Jorge Pardo.

PATRICK PAINTER

Jorge Pardo's latest show consisted of four bedroom suites, i.e., furniture, and a string of lights. Like his sailboat (exhibited at the MCA in Chicago) and his house (built for his show at MOCA), Pardo wants everyone to consider the suites as sculpture, but what you see looking at them is blond wood, simple no-frills construction, little gradated touches of decorator colors, convenient drawers and surfaces for, oh, perhaps a Noguchi or Nelson lamp or some other moderne tchotchkes. The stripped-down simplicity is IKEA by way of Martha Stewart, with pretensions to the rigorous elegance of Eames and Neutra. The suites are meant to be used, that is, slept in. I'm not sure if the mattresses, pillows, and sheeting were to be taken as art or not. Laura Owens, Pardo's companion, contributed four pretty near identical paintings - beehivey doings in Halloween oranges and browns - that were hung with each of the four bedroom suites, like, gosh, representations of their honeylike domestic bliss.

Pardo has said that, inspired and influenced by the best Californian midcentury architecture and design, he wanted to make sculpture - objects - that would follow those modern tenets and at the same time perhaps thwart the museum's idea of what sculpture could and can be. He hasn't thwarted anything. For all its tasteful hues and familiar lines, it's hard not to sense in this project a calculated cynicism: If Pardo's presenting the work as sculpture, in a Duchampian gesture, it's a tired, not to mention facile reading of Duchamp; if he's offering a critique of the ease with which art (as a category), in conjunction with the museum, co-opts and/or trumps design and craft, he's done so by disregarding the careful and caring mechanisms, precision, and skill of the well-made, of the crafted.

Many have suggested that what is really inspiring about Pardo's work is his process, the fact that he is willing to engage anything - potentially any manner of making, any made thing - as an artist. That's fine, but if your bedroom suite doesn't really ever question what a bedroom is (a la Oldenburg) or, say, the strangeness of the materials and colors a vanity might consist of (a la Artschwager), why should your product qualify as art? Again, Duchamp (may) allow Pardo to have this stuff be considered art, but it doesn't redeem the work's poor design or crummy construction, and because his output is supposed to be art as well as utilitarian objects, this shoddiness interferes with the Duchampianism. Part of Duchamp's gesture was his savvy and humorous commentary and continuation of dandyism. There's no humor in Pardo's work, nothing so raffine. Even if you agree with his premise of opening up to the realm of art any number of disciplines, the list is long, very long, of "artists" who are better, more innovative: Philippe Starck is a better "artist"; Walter Chatham and Zaha Hadid are better "artists." But what's gained by considering their work "art"? Do they become more complex or vital or interesting or weird? I don't think so. Starck et al. do, at least, frequently question what a chair is, what constitutes a home - and perhaps in the process question the relation of these things to art. I adore bedroom suites; I sleep in one every night. But my sleep is no more just or restful thinking I'm doing it on art, and in the end, I care more for sleep.

For art to exist, for it to continue, for vital young presences to keep making it, for anyone who wants to ponder it in its most profound implications, there must be a belief that art can be anything - limitless, infinite, as simple and complex and daunting and doubtful as life and the contemplation of its opposite; but that is not the same thing as saying that everything gets to be art. It's not as if something interesting, something invigorating couldn't be made of Duchamp's questions about things. Compare Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist with whom Pardo shares - at some beginning point - an affinity. Tiravanija succeeds by thwarting the curating of many of his objects: If his wok is not continually used it will rust or grow fungus; if his plants, his bamboo tree, are put into archival storage, they'll die. Pardo wants to call attention to the highfalutin category of art by making mundane furniture, but his furniture, unlike Tiravanija's work, in no way changes in its new context - it remains furniture regardless of where or how it is to be used or curated or sold. With his house, his bedroom suites, his chairs, Pardo fails where Butt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick reached the sublime: That a house is still a house, a chair still a chair, is something to sing about, but it's really dull and annoying to manufacture the idea.