Jorge Pardo is an artist living in America, but was born in Cuba. He was invited to take part in artranspennine98 and to show alongside three other artists: Langlands&Bell, Francoise Quardon and Atelier van Lieshout, to produce work for the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds that would ‘reveal’ some of the activities that take place within the Institute.

Pardo asked three of the Institute staff to choose a series of objects- sculptures, drawings, photographs, sketchbooks- that are part of Leeds Sculpture Collection, to be displayed, an object a day every day in Gallery Four at the Institute.

This approach to work engages with many ideas and concepts. The writing that follows will aim to explore different approaches to these ‘themes’:

Choice

Meaning

Display

It is aimed at secondary schools (and possibly older levels), but this is not to say that all the ideas in this short pack could not be used with any age group.

Choice

Ask your class to each bring in an object that has some significance for them. It could be loaded with memories or just be a beautiful shape. Display these for a term on a table in the classroom, and find five minutes each day to provoke discussion around each object. Another interesting exercise would be to ask the class to write down what they see in front of them; not what they feel, but what they see.

Each pupil could then choose another object that someone else has brought in, and explain why they like it/hate it. This raises issues around the audience: who is looking at the object?

Another thing to consider is labelling. Does the label you want to write next to your object also ‘explains’ it? Most visitors to a gallery look at a piece of work for 3 seconds and read the label for 10 seconds. What is the function of a label? Does the object of your choice have a name?

Meaning

The object that has been chosen obviously has meaning for the chooser, but what effect does it have on the audience? Talk about how the object makes you feel: does it carry any emotional impact at all, and if not, why not?

Display

Think about how you could best display your object. Jorge Pardo wanted to just have the object(s) on a table, but a lot of them are too valuable to simply rest on a table without protection from dust or theiving hands. Is this how you see your object? A perspex plinth now covers each object, but there are numerous ways to display an object that would enhance and support the meaning of the object. Artists such as Joseph Cornell, Avis Newman and Marcel Duchamp all used boxes, cabinets and shelves to great effect.

Joseph Cornell used boxes in an harmonious and poetic way, and he made hundreds of boxes throuhout the 1940’s and 50’s. Bird boxes were particularly important to him, and resembled cages (Question: are cages there to keep the person/animal in or to keep them safe from the outside world?)

Avis Newman also works a lot with birds: their feathers and their eggs, and is seen as a metaphor for flight and intellectual freedom. These tiny and delicate objects are usually coated with wax and look ancient and decayed, captured within boxes that hold lots of little shelves that display the shells or eggs.

Think about making a display ‘box’ for your object: would it resemble a shrine, a coffin, a cabinet or simply a box? Would it be transparent or viewed from one side only? Does it rest on the floor, ceiling or wall? Is it to be viewed from above, below or sideways?