IKEA
600 SW 43rd St, Renton, (425) 656-2980
I RECENTLY HAD a revelation in IKEA. I had gone down there with a nascent theory about the art offered by home-furnishings stores and catalogues, and was ready to be a first-class snob about it, if necessary. But as I wandered among the sample rooms, diligently taking notes on all the bland prints, I realized that there is something even more insidious going on. This isn’t art to look at–it’s art you look through.
I’ve been known to spout a version of this idea before, and my friends are probably sick of hearing it. But for those of you whom I haven’t bored to death yet, it goes something like this: If you look through a Pottery Barn catalogue, you can quickly identify what kind of person you are from a marketer’s perspective. Pottery Barn is so good at this that it can offer fairly nuanced versions of the same thing and it doesn’t feel repetitive; rather, it feels personal. For example, you can find three different leather chairs for the urban sophisticate, quite specifically targeted for the kind of person you want to be: Metropolitan (sleek, curvy, and understated), Manhattan (old money, slightly–perhaps endearingly–stuffy), or Tribeca (trend-bucking, with–oh my–wooden armrests). Each option is presented with all the right accoutrements to cement the atmosphere: black-and-white prints carelessly lined up on a mantel, piles of art books, cathedral-like clusters of candles. (Some are less skillful than others, however: One of IKEA’s oddly styled rooms combines gingham upholstery, an enormous television, and a stack of books including The Renée Richards Story.) So, there it is, an identity you can buy all at once, no thinking required.
This is where art redeems us: One of the great benefits of owning art is that it reminds you how complicated you are. Collecting art shows you what you love, and how various love is, how myriad its shapes. And art that’s worth owning, in my opinion, can’t be ignored.
Of course, IKEA and Pottery Barn and every other place trying to influence our ideas about home design aren’t really interested in selling art. They’re selling furniture, and the art is merely background; moreover, this is good design democratized, affordable (in theory) for everyone. But in all the flawlessly styled catalogue shots, the art implies the taste (whether it be Bauhaus, French country, or old New England) that comes with years of serious looking, without requiring the kind of time it takes to look. This doesn’t mean that you can’t, through cheap reproductions, acquire a taste for the real thing; even Plato allowed for the possibility of attaining higher love through the admiration of a beautiful body. But, there’s a great difference between seeing a reproduction and seeing an original, especially in non-objective work. Jackson Pollock’s works are certainly energetic in reproduction, but in person you see the way the paint gathers in places and dribbles away in others, a much more physical embodiment of the effort that went into it.
So there I was at IKEA, rather depressed and thinking about Plato and Pollock, when all of a sudden I progressed from the sample rooms to what IKEA calls the Marketplace, where you can buy smaller items such as linens, kitchenware, frames, and Swedish food. Here, things are not displayed in weird approximations of rooms, but in heaps and stacks. Rows and rows of empty glass jars, in different sizes. Towers of translucent blue wastebaskets. Textured, striped vases that rip off Jonathan Adler. Armies of sexy metal storage boxes, looking futuristic, effective, and sleek. This artful, more-is-more aesthetic mixed with IKEA’s raw-wood smell (the smell of desire, I think) cheered me considerably. The endlessness of the merchandise reminded me of certain kinds of sculpture; of how Robert Ortbal filled the storefront windows of 911 with empty tin cans last month, or how Christo planted hundreds of yellow and blue umbrellas in Japan and California, or Antony Gormley’s 35,000 clay figures filling a gallery in New York. I love how simple objects gain grandeur in number, even in a shameless pitch for my money. Why this made me happy I can hardly guess. But I did go back and buy some sheets. You can only hold out for so long.