Havana born artist, Jorge Pardo, recently had his first comprehensive exhibition in the United States at the Miami Center for Contemporary Art. His show, titled House, is a re-instillation of past works dating from his first solo exhibition in 1988 through 2007. Pardo’s past and present styles merge and are not categorized or recognized in the exhibit. Pardo combines mural sized photographs, ornately fashioned light fixtures, hand crafted furniture, geometric wall paintings, and everyday objects to create a unique interior space structured around the concept of a house.
Postcard for Workshop at Miami Center for Contemporary Art
Image: Jorge Pardo, Living Room, 2007
Pardo’s House is both familiar and oddly disconcerting. At the exhibit, viewers will be reminded of the interior space of a house; there is a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, a library, and a backyard complete with a swimming pool. The house lacks a bathroom, attic, or basement, but oddly has a café and a studio space. The vast open space of the rooms, the household items stripped of their usefulness, and the gallery setting, create an overall feeling of perplexity in House.
Floor plan of exhibit for Jorge Pardo: House
The different gallery spaces of the Miami museum have been opened up and connected for Pardo’s exhibit. The open floor plan, with rooms divided by partitions, allows visitors to meander through the various spaces. The rooms are large and loop into each other without obvious entrances and exits. This lack of a predetermined pathway creates the effect of disorganization and disorientation within the gallery.
Pardo’s House feels strange because it is so large. The rooms are sprawling and the ceilings high. Because the partitions do not enclose any space nor reach the ceiling, none of the rooms feel cozy. The sparsely decorated rooms are very open and create a feeling of vulnerability. The gallery has high ceilings and an emptiness, which makes Pardo’s House feel like a cold and sterile warehouse.
Another factor contributing to the unsettling feeling of Pardo’s House is the lack of privacy. In a normal house there is a hierarchy of space; some rooms are public space and others private. For example, living rooms or kitchens are public and designed to entertain company, while a bedroom is usually a private room. In Pardo’s House, all rooms are open and public; there are no intimate spaces allowed for privacy. The lack of privacy and vastness of space produces a sense of vulnerability.
Several of the rooms in Pardo’s House contribute to the idea of an all-inclusive exhibit, but don’t fit well into the concept of recreating a house. The café and studio are particularly out of place. The café is created from photos of the “Mountain Bar” in L.A.’s Chinatown which Pardo owns. It is separate from the house and fills a long hallway, which leads to nowhere. Red, plastic, spider-like light fixtures hang from the ceiling.
Mountain Bar -Wall Mural for Hallway
The studio area is created by a photo mural of both the interior and exterior of Pardo’s studio, a work bench with a computer, and some of Pardo’s early photographic work.
Jorge Pardo Studio -Wall Mural for Office
Untitled 2005 – Work Table and Computer in Office
These two spaces seem most incompatible with the exhibit because they are locations not usually associated with a home environment. The café and studio spaces remind us that we are not in a house but in a gallery transformed.
One concept Pardo revisits in each room is to question how the viewer reacts in gallery setting where familiar objects are arranged in a way to indicate rooms in a house. In House, Pardo has removed the functional and practical aspects of a real home; none of the rooms can actually be used for their regular purposes.
The most obvious way Pardo strips his rooms of their functionality is by completing them with photographic wall murals. In the kitchen the only real objects are a refrigerator, an inexpensively constructed island, and an espresso machine. The refrigerator works, or at least is plugged in, but there is uncertainty about working state of the espresso maker. The rest of the kitchen is completed by wall photographs of the sink, cabinets, and countertops. The wall murals suggests a kitchen, yet also draw attention to the fact we cannot use the cabinets or sink because they are only photographs. Like his kitchen, Pardo’s exhibit borders being art and being everyday.
Sea View Lane -Wall Mural for Kitchen
Pardo has a reputation for reconstructing everyday objects and making them impractical. The most obviously impractical items in House were Pardo’s beds and couch. The beds were suggested by large, yellow pieces of cardboard folded into the shapes of mattresses with polar fleece pillows thrown on them.
Wolfram 1997, Max jr. 1997 (left), Max 1997 (right) -Cardboard Bed Forms
Pardo’s couch is unusable as it is made solely of welded, copper pipes. Pardo’s furniture is art only after he removes its functional qualities, and Pardo does well. Museum guests have to carefully inspect Pardo’s objects to decipher whether they have been altered and whether they are an object d’art or an everyday item. All of Pardo’s objects are innovatively constructed and have a modern aesthetic.
Le Corbusier Sofa 1990 – Couch in Living Room
The gallery setting for Pardo’s exhibition also adds confusion to his work. Pardo’s earlier exhibitions have taken place in less traditional settings such as, peoples’ homes and garages, which further blurs the line between art and commonplace. Bedroom furniture is familiar when in a home, yet made strange when arranged in a gallery setting. “Do not touch” signs prohibit the viewers from feeling at home in House, as do the overly attentive museum guards.
Visitors have the option of taking a brochure listing the dates and titles of Pardo’s work, but no titles are displayed in the gallery. The lack of labels in the gallery makes the exhibit feel more like a house than an exhibit, but also poses questions. Which items are art? What is this artwork about?
Pardo’s exhibit is successful; it forces viewers to question their relationship to his work. Pardo’s House is certainly not a comfortable, cozy house or a house at all, yet it suggests rooms in a home. Like most real homes, House has furniture, walls, rooms, and even decorations on the walls, yet House bewilders viewers by denying some of the realities of a house. Aficionados are not sure if they are seeing art or seeing a modern and artistic home, which is disconcerting. When seeing Pardo’s work, one is not entirely convinced that they are experiencing art or the everyday, but something in between. Visiting Pardo’s House is an inclusive, aesthetic experience, and branches many areas of art and design, while its overall effect is oddly perplexing. House is not a home, but an interesting, thought provoking, and well-rounded art experience.
