Pre-Columbian, Post-Suburban

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Pre-Columbian Galleries, Los Angeles County Museum of Art/PHOTOS: LACAYO

On my out to San Francisco last month I swung though Los Angeles for a couple of days. One thing I was there to see were the new galleries for pre-Columbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They were designed by the artist Jorge Pardo as psychologically resonant spaces, with touches that are part cavern, part mesa, part mid-century-modern furniture showroom.

What that means is that Pardo has created gently undulating walls and vitrine pedestals, all made from layered sheets of laser-cut fiberboard. The wavy walls suggest geological formations. Call it pre-Columbian-meets-pre-Cambrian. But there’s also an unmistakable hint in those forms of the biomorphic shapes of ’50s furniture. It’s there in the colors too — yellow-orange and lime green. A lot of Pardo’s work as an artist straddles the line between artwork and functional object like a chair or lamp. This is sometimes just another way of saying he makes chairs and lamps and leaves it to the owners to decide whether you can touch them or not. (I think I just hit on an instant definition of art — it’s the thing you can’t touch.)

What I think Pardo has done here is use subliminal visual triggers to throw the LACMA collection into the same gap between artwork and functional object. Whatever these things were for the cultures that created them, they weren’t, for them, art as we think of it. Some of these objects had religious and ritual importance. Others were for domestic use — though those might have had spiritual value as well. (Then again, so do consumer objects now, like running shoes or designer teapots that provide validation for hip shoppers.) The Pardo framework proposes them as both as practical object, fetish and art by subtly reminding us that we have the same overlapping categories in our own culture.

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Because it’s so much a presentation rooted in understandings of this moment, I wouldn’t want this to be the permanent display option for the LACMA collection, which it isn’t. I grabbed coffee recently with LACMA’s Director Michael Govan, who told me it will remain in place for a few years. I went in suspecting I would dislike it but once I saw it the installation struck me as both startling enough to make you look harder at what you were looking at and subtle enough not to tell exactly you how to look.

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Speaking of look harder — as Christopher Knight pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, one problem with the installation is that in places you really do have to look harder. The curving glass isn’t non-glare, which means that from some positions you get reflections of the kind you see in those vertical light strips in the picture up top.