The Everyday on a Pedestal

Bright orange wall labels dotting the galleries send conflicting signals in “Against Design,” the new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Yes, it’s OK to sit on the oversize canvas beanbag chairs by Canadian artist Angela Bulloch, which are each large enough to accommodate two or more loungers (sociability is important here). No, don’t sit on the bed or open the dresser drawers in the sleek bedroom suite down the hall, built of painted plywood by L.A.-based sculptor Jorge Pardo (conceptualize its style cues instead). You’re certainly invited to enter the narrow, rambling, rather cramped camper/trailer by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, but do be sure to remove your shoes before entering (lest you scuff the polished floor).

Touch. Don’t touch. Be careful what you touch. A distinct sense of anxious unease surrounds the array of some two dozen objects by 10 artists assembled for “Against Design.”

This timely show, organized by Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and winding up a national tour, surveys the recent trend toward art that intersects with practices more commonly associated with architecture, fashion, advertising graphics and furniture design. Pae White makes city signage that locates erotic dynamics more than physical places. (Bondage imagery mixed with travel advertisements makes you wonder if the mind is even free to wander.) Joe Scanlan’s wood shelving system is adaptable to virtually any environment that needs a place to store books, while also recalling modular Minimalist sculpture. The interlocking planes of stainless steel in Clay Ketter’s “Cold Kitchenette” are like a Donald Judd sculpture waiting to be cooked on.

The ambivalence evident in the show’s conflicting orange labels goes to the heart of a traditional distinction between art objects and design objects. For designers, a chair, bed or pair of pants is meant to be actively used. In fact, a design object only begins to be transformed into an art object at the point where ordinary daily use is curtailed or made unusually cautious.

You might still use Grandma’s heirloom Tiffany lamp to light up a corner of the living room, or perhaps you wear that Halston halter-dress at rare special events. Yet, the lamp is put securely up on a high table, away from gamboling children and pets, and between galas the dress is wrapped in acid-free tissue and stored in the cedar closet.

Values other than mundane practicality get recognized in the transformation from design object to art object. They include questions of historical significance, economics and social relevance.

Design items are an excellent pacesetter for our secular society, because they can’t be rarefied. Everyone wears clothes, encounters advertisements, sleeps on something, etc. Rarity, which is built into the production of unique works of art, comes more slowly to mass-produced objects of industrial design, most of which get used up and tossed out. The few that remain approach (through the back door) the condition of uniqueness characteristic of singular paintings or sculptures.

So “Against Design” is not art that is “opposed to design.” It’s art pressed up against design, fudging boundaries.

Kevin Appel’s cool paintings and drawings read as carefully rendered graphic representations of modern architectural spaces, such as the floating stairs and transparent walls of the socially Utopian Case Study House program. At the same time they knowingly wrestle with assumptions about Color-field painting and geometric abstraction, which were swept away by the Puritan urges of so much Conceptual art.

Coming from the other direction, Roy McMakin’s painted furniture is meant to be used around the house--plates lined up on a white wall rack, socks and shirts stored in boxy dresser drawers--and its blocky style draws from idealistic predecessors like the Arts and Crafts movement. Subtle but pointed differences from ordinary furniture suggest another function: Every interaction with these objects is meant to be looked at and thought about.

For example, the spacing between three doors of equal size across the face of a cabinet at Ikea would likewise be expected to be equal. In “Untitled” (1997) they vary in width, depth, length and shading. McMakin’s divisions read as simultaneously physical and conceptual--like the stripes in a Barnett Newman painting.

Andrea Zittel’s “A-Z 1994 Living Unit II” is a big rectangular steamer trunk, which opens to become an all-in-one bed, bench, table, bookshelf, kitchen and bath. It’s as compact as Van Lieshout’s camper is unwieldy--a linear sequence of stylized, barely functional rooms (bath, kitchen, office/den, bedroom) whose abstracted shapes generate the sculpture’s irregular outer form.

One compelling work is also very sly. German artist Tobias Rehberger has used fashion as an inspiration for painting and sculpture--a blunt reversal of the usual energy flow, which has brought us things like Mondrian dresses. A neatly folded camel hair jacket, brown shirt and pants by German designer Helmut Lang rest on the floor in front of wall panels painted similar hues, and back-lit with hidden fluorescents and edged in surprising lime green. The fashion-forward mural exudes its own inner light, while also adding its own colorful twist to fashion precedent.

Rehberger’s fusion of Pop and Minimalism, together with his tracking of the ebb and flow of art and design both high and low, is second-generation design art. It builds on the important work exploring these concerns that Jim Isermann has pioneered during the past 20 years.

Isermann is not included in the show. While acknowledging his precedent in the useful catalog (designed by White), “Against Design” focuses on a generation born--with one exception--in the 1960s. But the older artist is worth emphasizing, if only because of a distinct tilt in this international exhibition. By far the largest contingent--four of its 10 artists--work in Los Angeles, where Isermann’s chairs, lamps, clocks, rugs, hangings, sculptures and paintings have been regularly shown.

Unfortunately, “Against Design” has been trimmed a bit from its original presentation in Philadelphia. The show feels a bit thin. The museum has filled in the gaps with six unrelated abstract paintings (McLaughlin, Irwin, Mangold, etc.) and one wall sculpture (Judd) from its permanent collection, but it wasn’t the wisest idea. Given the show’s design context, the inescapable effect is one of interior decorating with art.

Still, the emergence of design art as a growing phenomenon is a subject worth careful consideration, and “Against Design” offers welcome fodder. Design requires something art doesn’t. Design demands consumers. It’s part of the deal. You won’t have one without the other.

Modern art has an audience, which is not the same thing. In fact, for art, the issue of commerce has been contested for a very long time. A standard cliche says that it’s the audience who completes a work of art, but for design it’s the consumer who completes it.

The cliche about the audience has been a moral foundation for artistic production for almost a century. Design art is critically important because it acknowledges another significant (but battered) truth--which is that a moral foundation also underlies commerce. Design art may be the place where aesthetic issues of audience and consumer are finally thrown into high relief.

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* “Against Design,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (858) 454-3541, through May 20. Closed Monday.