On Art's Romance with Design

There always has been a rift between art and design in our culture. Yes, there has. Purists submit that the distance between art and design has to be preserved in the name of specificity; in an age where there is a multimedia meltdown, they warn that art must take care not to relinquish what is specific to it. Meanwhile, more nonchalant players insist that, on the contrary, to survive and be relevant in such an age, art needs to be more gregarious—it must reach out beyond its own confines—and design is surely one of its more suitable bedfellows. The sense of specificity that comes with an awareness of a discipline’s history, however, is as important to design art as the ability to make connections between disciplines. So perhaps both groups are partially misguided. Project, an installation by Jorge Pardo at Dia:Chelsea in New York in 2000, is a good example of why a comprehensive knowledge of the different disciplines is important. Pardo refashioned Dia:Chelsea’s ground-floor gallery, bookstore, and lobby in such a way that integrates these three formerly discrete areas into a flowing stream of vibrant tiles. Thus, to experience the installation is to be catapulted into a vertiginous world enveloping both the art gazer and book buyer alike. By way of reprieve, both ends of the space are coated with pastel-colored murals conceived by Pardo, and an adjacent office space is filled with his low-hanging lamps. A full-scale clay model of Volkswagen’s most recent Beetle took center stage in the gallery, while in the bookshop there is a seating area replete with delicately arranged chairs designed by Marcel Breuer and Alvar Aalto in the 1920s and 1930s. Pardo effectively preserved a sense of specificity in the installation through the decisive articulation of each space and object while, at the same time, striving to be gregarious by drawing the objects that constitute the installation from across art and design. Such installations have rendered design crucial to an understanding of contemporary art. So, too, have the flurry of recent group exhibitions devoted to design art. These include What If? Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 2000; Against Design, at the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2000; Beau-Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, Site Santa-Fe, 2001–2; and Trespassing: Houses x Artists at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2003. Despite these exhibitions, extended critical commentaries on the trend have been noticeably lacking.