ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #24

Jorge Pardo @ Haunch of Venison, London, UK

Installation view, Haunch of Venison (2003)

For his first exhibition in London, artist Jorge Pardo fills the Haunch of Venison gallery with new lamps, paintings, drawings and cutouts. These aesthetic proxies represent the main part of the exhibition that is not in the gallery, but several time zones away from the UK -- a house in Merida, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula. The house, which is also for sale both as artwork and real estate, may well become someone's prized summer home. Pardo's art is often described as defying categorisation, and is always balanced between generous approachability and a philosophical entanglement in the sticky world of design and art. Born in Cuba (1963), Pardo lives and works in Los Angeles and is best known for his first house project, 4166 Seaview Lane (exhibition, MOCA, Los Angeles, 1998), and redesign of the DIA Art Foundation, New York (2000) bookstore, gift shop, and lobby gallery.

Jorge Pardo's exhibition at Haunch of Venison runs through the 24/01.



This interview took place in Jorge Pardo's studio on 16/01/04.

Jill Martinez Krygowski: In criticism written about your work, there is always some mention of it "defying conventional categorisation". Barring the perennial task of wrapping our pencils around an artwork that defies clear labelling, how would you describe what you do these days?

Jorge Pardo: In general, I've always addressed the problem of categorization as something to use discursively, but not necessarily definitively within a commitment to a practice. In other words, I've never thought of myself as a painter. I just think that there's not enough material in that tradition to address the things that I'm interested in. A big part of painting or painters that are considered interesting is that their faith based practitioners.

JMK: What do you mean by "faith based"?

JP: I believe that there is an aesthetic tradition that is kind of amorphous, and to connect to it you have to disregard how arcane it is or something like that, and go beyond that to continue to make paintings. The kind of art that I'm interested in making really addresses the potentiality of methods of what's around now. I make paintings, but in terms of what materials that they're on, there's a kind of expedient indifference towards that kind of stuff. There's a specific way of working. For example, a painting at Haunch of Venison is on a polyester fabric. It's kind of funny and gives a kind of density to the image. It's not canvas. Sometimes I paint on plastic, and images like this are used to maybe inform other projects that maybe are in the public sphere. I've always considered my exhibitions in galleries as very procedural in a sense. They are part of a process within the studio, putting up things that you're making that are in development. But I don't really do exhibitions for galleries; that's not the end of the road for the more interesting aspects of my work.

JKM: It's a demonstration of the process of how you're working through something.

JP: Exactly.

JKM You've described your work and how you work as a "system" of sorts. The large yellow painting in the Haunch of Venison show seems to have a lot of luminosity or transparency due the material. Can you describe how that functions in the "system", in regard to the whole exhibition?

JP: This painting could become a way of dealing with a window situation, or facade, or maybe some sort of application within a building. I do a lot of tile work and things like that, maybe an aspect of that gets used, or not used. It's about experimenting on that level.

JKM: Like a preparatory drawing?

JP: Like a preparatory drawing, in a way.

JKM: Or sketchbook?

JP: It's funny to call these exhibitions "sketches", because they're pretty fully realised as exhibitions. But in terms of how we operate here they really are precursive models for aspects of which get used in other ways. In the studio we make a lot of things and we're really efficient at it. We have a lot of technology and it's equivilant to something like a fabrication company. Early on I realised that was what I would need in order to work in a way that was interesting, to control the way things are made and not just have a studio where you set up ideas. I like to make things, I come from that tradition. I'm pretty much like a self-trained cabinetmaker. I've been building things since I was a kid. I just happen to have this crazy post '70s, post studio art education. It's kind of a way of making sense of all that stuff. But I generally don't embark on things that I don't know how to manage on a structural level, or a production level. I don't have big ideas about using materials that I know nothing about, it's just not interesting to me. I like having a shop. It's just nice to make things, even if I don't make them myself. I like to have a place where I can edit within the fabrication process. It's very difficult to do that if you use a more standard model of sending stuff out.

JKM: Well, the production aspect of it becomes something very different.

JP: Yes. In general this studio is cued up for this happening a lot more than most studios. There are very few contemporary artists that manage the kind of production that we manage here. It's usually done by very specialised art production facilities outside of the studio.

JKM: The utilitarian aspect of what you make -- for example a lamp, a table, a house, a boat -- provides immense approachability for the viewer. It immediately becomes something contrary to what at times can be encumbering in contemporary art. It can bring you into the work in a way that is very generous.

JP: That's a good way to describe it, I would agree with you. I use things that are pretty close to people's everyday repertoire. It's an easy way to begin a discussion. The output of the work is to try and entwine the viewer with a different level of complexity of things than they have in their house or deal with.

JKM: I see it as a jumping off point.

JP: I also like these things. I think working with light is pretty interesting. It's a generative thing to look at in terms of space, and the way we live. It's always changing. There are also a lot of people who do it, so there can be a lot of interesting analogies and problems that you can set up by being engaged in those interests. It's easy to do and at the same time it's difficult to make interesting. The tradition of art furniture is really not much of anything.

JKM: You've overcome that completely.

JP: But I also make paintings too. I make things that look like very traditional sculpture. What I try to always make clear is that things that come out of the studio require some kind of consideration that isn't necessarily straightforward but at the same time happens after you've exhausted some cliche when you approach it.

JKM: And the cliche may be limiting.

JP: Yes, or just isn't a good place to stop in general.

JKM: The mediums that you work in seem limitless, yet somehow essentially rooted in painting. Although you don't define yourself as a painter, would you say that painting is a unifying factor in your work?

JP: I use the term sculpture more than painting because I think sculpture defaults into other types of considerations. The notion of sculpture that I use bits and pieces of is from the '60s, where somebody like Rosalind Krauss talks about sculpture in terms of an expanded field or something crazy like that. It's always something "adjacent to" because you exhaust something. I don't think in terms of sculpture as something that you walk around or inside of or anything. What's important is what you take with you in your head. That is the space that gets privileged. It's not necessarily the space you walk in. The space you're in is much more expedient. It's not an idea either. If you go to the shows there's nothing to "get". If they are done in the right way you can actually be there for half an hour. There are actually things to consider. That's the object of the exhibition. It's a real rudimentary form of engagement. I think the history of painting can connect to certain devices that I use over and over again, but it's not realistic to talk about the painterly things that happen in the work as having any primacy. It's like people who make fishing lures. It's just colours, it's just stuff. You have an arsenal of motions that you make, that make a certain amount of sense.

JKM: You’ve established that vocabulary.

JP: Yeah, and then you can play. It's not a question of painterly concerns that are much more idealistic than that. Like finding some sort of unchartered space aesthetically, which seems kind of stupid. The practice isn't driven by painting. It's just not. The thing that motors most of the work is that there's a point of view in that design, in how things are laid out and what they look like. The practice is highly speculative.

JKM: Tell us about the house you are building in Merida, Mexico. Essentially it is a dilapidated house in the heart of the city?

JP: It's a property that's been abandoned for a while. Merida is a city that had its heyday in the beginning of the 20th century. It was urbanised in the teens or so. There are a lot of colonial structures in the middle of the city. It's also a very Mexican city in the sense that it's not touristic like the cities along the Pacific coast. Merida is a working Mexican city. It's also rooted in this very deep tradition of the Mayan world. It's in the centre of the Mayan world, and there are still many people that speak Mayan. The way that people have yet to be uprooted is interesting.

JKM: Are there Mayan ruins in the city of Merida proper?

JP: They're everywhere. That region was the centre of the Mayan culture so you can't really go very far without seeing it. People have pyramids behind their homes. Every little town has a huge church that was built on a destroyed pyramid or something. It's like another country altogether. It has a deeply rooted history which is very different than the kind of cities that we live in.

JKM: Or even Mexico City.

JP: Or even Mexico City, which models itself very much like any American city. Most of the people that live in Mexico City aren't from that region. Merida is still very comfortable. Most of the tourists are Mexican tourists. I thought it would be interesting to build there because Veronica and I became attracted to that area, and it would be interesting to do a project like that for the gallery to see what would happen. I'm not an architect and I'm not somebody who those kind of venues come to naturally. If I want to create a structure or work with space and land and those sort of things I have to invent the venue myself. That seemed like an interesting city to unfold a project, like the one at Seaview Lane. I don't want to call it an architectural project, because it's not, it's really something else. Merida has a lot of tradition, and there's a lot of aesthetic history. It's a very Arab city with Lebanese and Syrian immigrants that live and work there.

JKM: The Spanish colonial architecture mixes with the Arab influence of mosaics, design, etc.?

JP: The tile floors are like an equivalent to a concrete Persian rug. Most of the houses are courtyard houses. When you go into these houses there are usually two rooms on the front, depending on the width, and it opens up to a huge interior courtyard. From the outside you see a continuous facade three feet from the street. And then the public life in Merida is really nice -- public parks are really spread out and festivals take place in the park. They are always mixing with tourism, but it's a different kind of tourism mixing with tradition.

JKM: You are keeping the exterior of the building whole, as is?

JP: Yes, We bought a building and we're renovating it. The old colonial buildings are landmarks, and there's a range of facades that you have to choose to rebuild them. It's also a really inexpensive place to work. The property and the labour are really reasonable. It's a very simple project and the exhibition revolves around that project in a way.

JKM: How do the tiles, floors, lamps, and other elements you are creating for the house reflect the local landscape (colours, textures) of Merida?

JP: The aesthetic of everything in the exhibition came from a group of photographs that I took the last time I was down there. [Jorge hands me a copy of the exhibition catalogue, describing the images and photographs]. The catalogue is like visual poem of information that we gathered when we went down to buy the property. The way I was thinking about the show was that I wanted to develop a type of aesthetic that stands in for the part of the exhibition that wasn't there, which was the house. In a way these objects in the show are in service of making atmosphere. It's dealing with an ephemeral kind of element anyway. It's light (lamps), you're in the space and walking between the stuff. It's kind of like a big landscape project, but at the same time it's like an artefact of something that's going to happen later on. Not an accurate document, but more of an emotional document. While you're in the exhibition, it may feel like something tropical, it may not, but after you're in it for a while, there's a quality that being in the space produces. It's like using a glimpse of something in an image that you bring from memory, or a photograph, along with a function of the software, and mixing it all up and hoping that through the way you control the light that something else happens all together. If the exhibitions work, it's something that keeps you (the viewer) in the show.

JKM: That's a lovely way of describing something that's not there. Like the analogy of a landscape, because you can visit a landscape once and go back to it in a year and it's transformed.

JP: It's a way to think about how to make images that are not necessarily pictures.

JKM: It reminds me of the difference between taking a still photograph and shooting video. The photo helps recall something fragmented, in contrast to video which gives it all to you.

JP: Yeah, because video controls point of view. I'm thinking more about glimpses of something.

JKM: You have mentioned that you consider the Merida house project a contemporary version of land art. Would you also say that it lies somewhere between the concerns of land art (the landscape itself -- scale, vistas, topography, the history of place) and sited sculpture (mass, form, volume, surface)**? Merida's abundance of new and old seems to readily lend itself to these issues.

JP: I think the Merida project redirects the problem of land art away from the Romantic tradition towards the Realists, and notions of Realism, such as David towards Courbet, for example. Moving in that basic direction, it has more to do with people's real experiences, as land art never dealt with the urban condition. It's more like Robert Smithson's work in the sense that it's anti-humanist. The eye of the artist should disappear. By proposing a work in a foreign country, in a developing city, for a gallery, it gets pushed towards this realist notion.

JKM: What do you envision happening with the house when it's finished? I understand it's for sale.

JP: The house is for sale, but we don't know for how much yet because we have to finish what we're doing. Its ultimate success would be for it to become some sort of presence in the landscape, somehow managing people's interests and desires to attract people to it.

JKM: Do you hope it will be open to the public?

JP: It doesn't matter to me. If some institution buys it that would be great, but a private individual would be fine too. It's just real estate, but interesting real estate that's a little bit different from what you normally get. It's embroiled in a different philosophical problematic. It's not like people have to understand that so much but most people that look at my work, even the ones that walk away and think "wow, it's a chair", at least walk away thinking it's kind of a different chair.

JKM: Do you go to Merida to oversee the project?

JP: Our last trip down there was for vacation, but the more distance there is to the project the less you can do that. It requires a lot more acuity to what the directives are. With projects like this you have to really control what happens. I have about three or four people that travel from the studio to oversee what's happening. There's an architect overseeing the construction. It's like the house we made in Puerto Rico.

JKM: Do you see yourself as an L.A. artist?

JP: Less and less. I felt more connected to L.A. when I was in school here. I don't really have a group of artists that I regularly communicate with like when I was in school, and even after about 5 years after I was out of school there was more of a community feel. It's better to describe yourself as an L.A. student. I don't have strong ties to the art that's produced here. I'm not that interested in it. I don't teach here, I don't have a group of students that I work with, there aren’t many things that connect me to notions like that. I'd like to teach but nobody hires me.

JKM: Well, maybe now that we've put that out there . . .

JP: I know. There's nothing here. There really isn't anything here. It's like saying you're from the moon, what the hell does that mean?

JKM: What is your favourite thing about L.A.?

JP: The weather, and living up on the hill. It's not the art.

JKM: Thank you, Jorge.

**see Beardsley, John: Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape, Abbeville Press, New York, 1984, page 110.


Jill Martinez Krygowski is an independent curator living and working in Los Angeles. She has organised exhibitions at LACMA, the Korean Cultural Center, and ART2102, and published in LACMA's magazine. Recently she has edited an issue of the online artzine, periscopes.org.


Image © the artist, courtesy Haunch of Venison

© 2004 KultureFlash Limited