Stay-at-Home Artist

An open house is scheduled in the historic Mt. Washington neighborhood this weekend, but an open house of a most unusual sort. For the house in question is also a sculpture, designed by 35-year-old L.A.-based artist Jorge Pardo, and the open house doesn’t send the typical signal that the house is for sale.

Instead it’s a sculpture exhibition, sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art and organized by curators Ann Goldstein and Stacia Payne. The open-house-cum-sculpture-show, open from noon to 5 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, continues through Nov. 15.

Since 1990, Pardo has been making and exhibiting a variety of sculptural objects that also do double-duty as plausibly functional items, including a stepladder, baseball bats, assorted lamps, desks, chairs, dressers and beds. Last year, for the international Sculpture Project in Munster, Germany, he contributed arguably its most beautiful work: a pier and pavilion built of California redwood and jutting into an urban lake.

Because Pardo’s sculptures take the form of easily recognizable utilitarian objects, they create an instant wrinkle in the cerebral cortex--a wrinkle of perplexing doubt about identity. Any sense of doubt is useful in overcoming the inertia of convention, usually a clue that you’re in the presence of significant art.

Unfortunately, the 3,000-square-foot house, located at 4166 Sea View Lane, is rather far from completion. (The exhibition was postponed from last winter, but anyone who has built a house or done remodeling knows that completion dates for construction projects are always as firm as Jell-O.) Still, enough of the two-bedroom, three-bath home is in place to get a good idea of what the artist is up to.

In style and materials it recalls Pardo’s lovely Munster pier. Clad in horizontal redwood strips, the house takes its architectural design cues from a variety of sources. They range from Spanish haciendas whose rooms open out onto a central courtyard--an old tradition important to vernacular building in Southern California--to the low-slung, rectilinear, indoor-outdoor communion with the landscape familiar in the classic Modernist architecture of Rudolf Schindler, the Viennese expatriate to L.A.

Loosely U-shaped, the exterior boundary of the house roughly follows the property line of the hilly, sloping site. At the open end of the U, a separate small pavilion serves as a carport on one side and a guest room with bath on the other. Openings between the small pavilion and the ends of the U provide space for a driveway from Sea View Lane and for a pedestrian entry via stairs from Sea View Avenue. Except for one door, all the exterior walls of the U are windowless and solid, creating privacy from adjoining properties and streets. By contrast, all interior walls are glass--either windows or doors--with each of the six rooms opening onto the central courtyard.

The division between solidity and transparency is reversed in the small pavilion with carport and guest room. Here, a glass wall on the exterior and a solid wall facing the courtyard deftly establishes a reciprocal sense of privacy for both guest and resident.

The house is a single story, but its elevation so closely follows the irregular slope of the site that interior stairs are abundant. The shifting roof-line, visually emphasized by the horizontal clapboards, becomes a kind of geometric barometer of the hilly natural terrain.

One result of these careful design decisions is a complex sense of connection to the earth, the sky and the hilltop setting--a connection that constantly shifts as you move through the glass-walled house. At the site’s lowest edge, inside a combination garage/studio, you feel embedded in the earth. In the living room at the top of the site, you look out over the rest of the house, the winding street below and the plunging canyons beyond, to the hazy sprawl of Los Angeles unfurling in the distance. These spatial maneuvers give the architecture its distinctly sculptural feel.

Because this “house that is also a sculpture” is currently featured as a museum show, Pardo has complicated matters by turning one domestic space into an engaging exhibition gallery. A portion of an exquisite, multi-part sculpture he made last year, borrowed for the event from the collection of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, is installed in the home’s dual-purpose garage/studio. The choice of room slyly recalls the site of Pardo’s first solo gallery show in 1990: a small garage in a West Hollywood alley, formerly operated by art dealer Thomas Solomon.

The untitled sculpture is composed of 39 hanging lamps with shades of swirling, multicolored, hand-blown glass, suspended by cords of equal length from a track that follows the periphery of the ceiling. Because the ceiling slopes to follow the terrain, the lamps hang at different heights relative to the floor--and thus to the viewer’s body.

Across the up-slope, the softly glowing lights hang at the height of your head, becoming quiet metaphors for the illumination of thought. Across the down-slope, they hang at the height of your torso, their organic shapes and interior glow shifting into metaphors for bodily spirit. The lamps illuminate ideas embodied in the house.

Pardo’s remarkable house, which he financed almost entirely on his own, further extends a defining artistic tradition in postwar L.A. Questioning the conventions that typically separate art and craft, or gratuitous aesthetic inquiry from the functional demands of utilitarian objects, has been a recurrent theme.

The inquiry drove the ceramic work made by Peter Voulkos, Kenneth Price and other artists affiliated with the Otis Art Institute in the 1950s--art that in fact represents the first bona fide movement in postwar L.A. Most recently it has been employed to significant effect in the weavings, wall-hangings, stained-glass panels and other estimable art Jim Isermann has made since the 1980s.

In fact, a highlight of the 1996 gallery season was a collaboration between Pardo and Isermann on a carpet-like floor sculpture. So it’s surprising that MOCA’s cute exhibition brochure--a printed set of fold-up cardboard boxes, published in conjunction with a Chicago museum where Pardo displayed an altered boat last year--makes no mention at all of this continuous thread running through 40 years of postwar art history.

Instead, as is MOCA’s habit, the brochure focuses mostly on late-1960s and 1970s Conceptual art as a legitimizing precedent. Conceptualism isn’t irrelevant for Pardo’s lovely “house that is also a sculpture,” but here its invocation neutralizes the physical relationship between the house and its context.

Erased from that context are the “glazed ceramic pots that are also painted sculptures” made by Voulkos and Price, Isermann’s “stained glass windows that are also paintings” and finally a whole tradition for contemporary art produced in Los Angeles.

* “Jorge Pardo: 4166 Sea View Lane,” closed Monday through Thursday, through Nov. 15. For directions, parking instructions and MOCA Sunday shuttle service, call (213) 633-5334.