designed this first major East Coast undertaking as a framework. Revisiting the rigors of modernism during a period that favors flow, even blur, and the breezy interpenetration of indoors and out, car culture and gallery going, Pardo is the wiliest of Bauhaus legatees. Everything looks good in his work's light, and if the price is a slightly vertiginous inclination toward art-design-fashion homogeneity, it seems a small price to pay.

Jorge Pardo's gallery installation at Dia Center for the Arts runs through June 17,' it will be reconfigured for Dia's September reopening, following the center's annual summer hiatus. The bookstore and lobby will remain as long-term installations.

Author: Nancy Princenthal is a critic based in New York.